News is urgent. So is building a network to tell stories at the community’s pace
Unlearning old journalism habits to make space for residents
The first thing that drew a teenage version of me into journalism — aside from the lure of wearing a badass “Question Authority” button — was the urgency of the work.
Asking questions on behalf of the public and delivering the answers felt like an honorable and important service.
That was well before news delivery was sucked into an exhausting cycle of tweets and stories updated by the minute, an unending push of information that I can only compare to being in labor — constantly.
About a year ago, the pause button was hit on what I’ll call my “traditional” journalism career of nearly two decades at The Plain Dealer, the only daily newspaper in Cleveland, my hometown.
It coincided with a global pandemic, a time when the need to get vital information quickly to city neighborhoods couldn’t have been greater and gaps in trust even more harmful.
Watching from the sidelines, while trying to freelance and educate three kids, allowed me a little headspace to examine aspects of local journalism that had tugged at my conscience for years.
Even when well-intentioned, reporting on complicated issues that spanned history, systems and trauma often felt too hurried or transactional because, in the end, the product was inevitably given more weight than the process.
Over the years, I often felt caught in the middle. One one side, there were community members who trusted me with their time and with their lived experiences. On the other, a flailing industry that rewarded stories tailored to fit a certain mold, sometimes pushing narratives preconceived based on data or shoehorned into slideshows. Or worse, what editors thought (suburban) subscribers wanted, sometimes based on clicks.
At The Plain Dealer, we did experiment with engagement efforts to listen to the community about the stories it wanted told. But the right results were hard to achieve when our majority white staff didn’t reflect the demographics and perspectives of all of the neighborhoods and cities we covered. It didn’t help that the big efforts often centered stories of trauma, loss and pain in a way that could (even unintentionally) feel unbalanced and extractive — especially when published alongside dissonant daily crime reporting that dehumanizes the same residents.
In September, when I joined the first class of John S. Knight Community Impact Fellows, I was in awe of sharing space with so many great thinkers — visionaries, to be honest — who are leading newsrooms, experimenting with civic-engagement models, finding ways to fill information gaps and telling stories in ways that repair harm in communities.
I was also relieved that I wasn’t the only one with baked-in habits, assumptions and practices I needed to “unlearn.”
This deprogramming on some level is philosophical. It requires being open to which parts of the journalism process we value and who gets to be a part of it.
But, for me, ideals don’t mean much if we don’t understand the actual steps to achieve collective goals.
I’ve tried to focus on how we might stitch together some of the elemental parts of journalism that I believe in — truth, transparency and clarity — with reimagined networks that empower community members to gather and share information at the local level. A different route to bolster accountability through repair of civic infrastructure.
The most meaningful “unlearning” has come as part of the Cleveland Documenters team, a gig I lucked into as the effort was getting off the ground last summer.
Documenters started in Chicago as a way to equip and pay residents to take notes at and live-tweet local government meetings. These citizens fill gaps created by shrinking newsroom resources and share knowledge with the general public, but also in networks of friends and neighbors. Beyond Chicago, where it is powered by City Bureau, and Cleveland, Documenters also serves Detroit (Rust Belt proud!) and is on the precipice of an even greater expansion.
In less than six months, Documenters has helped hundreds of Cleveland residents build civic muscle. It has helped me build community muscle.
In Cleveland, the work is nestled within a community organizing and network-building program called Neighborhood Connections, which rewards community participation and the energy of residents with small grants for neighborhood projects. That’s far different than a traditional news environment, where value is too often assigned based on clicks, Twitter followers or subscribers — regardless of how skewed that reality was because of lack of access and systemic inequities.
Lila Mills, whom I first met more than two decades ago when we were first fresh-faced interns at The Plain Dealer, oversees the Cleveland Documenters team. She’s been an invaluable guide for many of these lessons. Her compass is set to help people grow.
Together, we’ve been practicing what we call “fresh learning.”
That means we intentionally make room for people to try out new skills and to share with others what they’ve learned from successes or failures.
As a human, I love this concept. As a journalist with 20 years of newsroom baggage, it terrifies me a bit.
It was a joy to see a Documenter empowered to write a public-records request for the first time. Or track a city budget meeting.
It was also stomach-churning to watch a Documenter’s first live-tweet thread unfurling in real time — until I realized that shell shock was rooted in the veneer of perfectionism that many journalists cultivate.
When I brought this up to Mills, she noted that both journalism and community network building reward curiosity. Journalism, though, emphasizes rigid rules and mistake-correcting practices that can feel uninviting, even scary.
Community network building puts more energy into making a space where everyone has value and can contribute — and where it is OK, even expected, to make mistakes as we learn. That doesn’t mean we don’t fix mistakes; we’re pretty transparent when we do, often with the help of our beloved copy chief Mary Ellen Huesken. We just don’t devalue contributions from folks who are new to the work.)
My own “fresh learning” includes:
Moving at the pace of the community: Ignoring an ingrained instinct to be driven by output or outcomes — journalism’s shiny objects, like the series or the special section. That means the pace is often slow, and sometimes we have to overcome frustrations or barriers for folks who worry they don’t have the right skills. That extra time is needed to remove hurdles so our Documenters community can be more collective, inclusive, powerful and lasting. (Credit here Andrea Hart who early on schooled us on City Bureau’s Community Engagement Guidelines.)
Embracing imperfection: Cleveland Documenters Field Coordinator Lawrence Daniel Caswell (who also deejays our gatherings!) has cajoled us into accepting awkward pauses and rolling with technical issues. There’s no reason to create a mirage of perfection when we are working together. We all fumble sometimes. It’s OK. Caswell also is the backbone, who supports Documenters as they navigate local government, sharing feedback on their work while keeping tabs on the larger failings of the civic infrastructure in our city that must be addressed.
Creating community space for growth, skill sharing and collective goal setting: We’ve adopted a “Community of Practice” model. We don’t just assign Documenters to cover meetings, we meet monthly (sometimes more often!) to train together, to collectively decide what local issues we should amplify or explore more deeply. And we figure out how to use the information we gather to increase accountability.
Since November, we’ve signed up more than 350 Documenters and more than 200 have completed training. Collectively they have created about 150 sets of meeting notes or live-tweet threads.
More than 30 residents regularly show up for our virtual Community of Practice meeting to share skills and plan special reporting projects.
Our Documenters live in every ZIP code in Cleveland, and their diversity pretty closely reflects that of our city. Our work follows their curiosity. If something needs to be explained, we do an explainer, a process led by our new Civic Reporter Doug Breehl-Pitorak, who started as a Documenter. Here’s his explainer on the Cleveland City Council agenda. And another one on the status of public comment at council meetings.
Documenters can also fan out to do interviews on a topic, as we recently did to learn more about what influences Clevelander’s decisions about the coronavirus vaccines. Our network did more than 40 interviews with residents from all over the city.
This summer, with the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative, we will launch a free micro learning course that will train up to 500 Clevelanders to find public information and request records they need to be informed about the actions and spending of local government and elected officials.
Clevelanders have been hungry to be a part of this work. They just needed the right invitation.
This work of knitting together community networks and journalism — two things that should not have drifted so far apart — will take time, patience and support (please send money!).
It’s also urgent.
