Social journalism students share experiences from the People-Powered Publishing Conference
The goal of the People-Powered Publishing Conference (PPPC) is right in line with what we study as social journalism students — finding ways to strengthen the connections between journalists and the communities we cover. The focus this year was on changing newsroom culture.
This annual conference, held for two days at Columbia College in Chicago, was not exclusive to journalists working on engagement. Civic-engagement practitioners and community storytellers were also welcome to attend. The conference included sessions on topics like how to talk about race, covering rural communities, addressing biases and making local news more inclusive, to name a few. There were also clinics that offered reporters tools for ongoing community engagement projects.
We had a handful of students attend the conference this year and here are their experiences.
Diara Townes, Class of 2019
Community of focus: Disparity of recovery and resiliency efforts following Hurricane Sandy in the Rockaways
I got such great value from #PPPC19. Having time to become familiar with engagement-focused organizations like City Bureau was quite encouraging for a final semester student like myself. It was insightful to learn from engagement journalists about their efforts, and the challenges they’ve experienced navigating this expanding world. And I felt empowered when engagement organizers asked me for advice on what they could do better, and what I would suggest as next steps. It was two nights of academic and institutional reinforcement.
Mekdela Maskal, Class of 2019
Community of focus: People living in food apartheid in Brooklyn
People-Powered Publishing in Chicago was a reminder of the current institutional landscape of journalism; trying to move forward, slowly, and being urged on by small collectives of change-makers. Some conversations felt tired and stagnant–like how diversity in the newsroom affects coverage (no, duh?)–but then we’d be awoken by someone like Fernando Diaz, publisher at the Chicago Reporter, who spoke candidly about making gutsy decisions in the newsroom to make change happen, like writing a letter to e-suite executives with direct asks signed by the entire newsroom, unionizing, or quitting and creating alternatives. Some of the other leaders that created new fearless conversations at PPPC include the entire City Bureau team (shoutout to the person who works with them as a documenter and strongly asked someone in the audience to think about who they were reporting for!), Free Press (especially Alicia Bell who facilitated a beautiful conversation about building capacity with communities), and Amy L. Kovac-Ashley from the American Press Institute, who led a brainstorm on building new awards in journalism that actually incentivizes service and engagement. Thank you all!
Tori Hoffman, Class of 2019
Community of focus: Young men of color in Brooklyn as they navigate masculinity and what it means to be a man
I left the People-Powered Publishing Conference in Chicago feeling inspired and encouraged by the thriving network of engagement journalists building trust and power among their communities. A major highlight was getting to meet folks at City Bureau, a nonprofit civic journalism lab based on the South Side of Chicago, and Free Press, as they work to reimagine local journalism and give underrepresented people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape media coverage.
My eyes were opened during the session on systems change and systems thinking as it made clear the importance of addressing the structures and mental models that create and perpetuate the trends, patterns and events that we report on. I was reminded that while traditional journalists believe they provide enough context, it is both necessary to get to the foundation of the complex issues we cover and harmful to pretend that it is possible to be objective when we ourselves are a part of the larger system. I also enjoyed learning about Meetr from Andrew DeVigal from Gather and the University of Oregon in his session on measuring the impact of a project. This tool tracks the impact of a given engagement project and provides resource guides and case studies related to engagement work. In both sessions, it was very cool to be able to prove to myself what I know by sharing it with others who also believe in this work.
Read more about Tori’s experience here.
Jake Wasserman, Class of 2020
Community of focus: Harm reduction specialists in NYC’s opioid crisis
After coming back from Chicago, I’ve realized how truly revolutionary community engagement is within journalism, and how esteemed #NewmarkSocialJ is within the community of journalistic reformers. I enjoyed sharing our experiences with colleagues from both Illinois and other parts of the country, as well as learning some new engagement strategies for my work around the opioid crisis.
Some particularly great sessions were “Getting Engaged: Building the Community into Reporting Projects,” where we flipped convention on its head and mapped the assets of our communities instead of the deficits, and “Is Your Journalism a Luxury or a Necessity?” where we invoked Maslow’s hierarchy to figure out how to meet the needs of a community with our stories, projects, and actions. Thank you to everyone at Newmark who made it possible to go to PPPC19!
Read more about Jake’s experience here.
Michaela Román, Class of 2020
Community of focus: Social workers who work with people in public housing and how resources are allocated
It was great to see so many hard-working journalists and civic leaders wanting to take extra steps in their own communities and in their own engagement projects. This conference really did create a safe space to learn from one another on how to put people first.
The workshops and sessions flowed well through conversation and shared ideas. I attended one, led by Venise Wagner, where we broke up into groups based on a topic we were interested in covering or do cover, and I chose housing. We chose to focus on homelessness. Instead of “how do we solve” or “how do we report on” our topics, we used a chart to think about where the disparity starts and how people can end up in that situation. We broke down the systemic, social conditions that can lead to homelessness, including power and privilege. The big takeaway from this is that stories become more powerful the more we look at the social hierarchies behind what or who we are reporting on. I’ll take this model with me going forward as I continue to build a network of people working with those in public housing and understanding what resources are needed.
Allison Dikanovic, Class of 2020
Community of focus: Creating collaborative local news in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn with The City’s Open Newsroom project
I had the opportunity to attend a workshop led by Lewis Raven Wallace and Mia Henry of Press On Media, supported by City Bureau, called “Transforming Journalism Beyond Diversity” the day before PPPC started. I knew I was in the right place and would have much to learn from those around me in the days to come based on the first five minutes of that workshop. As a group, we talked about our “operating assumptions” to create a space that supported “journalism in the service of liberation.” The assumptions were: oppression exists, the goal of our work is collective liberation, we all have work to do and journalism is a key lever for transformative social change.
If all journalists honestly held and grappled with those assumptions and questioned how they could shift how our newsrooms operate in the communities we are supposed to serve, I think we would live in a completely different kind of media ecosystem. Those attending and presenting at PPPC created space to talk about how to do our work in a way that would shift the paradigm of journalism in this direction, and offered concrete examples of projects, organizations and initiatives that are leading this charge.
I feel like most of the sessions talked about shifting the value proposition in journalism and discussing ways to make journalism better meet people’s needs, rather than feeding our bottom line or our egos. Mike Rispoli of Free Press asked, “If we want to perform the act of journalism, but we are not meeting people’s needs, what kinds of incentives do they have to engage with our work?”
I will be processing the lessons and takeaways from PPPC for a long time to come, but it was energizing to be surrounded by those pursuing journalism from a whole different approach and mindset, one that is collaborative and is focused on sharing power and building power within the communities we serve, democratizing the power we wield as reporters.
I’ll definitely hold onto a sentiment that David Ryfe of the University of Iowa said, “Journalists have to learn how to love their communities more than they love their profession.”
Read more about Allison’s experience here
Madeline Faber, Class of 2020
Community of focus: Online communities of sex workers who are adapting to tech after the 2018 passage of SESTA-FOSTA anti-trafficking law
I attended the People-Powered Publishing Conference in 2018 as the editor of a local news magazine. I connected there with Newmark Social Journalism M.A. professors Carrie Brown and Terry Parris Jr. and many friendly graduates of the program. The conversations that we shared about the future of news and how the work I was doing in Memphis contributed to that larger experiment inspired me to quit my job and move to NYC to join the Social J cohort. One year later, I proudly joined the conference with a group of graduate students whose work I admire and whose support I treasure.
One of the main tensions I wrestle with in practicing social journalism is if traditional outlets can reform to support this approach, or if we have to start from scratch and, as Terry Parris Jr. said at the PPPC19 opening panel, “just blow it up.”
My favorite speaker at PPPC19 was Lewis Wallace, a journalist who recently launched The View From Somewhere podcast and book. At their presentation, Wallace said that if journalists want to rebuild trust, we have to be critical about the bias, privilege and power that we wield.
The kind of change we discussed at the conference can’t be developed merely by crowdsourcing for story ideas or rewriting our mission statements. Journalism as an institution has to undergo a culture shift if it aspires to produce and distribute news as a service to communities. I’m grateful to have a cohort of social journalists to grow with as we build a form of journalism that advances justice.
Erica Anderson, Class of 2019
Community of focus: People who are interested in adoption- specifically birth/first/natural mothers, pregnant people who are considering adoption, adoptive and hopeful adoptive parents, and adoptees.
There was unintentionally a common thread in many of the workshops I attended and it connects directly to my practicum work. I am working on a platform that helps connect pregnant people to resources and support in their local areas. Access to basic needs has become foundational in the work I am interested in as a journalist. I want to inform and empower people to be more civically engaged and strengthen our democracy, but in order to do that, people need to have stable housing, employment, access to food, healthcare, education, and childcare. They need journalism that address people’s troubles and fills information gaps, not just covering issues.
I enjoyed Jay Rosen’s workshop on The Citizen’s Agenda. Citizen’s Agenda is a specific way of covering elections that is driven by real people’s actual concerns. Rosen pointed out that we don’t have clear metrics of what successful coverage looks like. Is it really predicting the winner? How does that serve people? Instead, the Citizen’s Agenda begins with talking to people and asking them a different kind of question:
“What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes?”
It asks that question in as many ways as possible: text, email, calls, in person, social media, flyers. The answers to these questions are then published and drive election coverage. These questions become the north star for the publication to return to. This is not a new approach. Rosen has been preaching this model for decades and it is largely met with resistance. Political reporters are used to hunting down politicians to hold them accountable, but they also like the insider baseball nature of their coverage.
What if instead of asking people, “Who are you going to vote for?” or “What issues were most important to you?” we asked questions that get down to what is troubling citizens. Questions like:
“What does a community look like where people can live happy fulfilled lives?”
“What would need to change in your community to make that happen?”
In the workshop “Is Your Journalism a Luxury or a Necessity?” we looked at journalism that doesn’t always win fancy awards but does address people’s needs. Outlier is a good example — a service journalism on demand that delivers high value information directly to news consumers over text message and offer every user the ability to connect directly with a reporter. They focus on helping Detroit residents navigate the complexities of low income housing. During a breakout session, I sat with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune who was actively regretting a missed opportunity in her most recent story. She had reported on a student loan forgiveness program and had focused more on the accountability side of the story and missed an easy opportunity for a brief tag along explainer piece to help people understand if they qualify for the program.
“If we want to perform the act of journalism but we are not meeting people’s needs, what incentives do people have to engage with us?” Mike Rispoli, Free Press
This session felt like it cut to the heart of what we do in engaged journalism. This kind of “news you can use” is not flashy and is not valued in the same way, but I think this is how we gain trust in communities, and there are easy ways to adapt and expand coverage if we are constantly asking: who this story is for and how does it serve them?
