What does it mean to do social journalism?
What I learned while getting my masters at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Through a year and a half program in social journalism, each student within my 13 person cohort chooses a community to serve. I chose to focus on people living in Food Apartheid in Brooklyn. Food Apartheid describes the systemic racism and oppression that results in food deserts, food insecurity and lack of access to fresh foods. I’ve lived in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for eight years, but it wasn’t until this past year and a half, while studying social journalism, that I felt truly embedded in my community.
I decided to move to journalism from marketing, photography and events because I wanted to learn why people said, “journalism is dying”, and why I still felt unserved by many of the most influential newspapers and broadcasts making news today.
I graduated a month ago, and have learned about the evolving business of journalism and the models and metrics that help it better serve the public. I also have a deeper understanding of how new and old technologies, from texting to machine learning, can support or destabilize that goal. Most impactful for me though, has been reorienting myself with what journalism actually is, beyond the end result of a story. Being a part of a program that compels its students to actually ask, “what do you think journalism should be?”, has been paramount.
For my final project, called In Service Of, I held a workshop about food justice and food access for impacted communities, and I crowdsourced leaders to photograph and elevate through wheat-pasted portraits in the neighborhoods they work and live in. I also worked with community based organizations and individual sources to document food access points in an online map. All of these projects are ongoing as I continue to build interest and partnerships since graduating.
While working on my final project I was also a fellow at THE CITY, planning and launching their Open Newsrooms initiative with Brooklyn Public Library. I’ve been working on the project for seven months now, and we’ve held nine events in three communities working towards a more collaborative news-making process. We’re now diving deep into specific issues chosen by residents, and I’m focusing on how Red Hook is impacted by having to travel outside of their neighborhood for affordable fresh food.
Through all this work, I developed a set of guiding principles and I shared them during my graduation presentation (full video here).
Always locate yourself
This was my first lesson when joining the social journalism class. I switched over to the major from the M.A. in journalism after attending a session during orientation with Carrie Brown (the director of social journalism) and Jeff Jarvis (a professor in the program) where they talked about the myth of objectivity. It was the first time I heard people within journalism reject the notion that they could be objective about the world they existed in, especially as a part of institutions that weren’t representative of the public.
Since then I’ve found numerous examples of other journalism professionals rejecting objectivity. They instead create trust by being transparent about where their subjectivity lies. I’ve recently dug into The View from Somewhere, a podcast and book by Lewis Wallace. A journalist who got fired from his job for questioning whether objectivity was the right frame for journalism in the era of Trump (I recommend you listen).
I’ve carried this with me in my research and reporting with Brooklyn communities in food apartheid, by being upfront about why I’m interested in the subject and how my experience overlaps. Or, what I like to call, locating myself.
Start with impacted people
Being new to the field I followed the practices that preceded me. Most of them, especially in health and science, were about reporting stories from health data. They could be trends from the restaurant business, the medical industry or agriculture. When I started looking into food apartheid in Brooklyn, I didn’t know to use that term. I called it a food access problem (one that I had noticed in my own life) and was familiar with food desert and food insecurity terminology used by the United States Department of Agriculture. I started researching how it had already been reported on and found a lot of information about how food deserts were determined, and proposed solutions to opening grocery stories with tax incentives and business loans. After speaking with a lead researcher for the USDA, Shelly Ver Ploeg, I was reminded that journalism should start by getting cues from institutional experts.
Ploeg was transparent with me about the USDA’s prioritization of proximity to grocery store as the main issue in healthy eating, even though they knew that wasn’t the central issue. Ver Ploeg understood that issues like, marketing of fast food to black and brown teens, at four times the rate of their white counterparts, had huge implications and was, in my own words, being ignored.
Listen first
I quickly refocused my attention and dedicated myself to deep listening. I found a growing community of local organizers quietly doing the work to remind their neighbors of their personal histories with food and land, and were together creating alternate systems. I started following local leaders online and attended events in-person. I also researched online gathering spaces. There weren’t many local ones that were full of conversation, but there were national ones, like Black Farmers Nationwide on Facebook. They have over 7,000 members (~6 posts a day, hundreds of likes and comments), and reading posts and comments taught me how people dealing with the issues describe them. They talked about the problems from the systems (like black land theft) rather than it’s symptoms. It led me to better understand the use of the term food apartheid as a more accurate depiction of problem.
Meeting people in the community at events without an agenda or story in mind allowed me to fully dedicate myself to listening and building authentic relationships. I created a spreadsheet of everyone I met along the way, and after a couple months I reached out to individuals to get together one on one and better understand their perspective. I always asked how journalism could better serve them, and who else I should be talking to.
Share solutions like you share issues
One of the most common responses I got to making journalism better was about sharing solutions with the same weight as issues. Hearing this, I focused on learning about, and documenting the grassroots solutions to food apartheid I came across. From community gardens, to youth food training programs to CSAs that delivered farm fresh boxes of food to gardens for pick-up. Impacted communities were creating their own solutions, but the scale and context wasn’t being reported on, and therefore lacked documentation. I also noticed that if and when the solutions got coverage, the same person would be quoted over and over again and with a narrative of “singular rare hero”.
My idea for a map of food access points and community leaders creating solutions grew out of this feedback, and I learned a lot from the Solutions Journalism Network along the way as well. I’m currently going through their trainings and working towards a reported solutions journalism story of local food apartheid solutions.
Journalism doesn’t have to be a story
Before I shared anything about the map or the photo project, I held an event. I realized through my classes that the atomic particle of journalism isn’t always a story. I learned this especially well through planning Open Newsrooms with THE CITY and noticing how much important information was shared live and in person. During the first and second session of Open Newsroom we asked residents how they received and shared information that was necessary to their lives. The response was overwhelmingly oriented towards in-person exchanges through friends and at events, like block parties, as well as through one to one interactions via calls and texts. This rang true to how I learned about food access issues as well, from attending events and listening in-person.
I planned a workshop aimed at providing food justice information and solutions to impacted people. We created a safe space that didn’t rely on shame to change their current buying or eating patterns (something that they had been used to in “health” spaces). I co-led the workshop with a community leader and was also able to build trust and new connections that led to me building and sharing the main online component of the project.
Your north star should be impact
In the second semester we took a class called Metrics and Outcomes taught by Terry Parris Jr, who I also work with at THE CITY (where he is the director of engagement). During this class we learned about the current metrics of success within journalism business models to understand how they contribute to the ways stories are told. Most media companies make their money on advertising, and therefore measure success against page views and numbers of unique visitors, data that matters to advertisers. Some newer models rely on grant funding, subscriptions, membership, donations from readers or a combination. It was important to understand these models when evaluating ho had it can be for large papers to try to work towards impact while their business analysts don’t value it or know how to measure it.
The class also brought audience to my attention in a new way. Each of us chose to serve a specific community, or audience, with our work. And when thinking about how to share that work, many of us initially thought about pitching to to get published. But, we were pushed to think beyond just if our work was right for the publication, to whether or or not our communities access them. This was underscored by Iyeshima Harris, the program director of East New York Farms, who let me know that the gardeners in her program and community have grown weary of reporters coming to get information about their work to share outside of the community, in places they’d never see.
Is just sharing information towards general awareness enough? I argue that journalists should be working towards civic participation and engagement. We should be asking, “who is this newsworthy for”? And, are we providing enough information for readers to know where to go next?
Get offline and in-person
For me, and Brooklyn food apartheid. Information sharing and news gathering was being done offline and in-person. This meant that I needed to be there. That’s why my learning and sharing process was mostly done offline. I’ll continue to share the ongoing photo project — in collaboration with business owners — on the walls of their neighborhood, and prioritize in-person events and one-to-one calls and texts as the best ways to engage with the community.
I understand that this isn’t the case for all audiences. Some communities, because of geography or a need for anonymity, prefer to congregate online. Still, the industry too quickly falls back on the ease of the internet to find sources and information, and in doing so puts ourselves in an echo chamber of repeating information and charismatic leaders, forgetting a whole world out there — the public. The people who don’t get quoted and who’ve never spoken to a journalist. I was one of those people before journalism school. Now, I’m happy to be working in journalism as the connecter between communities and reporters, building trust and capacity within the public to engage with news-making.
Please join the Open Newsroom if you’re local to Brooklyn! And, follow along by subscribing to THE CITY’s newsletter (we’re coming to Queens soon). Otherwise, keep in touch here.
Big thank you to my social journalism cohort, director, and teachers for a supportive and boundary pushing 17 months!
