#TrustTheProcess, my year trying to learn how to serve people in a different way with journalism
Exactly one year before today, I was writing a text, on this very same platform, about what I was expecting from 2017 (the text is in Spanish). I had my plane tickets ready, and my family prepared to live a completely different year of our lives: a full, one-of-a-kind experience in New York during which I had a very simple goal: to know from inside, how much far I could take my sympathy and previous experience in social media platforms to do journalism and better connect with the people that I try to serve every single day I step inside a newsroom.
During my previous 2 and a half years as a Social Media/Audience Editor at El Observador, I learned quickly how, by simply listening to what people was trying to tell whomever was listening in the newsroom: lots of those who distrust media wants to trust them, but for different reasons don’t know how to establish a different relationship with them.
I was convinced that journalists should be the ones who provide a way to do that and stop thinking that everything ends when you file the story, a product bound to the profession but with an undetermined effect of the community that the journalist tries to serve.
This is mainly the reason why I wanted to come to the MA in Social Journalism after I saw Jeff Jarvis’s post on Buzzmachine speaking about “a degree in community information and engagement.” Through different agreements and scholarships, I was able to come this year to the program and try to figure out how I was going to learn this process in order to apply it back in my country.
The first thing I needed to do was picking a community. Perhaps naively, I tried to pick a beat unfamiliar to me and whatever community was inside New York City that might need extra help from some who knows at least how to gather and present information in a decent way. In a way, it was going to be my way to give something back to the City that opened its doors for me and my family for this year.
During my chilly first weeks in New York City, I thought that people facing trouble when trying to heat their homes in the winter would be a good community to work with. Almost immediately, I learned that this was a very insular, diffuse community, that was going to be really difficult to gather in order to serve. But still, I was concerned about the way we can tackle climate change and energy issues beyond the typical stories, so I decided to give it a go and face all the obstacles and mistakes that I was surely going to commit. I really believe that you cannot cheat yourself if you are going to be a journalist, so I didn’t wanted to work with an issue that I knew a lot about, even less to work inside a community that I already was a part of. If as journalists we have to build our beats from scratch, it just made sense for me to tackle this community-centered approach the same way.
If the reward is the path, as some might say, this one was something tough to enjoy, at least before the first months. If you want to build your path to a community from scratch, you will have to try a lot of things: partnerships that will go wrong, projects in platforms that don’t make a lot of sense, and even desperate experiments, like wandering through the streets of a neighborhood in the middle of a heatwave, trying to find people that endures the summer without an AC unit at home. There were moments of despair and (too few) baby steps forward.
The importance of pivoting
After the first semester of basic knowledge about my community through my first listening process and some other notions about how to measure success in journalism (impact and outcomes), something started to kick in. I learned what “energy insecurity” is and how it affects low-income citizens. And by the summer, while working on my data stories, I realized that I already had in mind where I wanted to focus: it wasn’t extreme cold, it was extreme heat. After speaking with lots of researchers and some community organizers and reading tons of academic literature about the subject, assisting to events and trying to speak with as much people as possible related to the issue, I learned among other things, that extreme heat is the top weather-related cause of deaths in the United States. I had to switch subjects and focus on that. That’s what you are expected to do in Social Journalism: to be able to refocus in order to tackle what your community needs the most.
After speaking with lots of researchers and some community organizers and reading tons of academic literature about the subject, assisting to events and trying to speak with as much people as possible related to the issue, I learned among other things, that extreme heat is the top weather-related cause of deaths in the United States. I had to switch subjects and focus on that. That’s what you are expected to do in Social Journalism.
Research published last year suggests that 140 people die in NYC every year because of extreme heat exposure. Heat kills in the long-term and, of course, there are at-risk demographic groups, with senior residents and infants among the most affected by this dynamic. Also, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 600 New Yorkers visit hospitals yearly because of heat-related emergencies.
And research says that the effect of climate change will also worsen the situation: excess respiratory admissions in New York State due to excessive heat would be 2 to 6 times higher in 2080–2099 than in 1991–2004, which potentially will raise the mortality numbers.
Extremely hot days are becoming more common and intense. A Climate Central analysis suggests that while New York City has averaged 3 days above 95°F over the past 20 years, the current trend of carbon pollution will increase that number to 31, with most of those days happening in recent years.
The situation is aggravated in areas such as Northern Manhattan and South Bronx. The fact that they are heat pockets has a direct effect on indoor temperatures. “If you look at weather related disasters like hurricanes and flooding, over the long term heat has actually killed more people,” says researcher Brian Vant-Hull, who studies urban heat-related issues at CUNY City College in New York City.
A sweltering apartment can be deadly. And despite 92% of New Yorkers declaring they have at least an AC unit inside their home, some of the lowest percentages of seniors having an AC unit come from areas such as Mott Haven and Hunts Point, together with different areas of Northern Manhattan, such as East and West Harlem. In South Bronx, only 70% of the seniors in the area reported having one.
And why are ACs so important? Because New York City buildings are basically made for the winter and they were not constructed with ventilation in mind, Brian Vant-Hull said. So, in the summer, these buildings made for keeping the people warm retain heat and also moisture, which ultimately affects health and triggers or aggravates respiratory conditions like asthma. Fans cannot battle moisture and dehydration that effectively. The ideal scenario is that people battle dehydration by drinking fluids and trying to ventilate their places as much as they can, but they can only do so much. This is why AC units are, in some cases, vital for city dwellers in heat pockets. I learned that there was a State program for providing free AC units but too few New Yorkers were taking advantage of it. And I also learned that there is a significant information gap inside the affected about which kind of solutions they might be able to get to improve their situation.
“I learned that there was a State program for providing free AC units but too few New Yorkers were taking advantage of it. And I also learned that there is a significant information gap inside the affected about which kind of solutions they might be able to get to improve their situation.”
How I decided to help them
When you start at Social Journalism, you have to know how far you can go, and how far do you want to go. After learning how a “hidden hardship” like extreme heat could kill people, I decided that I was going to go as far as I could in terms of trying to reach people and forget about getting an immediate impact or outcome. After my summer semester, I started working with AdaptNY, a project focused on covering adaptation and climate change issues. Our goals were similar, as AdaptNY (the same organization that built The Harlem Heat to verify the dangerous indoor temperatures that threaten Northern Manhattan dwellers) was thinking in ways to build an information resource for a specific community, with the community itself. Immediately, I learned that my objectives were aligned with AdaptNY’s, and thanks to the experience of working with Editor-in-chief Adam Glenn, I could get an even clearer idea of which would be needed to establish a neighbor-to-neighbor network in which those dwellers will be able to connect between each other and help themselves to better endure an extreme weather event such as a heat wave.
I worked with AdaptNY as a Community Editor, helping the organization take the first steps into a proposal for funding that will allow the project (which also has community organization WeAct, public radio WNYC and social journalism project IseeChange as partners) to become a reality. I produced stories, I helped to reactivate its Twitter presence and I reached other communities working in the area to let them know what we were brewing and to invite them to be part of the project in the future. 8 of those organizations said they might join the project as well, which can amplify the project’s reach, and the people it serves.
I also coded a tool for people to check if they are eligible to get one of those aforementioned AC units and crafted a “postcard journalism” project (read more about it here!) that will work as a different way to tackle the outreach process, trying to reach the potentially affected on an intimate level. Some of those postcards were crafted in Spanish, given the huge Latino population in the area. I got great feedback from within the people involved in the project and my goal is to keep working on it after the program and to ensure that I contribute this network to be a reality.
So, what about the process?
You probably will feel cheated if you reach this point of the text and I tell you that there is no single blueprint for applying social journalism. But I’m afraid I will have to tell you exactly that. There’s no single way to do this. You start by landing on your community the best way you can, with help or without it, and start crafting a strategy to listen. After that, you use that listening as the backbone for doing some of the reporting. But in the end, you just don’t provide a reporting project: you come up with at least a proposal to help that community to be in a better position to improve their situation or to be able to be more resilient.
It is impossible that Social Journalism works as a specific formula, because every community is different, hence the way you are going to approach it is going to be defined by the nuances and singularities of that community. But if you know that you start with listening (and that this listening process does not involve jumping on with your own ideas or early reporting) and that the long-term goal is to work with something that the community tells you they need, the process will take its own shape. Just don’t be afraid to change, to let time and knowledge to shape what you are trying to provide. Don’t be a slave of hunches about what might be more effective for a community. Just try things and don’t be afraid to fail, because no matter what anyone says, the only way to see if your ideas work is by trying and iterating.
“It is impossible that Social Journalism works as a specific formula, because every community is different, hence the way you are going to approach it is going to be defined by the nuances and singularities of that community.”
To put it on a simpler note, you just have to trust the fact that you may have the facts, but the real truth is inside the people who make a part of the community. #TrustTheProcess, a hashtag mostly used to portrait the almost eternal rebuilding efforts of the Philadelphia 76ers, claims that no matter how long it takes, the path will bring the reward. It will take some more years for the Sixers to have a great team, but fans are starting to see the first outcomes of it. I think that something similar will happen with the way Social Journalism contributes to communities, and this experience showed me that: we are not parachuters on these communities. If we want this to work, it will take time and commitment, and this is why I’ll keep collaborating with AdaptNY inside this project. Its on us to build trust and a sense of community and service through communication. Its on us to renounce as much as we can to forms that just don’t tell people how much you are on their side, and try some others. Its on us to care more for the people and less for the old ways of serving them through journalism.
I would like to finish this final entry acknowledging the help and inspiration from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s faculty, especially the Social Journalism program director Carrie Brown and professor Jeremy Caplan, whose teachings and different ways to push me forward and keep the confidence about my work contributed significantly for me to reach the next level as a journalist. Also last but not least, I want to thank to all my classmates at the program. For the feedback, for the discussions and for truly supporting each other during different moments of the year. I really think that we have a great opportunity to become part of a unique crop of professionals that will help to bring journalism closer to the people that needs it the most.
