Angelina Bellebuono, Journalism Will Save Us
One local photojournalist’s story and hopeful outlook on the future of journalism
In Madison, Georgia, it is particularly difficult to go anywhere without encountering a familiar face. Initially I was to speak with Angelina around noon, twenty minutes after she finished grocery shopping. When I received a call an hour later, I was unsurprised.“I should’ve known better than to say it would take only twenty minutes to get in and out of the Madison Ingles,” she told me, “the second I walked in someone was like ‘Hey, I haven’t seen you in forever!”

In her career as a freelance journalist, Bellebuono has contributed a multitude of work for and on behalf of the Morgan County community. Working at the Morgan County Citizen for almost ten years as a photojournalist, feature writer, and assistant to the managing editor, she was instrumental in the crusade to compose longer, more in-depth stories for the paper, concerning areas of interest in the community. “What does the community need to hear and how can we spin it to make it more appealing to them? What role does agriculture play in the community? What role does sports play in relation to this piece? etc.” By tying together what was important to our rural, southern town and what the breaking news was that week, Bellebuono along with editor Patrick Yost, was able to revitalize the 175-year-old news source for a new decade. A large part of this mission has to do with the local press’ relationship with the community. Bellebuono believes that the most vital tool in being a community journalist is having good rapport with everyone. If the editor is not in good standing with the sheriff, for example, the police office could turn around and give the law enforcement reports to another local paper.

That dynamic is extremely essential and because of it, Bellebuono has had the opportunity to enter into areas of the community in which she otherwise would have never had any reason to visit. “I’ve covered everything from KKK rallies to quiñceaneras,” she tells me, “things like covering a Martin Luther King Jr. Day service in a local black church, one that I probably would not have even known about otherwise and yet it was such a welcoming experience.” Most recently, Bellebouno produced a feature story for the Lake Oconee News about a local teenager who made a short film about his grandparents and the love they shared. The paper ran the piece on Valentine’s Day and not too long afterwards, she received a call from the grandmother who was livid. The woman had assumed that Bellebuono, who had not promised anything, would have passed along a copy of the story to her prior to it going to press. “Several people stopped me in the grocery store saying, ‘that piece was so beautiful and oh my God, it made me cry, it’s an intergenerational love story,’ and I was like well she was so angry about it and they said ‘oh honey, she’s got dementia,’ so my most recent work was an abysmal failure in my eyes, but the community loved it.”

When you work in small town journalism, you tend to end up covering the same events each year. Rather than choosing to be redundant, Bellebuono attempts to spin the story in a different direction year after year. One year when it came time for the annual county fair, Bellebuono was assigned to the event and encouraged to take photographs of the children and families enjoying themselves. “It ended up raining every night and no one came,” she said, “so I went out and talked to the workers, took photographs of them, posted them to Facebook and the story ran in the newspaper.” The work was very well received in the community and something that no one had really even considered before. These workers were out there every night regardless, rain or shine, and many of their stories were hard to read.

Bellebuono said it was something she would not had even contemplated doing in her first year of journalism. While she holds the conviction that her voice has remained about the same throughout her career, she does admit to gaining a much more creative perspective and process of finding stories. The story might be right there in front of you, very obviously, but you are obtaining said story differently than you would traditionally think.

I asked Bellebuono how she thought a journalist could help to unite divided communities, she responded with, “I don’t think the role of a journalist is necessarily to unite a divided community. I do think that the role of a journalist is to present things in a way that becomes the ammunition for people to use to unite a community. Journalists in a divisive community have to run their stories through a litmus test, is what I’m doing opening a window or drawing a wedge? If it’s drawing a wedge, then they don’t have the community’s best interest in mind and that’s not gonna get us to where we need to go.”
Bellebuono wants her legacy as a journalist and a teacher to be one of unification and hope. She has stated that she has had a hard time finding her voice again after keeping her opinion out of her work for so long. Now that she is doing more and more freelancing, she has the ability to speak on the behalf of others as well as herself. She wants to honor humanity and it’s diversity, use her work for “sewing connection rather than discourse.”
As for the future of journalism, Bellebuono confesses to be both excited and scared. She has enormous respect for the institution and says she would be more engaged if she was a decade younger. “It really is the heart of our country. I truly believe that if anything is going to save us, its journalism.”
Listen to the full interview here:
