Q&A: Joy Resmovits on listening and collaborating to reshape local coverage of gun violence
Joy Resmovits is the senior editor for local impact at The Trace, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to covering gun violence.
Resmovits has worked at both national and local outlets, from The Huffington Post to the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times, becoming well-versed in engagement journalism and collaborating directly with community members.
We caught up with Resmovits to hear how The Trace is listening and collaborating to reshape local coverage of gun violence in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia — and why they’re looking to expand their local initiatives.
WF: How did you get involved in journalism?
JR: I was supposed to be a doctor or a dentist. As a kid, I was good at science and my dad was a pediatrician. In college, I completed all of organic chemistry and loved it. But at the same time, I wanted free tickets to Broadway shows, so I went to an info session for the Columbia Spectator and tried to write theater pieces for them. I ended up getting some news training, and over time, somebody assigned me a story. Of course, it was a comedy of errors — my physical tape recorder broke.
But I felt so compelled by the work I was able to do, even as a student. I was assigned to cover graduate schools, and what really pulled me in was Teacher’s College at Columbia. I spoke to enough people who pointed out that its mission was civil rights, and though it’s located in Harlem, it sent a lot of its teachers to schools in Westchester or other wealthy places that didn’t quite need as much help. Even writing about that with my limited toolbox, it got me more interested in journalism and showed me the potential it could have for change.
When I was a college student, everyone told us that you start small and go bigger — you take an internship at a local publication and then hopefully one day wind up at the New York Times. I wound up doing exactly the opposite. I started big at The Huffington Post covering national education policy, and then went smaller and smaller in scope with local journalism. It was interesting to witness the dynamic between national and local reporters, and the assumptions one has about the other. It felt like with every step I was taking, I came to appreciate the local more in terms of the long-term accountability towards your community.
WF: Over time, how did your work become more local and collaborative with the communities you served?
JR: I went from Huff Post to the LA Times, where I was working on their education desk as an editor and reporter. We were working to make the coverage more accessible and start more Spanish translation — we wanted all of our explainers and tips about how to get your kid into a magnet school to be accessible to all of LAUSD, which is majority Latino. From there, I went to the Seattle Times, which was an even smaller market. I feel so fortunate to have gotten to observe how each of these different newspapers carves out a relationship with their community.
It was at the Seattle Times where I really got schooled in community engagement journalism. Anika Anand was the first engagement editor for the Seattle Times Education Lab, and I was learning on the fly about these programs to bring in student journalists, host community events, and all these new and different ways to incorporate community voices into our coverage. It’s because of this amalgamation of experiences — connecting the dots in national reporting, local stories, and learning about how community journalism works — that I feel prepared me for this current job at The Trace.
WF: What made you want to work for The Trace as senior editor for local impact?
JR: Before I got to The Trace, they created Up The Block, a community resource guide in Philly that connects folks affected by gun violence with community services. There’s been reporting done to back those services, and it’s all been collected on a website that is translated into Spanish, and it incorporates our stories, too. It was exciting to come into The Trace and see community journalism happening. The next question was: How do we scale this up? How do we create a model of reporting that incorporates community-focused work and puts participants in the driver seat? We wanted to go into the communities that wanted us there and where we felt like we could do something positive in terms of our service journalism, and have a beat reporter working alongside a community engagement reporter, with those two jobs viewed as pairs and equals.
We design these community engagement jobs with a listening period, so our reporters take time to have conversations, listen to people, and ask what they want from us before we make assumptions. We let that guide our community journalism work. When we think about who this work is for, one aspect of it is the power brokers who can change laws and policies, but just as importantly — if not more — are the people who are most affected by gun violence. They have to be central to our coverage. We have to think about them in terms of the stories we’re selecting, the voices we’re incorporating into our stories, and the way in which we’re distributing them.
For example, our community engagement reporter Afea Tucker goes out to community events in Philly to promote Up The Block and tell folks that we are there for them. In the course of doing that, she’s hearing story tips that she’s filtering on to Mensah Dean, a beat reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who incorporates those voices into his stories and is able to see patterns he might not have otherwise. In one case, she talked to 40 people at an event — that’s fairly good for one afternoon — which is just an added bonus to the reporting that he’s already doing.
In Chicago, our community engagement reporter Justin Agrelo learned that there’s a huge gap in trust between survivors and the media, based on conversations he had with survivors. We’re not hubristic enough to think we can solve this on a larger scale, but we did want to find our own way to bridge that gap. Our answer was a network that enables survivors of gun violence to tell their stories in their own voice. I have been so astounded by the response — we’ve had over 50 applicants, and most are direct survivors themselves. As a journalist, you’re not always used to hearing people say thank you. But so many of the participants said thank you, this is necessary, it’s part of our healing, and it’s a way to get our own stories out in our own words.
WF: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve come across in your work?
JR: Survivors often approach us with skepticism. How do we create a safe space to tell their own stories when they are obviously traumatic? What kind of mental health support can we bring? We have freelance contracts with journalists, but what does that look like for survivors that write for us? A lot of them feel like they’ve been so burned by journalists before. What language and extra protections do we need to give them? How do we treat them and their stories in a way that’s fair, and meet them in a place where they feel an authentic ownership over their own stories? We haven’t done all of this work before and we’re bringing these learnings to a vulnerable population and doing our best to help them tell stories and feel comfortable.
WF: As you look ahead, what are you most excited for The Trace to work on?
JR: I’m really interested in bringing other disciplines into journalism. We need to constantly remind ourselves that not everybody is as word-first, people have different ways of learning and absorbing material. ProPublica Illinois did this experiment with youth community theater as a way to build trust, using storytelling exercises and acting techniques. I would love to see us continue to think outside the box to marry The Trace’s organizational expertise on a tough, sobering, important topic with finding ways to bring people into something that’s difficult to engage with. How can we tell better stories that hold the causes of gun violence accountable and shed new light on what isn’t being done to solve it? At the same time, how can we incorporate what we’re learning into people’s daily lives and make it easier or more palatable to engage with?
We’ve been talking a lot about community collaboration, but collaboration with other newsrooms is also key to our approach. We just collaborated with The Washington Post on a story about a popular handgun that has allegedly been firing on its own. In Chicago, we worked with La Raza, Block Club, and the Chicago Sun-Times on our Aftershocks series. We’re always looking to be additive and find what’s missing and offer that to our colleagues.
The exciting thing has been watching the way that collaborative journalism — which initially was viewed on the margins of our profession — get more and more integrated with your bread and butter beat reporting. They’re intrinsically connected, even if they sound different and require different skill sets. If you have engagement and collaboration working together, it will always result in more robust coverage.
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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 primarily 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 operational and project funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, NJ Civic Information Consortium, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and the Independence Public Media Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
