PNI Month Notes — August 2021 — Megan
For too long, I’ve waited for “the news industry” to meaningfully respond to our local news and information crisis and its role in perpetuating racism and inequality. I looked around for a response that doesn’t carbon copy what we have but builds something new. Something to be hopeful about; something that reimagines journalism as the connector of a community, one that reflects it and betters it.
After years of running the Bureau Local, I realised that we can’t do that by attempting changes from the content side of the industry, it had to be changed at the source. The source and entry point for change is the business of news — the who and the how. And once I saw this, I couldn’t unsee it. It just sat there at the forefront of my mind and felt like anything that didn’t move me in the direction to rectify this was time and energy wasted.
I stopped looking around for ‘the industry’ to respond. And instead looked to what I can only describe as the small-but-mighty industry that was emerging (big thanks to Adrienne Maree Brown and her book Emergent Strategy for giving me the language to see this). They are the local news cooperatives forging into existence; the platforms built by and for marginalised communities — people and organisations I’ve been inspired by and collaborating with for years.
I’ve realised that those fighting for a re-imagination of news, its ownership and its service to communities can and should be the driving forces of change. We aren’t a fragment of ‘the industry’, we’re the future of it. That realisation brewed into the idea for a new newsroom startup and sustainability programme. Something shared, something like an infrastructure for better journalism.
And this month, that germ of an idea became a reality at our first design session for The People’s Newsroom Initiative. After nearly two years of remote working and isolation due to covid-19, our little team were able to safely meet in Swansea and lay the foundation. Shazia and Rocio are setting out to build a community newsroom with the Ethnic Minorities and Youth Support Team (EYST) in Wales, my colleague Shirish is supporting the design of the programme, and I am working alongside them to scale this and make it easier for others to follow suit.
Being in the same place felt incredibly monumental to the whole project. It was humbling, inspiring and just right in every way. Until this moment, I had been thinking about my work as something separate and parallel to the work of Shazia and Rocio. I had seen us as collaborators but with different outputs. How naive it sounds to me now.
At the meeting, Shazia and Shirish encouraged me to think about all this work as co-creation. They invited me to be a partner in the design of their future newsroom and I invited them to be a partner in the wider infrastructure project. The building, designing and scaling were now all connected. It felt the way you press the final piece of a jigsaw into place.
I started this project with a focus on the idea that inequality exists out of design. While that seems depressing, I’ve come to find hope in it (thanks to Shasha Costanza-Chock and her book Design Justice). Because it means that it can be designed differently. We can design it better. That’s why we kicked off the Swansea newsroom project with an initial design session; it’s why the next six months will be focused on designing for the needs of the community instead of preconceived ideas of how a newsroom should look and be; and most importantly, it’s why I learned that collaborations, alliance-building and change has to also be designed differently. I’m incredibly thankful for these learnings and am excited for what comes next. I can already feel and see a shift and know that as long as we stay true to these values and are responsive to them, real change is coming.
These monthly notes are reflections on what The People’s Newsroom team are learning as we build the project. You can read previous notes, and more from Shirish and Megan here.
You can read find out more about The People’s Newsroom Initiative here, and if you’d like to be kept up to date with how the project is developing and how you can get involved, then do sign up to our monthly newsletter.
