The practice may have many names, but the act of reporters taking a moment to put their best intentions forward when going into a new community and working to build relationships after a story is completed is one worth contemplating.
The Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver recently issued an Empowerment Journalism Media Guide intended to help reporters, whether they’re working on national, international or local stories, center the people they’re covering, instead of taking a more simplistic, deadline-driven approach.
The phrase “empowerment journalism” was coined by former It’s All Journalism guest Peter Klein, the Global Reporting Centre’s former executive director, and was initially used in connection with a series of documentaries on Indigenous communities in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, in Canada.
“In the course of making this series of short films that aired on PBS Newshour last year, they worked so closely with storytellers, they helped to craft these documentaries,” explains Andie Crossan, the Centre’s current executive director. “(Community members) would give guidance and input about what parts of the story they wanted to share. They were able to see rough edits of the documentaries. They were really co-collaborators and co-producers. This is what we look at as one way of looking at empowerment journalism: You can do it to a high level of inclusion, thinking about how you’re representing communities, how they’re able to represent themselves.”
The recently released guide, available on the Centre’s website and as a downloadable PDF, is intended for use by any journalist, whether they have a single day to work on a story or months to build a long-form story.
With the Turning Points project, the reporters and storytellers had the luxury of time to carefully and considerately piece the documentaries together.
Former podcast guest Britney Dennison of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver talked about empowerment journalism and her work on the PBS Newshour series, Turning Points in 2021.
“We wanted to figure out a way to make it scalable. How can you consider it when you’re a local reporter on a tight deadline? What could reciprocity look like? What could credit look like?” Crossan says.
Building relationships with sources is something most reporters set out to do, but it takes more than just picking up the phone when given an assignment or when information is needed. The reporter needs to let the source know when the story is published or broadcast and learn more about the community by following up and attending meetings.
“The goal in creating the guide, it’s more of a buffet as opposed to a set-course meal,” Crossan says. “The idea being that, based on your deadline, based on your circumstances, whether your newsroom is global or local, whether it’s breaking news, here are parts of this you can consider. One of the first things we suggest is (considering) who is the story for? Why are you telling this story? And kind of also thinking about your own positionality. Do you have connections with this community? Do you have any trust built?”
If someone else within a newsroom or organization has those ties already established, or if another reporter is already doing this work, try to learn from them and build upon their work instead of rehashing old information. Taking an extra few minutes to speak with someone who understands and has established trust and connection within a community can help shape a story in a way that best presents the community’s perspective on the issue, rather than what the reporter believes it to be, Crossan says.
“All we can do as journalists is build a relationship of trust and coming into it from a place of openness and the desire to be as accurate as we can be,” she says. “To do that, we have to have folks who are willing to talk to us. These kinds of (ideas), being more mindful ahead of reporting, is one way.”
Andie Crossan and Britney Dennison coauthored The Empowerment Journalism Guide. Crossan talks to It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about how empowerment journalism can help newsrooms produce “community-engaged reporting.”
