What is social journalism, really? How I’m applying it to Black Lives Matter
You might think social journalism is the same as social media, but not exactly!
Quite frankly, I’m tired of people thinking that they are equivalent, although it’s an understandable misconception.
CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s defining M.A. in social journalism program should be the industry’s standard. As a member of the inaugural class, I’m here to share how social journalism is much more than the usage of social media tools and how its process helped me serve the Black Lives Matter community journalistically.
Social journalism recasts journalism as a service to help communities reach goals and solve problems through the following principles:
1. Listening
2. Building relationships and trust
3. Engagement
4. Community collaboration
5. Finding solutions to a public’s needs
It’s a new frontier of journalism — encompassing many other aspects of journalism — including human-centered design, development, citizen journalism, advocacy journalism, solutions journalism and entrepreneurial journalism.
Social journalism takes some of its inspiration from civic or public journalism, developed by pioneers like Jay Rosen two decades ago. Civic or public journalism is also known for engaging with the public, creating public debate and integrating journalism into the democratic process.
Joy Mayer, who practices and teaches community engagement at Missouri School of Journalism, and Jeff Jarvis, a prevalent voice in emerging new forms of journalism — also talk about the future of journalism as being more collaborative between communities and news organizations.
Social journalism sounds pretty cool, right?
Journalism can be used to help people and have a more direct impact on different types of communities defined not only by geography, but having shared needs, goals, interests and experiences that bridge them together.
As for social media’s role, it is a way to practice the process of social journalism — especially with online communities who share real-life identities and experiences.
Conducting in-person interviews is still extremely important. It’s one of the greatest way to meet people and build relationships with your communities. Also, it’s a way to prove that you truly care about the issues at hand and the community’s needs. It’s never advised to parachute into a community only to get a story and never return again.
I recommend that journalists attend protests, community forums and board meetings just to get to know people. I encourage journalists to go even if it’s not a required reporting assignment. This is a technique I use to listen and discover what the Black Lives Matter community cares about. Also, meeting some of my sources at protests helped build trust.
I started implementing social journalism processes by serving the Black Lives Matter community back in late January 2015 — shortly after the program started.
#BlackLivesMatter arose as a popular hashtag on Twitter in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin.
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi co-founded Black Lives Matter, network of 26 chapters in three countries and now a powerful international movement.
Black Lives Matter set out to engage and connect people across social platforms — becoming a social media-driven community that correlated with real-life issues, including systemic racism and its daily brutal impact on the lives of Black people.
At first, my idea was to document the impact of how Black Twitter engages and connects people who culturally identify. During the process of listening to potential sources back in February, I started to pay attention to the significance of Black Lives Matter. While getting acquainted over the course of the spring semester and building relationships, conversations with my now-frequent sources helped me understand the challenges Black Lives Matter faces being recognized as an intersectional movement.
Media responded to the social media campaigns around Black men as victims of police brutality — like Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray. The response for Black transgender women and Black cisgender women (meaning they identify with the gender assigned at birth) as victims was much lower.
Also, the community expressed concerns with patriarchal ideologies and how the co-founders weren’t getting enough recognition, at the beginning of 2015. Two of the co-founders, Garza and Cullors are queer, and Tometi is Nigerian-American, which, as Black Lives Matter’s tweeted, it is an important complication to the narrative that encompasses working towards a collective liberation for all Black people.
As the year progressed, national call of actions for Black women as well as popular hashtags #sayhername and #blacktranslivesmatter raised awareness of the network’s focus on uplifting diverse voices.
Black Lives Matter called out media for its lacking response and misconceptions, while educating Black communities of the fight for liberation — not only against police violence, but systemic racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness.
Black Lives Matter faces more challenges with co-optation and the shifting of narratives with hashtags like #AllLivesMatter, something all co-founders have commented on. Critics blasted the movement’s approach to its political demands and for the disruptions of white liberal presidential candidates’ rallies such as Bernie Sanders.
The community faces other challenges: media biases and being under-reported. In some news media reports, Black Lives Matter was called a hate group. Protesters are referred to as thugs from time-to-time; Black victims are dehumanized or criminalized; and white police officers and shooters are shown greater empathy.
After listening, building relationships and using social media to engage with the community across platforms, I did some design thinking on creating possible solutions to help Black Lives Matter meet its goals.
Black Lives Matter organizers and I are collaborating with Black Narratives Matter. It is a site for news media on how to cover the community and related Black experiences, and to provide resources on race literacy and ethics.
Journalism should be about covering stories communities care about. We aren’t all impacted by news the same way. Therefore, having a specific focus on how different communities and individuals have a stake in the coverage of issues and topics is crucial. News media can focus on covering stories that have a direct impact on specific groups of people. I believe the amplification of community voices and building relationships can lead to that impact spreading beyond just that one community, but to greater sets of audience.
Now that we live in a digital age. “Audience” should be recasted as a set of communities newsrooms listen to, engage with and cover. Audience is still important in newsroom environments, but with so many niche news organizations and different types of needs out there, it makes sense to explore how audience can be an umbrella that is broken up into these subsets of communities.
My goal is to do that. My dream is to bridge together gaps between communities and news media, especially with developing Black Narratives Matter and my newsroom work at the Daily Dot. I plan to develop the practice of social journalism.
Note: This is the first post in a series of critical analyses documenting the process of social journalism and applying it to covering Black Lives Matter. Also, these essays on BLM will correlate with personal experiences of how I’m dealing with race and systemic racism, and how I’m having conversations about it.
Follow me on Twitter @DeronDalton, @BlkNarratives, and follow the hashtags #BLKSocialJ (BLK Social Journalist) and #BlackNarrativesMatter.
