Community Fed Because It’s Community Led
How Management Gets In The Way Of Connecting With Community
This past year, newsroom after newsroom highlighted their commitment to be more “diverse and inclusive.” An acknowledgement that they don’t look like the communities they cover. Legacy papers and local outlets say they badly want to build trust with Black and brown communities. And they’re virtue signaling they’re doing everything it takes to connect: public statements, publicized initiatives, maybe even a few entry level BIPOC hires.
But these conversations are useless, and exhausting, if we don’t address the root cause of the disconnect, which is out-of-touch management (predominately white and male), who doesn’t trust community members to get the story right, largely because they’re not in relation with the people they report on. And a complete lack of imagination for how to reach other demographics.
If newsrooms mean what they say, things need to change. Take the salary from top management and sustain outreach initiatives dreamt up between reporters and community members. Invite community advisory boards into the editing process. If newsrooms mean what they say, it’s time to reimagine the hierarchy they’re founded on.
I saw this up close last year filling info-needs in my home city of Milwaukee. Our Latinx community told us point blank, “We like what you’re doing but until your news service is in Spanish, it has no value.”
In Milwaukee, the Latinx population has more than tripled since 1990 and today makes up about 20% of the city’s total demographic (or 160,000 people), according to the census. And while Latinx doesn’t equal Hispanic, we knew there was a need.
Our partnering newsroom had the money to produce a Spanish-language news service. I even lined up local translators to listen and respond to residents’ information needs. But this gap was not a management priority. As a result, our work was delayed and relationships with community leaders who asked for this service suffered.
While the news service was eventually translated months later, we lost valuable partners and over 600 Milwaukeans died from COVID-19 in the meantime, including 95 from the Latinx community.
The Work is Happening
Regi Young has seen this problem up close in his work. He’s the Chief Strategy Officer of the Houston Food Bank and says top-heavy partnering organizations have a challenge being responsive to people’s real needs.
“Traditionally, we’d meet with executive leaders and he might sit in the convo and throw his piece in and it would go one of two ways — send it to a person a level down, or an ‘I’ll get back to you,’” says Young. “But either way it was the end of the discussion.”
Regi has worked to address food insecurity in Houston’s health care system, as well as on 25 Houston-area college campuses, and in local communities. He says that getting to this point, and connecting with so many partners, took a lot of reimagining.
“(Food banks) don’t really know their clientele that well,” Young said. “But lots of (community) partners have direct access to clients.”
Sounds like he could be talking about journalism.
In my work as a JSK Community Impact Fellow with Stanford, I’ve built a product that’s community led from the start. The building blocks were informed by conversations with leaders like Regi and Milwaukee residents. Here are some values and takeaways that could sharpen the way we all listen and practice journalism.
Finding Partners + Designing Collaboratively
What both Regi and I learned is that the work starts and ends with cultivating relationships. That means talking to lots of potential partners, building relationships based on trust instead of a transaction, and leveraging your resources that could serve a community — like paying to translate your news service into another language.
I partnered with the community group, Metcalfe Park Community Bridges to fill info-need gaps in the Metcalfe Park neighborhood in Milwaukee. They organize neighborhood cleanups, mutual aid food drops and more. I started here because they already created an infrastructure for info sharing and I had pre-existing relationships with folks who could put me in touch with residents.
The next step was hearing directly from residents.
Tran Ha, part of our JSK cohort’s leadership team, and advisor and founder of Tiny Collaborative, helped me design a few different surveys for residents. One of our surveys was designed for really brief interactions (2–5 mins) and another one for longer interviews (an hour or longer) that resembled oral histories more than an info-needs survey.
One of the residents I talked to was Richard Clark. He’s 70, retired after working 26 years in customer service at Aurora Healthcare and was once the Vice President of the Metcalfe’s neighborhood organization.
Richard is always out in community, either fixing kids’ bikes with the agreement that they clean up the block, organizing the men on the block to cut the grass of an empty lot, or organizing neighbors to vote.
“23 votes is a lot of votes for an election,” Clark said after organizing his block and getting 23 residents to show up in the most recent local election. “[Alderman Russell] Stamper won by 33 votes so I can call (him) and say, ‘Hey, we can swing this if you’re not listening to us.’”
Richard knows how power works. He says it’s in short supply in the Metcalfe Park neighborhood. In our hour-long sit-down interview, I had things I wanted to learn for the project, but I also wanted to ask questions that had nothing to do with our work: How has the neighborhood changed? What’s it been like working in Milwaukee over the years? These questions provided deep context about his Milwaukee experience, and we’re trust building.
I also met Brittney Taylor. She instinctively fills info-gaps by sending out regular texts to friends and family on how to access food or other resources. She’s a mother, community volunteer and has long struggled with the lack of useful information available to her community.
“If you watch the news you are misinformed,” Taylor said. “If you don’t watch the news you are uninformed.”
When we talked about what kind of information would be helpful, she wanted more than traditional info-sharing. She wanted ways to build community and how to have talks about growing and sustaining small businesses inside the community.
“The black dollar does not stay in the black community,” Taylor said. “And you can’t obtain generational wealth like that.”
The End of the Executive to Save Journalism
I think a lot about how newsrooms got to this point. Elite educated, overworked, out-of-touch editors that aren’t native to a place, assigning stories to reporters who also don’t reflect the communities they cover. And we wonder why people don’t support our work.
“Why do we have executives?” asked Regi Young. “They don’t move with the trends on the ground and how many times do they have to hear something before they remember it?”
What if we removed those execs and replaced them with Richard Clark or Brittney Taylor’s voice from the start? What if we spent less time in newsroom meetings and more time cultivating community relationships and designing surveys?
This was a problem with the project I worked on last year before starting my JSK work. The reluctance to introduce Spanish-language services was rooted in control. At one point a director said, “I don’t trust the community to get it right.” Retaining ownership was everything.
Where some see roadblocks to de-centering ourselves in the work, others, like Regi Young, see opportunity.
“You’ve got a whole team raising money and saying branding matters,” Young said. “But new partnerships can lead to additional resources, a replicable model and future revenue streams that were never available before.”
He says this as someone whose organization has been applying for grants they were never eligible for in the past.
Building these relationships and trust is slow work. And don’t forget, it’s because of a history of neglect that we have to fight this hard to be trusted in the first place. It won’t happen quickly and expectations need to reflect that.
Some residents don’t want to engage with us and simply won’t because of that history. In Milwaukee, Richard Clark, compared the media with local policing he’s seen over the years.
“I wish they would come through the neighborhood when something ain’t happening,” Clark said. “See what the neighborhood is doing on any given day. A sunny summer day in the evening when the kids are playing. Come through. Don’t wait for something to happen and now all y’all want to come in…like you really care when you don’t.”
If we really care about this work and the communities we serve, it’s time for a change.
