Social Journalism is About Finding Solutions With A Problem
I’m a student at the CUNY Graduate School of Social Journalism. This year is the third class of its kind. These are my thoughts about this experimental program. Specifically on the Community Engagement class, a course led by Jeff Jarvis, the founder of the program.
Acknowledging your bias is a cornerstone of Social Journalism. But so is good listening. The Empathize stage is the first, and arguably the most important, part of the design thinking process. It requires a moment of silence from your thoughts and preconceived notions, in order to fully hear the challenges of the people you are interviewing.
Our class is thinking of ways to better engage with the recent wave of activism after the 2016 election. In the Empathize stage, we’ve been interviewing folks protests, and there are many. Our findings have been interesting, holding back our own ideas and thoughts as we conduct these interviews has been difficult.
Now our group is now onto the next stage: Define. This is when we think of solutions to the challenges of our community based on what we learned. Whether we’re actually basing our ideas off of our findings is hard to tell.
Many of us have participated in protests and other civil society activity before. So we had to be reminded that this project must be based off of the challenges we noticed in the field, not our own personal experiences. But no matter how open-minded you try to be, it is impossible to divorce yourself from your values.
One of my group members follows the DIY art scene, a broad grassroots culture of young people who have increasingly dedicated their studios and resources towards social justice causes. During the Define stage, she felt that media attention focused on large political rallies with photos of seas of people. She felt that the activist community would be better served with better promotion of alternative, more intimate, resistance meetings.
My suggestion was a service that allows protestors to vote for who speaks at their rallies. I justified my idea after seeing a restless crowd go silent once the mother of a first-responder during 9/11 came to the podium at the #IamaMuslimToo rally. Her personal story seemed to capture the audience more than the scripted speeches from more conventional political leaders.
But as someone who finds little inspiration from speeches from politicians, it is very possible that my idea was going to make it to the Define stage regardless of what I discovered in the field.
In the design thinking process, I imagine that solutions in search of a problem are common in the Define stage. Whether these ideas actually serve the community in question, is something that will be tested later on.
