What Journalists Can Learn From Organizers
About 10 years ago I began visiting immigrant detainees through the Sojourners Detention Visitor Program, an initiative that connects imprisoned immigrants facing deportation proceedings with community volunteers willing to pay a friendly visit. As a new American myself, I was so affected that I had to put it in writing to process through all my emotions.
I spent the next couple of years either visiting jailed asylum-seekers or meeting some who were lucky enough to be released for weekly talks in New York City. I didn’t know at the time that I would eventually cover immigration for Global Nation, a digital magazine published by PRI, but those experiences opened up a world that found its way into my reporting.
When I look back, I realize how helpful those relationships were to my understanding of other immigrants’ lives. Wouldn’t it be good to develop those types of connections now, in my new role as a reporter?
That’s a topic we discussed this week in the engagement class at the Craig Newark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. We talk so much about the erosion of trust in journalism, but how do we build trust if not though sustained, reciprocal human exchange? And why shouldn’t journalists, whose work depends so much on the trust placed in them, include connections with community members in their practice?
Taylonn Murphy, a criminal justice organizer, was our special guest speaker. He’s the father of Tayshana Murphy, a promising 18-year-old athlete who was killed in 2011 by gun violence in West Harlem. Murphy decided to avenge his daughter’s death not by feeding the cycle of brutality, but by breaking it. He does so by changing the status quo and advocating for peace, education and healing. To make the point, he also joined forces with the mother of the young man who killed his daughter.
To solve a problem, he says, “You must identify it, [then] interrupt and mediate to change the community norms that cause it.” That goal can only be achieved through extensive observation and knowledge of a community.
Murphy collaborates with many journalists who rely on him as a point of entry to gain trust on the issues they want to cover in West Harlem. He says this symbiosis is natural because journalists control the narratives, while organizers and their communities don’t. By collaborating with an organizer, journalists gain greater access if they are transparent about their work, while the publics learn about and can build trust in the reporting process.
The Value of Permanence
Last week we talked about Hearken, a platform that helps newsrooms engage with their audiences, and publications like Voices of San Diego that practice “inclusion as the new objectivity.” That is, they overtly take steps to bring the public into their decision-making to produce news that is truly relevant. Recently Voices adopted Hearken to start fine-tuning its connection with the audience.
As I see it, the journalist-as-organizer goes a step further and becomes a sort of community reporting worker, to borrow language from the medical field, in which community health workers are residents of a community who know what problems affect it and what can be done to solve them.
Professor Carrie Brown, who oversees the social journalism program at the Newark School, presents an angle that gave me new awareness about the social journalist’s model when she recently wrote the following on Medium, “Although we operate on tighter deadlines than academics, we believe that journalists need to listen before reporting to better understand communities’ needs and diverse perspectives.”
Murphy calls it “connecting the dots,” which requires acquiring the observational experience and body of knowledge that gets to the root of the problem, not just its manifestations.
Journalistic engagement, then, becomes a way to build permanence and reciprocity that leads to cooperation in a community of practice. I see it as bringing a reporter’s techniques, contacts and experience to understanding how certain topics and issues manifest in people’s lives — how higher-level dynamics at the local, national and international levels trickle down and creep up to affect them.
“Journalists need to understand how it all correlates,” says Murphy. Community organizers can help.
When I think about the community of immigrants I’m interested in, some traits have always made me curious. Why do successful ones not want to be called immigrants? Why is being brainwasted taboo for some, while others are willing to talk about it? Why are immigrants divided (documented, undocumented, skilled, less skilled, etc.) and why do they accept it? I wonder: would the learning derived from understanding those issues benefit them?
Honing the Mindset
Quantum physics teaches that “reality is what we make of it.”
So, when considering a subject or developing a rapport, it’s useful to remember a couple of things:
The concept of “empowering,” is misguided; I just don’t like that word. It implies that we give power to someone, but people already have it, whether or not they are aware of it and choose to yield it. The late Steve Buttry did a good job of explaining what’s wrong with that mindset in “The voiceless have a voice. A journalist’s job is to amplify it,” CJR.
He wrote that the idea that journalists “give voice” to the voiceless paints us as though “we are miracle workers able to restore speech to the mute with the touch of a pen or microphone.”
Then he quoted Aly Colón, Knight Professor in Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, who says, ”Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that ‘we become their megaphones.’ We go out into our communities and there are these living books with important stories to tell. These people have the voices, but they don’t have the means to get heard.”
One more thing: Heather Chaplin makes an excellent case for a mind shift in “The Crisis in Journalism Is a Wicked Problem,” on Journalism + Design.
A problem is wicked, she writes, when it has reached a degree of complexity and unsustainability that traditional problem-solving techniques cannot fix.
“It has become obvious to me that the crisis in journalism is a wicked problem,” she writes. “It’s a tangled knot that is changing and creating new knots all the time. Massive technical disruption, fraying trust, collapsed business models, fractured audiences, rising propaganda machines, a White House bent on discrediting the whole enterprise. And of course, all these factors blur into other wicked problems, like changes in information technology, crumbling institutions, political polarization, shifting demographics, and so on.
“In other words, we will never be able to properly name the crisis in journalism, let alone solve it.”
So if journalism does have a wicked problem and we want to change its future, we’ll have to look at it differently. What if we saw “the future of journalism not as a campaign to win, but as an ecosystem in need of constant tending? If you’ve ever so much as kept a plant alive, you know you would never think about solving a garden. You’d think about cultivating it,” Chaplin says.
I think time has come to think of tending to, cultivating and sustaining community connections as a way forward.