Introducing: Listening Post Norrköping
Could you introduce yourself and your team and tell us a bit about how you’ve found yourselves in the media field in Norrköping?
Sure thing! My name is Mathias Lind and my two colleagues Thor Khodayari and Gabriella Norenius and I started our organization called Bred Blick just one year ago. Our goal is to highlight opinions and thoughts of people who are rarely given space in the public discourse. We aren’t exactly a media organization but today we work alongside local newsrooms in Norrköping to help them expand their coverage.
During some weeks of late 2015 more than 11,000 people a week applied for asylum in Sweden. Many of these people ended up in Norrköping, which is a pretty small city (130k residents). Local media had such an opportunity, and a responsibility, to provide information and a voice to these asylum seekers — but that didn’t happen. We started meeting up with news leaders, found out that they wanted change too, and slowly built a project plan.
Tell us about the origins of Listening Post Norrköping. How did the project start? How did you all find the Listening Post Collective?
We found out that our project got funded the same day we had our graduation party (which still feels unreal). Initially the idea was to gather journalists from newsrooms across the city in workshops — to develop methods and ideas aimed at countering ‘otherization’ in daily reporting — and then help them with implementation. We noticed early on that the news leaders wanted something more finished from the get go. A friend sent a link to your web-page, we read into it and just loved it! It works well for our original purposes but also evolved our thinking about fair reporting and the role of news media.
Have you had the opportunity to try the playbook out yet?
Yes! Early on in October we found out that the last big asylum accommodation in Norrköping, called Bollen, was being shut down and that the 250+ people living there were going to be moved to other cities. For those living there this meant, at best, that they would have to commute to all the activities and friends they’d gotten to know here in Norrköping these last two years (if they have enough money for transportation), and at worst, homelessness. Asylum cases for some unaccompanied youth are dependent on school attendance and often routines aren’t in place quickly enough at their new schools in new cities to create and sign off on a new individual education plan for them — which puts them at serious risk of getting deported to Afghanistan.
We wanted to make sure that the residents living there had ways of getting their voices and concerns raised. Our goal was then to serve as mediators between the asylum seekers and newsrooms, engaging with people from Bollen and making sure their concerns were being read in the newsroom’s editorial meetings.
We started using Groundsource for text messaging — and set up signs with our phone number in places we knew many residents spent their time. We also made sure to be physically present as much as we could at language cafés, at the Swedish intro courses, etc. We also set up a remote office on certain days in these places, so we naturally met residents that way. The landlords of Bollen weren’t stoked on what we wanted to do, so getting into Bollen was difficult.
What were some key insights from trying it out?
Step 2 of the playbook, getting out of the office and taking a walk, is so important! We were invited by a Bollen resident to come have fika (coffee and sweet bread) in his room. This experience was SO insightful for us. Just setting foot there gave us a much better understanding of what his everyday life looked like. This was something we couldn’t have researched or asked our way into. Being there, showing up often, and being curious were invaluable.
Taking time at the beginning of a project to do the information needs assessment is crucial. We skimped on this, to be honest, mostly because of the time pressure. People were being moved from Bollen quite quickly, so we felt we needed to get the text-message signs out there as soon as we could. We thought that we knew how to get our message out there since we have worked with others in the refugee community before. I suppose fooling ourselves that we had the answers was a good first-hand experience. We realized language barriers were way more complicated than we assumed. Despite our efforts to make the Swedish very easy in the questionnaire, not many used it.
What’s the state of local media in Norrköping?
Local newsrooms here struggle as most do anywhere. They are trying to keep up with the output they had before digitalization. New business models are being experimented with. This leads to less reporters out there building relationships with communities in Norrköping. However, we feel the culprit here when it comes to misrepresentation isn’t all resource-scarcity.There is a clear narrative that’s been building for a long time in news media discourse, that the news is for ‘us’ and about ‘them’. Much of the conversation in Sweden in regards to how we represent certain groups centers around quantitative representation, i.e. ‘percentage-wise, how well do we represent our population?’ and also about staff diversity — which is great! About a fifth of Sweden’s population are of immigrant background. A study from 2016 showed that in the local newsroom that best represented immigrants in its coverage, 10% of its stories were related to immigrants. These are steps in the right direction, however, we felt something more immediate was needed to change the way newsrooms cover and engage with the community.
What are your plans for the next few months?
There is a neighborhood in Norrköping called Hageby. It houses about 10,000 people. Unemployment rates in the neighborhood are more than twice the average in Norrköping and roughly half of the residents there have immigrated to Sweden. This area and those living there are regularly covered in a one-dimensional way or not at all. More than once we’ve seen news reports describing crimes in the city center of Norrköping that end with “…and then they drove in the direction of Hageby.” We are eager to find out what the information needs there are, and in what ways we could be of use. So, we are preparing an information needs assessment right now, as well as building relationships with different organizations who are already active in the neighborhood. We are also thinking about ways to create and distribute our own content. We’re hoping that newsrooms will begin to run with content that comes from our engagement but, in the meantime, we want to make sure these important stories are being reflected back to the community.
The Listening Post Collective is a project of Internews. We provide journalists, newsroom leaders, and non-profits tools and advice to create meaningful conversations with their communities. We believe responsible reporting begins with listening. From there, media outlets and community organizations can create news stories that respond to people’s informational needs, reflect their lives, and enable them to make informed decisions.
