Q&A: Sarah Alvarez and Erin Perry on why competition in journalism is over
Outlier Media is a Detroit-based service journalism organization that collaborates directly with residents through SMS texting and information needs assessments to report on the issues most relevant to Detroiters and fill accountability gaps in the city.
We caught up with founder and editor-in-chief Sarah Alvarez and managing editor Erin Perry to learn more about how Outlier thinks about collaboration and service in journalism.
WF: How did you both get into journalism?
EP: I’m from Detroit, born and raised, and when I was in high school the Detroit Free Press had a journalism program that allowed students from around the city to produce a monthly publication. Each school had a page in this collective, collaborative type of publication and it was delivered to about 30 high schools in Detroit. When I graduated, the Free Press awarded me a journalism scholarship that I took down to Hampton University. I had five internships by the time I graduated, and I was pretty sure this was the industry I wanted to be in.
SA: I was a lawyer before I was a journalist. I started my career in civil rights law, but I knew that it wasn’t what I wanted to do. We’re now experiencing all these Supreme Court decisions that are reversing long-standing precedents, and when I was in law school, we could see the makings of it, and I wasn’t sure if I could have the impact I wanted to. It took me about seven years to get to journalism. I started in public radio, and then about six years ago, I started Outlier.
WF: Outlier Media describes itself as a service journalism organization — how is service and collaboration a key part of your work?
SA: I think it’s insane that we even have to say that — all journalism should be service-oriented. Service journalism, much like engaged journalism or collaborative journalism, are terms that are used to ghetto-ize these different types of journalism and make them seem less important. This is compared to the “real business” of journalism, which is to do what exactly, if not to serve and engage with people? We use these terms because it describes to our community what we’re trying to do — to use reported, verified information to fill accountability and information gaps, to serve the people of Detroit, and help them address their challenges and meet their goals. We know we have to do this collaboratively. There is not a news organization in Detroit that’s strong enough to reach a general audience and get everybody the information they need. Only if we work together can we get the information in front of people.
EP: We host monthly collaborative editorial meetings that have representation from WDET, Detroit Free Press, Planet Detroit, BridgeDetroit, Detroit Metro Times, and Chalkbeat Detroit. There’s a shared agenda that each organization populates with information to discuss during its portion of the meeting — recently published projects, reporting resources we may need, collaborative ideas we want to pursue, story pitches to or from freelancers, and events we want to cross-promote. We also noticed years ago that there wasn’t really a pipeline for freelancers — writers, photographers, videographers — to get into the mainstream publications in Detroit. Those lines of communication didn’t seem to be very open. Now, we’ve seen newsrooms shrink, and we wanted to establish and widen this pipeline. We have almost 40 members in our freelance journalist network and they’re invited to our collaborative editorial meetings on a quarterly basis.
SA: Some of them are established freelancers that have been working in the city a long time, but the main place we get freelancers is through our Documenters network. We’re not just trying to keep our resources solely within our newsroom, or collaborate with other newsrooms — we also want to collaborate with Detroiters in general. We have more than 300 Detroiters in the Documenters network, and that’s a great entry point.
WF: The Documenters network is a great example of community collaboration — how else do you think about this in your work?
SA: We exist to be redistributive. The point of the journalism that we do is to help people get the information they need to practice self-determination. If you’re a gatekeeper, like we are in journalism, you can either choose to use your job to uphold existing power structures or to help people who have had less access to power, gain access to information and power. The Documenters program is part of that, as is our SMS network — we want to be accessible to people whenever they need us. Our information needs assessments are part of that, too. We want to cover what folks have said needs to be covered, where they are issues or pain points. What are people’s biggest challenges? What parts of the municipal or corporate apparatus are not responding to this? That’s what we’re going to respond to.
EP: And not only is this beneficial to Detroiters, but it also helps our partners in the industry. The notes that we train and pay to Documenters to produce are publicly available to journalists around the city. It’s right there for journalists to access and figure out what happened at that meeting that they didn’t have time to attend because their newsroom is half the size it was five years ago. It’s not just a message of empowerment to Detroiters, but also to the industry to help shore up information and fill those gaps. So instead of us being the experts to figure out what to cover, we like to say that Detroiters are the assignment editors. They tell us what to write about.
WF: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in building Outlier?
SA: Financial support has been the hardest part. When you have a newsroom run by women of color, we’re not going to be seen as visionaries. We’re going to be seen as disruptors — not in a tech bro way, where we have resources flowing towards us — but disruptive in a way that’s difficult to get support. That’s always been the challenge. But we are here doing this work, and we’ve found so many collaborators around the country and in this city. We collaborate very closely with a lot of news organizations that are similar to ours and serving different parts of the country — City Bureau, Scalawag, Capital B, Oaklandside, Resolve Philly — those collaborations have really helped sustain us when it felt like we weren’t able to make it. That’s where we go when we need support or inspiration.
EP: One of my dreams is for Outlier to be top of mind for people when they’re having an issue with the city. I want them to say, ‘you should text 67485!’ We need to get out into the community even more than we are now. We plan to be at more festivals and community events — that will increase the chances that people have that 5-digit number at the top of their heads when they see a problem. For example, we had a recent story about the Jeffersonian, a high-rise apartment building with lots of senior citizens that was without air conditioning during a heat wave. That tip came through the SMS system, and one of our collaborative reporters that we share with the Free Press was able to go after it and pursue that story.
SA: That’s like our version of breaking news. We’re not just trying to cover things — we want our work to be preventative, to the extent that it can be. That’s our goal.
WF: What have been the most important lessons you’ve learned as you’ve grown Outlier?
SA: Competition is over — and we all lost. So now, what are we going to do? The only thing that we can do is collaborate. That’s the best opportunity we have. We treat people with respect in our ecosystem and the community we serve. Our values are our values, and we show up with them wherever we are, and it makes us a great organization and partner.
EP: I’m a fan of putting the journalist before the journalism, and I think Outlier does that really well. Part of the reason why the industry’s numbers are much lower isn’t just because of financials — people are burned out. We don’t want people to feel that way here. Talking to people around the industry, the prevailing notion is still that we want to be first, we want to have everything. That’s problematic. We are intentional about what we cover and we don’t do it at the expense of the very talented people who produce it.
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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.
