Reluctance to lead
Finding the future of journalism through empathy, design thinking, and a redefinition of leadership
In early September of 2021, I began a nine-month journey as one of ten journalists selected from around the nation to be part of the 2021- 2022 John S. Knight Community Impact Fellowship at Stanford University.
As the name of the JSK Fellowship suggests, one of the primary issues we explored these past months was how we could deepen our engagement with the communities we serve.
What I did not expect, what most of us did not expect, is that another of the primary purposes of the fellowship was to nurture the ten of us as leaders, and to transform our perceptions of what leadership can accomplish in the world of journalism.
I am the founder and editor of WitnessLA, an independent nonprofit news site that focuses on the issues of justice and injustice that affect the health and well being of LA County’s communities. Yet, although I am inarguably running a news organization, albeit a small one, and I have faith in my ability as a journalist and editor, I didn’t really define myself as a leader.
As the JSK Fellowship continued, and we began to explore an array of leadership strategies, I realized that, historically, I was never a very good follower either. To the contrary, in the years before I launched WitnessLA, I’d become clear about the kind of in-depth, human-centered reporting that mattered to me. That vision led me to become a freelance writer, and book author, rather than reaching for the stability of an on staff position at a mainstream media outlet, where I worried I would lose my direction, or would be forbidden to follow it.
Years later, this same go-it-alone inclination (plus a nice foundation grant) led me to jump-start the independent news site that WitnessLA would become.
Yet, looking back, I see two other causal elements of my resistance to both leading and following. The first of those elements is the fact that I am a woman.
Statistically speaking, in the early 1990s, when I began reporting on the topics of justice and injustice that have informed my work and life ever since, women were rarely welcomed at the top rungs of the newsroom hierarchy. At a mid-level I worked with some terrific women as editors to whom I owe many debts of gratitude. But when it came to setting a publication’s editorial policy, women were — and still are — rarely the ones calling the shots.
In my early reporting years, this gender tilt also affected female reporters, who were not customarily assigned to the kind of edge-skating justice narratives I felt called to investigate and write. The strategy I generally used to deal with such gender bias was to immerse myself in the topic anyway, finding that, in most cases, an urgent story, deeply reported, would find a home, especially if no one else shows up to do the reporting.
My insistence on remaining independent was also affected by the fact that then–and now — I was drawn to practice a kind of journalism that not only included empathy, it was defined by it. Yet, up until recently, in too many mainstream circles, journalism of empathy was not considered…professional.
“Advocacy journalism,” a reporter-turned-public-information officer for a local policy maker once sneered in my direction, when I became visibly upset at the discovery that physical and emotional abuse was still being routinely doled out to kids in LA County’s youth jails.
I expanded my journalistic reach by starting WitnessLA in 2007. Between then and now our small but fierce news site has regularly won journalism awards (including two more this week), and has helped to change public policy with its reporting.
Yet, by the time I was recruited to apply for the JSK Fellowship, it was time for WitnessLA to reimagine its goals and direction. For that it needed an inspired and capable captain, a role that I was feeling increasingly unskilled at inhabiting
Leading with empathy
Thankfully, the nine months spent with nine remarkable journalists who were my JSK co-fellows, plus regular discussions with JSK’s exceptionally gifted advisors, Dawn Garcia and Alberto Mendoza, brought me to a different vision of leadership, and of myself.
The change was aided by the string of talented experts whom JSK provided to take my co-fellows and me through rigorous bouts of interactive instruction. In the realm of leadership, our coach was Dikla Carmel-Hurwitz of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. We explored communication theory with author JD Schramm, who teaches communication as a leadership skill to clients across the nation.
And, in the company of Tran Ha, we were immersed in an innovative practice known as design thinking taught in Stanford’s d.school.
The latter is an approach that borrows from the universe of design and applies an interweave of those methods to real world problem solving.
Tran, our instructor in all things d.school, helped us to use design thinking to explore creative leadership in journalism, which meant— among other things — looking for the non-obvious needs of the communities we were serving, while also leading with empathy, all of which necessitates deep listening, plus the willingness to leap into decision making while you’re actively learning.
There’s more to the theory, of course. Suffice it to say that Tran’s innovative teachings — along with the dynamic coaching of our other instructors — changed each one of us.
Somewhere in the course of that change, I located my inner leader and began to nurture her.
In recent months, as WitnessLA has begun to launch a series of community-anchored reporting strategies, which will, of course, require sustainable funding, this new experience of leadership has, for me, noticeably informed and brightened the road ahead.
Gazing into the future
Although the fellowship has ended, my nine co-fellows and I remain connected, with JSK and with each other. This means I am repeatedly inspired by the work of nine incandescent leaders who embody the future of journalism, as they explore and expand their own leadership abilities.
They are the following:
- Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, founder-director of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance and publisher of BuffalosFire.com, who continues to find innovative ways to bring access to information to members of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, so they, and other tribe members can better control their destinies.
- Simon Galperin, director at the Community Info Coop, and the Bloomfield Info Project, of Bloomfield, NJ — both of which are participatory media projects — uses technology and, when necessary, whatever tools are at hand, including a food pantry truck, to democratize journalism. He then explains his methods to the rest of us so that we may adapt them to our own journalistic ventures.
- Dr. Paulette Brown-Hinds, publisher of Riverside, CA’s essential Black Voice News, has also co-founded of Media in Color, an important new initiative designed to “strengthen and empower journalists and news outlets serving California’s communities of color.”
- Sonam Vashi, the co-founder of the community-led nonprofit newsroom Canopy Atlanta, in Atlanta, GA, who has jump-started a networked approach to journalism that serves Atlanta readers by producing stories with local residents. She does so, while never losing her love of and skill at narrative journalism.
- David Rodriguez Muñoz, a stellar photographer just hired by the Detroit Free Press. In addition to his work, “changing the world through “stories and images,” as he put it, eventually David hopes to return to California to found an information hub for the communities of indigenous farmworkers in his childhood home of Salinas.
- Sara Lomax-Reese, the President & CEO of Pittsburgh’s WURD Radio, and also co-founder and President of URL Media, continues to find new ways to reflect back to WURD’s listeners in a growing dialogue, her community’s “cultural brilliance,” and “historic resilience.”
- Jennifer Larino, the Executive Director of Lede New Orleans, a nonprofit that trains local BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people to become community storytellers. Now, inspired by our JSK experience, she is pioneering methods of creating “reflective media spaces,” which more fully value the experiences of community members.
- Lawrence Daniel Caswell, a natural leader, is the field coordinator of Cleveland Documenters, which trains and pays Cleveland residents to document local government meetings. In so-doing, the Documenters learn skills that are “useful for understanding local government,” said Lawrence, “and for participating more fully and with more agency in civic life.”
- And finally, Geoffrey King, the founder of Open Vallejo, through which he and his journalist partners are ferociously investigating and documenting the many unsettling actions of Vallejo’s police department, while also scraping and preserving local public documents, which seem to have a habit of vanishing. He accomplishes the latter through his newest project, the Vallejo People’s Archive.
I’m fortunate beyond expression to know them all.
Meanwhile, as I write this essay the world around us — local, national, and beyond — seems to grow ever more uncertain.
Because I’m a journalist it’s my job to try to find the best and most illuminating story inside the uncertainty.
Now, with the help of JSK, I have a few new tools to aid me. Some of the most useful of those tools have to do with my transformed view of leadership, which, to paraphrase Tran Ha, helps one face an “uncertain future not with fear and hesitation,” but “with purpose.”
And purpose, like leadership, helps map the way forward.
