Q&A: Darryl Holliday on why journalism should be more like community organizing
Darryl Holliday is a co-founder of City Bureau, a nonprofit civic media organization based in Chicago. With programs like Documenters and Public Newsroom, Holliday and City Bureau practice a type of collaborative journalism that melds community organizing, education, and journalism practice.
We caught up with Holliday to learn more about how collective action and community participation are re-shaping journalism, building support and trust, and allowing a new form of information sharing to survive and thrive.
WF: How did you get your start in journalism?
DH: I went to Columbia College in Chicago and worked at the school paper. Then, I started working at a hyperlocal news outlet called DNAinfo right out of college, which is now basically Block Club Chicago. I was a general assignment reporter and I’d drive out to the scene of a crime and basically file photos and a story from my car.
Doing the daily grind of street reporting taught me the basics, but also what we need to do to bring journalism closer to the people, and engage people in the work.
WF: How did City Bureau come about?
DH: It’s always helpful to learn the rules that you plan on breaking. At DNAinfo, I learned the traditional rules of reporting. I met Andrea Hart, one of the four co-founders of City Bureau (along with Holliday, Bettina Chang, and Harry Backlund). We kind of expanded each other’s definitions of journalism, civic engagement, and public education and what they could do together.
Those conversations were a big start. So was working at Invisible Institute, which was more civic-minded and participatory, and less about cranking out stories. It was about building public tools, doing deep listening, and really being with people to bring them into the space.
WF: What is your definition of collaborative journalism?
DH: I like to think more about collaboration between members of a community. What it is that we can do to improve the quality and breadth of conversations that happen around civics, local government, or community engagement? I keep going back to these 3 P’s: policy, people, and power. What are our contributions to the real nitty-gritty community conversations that have to happen? We’re facing so many challenges right now. I think they are collective action issues that people need to work on together.
At the end of the day, I’m less concerned about collaboration between journalists — I do think it’s important — but really, I think the endgame is more equitable and robust collaboration and connection between people in a community, or across communities that are impacted by similar issues.
WF: City Bureau definitely tries to break those barriers down, between who is a community member and who is a journalist. How do you think about bringing more people into this journalistic process?
DH: Historically, journalism has been an industry or a field apart — even the idea of bias forces journalism to take one step back and say, ‘I’m not a part of this community, I’m an impartial judge or observer.’ I think a lot of that is in need of a big refresh. A journalist is just one element of how people receive information — they get it at the barbershop, the salon, the library, a public access TV station, the list goes on and on.
What new skills do journalists need to be better conveners of people, facilitators of conversations, or fact-checkers for what’s going on in a community? We’re thinking about different ways to apply organizing and education skills to create new models for how people work with other people, and how people work with journalists.
WF: What is City Bureau working on to help create these new models of journalism?
DH: During the pandemic, we made a COVID resource finder. We were talking to people in our communities, and what we found is that there wasn’t necessarily a lack of resources — there were many groups in Chicago who were working on food, money, or access to resources — but it was hard to connect the resources to the right people.
Instead of making a new resource, we made an online tool that made it really easy to filter and search according to your needs and just connect all the resources from all the community groups that we knew were out there with people who were looking for them.
We’re also working to expand Documenters, which is now in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Minneapolis. We’re talking with folks in the South, West Coast, and Great Plains region about how to set up more Documenters sites within this growing network.
WF: What have been the biggest learnings from Documenters? Where has it been most useful or impactful?
DH: We’re thinking through what it means to be a part of a civic community, locally, that’s also connected to a national community of practice. There’s this group called the Network Weavers, June Holley has written a lot about this.
For example, we have Documenters who are really interested and eager to engage with what’s going on in Minneapolis. When we get the Minneapolis folks together with the Cleveland or Chicago or Detroit folks, they begin to find connections that they thought may have been siloed to their area.
Lead pipes are one recent example. Once you get people talking about the issues that affect them, you find that there are connections across geographical lines. That pluralist approach brings up new ways of engaging and solving those problems.
WF: What is the outcome or impact of those network connections? What can then happen?
DH: I mean, we’re going to find out. I don’t know of many journalism organizations that are really interested in community organizing as a tenet of journalism. I think about groups like Canopy Atlanta or Resolve Philly — there’s this new crop of media organizations that are really taking it very seriously.
We’re learning on the fly. All the Documenters sites are engaging in similar activities, and coming up with a range of successes and challenges. We want to help build out a system of self-support — that isn’t necessarily reliant on City Bureau — so that the people who are engaged in the work can communicate and continue to meet with and help each other. There are so many resources and opportunities to share in this community. Network weaving is about making sure they’re being used efficiently and effectively, and the overall group can benefit from all of it.
WF: You recently wrote a piece about journalism as a public good. How do all these ideas connect?
DH: There needs to be a revised theory of change for journalism. Not the one that’s like, ‘write the stories, place the ads, get people in power to change policy.’ We think about it like, ‘journalism is one tool in our belt, but how are we supporting the conversations that communities are having so that they are the drivers of change — and so that civic power is built up within communities, as opposed to being built up within newsrooms.’
If we’re really able to engage people in the process of information as a public resource, then I think what you could have is more trust and more support in journalism organizations. Anyone who supports Documenters with their dollars is basically paying their neighbors to engage in the practice of journalism. Embedding journalism into communication infrastructure — into how information actually flows in communities — will de-professionalize journalism, which I don’t think is a bad thing. It’ll bring journalism into the realm of how people actually think about information, which I don’t think is journalism.
I think journalists use words like journalism, you know what I mean? People use words like gossip. People talk about information in ways that are more community-focused and I think journalism needs to look more like that to thrive and survive.
WF: Overall, what have been some of your biggest insights and learnings through your work?
DH: Collective action is the mode through which we’re going to solve a lot of problems. Journalism has this lone wolf mentality. An investigative reporter stays up all night, doggedly filing FOIAs, writes the big story, and gets the Pulitzer Prize. Journalism has this hero mentality that I think is really at odds with how communities work.
I think this question of trust also needs to be flipped. It’s less about whether people trust journalists and more about whether journalists trust people and communities to be able to solve problems and produce, distribute, and share accurate and relevant information to their folks. Journalists use words like empowering, and a voice for the voiceless, but like, who said we get to do that? I think investing in listening and trusting different skillsets to influence and improve journalism can open up a whole lot of doors in this field.
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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.
