All my conversations lead me back to local news
Explaining to my dad how working in news deserts might help Spaceship Media achieve its mission
I spend a lot of my time thinking about three topics:
Democracy: How it’s supposed to work? How is it broken? How can it be fixed?
Information: How do people get it? Who do people trust to give it to them? How do people verify it?
Communication: How do people talk to one another effectively? How can words harm so deeply, even if unintentionally? How can some words be so healing?
These three (admittedly) large concepts consume my working day as a journalist — I am the Innovation Director at Spaceship Media — and they keep me up at night as an American.
The other night, I was watching the Mets/Nationals game in my living room with my dad — with my recently retired dad who is hard of hearing and distractible. My dad who raised four kids on a shoestring, who instilled in us the slight paranoia to always wonder if our otherness caused our treatment, whether positive or negative.
My siblings and I are first generation Mexican-Americans … border kids. The four of us grew up on Second Street. Two blocks away the international border loomed, in my early memories as an imaginary line, and later, as a barrier of increasing heights and hefts.
My dad who for years watched both MSNBC and Fox News because he wanted to stay on top of how corporations were influencing government and screwing the people. It struck me suddenly that we hadn’t seen the news at all during his three-week visit. When I asked him about it, my question took us into an unexpected (and Spaceship-Media-related!) conversation about the emptiness and hopelessness that focusing on politics in Washington had created in him. “It’s hard to care or want to do anything,” my dad lamented (too loudly, with my daughter sleeping in the other room). “It’s hard to care when all the bozos in Washington are fighting.” Research confirms that my dad is not alone in this thinking.
I grew up in a house where voting didn’t require stickers. You went and you voted because you were supposed to. Civic engagement mattered. My dad ran for city council in our close-knit community of 16,000 and many of his friends held some office or other at some point. My parents also made sure that we understood that politics is a powerful game that was stacked against us in many ways (our economic standing, our limited educational opportunities, our brownness, our fronterizo syndrome). They never did it overtly though, but encouraged our critical thinking and rebelliousness.
Once, at a school event, the spouse of a school administrator called my brothers “beaners.” I overheard and promptly “accidentally” spilled fruit punch on her white dress. My dad ran over with a cup of soda water to help her clean it up, passing me without reprimand. A while later, he winked at me from across the room. On the ride home he guffawed when I told him why I’d done it, but said,“You can’t spill fruit punch on every gringa, mija.”
The games on the MLB Network went west, from Mets and Nats (the Mets won) to Diamondbacks and Dodgers, and my dad and I started discussing local politics. We talked about how the best way for any person to make their voice relevant again is to get deeply involved in their local community. But in order to be meaningfully involved in community, the layers of bullshit need to start being dug out, we need to stop being petty, argumentative, stubborn and just plain nasty with each other and get back to the business of civil conversation and the solutions that emerge from it. This led me to explain to him more about the work I’m doing developing Spaceship Media 2.0, which will bring dialogue journalism to communities who have lost (or never had) media infrastructure. We believe the best way to fight polarization is to address communication, information and democracy at the micro, most local, levels.
The first step is to heal and rehabilitate our trust in each other. The only way we can begin to do that is to start talking to each other, not yelling at each other, not accusing one another. Dialogue. In small groups, with your family, with your neighbors. Communities must being to reconstruct the underlying structure that held them up. Building Communities.
Talking will surface questions and disagreements, that’s only natural. So the second step is to find trusted sources of information, and it doesn’t matter if the individual trusts them always. It matters if the community as a whole trusts them. That requires transparency and investment. That can only happen with proximity and intention. Journalists must return to the beat that puts them in the middle of answering the questions that their community needs answered. Restoring Trust in Journalism.
Only then will we be able to discuss issues civilly with one another and come to agreements with how to move forward. Not come to agreement, mind you. But realize that somewhere between strident pro and strident con, live the rest of us in the real world. By talking to each other with the same reliable information in hand, perhaps, we can shed our political avatars and begin to see each other again as family and friends and neighbors. Reducing Polarization.
These are the three tenets of Spaceship Media’s dialogue journalism: Building communities, restoring trust in journalism, and reducing polarization. By bringing these into local communities where conversations can be productive, we return to the best of traditional journalism in a new way. Restoring the things that make a democracy functional: information and communication.
Before this can happen in Washington, it has to happen at home. By healing our local communities, we can begin to heal our nation. Democracy depends on us being able to solve our most mundane of local issues in a congress of the people informed with real facts working to make it better for the vast majority of us.
The Dodgers finished demolishing the Dbacks. My dad rose from the couch to go to bed. I closed up my laptop and my dad asked “You’re done working?” I looked up and said, “Nope, not yet.”
