How the class of 2019 put engaged journalism into practice
A master class in serving communities in new ways
The graduating class of the Social Journalism MA Program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY welcomed journalists, community members, family and friends to campus in December to hear about the engagement strategies they used to reach and impact communities over the course of the past 16 months.
This group of students proved all that is possible when journalists listen first and do journalism with, and not just for, the communities they serve. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the time they concluded, and the path that they set will be inspiring to future classes.
In these presentations, you’ll hear from students who used:
1. Crowdsourcing efforts
2. Listening posts in communities to hear from residents
3. Facebook groups and other platforms to connect on an issue
4. Bots and other technologies
5. Forms and surveys to capture community needs
6. Engaged art projects
7. Newsletters
8. Zines and other “offline” publications
9. Social media — not just for distribution, but for connection
10. And much more!
Their work will offer ideas and inspiration for engaged journalists working with many different types of communities.
Ariam Alula
Ariam Alula focused on the caregiver community navigating autism
Twitter // ariam.alula@journalism.cuny.edu
Ariam Alula spent the past year-and-a-half supporting the emotional and informational needs of caregivers of people with autism and other disabilities.
In her final semester, she studied immersive technology like virtual reality because she believed it could help audiences experience life from a different point of view and better understand the stresses and joys of caregiving.
What resulted is a two-and-a-half-minute 360-degree video showing a day in the life of Dru Ramdin, a caregiver in the Bronx who was a stay-at-home mom for the first 15 years of her son’s life.
Ariam also organized events to help people in this community deepen supportive ties with each other and share coping strategies and wrote an personal essay about her own experiences as a caregiver. Her essay won the student excellence award from the New York Association of Black Journalists.
Erica Anderson
Erica Anderson focused on domestic infant adoption.
Twitter // erica.anderson@journalism.cuny.edu
Erica Anderson traveled the country to listen to the stories of birth mothers whose children were adopted.
Adoption is a big business, and it is not a very transparent one. Although thousands of adoptions take place every year and go smoothly, many can leave pregnant women vulnerable to coercion or mistreatment in a system that is under-regulated.
Erica is filming a documentary and finishing her reporting about the adoption industry from the perspective of birth parents; stay tuned for more. She will also launch a website, AdoptionUnpacked.org.
Lena Camilletti
Lena Camilletti focused on the community impacted by opioid use disorders.
Twitter // lena.camilletti@journalism.cuny.edu
When Lena Camilletti was 11, her parents told her that her sister Angela was coming home from college and would be on house arrest for drug-related charges, and she was thrilled. To her, this meant that she was going to have more time to spend with her big sister. It wouldn’t be until after her sister’s death that Lena would grasp what it meant to have opioid-use disorder. Lena was inspired to find ways that journalists could better represent and serve other families like hers.
As as intern with the Burlington, Vermont-based newsweekly Seven Days, Lena helped develop what is now All Our Hearts, a crowdsourced project that helps people honor lost loved ones in their own words. Buzzfeed wrote about the project in October. She also organized events that helped participants come together to memorialize their loved ones.
Lauren Costantino
Lauren Costantino focused on parents in Red Hook who have been impacted by school segregation.
Twitter // lauren.costantino@journalism.cuny.edu
Lauren Costantino is a high-school teacher-turned journalist. She ultimately decided to focus on the very thing that drove her to leave the teaching profession — the ongoing segregation of public schools.
The public school system in NYC is one of the most racially and economically segregated in the country, and District 15 in Red Hook is no exception. Lauren listened to parents to understand how they viewed the issues impacting their families and the ways in which public meetings around educational issues were not easy for many parents to access.
She built a website called RedConnect: an all-in-one virtual platform that aims to bring awareness to educational issues that affect Red Hook residents while encouraging parental involvement. After hearing from parents and connecting with a community organizer, she began live-streaming public education meetings so that people who weren’t able to attend could have another way to access them.
Chalkbeat, a leading education news site, posted the live stream on their website, as well as a description of Lauren and the RedConnect project.
Tori Hoffman
Tori Hoffman focused on young men of color coming to understand their masculinity in new ways.
Twitter // tori.hoffman@journalism.cuny.edu
Tori Hoffman’s project, “boys will be,” is focused on what she learned from listening to young men of color about what they believe it means to be a man today. She heard that they need to see examples of what healthy, respectful manhood looks like; they also want to share their experiences and learn from each other in a peer-to-peer environment.
Her project cultivates open-mindedness and less rigid definitions of manhood for future generations. Tori led group discussions and surveyed over 20 boys on how they communicate with other boys and men. She produced a video series to empower young men to see themselves as powerful agents of change in their community.
Kerem Inal
Kerem Inal focused on creating a space for people who distrust journalists to have conversations about fact-checking
Twitter // kerem.inal@journalism.cuny.edu
Kerem Inal wants to better understand why some people don’t trust fact-checking practices and find ways to engage them in conversation to combat misinformation and counter inaccurate assumptions.
After months of listening to and observing communities on Reddit who discussed their disdain for journalism, Inal created VerifyThis, which aims to create conversation on fact-checked articles. The goal is to connect journalists with readers who distrust their work so that they can develop shared understandings of what facts should be seen as credible and how verification practices operate.
Daniel Laplaza
Daniel Laplaza focused on accessibility barriers in New York City transportation.
Twitter // daniel.laplaza@journalism.cuny.edu
Before he joined the M.A. in Social Journalism program at the Newmark J-School, Daniel Laplaza was a teaching assistant at The Henry Viscardi School (HVS), in Long Island, New York, a school for students with physical disabilities. This experience inspired him to understand the many challenges people with disabilities face on New York City public transportation.
Of the 472 stations in the New York Subway, only a quarter are accessible (121); Access-A-Ride services can be slow or inconvenient.
With the help of the community, Danny built a text-service Up or Out. Users first text the service to get its attention, then reply with the line they hope to take and the station. Up or Out will then report back any outages it finds and when the elevator or escalator will be back in service.
Beatrix Lockwood
Beatrix Lockwood focused on people and their families who are impacted by incarceration.
Twitter // beatrix.lockwood@journalism.cuny.edu
Beatrix Lockwood listened to people in the nation’s jails and prisons, along with their families and other loved ones, and learned about their challenges and information needs.
When Queens elected its first district attorney in more than three decades, Bee wanted to make sure that the people who would be among most affected by the outcome — people with criminal justice touchpoints — had the information they needed to participate. So she created an interactive voter guide; the candidate questionnaire was sourced from interviews with formerly incarcerated people and organizations that work closely with them.
For her Prison Food Diaries project, Bee crowdsourced information about meals from dozens of people in prisons across the country; this became an Instagram story series.
She also created a ‘zine, , two pop-up newsletters, several as-told-to’s, profiles, and reported pieces.
Bee also worked with Nicole Lewis, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, on a series of crowdsourced articles about the experiences of family members of the incarcerated, such as the high cost of phone calls. The stories were published in partnership with the New York Times, including a five-day pop-up with the Race/Related newsletter.
Mekdela Maskal
Mekdela Maskal focused on communities impacted by food apartheid in Brooklyn.
Twitter // mekdela.maskal@journalism.cuny.edu
Mekdela Maskal has lived in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for eight years, but it wasn’t until this past year and a half, while studying social journalism, that she felt truly embedded there. She focused on Food Apartheid, or systemic racism and oppression that results in food deserts, food insecurity and lack of access to fresh foods.
For her final project, called In Service Of, she planned and co-led a workshop with a community leader about food justice and food access for impacted communities. She crowdsourced ideas for community leaders to photograph, and celebrated them through wheat-pasted portraits in the neighborhoods they work and live in. She also worked with community-based organizations and individual sources to document food access points in an online map. All of these projects are ongoing as she continue to build interest and partnerships since graduating.
She also worked in nearby Brooklyn neighborhoods as a fellow at THE CITY, planning and launching their Open Newsrooms initiative with Brooklyn Public Library. They have held nine events in three communities so far, working towards a more collaborative news-making process.
Zanna McKay
Zanna McKay focused on the community in long-term recovery from substance use disorders.
Twitter // zanna.mckay@journalism.cuny.edu
Zanna McKay learned that one of the main challenges for people in recovery from substance abuse disorders, especially those who don’t end up feeling at home in a twelve-step program, is figuring out what resources are available to them. As awareness grows around the country that we are in a national health crisis, many more resources have started to become available to people seeking help and support in getting and staying sober.
The problem is finding reliable, relevant information at the right time. It can take a tremendous amount of time and web-savviness to navigate all the options and information, which ranges from private companies promoting services to poorly-designed government websites.
After spending time listening at a recovery center in the Bronx and getting to know participants, she created a comprehensive Google Doc for the community with links to resources. Normally, this information is housed in large binders at the center, but can now be distributed much more widely easily.
She is also partnering with a recovery center in upstate New York to listen, provide resources and share stories.
Tiziana Rinaldi
Tiziana Rinaldi focused on malemployed immigrants in the United States.
Twitter // tiziana.rinaldi@journalism.cuny.edu
Tiziana Rinaldi’s community journey started a year ago, when she booked a ride on Lyft. The young man who picked her up was Muhammed Batmanoglu, a bio-medical engineer from Turkey who couldn’t find a job in his field despite his Ph.D. and fairly good English.
Malemployed newcomers are foreign-educated immigrants — medical doctors, pharmacists, teachers, lawyers and engineers, to name a few — who lack the resources to find skill-appropriate work in the U.S. They end up either unemployed or working at “jobs for which they’re overqualified or overeducated or both,” as she wrote for NJSpotlight in 2017.
Tiziana developed a series of free, offline educational events that delivered both classes in English as a second language and specialized career-orientation instruction. She called it The JobUp and set out to equip malemployed participants with the resources they need to navigate the U.S. job market and boost their confidence.
Lakshmi Sivadas
Lakshmi Sivadas focused on the climate crisis in the Rockaways.
Twitter // lakshmi.sivadas@journalism.cuny.edu
Lakshmi Sivadas collaborated with colleague Diara Townes to work with communities in the Rockaways that faced the brunt of Hurricane Sandy and are concerned about preparations for future storms.
Tracking disaster-recovery information after Sandy is a mammoth task. Billions are pumped into post-disaster recovery and rebuilding world over, but there is little transparency and accountability in government led recovery efforts.
Sivadas and Townes developed therockawayproject.org, a recovery platform that seeks to centralize post-disaster recovery information.
Diara Townes
Diara Townes also focused on the climate crisis in the Rockaways.
Twitter // diara.townes@journalism.cuny.edu
Why do people have doubts about the cause of rising sea levels, longer droughts and stronger storms when the science is so clear? Diara Townes, a marine and environmental scientist, wanted to better understand and combat this skepticism in her career change as a journalist.
In addition to talking to climate change deniers in Facebook groups to try to understand the source of their doubts, Diara partnered with Lakshmi in the Rockaways to work with people who had already dealt with serious effects from changing temperatures and stronger storms.
They pulled recovery and resiliency reports from the city, the state and the federal government and learned that the the racial and resource disparity that was present prior to Sandy is even more apparent now. They were invited to present the results of their reporting at community meetings.
Diara also spent time reporting on and listening to the youth climate movement, which organized large protests in New York City and elsewhere.
Isadora Varejão
Isadora Varejão focused on immigrant women who are victims of domestic violence.
Twitter // isadora.varejao@journalism.cuny.edu
Isadora Varejão created Women Against Violence Experiment (W.A.V.E.) as her social journalism practicum to develop unconventional services to inform Brazilian immigrant women who are victims or at risk of domestic violence.
U.S. legislation and immigration procedures are complex and can intimidate any immigrant, let alone one who feels threatened by a partner and the government. With that in mind, Isadora created Chicabot.
This chatbot shares information about resources to combat domestic violence in a conversational way. During the chat, the user dictates how much she or he wants to know about a particular topic by clicking on the buttons.
Chicabot is embedded in W.A.V.E.’s webpage (look for the speech balloon on the bottom right corner.) It was developed with Dexter app, which allows you to build prototype without having to actually knowing how to code. She wrote about the experiment here.
Additionally, inspired by the Theater of the Oppressed methodology, Varejão created, organized and performed in a play. In forum theater, members of a marginalized community who are experiencing some sort of oppression come together with the help of a facilitator and create a play. After they perform it, the facilitator invites audience members to replace actors onstage in moments of crisis to try to change the outcome of the scenes.
Ten members of the Brazilian community in New York and New Jersey participated in the creation of the interactive play. A few had been in an abusive relationship while living abroad, and one of them is a witness in a case where a woman was murdered by her partner.
Opening night was Dec. 6, and the performance had 60 attendees, 15 of them men. The play was in Portuguese, but the facilitation was translated into English.
For more information on the Social Journalism program, visit our website. Read more about the class of 2019 from Program Director Carrie Brown and professor Jeff Jarvis.
