Q&A: Priska Neely on why people need to come first in collaborative journalism
Priska Neely is the managing editor for the Gulf States Newsroom, a NPR collaboration between public radio stations in Birmingham, Alabama (WBHM), Jackson, Mississippi (Mississippi Public Broadcasting), and New Orleans (WWNO) and Baton Rouge (WRKF), Louisiana.
With a caring, people-first approach, Neely is a savvy collaborations leader who understands what it takes to train and empower journalists. We caught up with Neely to discuss how she built the Gulf States Newsroom from the ground up and what she’s learned.
WF: Why did you get involved in journalism?
PN: I’ve wanted to be a journalist for most of my life. My parents tell me when I was five years old, I used to interview people in my family with an imaginary microphone. I always enjoyed writing and telling stories. I edited the paper in high school and majored in broadcast journalism in college. When I discovered the world of public radio, I found it was more my speed — I interned at NPR after college and got hired. I worked on Talk of the Nation, a live call-in show that really shaped how I think about reporting. We always had to think about framing the question of the caller and how we were going to include the audience in the conversation. That stayed with me.
After, I worked at KPCC (now LAist 89.3), where I covered the early childhood beat. When I heard the statistic that Black babies were twice as likely to die in the first of year of life than white babies in the US, it challenged the assumptions I had about education, access to healthcare, and income — but it was really about the toll of being a Black woman in the US, the stress it has on the body, and discrimination and bias in healthcare. I ended up doing a year-long project on that in 2018, which included a lot of community engagement.
WF: How did those early experiences with community engagement and audience collaboration shape your career?
PN: I was doing a lot of outreach and engagement at KPCC, especially for the project I was working on, which was centrally stories about Black women — who are not necessarily listening to KPCC or NPR — not because they didn’t want to, but maybe they didn’t know about it or we weren’t framing stories in a way that was interesting to them. It was very important to me to get people involved in the stories and really take the reporting to them, and have that symbiotic relationship.
We did that with a lot of direct outreach, snail mail, social media — I was also on the talk show for KPCC and got a lot of people to call in and share their personal stories. For so many of the stories we tell, there’s a personal story driving the work. It made me think about how many more people could resonate with the experience of discrimination in healthcare, losing a child, or almost dying themselves in childbirth.
WF: What made you want to take on the Gulf States Newsroom collaborative project?
PN: When I was starting at NPR, everyone was saying there weren’t enough editors, and leadership wasn’t a path that people chose. But I knew I was interested in that. I knew I had the ability to assess situations, support people, and train. I had always done that on the side in my roles as a producer and reporter. I wanted to be an editor and help people do their best work.
At KPCC, there was a lot of pressure — much of it from myself — to tell the stories of Black women and be a Black woman reporter. When I left, I felt the need to call so many people, and there was a real feeling of, ‘Who will tell our stories?’ I knew I wanted to be in a leadership position so I could make sure that one reporter didn’t have to carry that burden. I wanted to take that experience to the next level and be a leader to help more reporters.
I also knew that I wanted to live in the South. I went to college in New York, I worked in DC, LA, and the Bay Area — big, expensive cities where the media markets are very large. I was interested in the challenge of working in an area where there isn’t that sense of competition, but there’s so many stories to tell.
The Gulf States Newsroom was new, and it’s been very challenging as a first job for a manager. But at the same time, because we built it from the ground up, I was creating the expectations as I was going. It’s part of NPR’s collaborative journalism network and at the time, there were similar models in California and Texas — but the Gulf States Newsroom was the first multi-state one. We had to think about the issues that united our three states and healthcare, criminal justice, and wealth and poverty were the first beats we started out with. These stations are small but mighty, and we’ve hired more people for our regional team based at the stations, adding a ton of reporting power.
I’ve been able to hire a team of people who are passionate about the region, digging into their beats, getting out there and meeting people, and amplifying their stories in creative ways. It’s a very diverse team, too — and we’re providing a lot of training to people who are new to radio. When it comes to hiring, I try to take the phrase “hit the ground running” out of my vocabulary. I think that in order to make any change in journalism for diversity and being more reflective of communities, you can’t only take people who already know how to do every aspect of the job.
WF: What were some of the biggest challenges in starting the Gulf States Newsroom?
PN: It was very lonely in the beginning, and it was difficult. I would ask people for advice and a lot of my mentors just wouldn’t know how to advise me. They hadn’t hired a whole team before, or recruited people in the South. It took me a while to realize, on a personal level, that this job can just be kind of hard and weird sometimes — and it doesn’t mean that I’m not capable or good at it.
I think being a collaborations manager can be especially lonely. You’re operating in this void alone and asking people for their time. I felt like I was organizing all these meetings to get our collaboration started, but people were just like, ‘What is this? Why am I giving my time to this?’ You have to work hard on those relationships and keep saying the value it will bring. Today, we had a big meeting with all the partners, and it’s awesome to see two years later how much less awkward it is and how much more people are used to connecting and sharing around the collaboration. We do a lot of work between the regional team and the local reporters, and it’s becoming more seamless, reciprocal, and feeling more like an overall united newsroom.
WF: How did you generate that buy-in and prove the value of the collaboration to people?
PN: It shifted once we had reporters. First, it was just me and I was having meetings with the news directors, and we’d come up with story ideas — but we wouldn’t have anyone to report on them. We couldn’t take a local reporter off their work. Once we had reporters, you could see that they were filing stories and working on features that were regionally relevant. Then about two years ago, we did this 30-minute special across the stations marking the first anniversary of the pandemic. We had an idea to re-visit and spotlight the stories that the local reporters had done so far, and introduce our new regional reporters and have them talk about what they were going to be reporting on with the collaborative.
I’ve also tried to encourage my team to hype each other up — posting compliments in public Slack channels, or at least texting your colleague that you heard their story and loved it. We’re really trying to influence the rest of the team to do that, too. We have a weekly news meeting with all the local stations and we’re starting a little shoutout session, and it’s going really well. It helps you take stock and remember what we do and what we’re about.
WF: What have been some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned in collaborative journalism?
PN: I have a list called “Lessons from collaboration” and one day I’m definitely going to write about what I’ve learned. But there’s only one thing on this list right now: If written communication gets weird, pick up the phone. A quick call can be so important — talking things out, even just for 30 seconds, can really make a difference. I went to visit a station in person the other week and had a 15-minute conversation that solved something I was trying to do for three months.
Getting to know people is also important. I’m huge about this with my team — we have bonding, retreats, icebreakers, meetings — I find that taking time to connect with people goes a long way. Just going to lunch, or for a walk, and not only talking about work, or having a phone call and asking about your day. I care a lot about people and being an intentional leader. When people are in a good spot, they can tell great stories — but they need to feel clear and confident about what they’re doing.
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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.
