How the class of 2017 put engaged community journalism into practice
Watch each Social Journalism student’s final presentation
By Ariam Alula and Alyxaundria Sanford
The Social Journalism Program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism welcomed journalists, leaders, community members, family and friends to hear, in-depth, about which engagement methods they used to reach and serve communities.
Listening and empathy are at the heart of social journalism. To understand a variety of communities – from survivors of sex trafficking and and victims of emotional abuse, to Rohingya refugees in the U.S. and residents of Harlem living with energy insecurity – 2017 students employed a variety of engagement methods.
In these presentations, you’ll hear from students who used:
- Crowdsourcing efforts
- Listening posts in communities to hear from residents
- Facebook groups and other platforms to connect on an issue
- Bots and other technologies
- Forms and surveys to capture community needs
- Engaged art projects
- Newsletters
- Zines and other “offline” publications
- Social media – not just for distribution, but for connection
- And much more!
See how our third cohort used their journalism skills to provide solutions for some of the most vulnerable communities in New York and beyond.
Sebastián Auyanet
#TrustTheProcess, my year trying to learn how to serve people in a different way with journalism
“Throughout my whole career I worked to get sources now I know that if I’m going to be a social journalists I need partners,” he said.
Sebastián Auyanet now works as an Associate Producer at NowThis Español. He is also a program consultant at SembraMedia in Uruguay.
During his year in the program, Auyanet created connection, awareness and depth of understanding for low-income residents in New York City who lack access to air conditioners in their home. This community affects thousands of residents who live in NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) and a number of them who account for an average of 140 deaths per year related to extreme heat according to a study. In 2006, the Energy Action Project discovered that a lack of energy security or “energy insecurity” impacts 16 million citizens in the United States.
This fascinating issue is interesting because while Auyanet learned that heat waves can be attributed to climate change, it is hard to pinpoint a cause. Once Auyanet began making connections with members of this community he learned of its information gaps. He attended events, spoke to researchers and community organizers about the issue and soon learned that many people did not know that they could apply for a free AC unit.
He produced four stories and six blog posts on his Medium publication titled “Hidden Heat.” He created a postcard journalism project with the community to bring information about energy issues that people can have in their homes and worked with organizations including AdaptNY to reach the community.
Ghita Benslimane
My Year Serving International Students Through Social Journalism
“I started from scratch and I did something that is being considered innovative in journalism — listening,” she said.
Ghita Benslimane spent her year in graduate school working on a community she identifies with: international students living in the United States. Originally from Morocco, Benslimane lived in the U.S. for five years and had to leave her job at Snap, Inc. in 2016 due to the U.S.’ tight immigration regulations.
Benslimane profiled 50 international students as a key listening tool to understand the community’s wants and informational needs. She surveyed students from different colleges and created a community e-newsletter with news pertaining to international students. She put a face to the students and words to their stories on the public-facing Instagram profile @internationalstudentsny. Through social media campaigns, she brought awareness to the needs and realities that international students face.
She produced a bi-weekly newsletter called “Students with Borders.” She wrote HB-1 explainers on Medium. The process is complicated. Many international students want to stay in the United States to pursue work opportunities after they graduate, and would like information to do that. So Benslimane created and coded a tool called “Do They Sponsor?” for students to find employers who might sponsor them. Benslimane is a senior producer at Brut.
Jessica Brockington
In journalism school, elevating voices
“I realized a lot of faith leaders were stuck in their old fashioned ways of communicating,” she said.
Jessica Brockington used her veteran journalism skills as a former local news editor to explore the ways faith-based leaders communicate their messages on social media in the age of Trump. Brockington was fueled to launch this project following national conversations inciting tension and divide amongst Americans (think: Xenophobia, Immigration, Hilary’s Emails) that often flood our timelines. How were interfaith leaders responding on the web?
Brockington visited churches and mosques to meet and interview community leaders which she captured on her social platforms. She live tweeted rallies like #IAmMuslimToo and #NotMyPresident Day supported by interfaith organizations. She created a survey to better understand the challenges faced by the leaders of these religious spaces in a world where everyone now seems to communicate through a screen.
She learned a lot were hard to reach on Twitter. She eventually aggregated the bulk of her reporting online on social: Facebook page, Twitter page called “New York City of Love”, and a NY City of Love.
Brockington is a news reporter at WBAI Pacifica Radio.
Laura Calçada
My year listening and serving socially engaged artists
“Art is alive. [It] moves the artist out of isolation and into the community,” she said.
Laura Calçada i Barres cultivated relationships with people who believe in art’s ability to affect change in society as part of her year-long project. The term came to be known as “socially engaged art” which she describes as artists co-creating with a community to address social issues.
For the last leg of the project, she connected with residents in her Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights through events and leading a survey with the main question: “What do you think is the best way to use a small store-front community center on Kingston Avenue?”, a space that at that time was rented out by the Trinity Grace Church from Crown Heights (today Reconcile Brooklyn), to serve the kids and neighbors of the area. Over 100 residents answered the survey and, though the civic space is no longer standing, the effort was a great way to connect and listen to the various needs of the people who conform that section of Crown Heights.
Calçada contributed to the respected New York City cultural blog Hyperallergic interviewing artist Maria de los Ángeles and writing a piece on the arts situation in her native Catalonia. Calçada also developed strong working relationships with two socially engaged artists, Ronny Quevedo, and Renee Sills, whose work she documented with a social video and through photography, along with other artists and cultural workers she met that year.
Since returning to Barcelona in June 2018, Laura Calçada has been working as a freelance journalist for Núvol, ALMA, Ràdio Granollers and Festival Panoràmic and is currently writing a memoir of her years in New York City.
Melissa DiPento
I spent a year listening and getting to know journalism educators. Here’s what I learned.
“A more diverse newsroom starts in the classroom,” she said.
Melissa DiPento spent the year focusing on ways to make journalism education more inclusive in an industry where diversity of staff have long been a weakness.
DiPento was an active attendant at conferences where journalism educators convene like the ONA Conference in Washington D.C., and the Collaborative Journalism Summit at Montclair State University. She met educators through the Disruptive Journalism Educators Network group of Facebook and during #EdShift Twitter chats.
DiPento launched a mentoring program called Academic Allies where 19 educators were paired with a journalism student. She also created a Slack channel for journalism educators to continue conversations around newsroom diversity.
After graduating, Melissa DiPento spent two years as a lecturer in the TV and Radio department at Brooklyn College. She now works at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism as the Educational Program Coordinator, supporting the Social Journalism program and the new Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership.
Maria Fraschilla
A Master in Social Journalism: What I Learned and Accomplished
“Athletes are meant to be strong — physically and mentally,” she said.
Maria Fraschilla spent the year deepening connections within her own community. As an athlete who has struggled with living a balanced life from depression and anxiety, she knew early on that the topic of mental illness within the community was taboo. She saw and heard narratives from athletes or about athletes in mainstream media and on the internet were different from her own.
Using social media to listen to her community, she connected with fitness influencers on Instagram who shared two surveys to gain insight and feedback. Fraschilla also used hashtags like #powerlifting and #trackandfield Fraschilla discovered personal stories of athletes who also had been struggling with their mental health. She created a Crushing PRs, a Medium Publication, to house those stories.
Talking about her own experience landed her a screening credit on a YouTube web series called The Sports Walk at the 2017 NYC Web Festival. Fraschilla is currently working as a Social Media Specialist at Wounded Warrior Project.
Jennifer Groff
Social Journalism Begins with Listening and Thrives on Engagement
“Through listening, I was able to learn that we need to stop being the voice for the voiceless and amplify survivors by engaging them to tell their stories,” she said.
Jennifer Groff dedicated her year in the Social Journalism program to empowering survivors of sex trafficking to tell their stories. She learned that victims of this global issue affecting up to 800,000 girls and women have several needs. As a journalist, she focused on three: 1) reducing stigma around prostitution, 2) deepening awareness beyond stereotypes of trafficking through personal stories of survivors and 3) empowering people in the community to tell their stories.
Establishing trust in such a vulnerable community posed and obstacle for Groff. To gain better insight, she interviewed 19 advocates and professionals who work in this realm.
Relationships with these stakeholders and her engagement with the sex-trafficking survivors were essential for her to build trust.
Her work took her outside of New York City. She attended conferences in Philadelphia. She led creative writing workshops to engage her community in Columbus, Ohio and Bangor, Maine. She asked participants to crowdsource six-word stories, borrowing from Hemingway. These stories would become the foundation of writetobeheard.us, an online portal where survivors can share their stories and resources with each other.
The six word stories were also featured on the @writetobeheard Instagram account. Groff also set up a Google Voice number for participants to call and leave their stories in the form of a voice message.
Groff also reported on the spike of arrests of women who work in massage parlors in Brooklyn.
Jennifer Groff is the Community Engagement Director at The Salvation Army Greater New York Division.
Viktoria Muench
How I used my Social Journalism degree to serve victims of emotional abuse
“People who are in emotionally abusive relationships don’t always realize they’re being abused. Just because [this abuse] doesn’t involve [physical] violence doesn’t mean it’s not abuse,” she said.
Viktoria Isabel M. worked with people who have been emotionally abused during her year in graduate school. Her work, revealed that emotional abuse is the most common form of abuse yet also the least researched. Emotional abuse often leads to depression, low self-esteem and lack of self worth.
Through her reporting, Muench found the needs of people in this community can be distilled in three words: information, safety, and comfort. So Muench set out to empower them through an awareness-initiative called the Broken Angels Project.
The project involved a Medium publication, a podcast, and videos. Muench produced a public service announcement (PSA) video where she invited train commuters to write their definitions of abuse on post its. She also used her own experiences as a way to approach the community and show empathy toward survivors, including a personal essay which was featured on the Medium publication “Bad Romance” in 2017.
Muench is an associate producer at MONEY (Magazine and Money.com).
Angelo Paura
“In this moment of ‘fake news’ and populism, it is really important to make clear what is journalism and what is entertainment,” he said.
Angelo Paura spent his time in the program covering the intersection of journalism and Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). He found that innovators and stakeholders needed a space to connect and discuss ways to disrupt traditional media and to do so ethically.
Paura implemented a three pronged listening approach to listening to his community: created relationships before he needed them, joined Google and Facebook groups to engage in conversation, and asked opinions with surveys. He also created his own Facebook group to serve as a platform for open dialogue.
In addition to the Facebook group, he used Twitter to share his content and ideas with this community. Paura wrote articles and produced a podcast, ATACAMA, to explore how media innovation is changing our perceptions.
He also held a live event and invited Jamie Pallot of Emblematic Group, who discussed the ethical concerns on a project that included a man in solitary confinement.
Paura is an Editor and Analyst at NewsGuard Technologies, a company that helps verify legitimate online news outlets.
Max Resnik
The Year of Living Social Journalism(ally)
“Local news is wildly important to New Yorkers,” he said.
Max Resnik grew deeply involved with New York City’s local and hyperlocal news outlets during the course of his year in graduate school. Through collaboration with the Center for Community and Ethnic media (housed on the 14th floor on the Newmark J-School), which organizes monthly trainings for reporters and publishers to develop new skills, Resnik was able to tap into a database of over 300 local outlets.
He facilitated local reporters from ethnic media on virtual reality and video and photo mobile editing at over a dozen trainings. He organized speakers for the school’s Latino Media Summit, and facilitated a virtual reality training with news outlets. Resnik redesigned the website for Mott Haven Herald, a publication serving residents in the South Bronx neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose and Port Morris.
Max Cannon Resnik is working with Cortico and the NYPL to build out the Local Voices Network in New York City.
Alyxaundria Sanford
A year at CUNY J-School as a Social Journalist: What I Did & What I Learned
“I’m not a part of this community so I had to break in and listen and make myself available,” she said.
When she enrolled in her second Master’s degree (the first one from CUNY John Jay) program, Alyxaundria Sanford already had a focus in mind — serving women who are re-entering society after incarceration. It turns out this is the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the United States, who face challenges to re-entry. From meeting people online and in-person at Sanford began to build a rapport with the community, and learned people in this community experience trauma and sexual abused during their time in prison.
Through this work, Sanford created the Medium publication “Valiance” to amplify the voices of these women. She also started a Facebook group for them to have access to other community members and share resources on basic necessities like housing and job opportunities. She also produced a social video about a formerly incarcerated woman who creates healing and housing for other women who have been in the system. Her name is Topeka Sam, and two years later after maintaining that connection, Sanford wrote a profile on Sam’s work which landed her a national byline on Essence.com during Black History Month in 2019.
Sanford is the Interim Social Media Manager at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and is also currently freelancing and is a Digital Trainer for a partnership between the Society of Professional Journalists and Facebook Journalism Project.
Charles Turner
How I Used Journalism To Address the Needs of the Rohingya Community
“Traditional journalism does not break echo chambers as much as putting the community at the center of the reporting process,” he said.
Charles Michio Turner set out to focus his project on Rohingya refugees, a Muslim ethnic group from Burma in Southeast Asia that have been denied citizenship rights since 1978. He felt that despite the Rohingya group receiving national media attention in recent years, people still don’t have a deep, nuanced understanding of the community.
Having written an explainer about the community’s history for the WikiTribune, Turner created an information needs assessment to unpack their needs. He discovered that much of the Rohingya diaspora — a group present in the U.S., Canada, and Europe — have an array of needs that deal with, but are not limited to identity, literacy gaps and the inability to communicate to their best potential due to physical distance. Many members of this diaspora, Turner learned, use WhatsApp and Facebook to communicate with each other.
He also learned the Rohingya community often don’t receive empathy from other minorities in Burmas. So Turner built a tool called BURMA CONNECT for members of various ethnic groups in Burma can talk about their identity as a way to build bridges with one another. These conversations took place on Zoom conference calls.
Turner is a Product Manager for the “Neighbor Post” at Patch.com.
Kristine Villanueva
My Awesome Project Failed. Now What?
Kristine Villanueva’s tenacity for understanding and serving the underground music scene in New York City taught her three things about this community from a social journalism lens: be present, experiment, and meet people in real life.
She spent the year learning listening to what the community wanted and how to address the gap of coverage it receives. Villanueva learned the reality that many people in this community face the threat of losing their space to live and perform. In return, she produced a publication on Medium called Edge of Sound, a zine that included a texting feature for feedback and Instagram with the same name. In a reflection piece for her practicum, she says she learned that people engage with visuals on social media. The zine format touches on the history of the community which used the paper to spread information at performances and events in the ’70s. Villanueva set up metrics goals early, set up channels for feedback and maintained relationships with people in the underground music scene to help inform her reporting.
Kristine is the Audience Engagement Editor at the Center for Public Integrity.
Don’t miss the class of 2019 presentations, which will be held on Dec. 10 at 5:30 at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism!
