By Michelle Strutzenberger
Republished content with permission from Axion News.
Renewed Hope for Journalism Creates Shifts
Gathering centred on how communities, journalists can thrive together igniting new connections, possibilities
An energy for discovering and bringing to life journalism’s deeper promise is still pulsing days after a gathering in Portland, Oregon, inspiring participants to new connections and possibilities.
“My hope has been renewed,” says Renee Mitchell, admitting she had long bought into the pessimist view that journalism was basically a dying industry, gasping for its last breath, which “deeply saddened her.”
“(W)hat is coming is not new journalism but next journalism, where the possibilities are endless . . .” — Renee Mitchell
“But I now recognize that what is bubbling up in the void between what was and what is coming is not new journalism but next journalism, where the possibilities are endless on how to use technology to tell stories that build, empower and inspire community. That’s what’s so exciting for me.”
Hosted by Journalism That Matters and UO SOJC’s Agora Journalism Center, the gathering drew more than 100 journalists, community activists and others representing a diversity of professions. Called Experience Engagement, the highly participatory gathering or “unconference,” as it was called, centred on the question: What is possible when the public and journalists engage to support communities to thrive?
What’s now possible in the lives of three participants in the gatherings begins to answer that question.
Shaping a Community’s Soul
Amalia Alarcon Morris joined the Portland gathering as a government administrator responsible for civic engagement. Her bureau provides support to people at the community level to build capacity, develop leadership, identify issues that matter to them and build bridges back to city government, so that they can influence decisions that shape the community’s quality of life.
Amalia was encouraged to attend the events after participants at a conference on public participation heard her passionate reflections on the importance of story in shaping community.
“I was on a panel around equity and civic engagement and one of the things I said, which I firmly believe in, is that when we work in government, there is a kind of data lust that happens where people are constantly asking us for statistics; they want quantitative information to support the work that we do. But they don’t give the same respect to people’s stories.”
Quantitative data is fine, but people’s stories are the data, Amalia continues, and it is in “sitting down and listening to people’s stories” that hearts and minds are changed.
As a result of the Experience Engagement gathering, Amalia is now actively working towards forming collaborations with journalists in the city of Portland who have an orientation to the journalism that she saw might be possible.
“One of the biggest things that I walked away with…
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