Building reflective media spaces to realize change
Five practices to bring reflection into your organization
Having time and space to think and reflect. This is one of the most valuable aspects of a JSK Community Impact Fellowship at Stanford. The last nine months have driven home how critical holding space for reflection is for growth, both as an individual and as an organization. As the fellowship comes to a close, I wonder how I might leverage that learning to build better media spaces.
Making time for reflection was an early practice at Lede New Orleans, the nonprofit journalism organization I co-founded in 2020 to provide multimedia journalism training to young local Black and brown creatives. It’s also the focus of my JSK work.
At Lede, we close most training sessions and internal meetings by answering a few go-to reflection prompts. Holding that space allows me, my team and the young people we serve to exercise our curiosity. It gives me dedicated time to slow down and think about what I’ve learned and how I might apply those lessons as Lede grows from a training program to a civic media hub. It also allows me to assess failures or shortcomings in a way that reveals a constructive path forward, instead of sweeping past whatever went wrong and hoping it doesn’t happen again.
I was energized when I saw a similar emphasis on reflection emerge during my first sessions as a JSK Community Impact Fellow. Fellowship sessions start with cohorts sharing recent wins and they end with a reflection exercise. Throughout the fellowship, we used the digital collaboration tool Mural to jot down learnings, reminders and lingering questions on a virtual whiteboard, and share feedback with JSK leadership. I spent hours reflecting on successes and failures with cohorts and JSK managing director Alberto Mendoza, my advisor. I was even encouraged to reflect on the steps I was taking to care for my body and mind, and how that feeds my work with Lede.
This experience changed me. Few of the journalism spaces I worked in prior to founding Lede New Orleans held space for reflection on a regular basis. I’ve sat in plenty of hour-long editorial meetings and one-on-one performance reviews. But I can’t recall meeting with my reporting team or an editor for the sole purpose of reflecting on what kind of job we were doing and how our work was impacting others. Often reporting projects were put to bed after publication without much collective discussion outside of a celebratory happy hour. I had more in-depth discussions about clicks and engagement than I ever did about what I learned that week as a local reporter. Reflection just wasn’t a part of the work process.
I look around the journalism world and see a lot of burnout. Journalists feel ignored or trapped in unfulfilling work, feeling that has increased during the pandemic. Newsrooms are disconnected from the needs of communities of color and continue to make decisions that harm them. Journalism is missing the mark on what it means to build workspaces that promote diverse thought, in addition to racial and ethnic diversity. It’s stifling innovation.
These issues won’t be solved with a few training sessions, updated policies or meetings; they require a cultural shift. Making more time for reflection is a step toward that shift. You shouldn’t have to apply for a fellowship to reflect on your work and your impact. We can hold this space in our workplaces now.
How can we build more reflective journalism spaces? Here are some group reflection practices I’ve gathered as a JSK Community Impact Fellow at Stanford.
1. Make time.
There are lots of opportunities to bring reflection into your workflow. It doesn’t need to take a lot of time, but it does need to be consistent. Add a few minutes for reflection to regular meeting and planning session agendas. Hold a weekly townhall for reporters and editors to share learnings and mistakes from the week. Build periodic recap and reflect sessions into the calendar for long-term reporting projects. Holding consistent space for reflection signals that this part of the work is important. It also sets the stage for diverse thinking to emerge among team members, a key ingredient for innovation.
At Lede, we hold 5–10 minutes for reflection at the end of program meetings, as well as training sessions for our Community Reporting Fellowship program. This practice has helped us learn what people value about our programs, surface pain points, and develop new approaches for community-driven reporting. It’s now a part of the way we do things, and our team and the young people we serve have come to expect it.
2. Use prompts.
Prompts are useful for switching team members from a problem-solving mindset to a reflective mindset, and to seed constructive dialogue. At Lede, we use the simple sentence prompts “I like…,” “I wish…” and “What if…” to spark discussion. Participants are encouraged to use the prompts to start their sentence (e.g. “I like that we got hands-on practice with cameras,” “What if there was transportation assistance available to help people get to the workshop?”). I especially like “What if…” because it encourages you to get creative and daydream a bit. The JSK team encouraged cohorts to write down “important reflections, realization or questions” after each session. Over time, we’ve found the prompts have become a part of our organizational language in and out of reflection periods. It delights me to no end to overhear “what if” statements bubbling up among the young storytellers training in our newsroom.
3. Embrace silence.
Reflection sessions at Lede often start with a healthy silence (think 7–10 seconds). This is especially true in the world of video conferencing. I’ve learned to lean into that silence as a sign that folks in the room are switching into reflection mode and formulating their ideas. Executives, managers and team leads take note here: resist the urge to jump in and add your own thoughts, or call on specific team members to speak. If you typically do a lot of the talking during meetings, use reflection time to listen. Silence might feel awkward, but it can also hold space for quieter voices to enter the conversation. If you do call on someone, pick a person who hasn’t spoken yet and lead with curiosity rather than confrontation, for example, “Trevon, I’m curious about what you’re thinking.”
4. Pass the mic.
One way to ensure everyone has a chance to talk is to go in a circle and give each 30 seconds to respond to a single prompt. This works best for small groups, and can be a good structure to adopt if one or two people tend to dominate team discussions. It’s also a good way to be intentional about holding space for teammates who are members of underrepresented groups. That said, don’t force people to share; give folks the option to pass or yield their time if they are still thinking or have already shared.
5. Get creative.
There are lots of ways to encourage and gather reflection. Group discussion is just one option. Consider having team members jot down reflections on Post-its and add them to a reflection wall. Jot down collective notes on a whiteboard. Get physical and have team members respond to questions by walking to a specific corner of the room or using colorful circle labels to map feedback on a posterboard. I’ve found that the more you can take reflection offline and get people moving, the better the engagement is. You can always post a photo of whiteboard notes or Post-its in a Slack channel later on.
The heart of our work at Lede New Orleans is in building spaces where the experiences of Black and brown people are valued, and people feel comfortable posing questions and sharing what they think. These reflection practices help us build that culture, and realize the change we want to see in local media.
