Q&A: Cassie Haynes on what city governments can learn from collaborative journalism
Cassie Haynes is the co-founder and co-executive director of Resolve Philly. In 2018, she joined Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, who was leading the collaborative reporting project Broke in Philly, to grow and scale the collaborative for financial sustainability.
With past careers for the City of Philadelphia, nonprofits like the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, and numerous startup companies, Haynes has experienced the trials and tribulations of collaboration.
We caught up with Haynes to hear about what makes Resolve Philly work — and why cities should look to collaborative journalism for inspiration.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
WF: How did you end up with Resolve Philly after working for the city government in Philadelphia?
CH: I was only with the city for a short period of time. It was not a place where I felt I could be impactful. City government is the antithesis of collaboration, I will tell you that, not a lot of that going on. I was the deputy of the city’s anti-poverty agency and just really frustrated with the stagnant economic mobility, the government’s lacking response, and the all-around apathy.
I was friends with Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, who was working on Broke in Philly, and she reached out about their reporting on poverty. We started going to a lot of the same conferences and events around the city. I recognized journalism — specifically collaborative solutions journalism — as an opportunity to have an impact on my community and to address harmful narratives that I’ve seen in news media.
WF: It’s interesting that you thought you could have a bigger impact in journalism. What were some of the difficulties you faced in city government?
In my experience in Philadelphia, the agencies compete with one another. Every agency wants to be able to claim the outputs. There are often power grabs — which agency gets to claim which piece of impact is politicized — it’s kind of gnarly.
The agencies aren’t incentivized to work together. At any given time, four agencies are going through the strategic planning process and not talking to any of the other agencies about it, even when they’re serving the same populations. There’s a ton of wasted time, money, and effort. It’s kind of like newspapers competing in journalism.
WF: How was Resolve Philly different? And why is a collaborative approach so much better equipped to address problems and find solutions?
CH: When we started trying to build out Resolve into something more sustainable, there was already infinite trust between Jean and the partners. It was also our values as an organization: collaboration, equity, community. The equity piece, especially when resources are involved, is a big part of it. I think it’s important to make sure that everybody from the Philadelphia Inquirer to small, single-person desks have the same access to resources in the collaborative, and the same value is placed in how they’re showing up.
We have 25 partners that have different audiences, led by folks with different experiences, who come from different places, have different skill sets, and speak different languages. The key to solutions is looking at them from as many angles as possible. I think there’s no better way to do it than basically all the newsrooms in a community coming together and examining an issue from all these angles, asking all of these questions.
WF: Both journalism organizations and city government often forget about those underrepresented communities. What needs to happen to give more people a seat at the table?
CH: Absolutely. Or maybe they already have a ceremonial seat, but with no fork or spoon. We don’t give people the tools to be successful in those seats — we don’t give them everything they need in order to fully participate.
WF: So how do you better equip communities with those utensils, so to speak?
CH: We do a lot of trust-building between communities and local news. One example is supporting local organizations in their relationships with the media. We had one of our community partner organizations reach out to us after a horrifying murder where a Black trans woman was killed and her body was found. There was an article in another media outlet, not one of our partners, that misgendered this person.
So before more damage was caused to her community and family, we were able to reach out to our partners at Philly Gay News, where we have a deep community relationship. They were able to confirm the identity of the person and it prevented any further outlets from picking up the misgendering.
That’s the relationship we have with a lot of organizations locally — folks feel like they can call Resolve with a challenge like this. We also then asked one of our communications consultants to work with the residential treatment facility where she had been and do training with the staff so they could be prepared for the interview questions they were getting about her murder, which was really high-profile.
WF: This kind of collaborative response is super important, especially in crisis situations. How did having this network also help in a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic?
CH: We took a specific approach in pandemic response, working with our partners to address the communication needs of those on the other side of the digital divide and most vulnerable to COVID-19. We are constantly engaging with people back and forth through our initiative Equally Informed Philly. It’s a two-way text line that serves as a Q&A — one of our editors responds in English and another in Spanish.
It started as a mechanism to get people the information they needed to stay safe during the pandemic. It’s become an evergreen initiative for Resolve Philly as we recognize the needs within these communities — largely Black and Brown, immigrant folks, working low-wage jobs, or folks with disabilities — who are most at risk in times of emergencies. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is, those kinds of populations are always going to be most vulnerable.
We’ve been thinking about how we can build an agile communication system that allows folks with just a regular SMS-enabled phone — it doesn’t need to be a smartphone — to easily get useful, actionable information when they need it.
WF: Do you ever think about how institutions like city government should incorporate some of these collaborative lessons?
CH: All the time! We talk a lot about how so much of what we do, so much of how we operate, would be so beneficial in other spaces.
Every single person on our team is a gem and a blessing, truly. But one of the best hires we’ve made is an internal project manager, Ruby George. And she just manages the shit out of every single project, every process, every workflow, every communication system. It’s just absolute gold.
We are so much more efficient in how we can collaborate with our newsroom partners, with our community partners, and with industry colleagues because we have the tools and the workflow and the process in place to make it happen — in a way that doesn’t drive people nuts.
Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
