‘100 Days of Dignity’ collaboration: community newsrooms, will you answer the call?
Newsrooms: Register here to learn about joining the 100 Days of Dignity collaboration.
I found my new favorite slogan a few weeks ago at the Chicago History Museum.
In the section of Designing for Change: Chicago Protest Art of the 1960s–70s devoted to gay rights, there’s an orange button that boldly states: “I wasn’t recruited, I enlisted.”
On the wall above the button’s case is a Gay Liberation flag that activist Gary Chichester has carried in every Chicago Pride march since the nation’s first pride parade there in 1970. Imagine the history that flag has witnessed over the decades. How different must it have felt to carry that flag the summer after the Stonewall riots, and again years later once gay marriage was legalized? What courage did it take to pin on that orange button and walk with others, showing your true self?
I’m gay, and I’m a journalist. I enlisted in this profession because I love hearing and telling people’s stories. I was drawn to engagement journalism after witnessing the power newsrooms have to be a force for good following disaster, and I continue to believe in its power to help communities grapple with complex challenges and differences.
That day in Chicago, just before the inauguration, I had gathered a small group of co-conspirators from journalism support organizations to explore how we could come together in 2025. We were there to re-center our work on what we were working toward — on what kind of world we wanted to help create, not just on helping newsrooms produce more content. We were asking ourselves: to what end?
Surrounded by images of resilience and hope from the queer community, my community, I felt a sense of possibility.
What we’re learning together
Community newsrooms have a vital role to play in equipping people to navigate their lives. As we tried to capture what community-centered journalism can make possible, we filled whiteboard after whiteboard with questions. We grappled with who journalism is supposed to serve and who it fails; with how to account for those actively seeking to curtail others’ rights; with the business model incentives and historical failures of the media. We also examined what it means to be in journalism at this divisive moment, where reporters are being maligned and attacked, and polarization and dehumanization are rampant. How are we supposed to practice democracy, to address the problems we face in our individual lives and collective society, if people don’t value one another?
Here are the questions we landed on: What’s preventing people in our community from feeling valued and respected? How can our journalism inform their choices, and the decisions that shape their lives? How can we shine a light on people’s struggles and on their humanity, so everyone has a chance to live with dignity?
Journalists, we’re inviting you to explore these questions as part of a new collaboration called “100 Days of Dignity.” You can learn more by registering for our Feb. 26 call here.
Dignity means feeling respected and valued for who you are. When we explore what it means for people to live together with dignity, we move beyond polarization and politics. Whether or not an individual feels they are able to live a dignified life is something only they can decide. Whether our communities are doing enough to allow everyone access to dignity is up to us to uncover.
Our project team is an incredible group from the Center for Cooperative Media, OpenNews, Hearken, Trusting News, and the Solutions Journalism Network. If the 100 Days project finds that asking people about barriers to living with dignity could help newsrooms better serve their communities, we are committed to finding resources to make that work happen.
This is the first step. We’re planning to share our findings at the Collaborative Journalism Summit in May.
We want to find out:
- What can newsrooms learn from listening to community members about what they need to live with dignity?
- Can those learnings help shape coverage that is relevant, reflective and useful to our communities?
- What do these conversations mean for community members?
And: Will newsrooms answer this invitation?
If your newsroom serves a community, whether that means a specific place or a specific group of people, we’d welcome the opportunity to explore these questions with you.
At the museum that day, I bought an Ida B. Wells-Barnett sticker with this quote: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Barriers to living together with dignity are wrongs we can work together to right. If you want to learn how your newsroom can enlist in this work, start here.
