Why The Black Press? Why Solutions-Driven Data Journalism? Why Now?
And why I’m working to make data reporting more accessible to newsrooms serving Black communities.
“A fearlessly edited press is one of the crying necessities of the hour,” investigative journalist and newspaper publisher Ida B. Wells said during her address to the membership of the National Press Association in 1893. Something she well understood during her day, because her journalism was in the service of ending lynching in the United States and promoting the civil rights of Black Americans. Wells used quantitative work on lynching statistics to force other critics of lynching, as well as defenders, to reckon with the facts concerning why white mobs lynched mostly Black victims.
She used data journalism as a tool for social justice. She needed to be fearless… to uncover the truth… and to tell the more complex story.
I keep Ms. Wells’ words on my desk as a reminder of the tradition and legacy I proudly uphold as the second generation in my family to publish the Black Voice News, a 50-year old print and digital publication in Southern California. I believe I have an obligation to provide our community with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, help them to understand the systems in which we live, and provide information that will give them the impetus to act, and continue to monitor those in power. Data journalism has become a necessary tool in service of “justice seeking reporting”, which is our North Star.
My project as a Stanford University John S. Knight (JSK) Community Impact Fellow is expanding my thinking on solutions-focused data reporting on racial justice, building on my experience with two Black Voice News initiatives: Mapping Black California and DaHUB. My initial work is to better understand the needs of Black media publishers as they attempt to utilize data or visualization technology in their reporting, identify the types of data we need to tell justice stories by surveying organizations and individuals doing systems change work, and explore data “asset-framing” to expand community narratives shifting from injustice to justice.
New World, New Tools
In 2017, I launched Mapping Black California as an initiative of Black Voice News, to better understand, report on, and visualize data on Black Californians. The initiative utilizes geospatial technology to enhance community news and storytelling.
Our first map project: Segregation by the Sea, told the story of California’s history of segregated beaches, taking readers on a tour down the California coastline highlighting — through archival images and short vignettes — the history of California’s various segregated beaches.
Since then the team at Black Voice News has grown in experience and expertise. We’ve trained our graphics team to make maps and story maps, and have paired them with our writing team to expand our data journalism work, building a variety of maps, story maps, and data dashboards.
In March 2020, when the impacts of COVID-19 on the Black community were beginning to become clear, we dove into reporting on the issue looking for state-level demographic data only to find the absence of consistent data on infection rates, death rates, and testing by race.
We worked with the information we could find.
One story compared this pandemic to the 1918 influenza epidemic and explored the data that was available that illustrated how — during both pandemics — Blacks were disproportionately impacted negatively by the disease. And our first dashboard “COVID-19 in Black California” aggregated data from a wide selection of sources and populated with data collected and curated by our team, allowing us to report more directly on the immediate impacts of the disease on Black California.
Our work in mapping led us to better understand the need for better disaggregated data and led us in 2021 to work on DaHUB, a Google News Initiative funded data hub that will allow us to better share, store, and visualize data for our reporting.
I believe reporting on the pandemic has also proven how important it is for all newsrooms, no matter how small, to be data literate, or at least, have basic skills in data journalism. It has become an indispensable tool in challenging misinformation and disinformation, in making the abstract understandable, and providing critical insights with informed analysis.
As my team at Black Voice News struggled with our own attempts to produce more data-supported reporting, I started asking the question: how might we make data journalism — especially data journalism on racial justice and equity — more accessible to small publishers like us?
Why the Black Press? Why Now?
Our work at Black Voice News is grounded in the tradition of the Black Press.
Some critics argue that the Black Press was founded because major media at the time virtually ignored Black America, and not only were we ignored in most cases, we were demonized, silenced, and criminalized. The groundbreaking project Media Reparations 2070 outlines that history, “(the) Black community has fought for a just media system and the health and well-being of our communities. Since the colonial era, media outlets have used their platforms to inflict harm on Black people through weaponized narratives that promote Black inferiority and portray Black people as threats to society.”
The role of the Black Press, identified in the 2021 Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York’s Center for Community Media’s report “Why Black Media Matters Now,” was both “needed and visible when the convergence of the worst pandemic in US history and state violence both were disproportionately impacting Black Americans.” The report tracked 179,865 articles in 97 media sources from March 1, 2020 — May 1, 2021 and analyzed popular topics: COVID-19, health, racism, politics, and culture and identity.
According to the report’s key findings: Black publications provided six times more coverage than mainstream media on issues of importance to Black communities including racism, health disparities, and voting access. In regards to COVID-19 coverage, Black media was five times more likely to mention “disproportionate racial impact” and two times more likely to mention frontline and essential workers.
As a sector, our coverage is critical.
Learning Lessons as a JSK Community Impact Fellow
My first quarter as a JSK Fellow has been spent researching and identifying resources at Stanford including learning about the diverse collection of libraries, centers, and initiatives that will help inform my work, namely the KNOW Systemic Racism (KSR) Project of the Stanford Libraries led by Racial Justice and Social Equity Librarian Felicia Smith and Big Local News led by computational journalist Cheryl Phillips. KSR is creating a searchable database to discover and critically evaluate data regarding systemic racism against Black people, while Big Local News is designed for journalists and newsrooms to share data and collaborate on projects.
Both are invaluable resources for this work.
I’ve also enlisted the support of a research colleague to craft survey questions as I begin this journey to make solutions-focused data journalism more accessible to Black Press organizations. I will be talking to representatives from two key stakeholder groups: Black publishers and Black-led organization leaders who are engaged in systems change work to better understand their data accessibility needs and challenges.
Ida B. Wells also once said, “There must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice if we only know how to find it.” I believe that one of the roles of journalism is to find and interrogate those remedies and we must utilize the tools of data-driven storytelling to achieve that mission.
If you are interested in learning more about my fellowship project or any of the Black Voice News projects mentioned in this post, please email me at pbhinds@stanford.edu.
