From Sources to Co-Creators: Innovations in Participatory Journalism
The world of participatory journalism is becoming increasingly sophisticated. As newsrooms continue to experiment with how they collaborate with their audiences and communities, some newsrooms are venturing into what’s been considered forbidden territory in the past: involving the sources of stories more intimately in crafting, shaping, correcting and signing off on their own narratives. It is a process, essentially, of sharing power in the content creation process.
For anyone who thinks this may constitute a violation of the journalistic process, I invite you to suspend that assumption for a moment and see what you think after learning about this ground-breaking podcast, After the Assault from CapRadio, and reading the following interview with innovator jesikah maria ross.
I’ve been a huge fan of jesikah maria ross’s work for years. Her background in community organizing and the arts has proven to be a bottomless source of process and practice innovation in journalism. When I heard about the trauma-informed reporting series she helmed about sexual assualt — who was involved, how they went about reporting it, and what the ultimate “products” were from it, I was so inspired I asked if I could record a conversation with her. She graciously accepted, and the interview you’ll read below has been condensed and clarified.
I hope upon reading this, more reporters and newsrooms can take lessons from this series and perhaps reposition the way they see their role: from gatekeeper to bridge, and from producers of content to architects of civic infrastructure.
Brandel: How would you describe After the Assault?
ross: After the Assault is a project that explores what survivors experience in the aftermath of sexual violence and during police investigations. And it takes on a crucial but often overlooked question for survivors: How can healing happen even when justice does not?
It is what I call a participatory journalism project. By that I mean three things: First we selected and developed stories in conversation with the communities most affected, in this case survivors of sexual assault. Second, we designed a reporting process that generates understanding, connection, and trust among stakeholders — survivors, their loved ones, journalists, law enforcement, health providers, advocates — while generating content for our news department: a podcast, webstories and digital resources. And third, we worked to create and strengthen existing networks in order to build community resilience beyond our reporting. That way as our newsroom turns toward another pressing social issue, we’ve created stories and relationships that can help move social change efforts forward.
Brandel: The project started as accountability journalism, right, but then that frame changed. Can you explain?
ross: The project began when a survivor reached out to CapRadio about her experience, and told CapRadio that if they wanted to do this story right, they needed to give survivors agency over how the story got told.
Managing Editor of News Nick Miller and health-care reporter Sammy Caiola enlisted me to help figure out how to do that, and I organized a series of convenings, one with survivors and another with institutional stakeholders (law enforcement, advocacy groups, health-care providers). We brought in Data Reporter Emily Zentner to help us get the data we needed to underpin our reporting and figure out how to use it a way that was in line with the participatory approach to relationship building.
In moving forward with After the Assault, it seemed like a lot of accountability journalism focuses on using data to call out or expose wrongdoing by those in power — in this case, law enforcement. We wanted to use data in a different way, as part of looking at failures in a system at large and starting conversations with police, survivors and the wider public about the problem and potential solutions. Our project got started just as the “defund the police” movement got going, when law enforcement was really wary of talking to reporters. We needed to be thoughtful about how we approached police to create the best frame for getting people in the room.
So we pivoted to take more of a systems thinking approach to our reporting (hat tip to Cole Goins and Kayla Christopherson of Journalism+Design). Systems thinking is a way of exploring an issue or a story with the understanding that it is composed of multiple interconnected people, forces and values. It doesn’t let people off the hook for being bad actors. But it does explore the complexity of how systems operate in order to uncover solutions.
The systems thinking approach helped us to co-create After the Assault with a cohort of sexual assault survivors who shaped every aspect of the project. One of their main goals was to make change in the legal reporting process, which includes dealing with health care clinics and rape crises centers as well as police officers and detectives. They wanted better outcomes and experiences for future survivors. And they wanted the act of publicly telling their painful stories to make a difference.
To me that meant that we also needed to be in conversation with different players in the legal reporting process and to explore, with them, how this system was or wasn’t working, and where we might come together to improve it. That’s a tricky line to walk…holding space for survivors who are at the center of the issue, who need and deserve the highest level of care and attention, while also making room for their loved ones, law enforcement, advocates and health care providers who may have wronged them to also participate.
Brandel: You spent a lot of time in this project creating conditions for information sharing, and involving your sources and the advocacy groups in your editorial process. Did you get pushback from editorial around the involvement of your sources in this different way?
ross: We did approach this issue and our sources in a non-traditional way. That’s the benefit and challenge of having someone like me, trained in participatory media and community development, lead a public radio reporting project. I’d point folks interested in what that was like for a reporter to read Sammy Caiola’’s powerful article How working with sexual assault survivors changed the way I think about journalism,
But I really didn’t get a lot of editorial pushback. I had support from our Managing Editor for News, Nick Miller, who specifically wanted to share power with survivors in how we told their story.
And anytime I thought we might be pushing journalistic boundaries I’d workshop those ideas with Sammy, who I absolutely trusted to raise any red flags if she saw them.
As the project director, no one pushed back on how much time I was spending creating conditions that led to trust, vulnerability and deep collaboration with sources, but then again, only people on the central project team saw that work happening. It’s one of the big challenges doing participatory or engaged journalism. All that relationship-building and experience design, not to mention engagement administration, is usually happening outside of the standard newsroom workflows and is most visible to those directly involved. Feeling invisible while working so hard on an emotionally draining project like this one is, unfortunately, often a challenge for engagement practitioners.
Brandel: What did you learn about doing a project like this with survivors of trauma?
ross: Sharing power, or co-creation, means involving those we are reporting about in naming and framing the issues and solutions. So we did a lot of that, asking survivors to brainstorm topics they wanted to see covered and to prioritize them, inviting them to annotate our podcast outline and episode descriptions and to give input on our grant proposals. We even played them rough and final cut clips before publication to help prepare them for our big, heavily promoted podcast drop.
And at each step, we spent a lot of time workshopping our wording and methods with a trauma-informed peer counselor who also participated in nearly all of the 21 gatherings we had with survivors. In other words, we were super caring and careful.
And yet, there were times when we still triggered a survivor. Not often and rarely in a big way, but it happened and was often a surprise. It just revealed to me that even if you are trying your best, you may still provoke pain and discomfort in this kind of engagement. In fact, just asking survivors to meet with us generates discomfort for them, no matter how much they want to talk to us or tell us it helps them. You have to acknowledge that, own it and work with them to find the best way forward.
Brandel: You created a tremendous variety of resources as part of this project. You didn’t just point out gaps or problems, but you worked to find solutions. Who is this series for and how did that inform what “products” the team created?
ross: Finding solutions is exactly the kind of effort that is foundational in participatory journalism, but it’s not as visible in the way that the reporting is.
It was a challenge to determine “who is this journalism for?” because the people at the center of the issue, the survivors, had their own set of information needs, yet their goals for the project involved changing how their loved ones, rape crises centers and law enforcement treated them on their healing journey. They wanted loved ones to have more empathy and understanding of what they were going through, they wanted advocacy groups to be more culturally competent in working with BIPOC communities and they especially wanted police to be better trained and required to use more trauma informed protocols.
So, while the podcast series centered survivors and put their needs and experiences first, the survivors’ goals for the project necessitated that we also consider what information was also needed by the people they interacted with in the legal reporting process.
Which brings us back to systems thinking.
For me the trick was to convene and listen generously to people in different parts of the system to discover what we as a public radio station were uniquely positioned to contribute.
I think of it as holding space for audiences in concentric circles. One circle is made up of survivors. They wanted to know how the legal reporting process works, down to specifics like, if they should report or not? What are their rights or options? How do they navigate the justice system? How does being raped affect their brain, and might this explain the different physiological and emotional challenges that are coming at them?
Then there are their loved ones — the survivor’s partners, parents, siblings, colleagues and friends. As it turns out, they had a similar set of questions, but also wanted to know what organizations they could turn to for help in how to best support someone who has been assaulted. So we included them in the same circle with the survivors.
In another circle you have the advocacy organizations that interact with survivors along their healing journey. They provide different levels of support — from accompanying survivors during initial interactions with police and to collecting evidence for rape kits to providing counseling, translation services and peer support groups. Through listening sessions we saw that they needed up-to-date and well presented information they could distribute to help survivors understand what to expect as they moved through the legal reporting process if they chose to report. These groups also wanted to reinforce that it is always the survivors’ choice to report or not, and regardless there are services they can access to help heal.
And then there is the circle with law enforcement. In dialogues with police, their crime lab staff and district attorneys we heard that they desperately wanted the survivors and their loved ones to have a better understanding of the steps in the legal reporting process. They felt this knowledge might help manage expectations about what will happen, when, and how long moving a case forward can take. They wanted the public to understand how incredibly hard it is to gather evidence and bring perpetrators to justice in sexual assault cases, and the ways in which survivors can contribute to the process (for example, get a medical exam as soon as possible, keep your clothes and don’t wash them).
Part of my model is always looking at not just issues but solutions, and having those come from the people at the center of the issue or on the front lines. So, when I was having these conversations I was listening for what needs overlapped in the center of the Venn diagram that we could address with our journalism.
All of these groups needed a ‘one stop shop’ to the legal reporting process. Something that would answer the questions survivors and their loved ones have in the immediate aftermath of an assault and that also laid the legal reporting process out in a way that was accessible, supportive and unharmful. And we needed to collaborate with advocacy groups and police departments to develop it so that it would be accurate and representative, for starters, and also so that they would use it because it also helped meet their needs in communicating critical information to survivors.
The guide we created, led by CapRadio’s digital and product teams, is for survivors and their loved ones and designed to be used by advocacy groups and law enforcement as part of their work to support survivors on their healing journey. While we’re still working to connect more people to the resource, we hope it finds more use soon.
If I had to pick one piece of the project that best illustrates the principles of participatory journalism, it’s how we went about designing this guide with and for the different stakeholder groups. One survivor had this response to the guide: “It is honestly the exact kind of resource that I had hoped existed when I first reported and I’m so thrilled with the outcome. It was not retriggering for me personally, and instead brought me hope.”
Brandel: It is pretty unusual for a guide like this to come from the local public radio station, and not another source.
ross: CapRadio’s public service mission is to gather, curate and distribute information people need to navigate their world with purpose, power and connection. So creating this guide is squarely in our wheelhouse. No one else was doing it because it’s not their job.
For advocacy organizations, it’s not their job to make something useful for law enforcement. And law enforcement isn’t in the business of making material advocacy groups need. And neither necessarily has the time or skills to build the kind of trust and confidence we did with survivors, who need to be part of the process if the product is going to be relevant to them. That’s one reason why it makes sense for public radio stations to create these kinds of resources.
But the other piece that became clear to me through our process is the bridging role we as a newsroom play, and how that is so important to create the kind of civic infrastructure we all want and need. And by civic infrastructure, I’m talking about building the on ramps and avenues for people to participate, collectively, in community change efforts. Bridges are infrastructure! Bridge building takes a focus on forging relationships among natural allies and unusual suspects, and facilitating processes where they can hear different perspectives, reconsider their own, identify solutions and decide how they can play a part.
So we became this bridge where we, for instance, could play audio clips of survivors sharing their experiences with law enforcement and it seemed as if it was a bit mind blowing to them. Police that met with us on a regular basis were hearing things that they don’t usually hear, and that are hard for them to hear. And the same is true for survivors — it was hard for them to hear law enforcement’s perspective. I feel like the Sacramento’s Supervising Deputy District Attorney summed it up when she said:
“I spent seven years being a prosecutor of adult and sexual assault crimes. I’ve spent the last two and a half years as a supervisor of adult sexual assault crimes. I think I have a lot of empathy and understanding, and yet … to hear how victims perceive what’s happening when we believe in law enforcement and prosecutors offices that we’re doing a really good job for them, that there’s things they perceive much differently than we do.”
Relationships are what’s going to move the needle on complex social issues. Public media stations, using community engaged journalism approaches, can uniquely situate ourselves to be the bridge that listens to community members, in this case survivors, and help ensure their voices are heard by decision makers and the wider public.
Special thanks to the survivor cohort who made this project possible: Aurora, Erin, Jesa, Laura, Maddie, Monica and Penny. Thanks also to CapRadio’s Emily Zentner, Chris Hagan and Veronika Nagy for data reporting and product development on this project. Alisa Barba edited this article.
