Journalism as repair and power building
News organizations can build trust and audiences by committing to repair and power building.
This presentation was delivered at a session on audience development at the Independent News Sustainability Summit in Chicago. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
When was the first time you were distrusted as a journalist?
That moment happened to me ten years ago as an undergraduate journalism student at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
I was reporting on a local soup kitchen for a class assignment. It was my first time visiting one in my adult life, but I confidently walked in with a notebook and recorder, headed to the counter, and asked who I could interview for a story.
They politely asked me to leave.
I was someone they’d never seen before, in town temporarily, on assignment with an institution doing little to make life livable for their community.
The question of why I was distrusted at that soup kitchen ten years ago has stayed with me throughout my career.
I’ve worked as a hyperlocal reporter, studied engaged journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and collaborated with dozens of newsrooms through business and engagement support roles before launching The Jersey Bee.
It wasn’t until my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University that I finally considered that experience more deeply.
Why would anyone there talk to me? Why would anyone in that room—or anywhere else for that matter — read what I had to write?
The likely best-case outcome for my subjects would be that nothing much would change in their lives. The worst case was what I wrote could ruin them.
Which brought me to the question the staff at the soup kitchen didn’t even bother asking me: Why was I there?
I might have answered: “To help people know about this.” But if that’s why, I could do a lot more to get the word out than write an article.
Trust and intention
Research on trust in news suggests that why journalists do what they do is a leading influencer of whether or not people trust us.
In study after study, it’s not just what we report or how — but why — that tips the scale towards distrust.
In 2017, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism summarized the majority opinion of their study on distrust trust in media: “Powerful people are using the media to push their own political or economic interests, rather than represent ordinary readers or viewers.”
In 2020, a Pew Research Center survey found U.S. residents describing “a lack of transparency…with respect to the work news organizations do.” With a majority — 80% — thinking news is at least “somewhat” influenced by financial and corporate interests.
More recently, in 2024, researchers Jacob Nelson, Seth Lewis, and Brent Cowley published research in the academic journal Journalism that suggested that no matter how much or little people knew about how journalism is funded, most people believed news organizations reported news inaccurately “because they simply wanted to generate larger audiences.”
The Jersey Bee’s “why”
When we launched The Jersey Bee, our goal was two-fold:
- Meet the civic info needs of our primarily BIPOC, working-class community.
- Develop a service model for info districts, a model for funding local news as a public utility.
This lead us to ask:
- Why would our community, historically marginalized and exploited by media of all types since this nation’s founding, care about our journalism?
- Why would future voters elect to support a local news provider through a tax levy, no matter how small the dollar amount, under those conditions?
Big questions on their own, but together, they offered a clear, if challenging, path forward.
First, we would acknowledge and try to repair the harms of journalism and other institutions.
Second, we would build power for ourselves and our community to enable the future we needed to thrive.
Our reparation strategy is present in everything we do but is most clearly exemplified by The Jersey Bee’s daily newsletter, The Daily Buzz, and our food access efforts.
Local news to support desegregation
The Daily Buzz is The Jersey Bee’s daily newsletter, delivered Monday through Thursday as 12 unique editions serving the 12 towns and cities in our service area.
To produce The Daily Buzz, our events calendar, and content for our website and social media, our small editorial team reviews hundreds of pieces of online news and information weekly.
They use automation and generative AI tools to summarize and repackage local info for easier access and consumption.
When we served one town, our chief goal was improving information equity and building a broad base for engagement and power building.
But in 2023, we expanded to 12 towns and cities, curating information from across the region and distributing it hyperlocally, enabling us to be a force for cultural integration in one of the most segregated and unequal regions of the United States, acknowledging and responding to the harm of a century of media redlining that’s made it harder for people of color and working-class communities to access the resources available to their neighbors simply for a lack of information.
Local news to meet basic needs
The Jersey Bee’s approach to meeting the needs of a broad, diverse audience also means helping people access basic needs.
The Jersey Bee prioritizes service by following an information hierarchy of needs. We try to address people’s basic needs, such as food, water, shelter, and others, so they can fully participate in community.
That’s why improving access to food aid and other resources has been a priority for The Jersey Bee since day one.
In May 2020, shortly after we launched, we sourced thousands of cloth masks and distributed them through area food distributions with callouts to sign up for our text messages delivering food aid and other info.
We handed out food, delivered texts, and listened to food system stakeholders for three years before launching our food access beat in 2024.
Our commitment to repair has enabled us to enter spaces often closed off to journalists: food pantries, municipal offices, regional public health coalitions, and other places where journalists are usually more trouble than they’re worth.
But nothing stands out to me more than a recent backpack giveaway where we debuted our food access mini-zine.
In our routine listening, we saw an area school distributing a poorly formatted flyer.
Anyone who follows local government may be familiar:
- PDFs on Facebook with QR codes or long illegible links to register.
- Missing dates or other critical information.
- Word art from 2000.
The Jersey Bee reached out to help the school improve the flyer and increase access to the resources they were providing.
Our why was clear: we’re not here to write a story (most of the time) — instead, we’re here to help in any other way we can.
We helped improve with one flyer and then another.
And the next time they held a community event, they invited us.
The Jersey Bee was able to distribute food access info to people who need it most — and would be the least likely to find and discover our services online — thanks to our commitment to finding ways to fix things, not just documenting what’s broken.
You can read more about our strategy to use journalism to improve social and economic conditions in our community at jerseybee.org.
