Reflected Courage
How nine remarkable journalist colleagues taught me I don’t always have to face the challenges of nonprofit journalism alone
Fifteen years ago, I was offered a small grant to create an experimental one-person news site, a blog really. It would focus on criminal justice and youth justice issues in Los Angeles County, a topic in which I had some expertise.
I agreed to the experiment because it seemed that everywhere I looked, the life-wrecking flaws and racial inequities of the local and statewide justice systems pointed to stories that needed telling. Yet, most news outlets were not covering these issues I was seeing. Or, if they did, the coverage was rarely at any depth.
The project, which I christened WitnessLA, was only scheduled to last a year. But, unexpectedly, it found a niche in LA’s news ecosystem. So, when the year was over, I didn’t have the heart to shut it down.
Instead, I continued to grab hours in between my paying assignments as a freelance journalist in order to keep WitnessLA running a little longer. Then a little longer still.
Eventually, a foundation offered me a new grant, and I was able to hire an assistant editor. With additional grants, I hired a freelance reporter or three, and began mentoring USC Annenberg journalism students in the art of justice reporting, then published their writing whenever possible.
As the years passed, our small but fearless nonprofit news site continued to break stories, and we won awards for our work. And, with some regularity, our investigations had a measurable effect on public policy.
But, while our reporting flowered, and we were skilled at operating on a shoestring, our workload was becoming unsustainable.
By 2019, WLA assistant editor Taylor Walker and I were both exhausted.
We considered a merger with another nonprofit news site. However, after months of negotiations, the guys in the room kept urging the women in the room to sign contractual paperwork that did not represent anything close to a marriage of equals.
Worse, the deal would have restricted our ability to report on certain topics that we — and the communities we serve — consider essential.
I called off the wedding.
Yet, the fact remained that we needed a reset of some kind, albeit not one that would take a wrecking ball to what had made WitnessLA of value in the first place.
Then COVID arrived, and our work seemed to double. On certain days, I considered shutting the site down altogether.
But, people kept coming to us with stories that required reporting.
Insert a miracle
The path that would lead to the needed reevaluation of WitnessLA’s trajectory appeared out of the blue one afternoon in May 2021.
It arrived in the form of an unexpected email from Pam Maples, who introduced herself as the managing director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships based at Stanford University. Pam said she hoped I would consider applying for JSK’s 2021–2022 Community Impact Fellowship.
She’d heard of our work, she said, and thought I might find this program helpful. “Your focus aligns with ours,” Maples said.
Two months later, I got the call informing me that I had been selected as one of ten journalists chosen from around the nation for the nine-month JSK virtual fellowship, which was to begin in mid-September, 2021.
I cried when I got off the phone.
In the six months between the fellowship’s beginning and now, my JSK advisors have given me the counsel and emotional support I had not admitted I needed.
They’ve also provided additional mentoring in the form of an array of Stanford experts who introduced our cohort of fellows to topics such as an insight-stimulating process called “design thinking,” and in another case, helped us to expand and reboot our conceptions of leadership.
Most importantly, week after week, through exchanges with my nine remarkable JSK co-fellows, I was also able to regain the confidence and the emotional distance I needed to reimagine WitnessLA’s future.
Here are a couple of my conclusions.
The magic of narrative, and community storytelling
When I got into journalism, it was because I believed in the power of deeply reported narratives to break through readers’ resistance to caring about painful topics and seemingly unsolvable problems.
At WitnessLA we learned that good storytelling allowed the members of the communities most affected by our reporting to see themselves in the narrative. Then, if they didn’t know already, it often helped those same community members to see that they were the ones with the power to lead the way to policy change.
Yet, over the past few years, the narrative side of WLA’s investigations too frequently became the accidental casualty of our overload.
Now, in the course of the fellowship, I’ve not only come back home to narrative journalism, WitnessLA also hopes to expand its definition.
Another change encouraged by this Community Impact Fellowship, is the decision to include community voices in a more integral way in our reporting framework.
For instance, one artifact of the deadly early months of COVID was the appearance of self-recorded video speeches by frontline healthcare workers, which were run on cable news with powerful and devastating effect.
This year, as part of a new investigative series, WitnessLA will introduce our own “video op-eds” recorded by community experts whose lived experience allows them to know the failings of our faulty systems better than anyone.
Inspired by the work of JSK Fellow, Jen Larino, whose nonprofit, Lede New Orleans, recruits and trains “community storytellers,” we intend to provide coaches to guide these expert voices in growing their ability to create their own video essays.
Journalistic midwifery, you might call it.
There are, of course, a list of challenges that accompany the deeper and more community-anchored reporting strategy we’re creating, including the challenge of finding adequate funding.
But, during these past JSK Fellowship months, swinging out on my professional trapeze has been made easier because of the company of my gifted and courageous colleagues who are each taking their own professional risks, and who do this risk-taking whether they feel secure or not, because they believe in the urgent nature of their work.
So it is that week after week, ten different journalists, from ten different towns and cities, with ten different sets of experience, continue to reflect courage back and forth between us, collectively and individually.
For me, during these last six months, that reflected courage has been a form of light.
All photos by Celeste Fremon
