Better News: Measure the impact of local journalism on your community

Anjanette Delgado is the senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press. She recently wrote an article for the American Press Institute’s Better News initiative about the paper’s community impact report. Better News host Michael O’Connell talks to Delgado about how newsrooms can create their own reports to measure the effect local journalism is having on their community, as well as how it is contributing to their fundraising efforts.

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) to share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies, and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

Better News: Events may be difficult, but they’re still worth doing

448. Giving sources the power to tell their own stories

Too often, and for too long, reporters have practiced “parachute” journalism, dropping into communities and working with a local to cover a story before flying off again.

“That usually leaves a lot to be desired in terms of missing context,” says Britney Dennison, deputy director of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. “A reporter might hire a local fixer, but the fixer might not have the same type of ownership over that reporting process.” The reporter also simply tells the story they believe needs to be told, missing a lot of nuance and depth is just below the surface.

Britney Dennison is the deputy director of the Global Reporting Centre.

The Global Reporting Centre is modeling a new type of in-person reporting, centered on storytellers who are far more involved and entrenched in the process and outcome than a parachute piece.

“We’ve really started to think about, how do we reframe that model?” Dennison says, thinking about who the audience is for a piece and how can the community and that audience have a greater stake in the outcome to provide a more resonant story.

“We started developing this model we called empowerment journalism,” she says. “The idea was to work with a story subject and make it almost autobiographical. The story subject was really serving as the director and involved in every stage of the production. We would sit down ahead of the interview and ask questions: What would you ask yourself? Do you want anyone else featured? Are there any new places we can film? We’d give our own feedback, like this seems like something meaningful to your story, how would you feel about filming there, or it seems like your story is for searching about identity, does that seem correct to you.

“The whole power dynamic has shifted,” she says. “We’re there for support for the storyteller and to capture their autobiographical story.”

The end result of this, following years of reporting, editing and, in some cases, starting from scratch, is the Turning Points series produced in partnership with PBS Newshour.

“It’s eight videos, eight storytellers, each one talking about challenges and resilience in Indigenous communities around alcohol use addictions,” Dennison says. Their work started in 2016 with consideration of how to tell more nuanced stories about alcoholism and addictions in First Nations communities in northern Canada, “a community and a story that has been historically misrepresented for a long time. Not only are stories about addiction and alcohol use heavily reliant on stereotypes, when they talk about native communities, they’re often outright racist and miss context and the historical traumas that exist in these communities,” Dennison says.

The group spent so much time, and so much care and effort, working diligently with Indigenous storytellers that people were surprised the group was still around, years after the project started, Dennison says.

“For so long, journalists that have worked in Indigenous communities have come in and taken stories from them,” she says. “Since we were there year after year, we were able to build trust.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Britney Dennison, deputy director of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver. She talks about empowerment journalism and the culmination of several years’ worth of work, a new series for PBS Newshour called Turning Points.

434. Put community at the center of your journalism

447. Freelancer won’t let cerebral palsy sideline his sports writing career

Blake Baumgartner has more to give and more stories to tell.

A passionate sports fan since childhood, he went to Michigan State University to pursue a career in journalism, ideally sportswriting.

Blake Baumgartner is a freelance sports writer from Naperville, Illinois.

For the better part of a decade, Baumgartner worked as a freelancer for the The Sun in Naperville, Illinois, a three-days-per-week newspaper, covering the important football, boys basketball and baseball stories of local high schools and serving as the lead prep writer.

“I was doing what a staff writer would be doing, covering those three beats. Features, gamers, all-area packages, any recruiting stuff, like if we had an athlete commit to a school,” he says. “I was doing what a staff writer would do, just without the title and cache that goes with it.”

There is one other main difference between Baumgartner and other full-time sports writers, in Naperville and other markets. Baumgartner has cerebral palsy, which limits his mobility.

“The only difficulty was football,” he says. While other reporters could stand on the sidelines, notebook in one hand and pen in the other to take notes, he needed to cover the game from the press box. “I can’t stand for long periods of time and being able to grip something in my left hand and write with my right. I’d have to be up in the press box, keeping my own stats, keeping play-by-play in a steno notebook. I can’t drive. My mother’s kind of a saint. She’d drop me off at any game and then pick me up.”

Filing stories wasn’t an issue as he’d attend games on Fridays and weekends, go home to file a story with his editor for a weekend website publication and the story would be in print later.

Unfortunately, Baumgartner knows his mobility limitations have restricted his abilities this far. He’s eager and hopeful, however, that this won’t be the end of his story.

On the advice of some contacts who have become allies at ESPN, he wrote a few pieces for Medium telling of his passion and challenges. The personal pieces were among the most difficult he’s had to write, Baumgartner says, but he wants to keep sharing his story, and his life, in the hopes of landing a full-time job covering sports.

“I’m scared to death that I’ve been typecast” as a high school sports writer, he admits. “My intention was never that. My intention was always to pay my dues.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Blake Baumgartner, a freelance sports writer from Naperville, Illinois. They discuss Blake’s passion for sports and the difficulties he’s faced as a reporter with cerebral palsy.

417. Can’t find women who know sports? Try harder

446. It’s a dangerous time to be a journalist in America

It will likely come as no surprise to know that 2020 was a dangerous year to be a journalist in the United States.

Michael De Dora, the Washington advocacy manager at the Committee to Protect Journalists, says the organization’s most recent census found a 600 percent increase in attacks on journalists compared with 2019 in the U.S. alone. This includes more than 100 journalists arrested and/or criminally charged and some 300 assaulted.

Michael De Dora is the Washington Advocacy Manager at Committee to Protect Journalists.

“We’re sifting through 980 total violations related to social unrest protests” alone, he says.

The protests around the country last summer, in particular, put American journalists in a dangerous position, as they were physically between those demonstrating in the streets and the law enforcement officers who both didn’t want the reporters there and might not have known who the members of the press were unless they were wearing vests or other identification. (Granted, some officers knew who members of the press were and attacked them anyway.)

“What you’re seeing is something that is the result of the soil and the atmosphere that already existed,” De Dora says. Politicians from the highest levels of government down to local elected officials “have been accusing journalists of being fake news and enemies of the people. Coupled with the rapid disappearance of local news outlets in a large percent of the United States, we have a situation in which people may be more open to accusations that news organizations are fake news or enemies of the people, because they may not know a journalist or have a local outlet. Accusations of being fake news may more easily take hold. Unfortunately, this leads us to, for the United States, a country where there’s fear and mistrusts of journalists and news organizations and the information they’re producing. This is in large part due to the fact that we have elected leaders who find it too easy to blindly criticize journalists.”

While the number of attacks against journalists has risen, and distrust of the news has grown, De Dora notes that this in and of itself isn’t exactly new.

“What’s interesting is about (Thomas) Jefferson and (John) Adams and others who wrote the founding documents (of the United States), even while they were speaking to this need to have an independent press … they were not really that friendly toward the press in their private written documents. In a lot of letters they exchanged, they were critical of the news out there,” he says. “What we’re seeing that’s different from the last decades is what you said, this complete attack on the role that the independent press plays in a democratic society.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Michael De Dora, Washington advocacy manager with the Committee to Protect Journalists. They discuss the sharp increase in attacks against American journalists in 2020 and what might be in store for the press under a new administration.

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

445. Investigative reporter exposes maid abuse in Beirut

In Lebanon, women from African countries who work as maids are often abused, raped, and essentially treated like slaves by their employers. Under a sponsorship system called kafala, in which maids are legally tied to the people who hire them, this abuse goes unpunished and under-reported.

But Lisa Khoury, an investigative freelance reporter who lives in Buffalo but has close family ties in Lebanon, thought about this abusive system and the women whose lives are ruined by it, for seven years before she had the opportunity to bring it to light.

A recent article published by Washington Monthly shares their stories and the efforts to make a change.

“This one has been on my mind for seven years, since my first adult trip,” Khoury says. “I noticed that there are these Black and Asian maids who are treated incredibly poorly. I thought it was too hard a story to do because there were so many barriers in the way.”

During her last trip to Lebanon, in 2019, she explained her seemingly far-fetched story idea to a family friend, who then introduced her to their maid, Josephine, originally from Ghana.

“She opened up to me for two hours. She was crying, telling me about her past employers who starved her, made her sleep on the kitchen floor, attempted to rape her, verbally abused her, didn’t let her speak to their children because they said she would infect them with African diseases. At the end of the conversation, Josephine took a deep breath, like a sigh of relief,” Khoury says. “The next day she told me that for the first time in years, she slept, because she felt like she got it off her chest.”

From there, Khoury contacted Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both of which have been publishing reports and calling on the Lebanese government for decades to end kafala. She was also introduced to a Facebook group called This Is Lebanon, founded by former migrant domestic workers who had been abused themselves.

“Because the Lebanese government is so negligent, not just on maids but on its own people, there’s no reliable justice system or police enforcement or rules or laws that protect maids,” she says. “They go to this Facebook group. It gets thousands of messages a year from women saying can you help me, I haven’t been paid in months, can you please help me, I’ve been sexually assaulted, can you help me convince my boss to let me go home. There are people behind the Facebook group that then contact these employers and say if you don’t let this person go, we will do X, Y, Z. It’s kind of bizarre, but when you live in a country where there are no rules and no proper system in place, this is what they have to do.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by freelance journalist Lisa Khoury to discuss her new investigative piece, The Real Housemaids of Beirut. She reports on the disturbing abuse of domestic workers and maids in Lebanon who have very little protection or recourse against their employers.

#322 — Syrian child brides: Pursuing a story that needed telling

444. How Documented uses WhatsApp to reach its audience

Reporting on immigrants and refugees is a daunting task. Getting that coverage back to those protagonists can be equally difficult, especially if the reporter and publication use a different language.

Mazin Sidahmed started his career as a software engineer, but his passion for journalism led him to cover immigrants and refugees, first reporting about the plight of Syrian refugees in Lebanon before moving to the United States and reporting on broader immigration issues.

In early 2017, following the inauguration and early dramatic policy changes around immigration from the Trump administration, Sidahmed and a friend started thinking about taking on a project focused on immigration reform. They received a grant to start a newsroom and saw a great opportunity to work more directly with the immigrant and refugee community.

Their project, Documented, covers “New York City immigrants and the policies that affect their lives,” Sidahmed says. “One of the things we knew starting this was people who work on immigration issues professionally will gravitate toward our work.”

The challenge, then, was finding ways to get their work out in front of the people who would be not only their audience, but their sources and the voices in their reporting.

“When I was in Lebanon, I’d go to a refugee camp, go back and write a story, and there would be no connection to the protagonist of my story. The story was published in a language they don’t speak. … We wanted to break that cycle and make sure the people affected by our stories were the people reading our stories. We started off thinking it would be easy, we’d just translate our stories into other languages and people would find it. That wasn’t the case.”

They partnered with a professor who taught a class on reporting with communities and learned, through a year-long project, that while people were interested in the expected kind of information — how to find lawyers, how to extend visas — but learned there was no centralized place to get information and the resources they were looking to access.

They also learned that the immigrant and refugee community utilized WhatsApp, a secure social networking platform, to share what information they had.

Documented is now a WhatsApp newsletter. People are finding their articles and reporting via searches, in which a few sentences are published but readers are encouraged to send Documented a message and join their group.

“It has revolutionized our approach to journalism,” Sidahmed says. “We re-engineered our newsroom to be focused from the ground-up, making sure people affected by our stories were our readers. We didn’t realize what it took to achieve that until we did community engagement work. Now we are reaching a place where that’s true and we’re building a secure relationship. People are feeding us information that’s the source of stories, and they’re in the stories. It’s become more organic.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell speaks with Mazin‌ ‌Sidahmed‌, founder of the immigration publication Documented. They discuss how WhatsApp has become Documented’s distribution network and why listening to the immigration and refugee community changed the course of his work.

433. Movement journalism: A way to report on injustice

Better News: Use Slack to host cultural conversations in your newsroom

Corinne Chin and Lauren Frohne are video journalists at The Seattle Times. They wrote a piece for Better News on how the Times is using Slack to lower barriers, expose insensitivity, and allow conversations about cultural issues that can arise from their stories. Better News host Michael O’Connell talks to Chin about how newsrooms can use Slack to facilitate similar conversations.

443. Tucson newspaper proves to be a vital source for the Latinx community

The Latinx community around Tucson, Arizona, has been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. La Estrella De Tucson, a weekly Spanish-language newspaper, with the support of the Arizona Daily Star, has taken this moment to refocus on what its readers want and need to know in order to better protect their health and their futures.

Liliana Lopez has worked for the paper for 16 years and became its editor last year. While she’s the only writer on staff for La Estrella, she says the support of the Arizona Daily Star newsroom has helped her share information, in English and Spanish, with her community.

“Other publications here are more oriented to commercial or marketing. I don’t want to say they’re not doing a good job but they have a different role,” she says. “La Estrella is doing real journalism. … I think our community recognizes our effort. The organizations who are trying to help the Latinx community have been working very closely with us.”

In addition to her new title at La Estrella, Lopez also was afforded the opportunity to participate in a Community Listening Fellowship sponsored by the American Press Institute.

“Something had been broken at some point and we were very focused on how to better know and listen to our audience,” she says. “Then we learned about this fellowship. We applied and I‘m so grateful that the American Press Institute gave me the opportunity to be part of this program. It couldn’t be more important for me and for us at La Estrella.”

After the fellowship, Lopez and the paper initiated a reader and community survey to better understand the readers, their concerns, their issues, and what they held to be important.

“We learned that we have the same dreams, the same issues,” she says. “We all want to be healthy, we want to be in a better position, but we are not all at the same level. We wanted to work, to do journalism that would be useful for our community. This fellowship came at the very right moment for us.”

Top among the list of priorities: affordable health services and ways to help children go to college.

La Estrella has worked to provide information to its readers not only about federal programs for health care, but also community-based health opportunities for those who might not be eligible for government assistance.

“We created a couple of stories telling people why and how this pandemic is affecting more of our Latinx students, especially with illegal status. What we learned in those past months is now in use to create relevant journalism in this pandemic. Health services and education opportunities are one of our focuses. We have been able to address these subjects in the pandemic context.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Liliana Lopez, editor of La Estrella de Tucson, a weekly Spanish-language paper in Arizona. They discuss what she learned from the American Press Institute’s Community Listening Fellowship and how she put that information to use to help the Latinx community during the pandemic.

437. Objectivity, racism, and the crisis of credibility

Top 10 podcast episodes of 2020

Every New Year’s Day, we like to look back at the most popular episodes to see what topics and guests proved to be the most interesting to our listeners.

Here are the Top 10 episodes released by It’s All Journalism in 2020:

Public Narrative works to help newsrooms find stories they may be missing

Jhmira Alexander, president of Public Narrative, discusses the importance of educating community partners on how news works.

The more journalism and social media change, the more journalists are needed

Amy Eisman of American University’s School of Communication discusses how things have changed in ways large and small and why real, fact-based journalism has never been more important.

Critical thinking is an essential skill for journalists

Jonathan Haber, author of a new book by MIT Press, discusses how journalists can use critical thinking to improve their reporting.

What’s it like for a new journalist?

Sarah Ramantanis, an intern with World Vision Australia talks about the challenges facing new journalists and how she’s trying to make a name for herself.

Mike Donoghue and David Cohn talk about how the coronavirus is changing newsrooms.

Coronavirus is changing how newsrooms work

David Cohn and Mike Donoghue of The Alpha Group talk about how the coronavirus pandemic is altering the way newsrooms work.

America has a bad case of truth decay, according to new RAND report

Jennifer Kavanagh of RAND talks about her new book, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life.

Simon Rogers data journalism expert — Simon Rogers is a data journalism expert with the Google News Initiative.

Data journalism in the age of coronavirus

Simon Rogers, a data journalism expert with the Google News Initiative, discusses how data journalism can help reporters find new ways to cover coronavirus.

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

C.J. Benjamin, emerging audiences editor for the Democrat and Chronicle, discusses how the paper successfully developed a strategy to better engage a younger and more diverse audience.

Author and editor Elizabeth Mitchell (Ceridwen Morris) — Author and editor Elizabeth Mitchell talks about the interview process and writing. (Ceridwen Morris)

Fake news, presidential deception and the Civil War

Elizabeth Mitchell, author of Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House, talks about the interview process and how 1864 is more like 2020 than most people realize.

Tina Vasquez discusses movement journalism

Movement journalism: A way to report on injustice

Tina Vasquez explains how movement journalism can help reporters present stories about marginalized and underserved communities.

442. 2020 Lookback: America from Canada’s perspective

The long peaceful border between the U.S. and Canada provides for more than just easy passage (in non-COVID times) between countries. It allows for shared experiences and stories that cross freely through radio and TV broadcasts.

The two countries are separate entities, however, and in the 1960s, many fled the draft during the Vietnam War to find shelter from the conflict in Canada.

In the lead-up to the November election, Dave Bidini and his West End Phoenix newspaper in Toronto wanted to use the time to talk with some American ex-pats living in Toronto about what it was like to observe that chaos from afar and how their life in Canada was different from what they left behind.

It was an ambitious project — while the broadsheet paper usually publishes once a month or about every five weeks, this was the paper’s second issue in October — and contains 25 personal narratives about what it’s like to be an American living in Canada.

“One of the things I wanted to check at the door was the self-aggrandizement that happens when Canadians write about the States,” says Bidini, one of the paper’s creators and a founder of the band the Rheostatics. “We’re pretty good at positioning ourselves as superior. We overlook our own issues when talking about ourselves in the context of the States. … Often when you find, when there’s the perspective from Canada about other places, it’s always gun laws and health care, but there’s a lot of ways we fall short.”

In the issue, simply called The Americans, Bidini says he was heartened to see stories of longing.

“Lot of people said it’s great being in Toronto but I miss my home and I miss my family and I miss this about living in the U.S.,” he says. “One woman talks about having a beautiful home in Detroit with a big yard and what it cost her for living in that city. I was pleasantly surprised people were able to talk about their yearning for a place they left.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is rejoined by Dave Bidini, co-founder of The Rheostatics and the West End Phoenix, a Toronto-based broadsheet newspaper. They discuss The Americans, a special edition published just before the November election in which ex-pats living in Toronto write about what it’s like to observe the U.S. from across the shared border during a difficult time.

#357 Keeping print alive in Toronto’s West End

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