What I learned in my first semester of grad school — presence is key

Being there is the thing itself.

The single most important lesson I learned about reporting, interpersonal relationships and community engagement in my first semester in the Social Journalism cohort at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY is to be present.

Image from a social experiment I conducted at Bryant Park in NYC during my first semester at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Thanks to the wonderful professors, guests and colleagues that I learned from, I know that the time you, as a reporter, spend with the community you wish to serve, in their spaces, is by far the most important part of your work.

Observing and listening with empathy, showing compassion and seeing a real human with real agency behind every data point, story or proposed question or idea — that is what makes up our presence. It is the slowness and intentionality in our reporting as engagement and social journalists that separates us from the parachuting folks.

Being there is the thing itself. It is not about getting huge insights and forming deep human connection at every turn, but rather about engaging with a group of people who expect you to extract information, be temporary, to let them down or skew their story as so many others have done, and to prove them wrong with your presence.

Another takeaway from the semester is that we are not the gatekeepers of information. Stories should not start with us; our motives or our goals, but rather, they should start with information needs that we can meet. As a journalist, you may have the eyes and ears trained to recognize needs and the intentions to communicate someone’s lived experience well, but the profession is about service above all else, which is inherently selfless. It is not our job to curate the conversation about a topic, but rather, to provide the necessary information to allow an individual or community to initiate one entirely their own. We’re in the business of promoting agency — and that is a social service.

Social journalism is about meeting the information needs of a specific community that is bound by experience rather than by geography. Those information needs could be internal or external, but what I learned and put into practice last semester is that you need evidence from the community to truly know what their needs are — and that your work will only serve them if you listen.

In doing so, I have acknowledged what I do not know; what biases and perspectives with which I look at the world and form my opinions about it. I have tried to follow many of the people, publications, articles and other resources that cover issues faced by the community I chose to cover, such as The Good Men Project and this hyperlink wonderland of a NYT article that discusses teaching and learning about about masculinity in an age of change.

I have learned how important it is to be in the know about the previous coverage on the community I wish to serve, which is 12-to-16-year-old boys in New York City n(I haven’t narrowed down to a specific borough yet, but I very well might), navigating their identity, societal pressures to be a man and male role models in their life.

I have also found helpful, more recent articles such as How ‘traditional masculinity’ hurts the men who believe in it most published in The Washington Post earlier this month, a recent NYT Opinion entitled A Frat Boy and a Gentleman and the backlash over the #MeToo-inspired Gillette ad in combination with their launch of a new site TheBestMenCanBe.org, which details their new commitment to actively promote “positive, attainable, inclusive and healthy versions of what it means to be a man.”

Taking after the principles of Constructive Journalism, I see it as my job, especially for the community I’m working with, to identify and present more complex analyses of realities people face, past and present — their lived experiences, environments, issues, successes. As journalists, we don’t need to avoid sensationalizing or generalizing one story, and focus on providing enough context for an audience to understand it fully.

When reporting last semester, one happy surprise I had, which greatly influenced my decision to narrow the community I report on the way I did, was that I expected talking to boys from ages 12–16 to be a challenge. Past experiences and messages from society led me to believe I would get one-word answers from the boys in an interview. This was not the case. They spoke clearly and at-length and had very valuable experiences to share.

My experience talking to young men of that age inspired me to show the rest of the world what they are capable of and to change the narrative around young men; what they’re capable of and what they experience. Like I said above, however, I am first committed to diving into their experiences, identifying their needs further and coming to solutions and realities that enhance their quality of life, collaboratively.

Since one of the main issues my community faces involves not being able to share their feelings openly, I imagine I will face challenges when trying to engage and convene my community as a whole, but I feel well equipped with the skills I have gained thus far, to at least try. My plans to serve this community going forward include the following items:

• Continue to listen and observe with empathy
• Highlight the flexibility of the male identity
• Get feedback on work already done and bring all new contacts into reporting process (at one professor’s suggestion, I have made a spreadsheet with all of the contact info I got from the social experiment days and will send an email to them when I prepare to make another big step and ask for their input on it before I do it)
• Identify specifics that would help them meet their needs by brainstorming with them
• Publicize the data that’s out there about men’s psyche i.e. Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Men and Boys and supporting CDC data
• Provide a bridge to resources that already exist that would help meet their needs or even help them explore and navigate questions they have i.e. mental health resources
• Conduct another social experiment, in which I ask about needs more specifically
• Collaborate on new resources, services, spaces and more
• Ask young men to share their social habits with me by letting me see and understand the videos, articles, books, music, movies and other media they consume and why
• Build a healthy online community in which boys and men can share resources and examples of healthy masculinity that they find and follow on their own
• Start a social media campaign around a hashtag in which men can congregate, track and update their experiences with healthy masculinity
• Create avenues for journalists to interact in more mutually beneficial and ethical ways with existing social media subgroups that are specific to boys and men
• Establish rules and guidelines that allow me to deal with possible trolls in these online spaces or other so-called bad actors that might interfere in some way with the work I and my community of boys and men engage in
• Regularly revisit my sources to check-in on the success of my journalism for them

Here is the link to my digital landing page for my project, a publication on Medium that I will regularly update with my progress.

With that, I am ready and excited to start my second semester at the Newmark J-School, to pursue these plans with intentionality and to remain present in all my work.