In 1994, as the number of migrants coming to the United States started to hit a peak, Abu Taher arrived in New York City. A daily newspaper in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that he worked for at the time had sent him to the U.S. on assignment. Taher lived in a small apartment that he shared with more than 10 other Bangladeshi immigrants in the Bronx.
It was his first experience to get his bearings in a newfound American life.
Whenever he would go to social gatherings on weekends or visit the mosque, Taher realized, the Bangladeshi immigrant families that he’d meet had almost exactly the same questions in his mind: where to find a reasonable car dealer, a trusted immigration lawyer and an experienced real estate broker, or how to access information. Those questions, though they seemed basic, kept him wide awake at night; he knew that they were critical for anyone new to this country.
A veteran journalist, Taher decided to establish his own weekly newspaper in 1996, Bangla Patrika, that would serve as a “life link” to members of his community in the New York and New Jersey areas and their loved ones in Bangladesh, covering news and information that they could use practically.
“That was the main purpose of the publication: giving information to my fellow Bangladeshi immigrants on how to live a normal life in a new homeland and, at the same time, connecting them to the homes they left behind,” he said.
Print as the flagship
Taher said that Bangla Patrika, now one of the longest-running ethnic media news outlets in the city, has remained true to its core purpose.
Despite significant changes brought by digital technology — utilizing mobile devices, blogging — joining multiple social media networks and producing slideshows and videos, Taher said that the survival of his paper still largely rests in the same community that he’s served since its inception over 20 years ago.
Like hundreds of ethnic media in New York and New Jersey, particularly among newspapers, the print edition remains to be the flagship of the news outlet — unlike its mainstream counterparts that have shifted by and large to digital and relegated its print edition to a secondary portal to news access.
In fact, over the last decade, some digital-first ethnic media publishers inNew York and New Jersey have found that some community members they serve don’t consider a news organization legitimate unless it has a print edition.
“In the Filipino community, you are not considered a ‘real’ newspaper, if you don’t have a print edition,” said Cristina Pastor, publisher and editor of FilAm.net.
Business sustainability
While many publishers can see the value of digital presence, not all in the ethnic media sector believe it’s the most effective way to keep the business afloat.
Kaushik Shah, publisher of Gujarat Darpan, a monthly magazine in Gujarati based in central New Jersey, said that his paper’s circulation grew to nearly 15,000 copies a month — a 75 percent increase over the last 20 years.
While his magazine has an online edition, mostly PDF files uploaded to its website, he said he owes the growth to his print subscribers and readers who are mostly Gujarati immigrants in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. These subscribers, according to Shah, may be on Facebook using their smartphones, but the majority of them still access their news and information through print.
“This is why enhancing my digital existence is not a top priority for us. Gujarati readers who are, for example, in San Francisco, they could get their news from other Gujarati publications based in California — we don’t have to capture them on the Internet,” Shah added. “But in order for us to stay in this business, it is not just all about increasing the number of readers from across the U.S. and around the world, but rather it is about going back to the basics: provide local content that our readers actually need.”
Advertisers Still Prefer Print
Kleibeel Marcano, publisher and editor of Reporte Hispano, one of the biggest Spanish-language weeklies in New Jersey, was on the same page. The ad sales, he admitted, have gone down, but the number of his readers — including those on social media and online generally — has increased nearly tenfold in recent years.
Kleibeel Marcano (third from left) with other NJ ethnic media reporters at a press briefing, organized by Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media. (Photo Credit: Anthony Advincula)
As he enhanced the paper’s digital presence, it also increased his overhead cost. Most interestingly, Marcano admitted that his paper, like any ethnic media news outlets on a shoestring budget, also finds it challenging to monetize digital content:
“Our biggest advertising revenue sources still come from our print advertisers,” Marcano said.
While he lost some of the paper’s big corporation advertisers, he added, most businesses in the community still place ads in the print edition.
“Whether we are expanding our reach through online or boosting our social media presence, there’s no way that we could get rid of our print edition,” Marcano said. “The Internet has inundated our readers with information that they actually don’t care about, with unreliable and untrusted sources. Because our readers know that we are part of our community and we know our community, they will continue to grab our newspaper from the newsstand.”
Oni Advincula was a former editor and national media director for New America Media and a correspondent for The Jersey Journal and The Associated Press. He is the co-author of “The State of Ethnic and Community Media in New Jersey” and has worked with ethnic media in 45 states for more than 20 years.
Last year, Democracy Fund commissioned a study focused on philanthropic support of newsroom diversity. The findings revealed troubling disparities: Between 2009 and 2015, only 6% of the $1.2 billion in grants invested in journalism, news, and information in the United States went towards efforts serving specific racial and ethnic groups, and only 7% went towards efforts serving economically disadvantaged populations.
To begin addressing the longstanding gap in capital and resources for news entrepreneurs of color, we are helping launch the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. It’s designed to support and build the capacity of newsrooms by and for people of color, who are best positioned to deliver critical news and information to their communities.
So far, the Fund has raised $3.6 million and will begin making grants in the first quarter of 2020. Donors include Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, Google News Initiative, and the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Maya Thornell-Sandifor, the director of Racial Equity Initiatives at Borealis Philanthropy, where the fund is hosted, explains why this initiative is meaningful:
“Media outlets led by and for people of color break stories and offer perspectives that are relevant to the communities they serve and inform the public dialogue in invaluable ways. Now more than ever, we need reporting that addresses the root causes of racial injustice and confronts racism with unflinching honesty and courage. This fund will strengthen the capacity of news organizations that prioritize building long-term relationships with communities of color, helping them expand their reach and impact.”
Journalism has long struggled to reflect the diversity of the communities it serves. However, throughout American history, media by and for people of color has played a critical role in informing, engaging and connecting communities who were left out or forced out of our national story. Over the last year, we have published three reports shining a spotlight on this history, and chronicling the role of American Indian, African American, and Hispanic media. While the entire media industry is struggling today, the economic challenges facing these publications are made all the more difficult by longstanding inequalities in access to funding.
“Media organizations led by people of color have long been a vanguard of our democracy, holding the powerful accountable for the ways it treats its most vulnerable citizens in ways mainstream media has often failed to do. It was organizations such as the black press that campaigned most vigorously to abolish slavery, to pass federal legislation against lynching, and to end Jim Crow, when mainstream media either ignored these stories altogether or sided with the powerful. Journalists of color consistently bring credibility and accuracy to the coverage of our multiracial democracy, yet media organizations led by and serving people of color consistently struggle to gain the types of resources that allow them to have a broad and sustained impact. We at the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting are excited to see how the fund will help to change that by providing pivotal support to these newsrooms at a time when their unique perspective and coverage is desperately needed.”
The Racial Equity in Journalism Fund launches today, but that is just the beginning. We know it will need to grow and expand to meet the needs and catalyze the opportunities we see in the field. We know a more representative industry is crucial to ensuring all communities have access to news with a broader, more accurate array of perspectives, and we hope the fund will serve as a meaningful step forward in closing the historic gap in funding for entrepreneurial journalists of color.
If you’re an outlet interested in receiving support from the fund, you can sign up here to receive forthcoming updates about the application process. And if you’re a funder interested in supporting this work, please contact Borealis Philanthropy’s Director of Racial Equity Initiatives, Maya Thornell-Sandifor: mtsandifor [at] borealisphilanthropy.org.
A: “It is the movement of thoughts and ideas through time and space”
– Matt Locke, Director of Storythings to Tony Ageh, New York Public Library, Chief Digital Officer
As part of research conducted for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts, technical practitioners and community groups, sat with journalists and listened.
A substantial part of this work has involved scanning similar fields and communities also undergoing deep transitions and shifts to surface what lessons, patterns and practices in those spaces can be applied in the newsroom context.
They share similar struggles and are asking themselves a similar set of questions media and journalism funders are grappling with: What comes next? How can we have the most impact? How can we support leaders in this space? What does growth look like in this new world? Where do we go from here?
The challenges are shared and I observed more leaders from overlapping fields asking these set of questions in common physical space with community journalists.
That is because for many communities, physical newsrooms and newspaper buildings are relics of the past.
The physical headquarters of newspaper buildings and local broadcast stations once represented prestige and as sources of pride for its owners. The buildings were often grandiose, ornate, symbolic to news organizations stature in civic life. The structures reflected, both visually and physically, lop-sided power dynamics between newsrooms and the communities they covered. As David Uberti wrote in Columbia Journalism Review,
“The buildings often had on-site printing presses, adding the machinery’s low hum to already buzzing newsrooms, and affording residents the opportunity to see a newspaper being made. The properties were a physical link between journalists and the communities they covered, the ultimate branding tool. Their dazzling architecture and mammoth scale sometimes rivaled those of government buildings or other institutions, showcasing newspapers’ prominent place in the community.”
Journalism is intended to serve the public. Yet for more than a generation it was considered standard practice for local news operations to be housed within ornate, sweeping physical structures creating a structural hierarchy and barrier separating journalists from the very same public they were intended to serve. On the surface there was a functional reason for this: printing press operations required substantial space and the technology to decouple printing press operations from newsroom operations did not become was not ubiquitous or affordable for local newsrooms. But there was also a more sentimental, emotional rationale for this practice: the buildings that hosted news headquarters were universally considered by owners, investors and powerful actors as highly prized possessions and regarded as crown jewels to local media empires.
Until the crown jewels became unprofitable.
As the news industry struggled to find ways to increase revenue, many buildings that served as local news headquarters in cities around the country were put on the market. The buildings the news operations occupied were more profitable than the businesses run inside it.
The Oakland Tribune permanently moved out of the historic Tribune Tower building in 2007, the building has turned over ownership several times since the sale. News operations for The Oakland Tribune relocated multiple times over the ensuing decade before the 150-year-old publication ultimately ceased publication in 2016. Around the country, amid rising real estate values and diminishing revenues, legacy local news operations faced similar fates: in 2011, the Inquirer Building which over the years housed both the The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily Newssold to developers for an estimated $20 million dollars. In 2014, the building that once housed the Detroit Free Presssold to developers for more than $8 million dollars. Claiming losses of around $11 million dollars, Publisher E.W. Scripps Co. placed The Rocky Mountain News up for sale. The paper’s final issue was published in 2009, it’s former headquarters sold and later demolished in 2007. The Des Moines Register left the space the newspaper occupied for more than 95 years, the building was later sold and is now luxury lofts.
Market dynamics led local news outlets to shift from real estate owners to tenants or in less fortunate outcomes, to shift from real estate owners to fading memories. While the digital disruption led the remaining outlets left standing to reckon with a laundry list of constraints; smaller staffs, shrinking budgets and ever-shrinking audiences, just to name a few. For others, this flux presented an opportunity to redefine and renew: the fundamentals of the journalism business have altered, the nature of distribution and news consumption has changed, how newsrooms connect with audiences must be reimagined. This all presents an opportunity for reinvention, as former Detroit Free Press editor Paul Anger describes:
“It’s the publishing industry. And when you’re in a building that really doesn’t serve your needs anymore — there could be open space, configurations that don’t work for you, equipment or costs that don’t make sense — moving somewhere new is starting fresh.”
An opportunity also exists here for media funders as well: how can diversity, inclusion and connection to communities be baked into this stage of reinvention?
Remix Revitalization
While the business of media has altered, the fundamentals of journalism has not: journalism exists to serve the public. As these grandiose buildings were sold off over the aughts, strong journalism was still produced as technology transformed the spacial needs required to do run a newsroom and cover communities. Media funders can support newsrooms continued retreat from structural barriers between journalists and communities by remixing how philanthropy invests in communities that bridge overlapping ecosystems also in deep transitions.
Philanthropy has long served as a catalyst for community and industry revitalization efforts. This hybrid role as convener, organizer and catalyst is one that is not unfamiliar to many funders. As James M. Ferris writes in Stanford Social Innovation navigating complexity is, in fact, an inherent strength for many community funders:
“… philanthropy is able to lead, not by dollars alone, but by leveraging all of its assets — expertise, reputation, and networks — to address public problems. These foundations purposefully forged relationships and networks with stakeholders in the community. They also consciously developed intellectual capital about programs and places. That latter behavior brings to light another important reason why they have proven effective leaders. In addition to embracing adaptive and distributed leadership, these philanthropies have risked developing and advancing a point of view. Foundations that aspire to be changemakers must be much more than grantmakers. The conventional view that “it is not about us” must give way to the willingness to set a course and stand by it. Foundations can create and maintain a point of view to great effect, as long as they are credible and transparent.”
The key here is for media funders to see themselves as active participants in community ecosystems rather than passive grantmakers. It requires a conscious and continual shift of power dynamics that allows the imposing, structurally cold and physically removed newspaper labyrinths of the past to continue to dispose. In it’s place, media donors can catalyze and pilot fresh systems, practices and mechanisms that allow for deeper integration into communities journalists serve and for closer listening to audiences local media seeks to reach. Through accepting change as a constant, media funders can proactively lead deliberate, continual investments into more resilient newsrooms through funding models for local news to build capacity to adapt to continuously change and newsroom reinvention.
Avengers Assemble: Bring Newsgathering & Programming into Community Spaces
Ariell Johnson owns Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, the first comic bookstore on the east coast owned by a black woman. Johnson got the idea to create a hybrid community hub when a beloved coffeeshop across the street from a local comic book shop she frequented closed down — she wanted Amalgam to bridge both functional spaces, recreate the inclusive, warm environment she experienced and serve as a gathering space she knew the community needed.
Today, Amalgam describes itself as a “… celebration of geek culture. A place for comic book fans, hardcore gamers, movie addicts, television connoisseurs, and zombie apocalypse survivalists to meet, and with their powers combined, change the world a little bit.”
Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse. Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
In my opinion, Johnson succeeded in her intention to create a warm, inclusive environment. On my visit to Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse for this research, it struck me as an ideal community hub: curious, friendly strangers, plenty of nooks to get lost in conversation or explore new worlds, ample convening and learning space and yes, comic books and coffee. For journalists invested in understanding the pulse of a neighborhood and it’s many varied voices, Amalgam stands out.
In an interview with me, Johnson describes the space as something built with flexibility and change in it’s DNA because community was centered in the intentionality behind Amalgam’s design:
“Community has been the center of this, while designing the shop and everything, it was always the goal to make it be conducive to be a community space. Just from how everything was designed and setup, even how the retail shelves in the back of the store are arranged, it was all done with the understanding that we’d like to be able to build community back here. Things need to be able to be moved, rearranged, to push things out of the way so that we can arrange the floor as we need.”
For media funders invested in reimagining newsgathering truly rooted within local communities, it is worth exploring how donors can create opportunities to support local, diverse entrepreneurs also embarking reimagining possibilities in their communities. In an interview with me, Johnson explains the most straightforward way for funders to accomplish this is to support diverse entrepreneurs in local communities:
“Make it a point to try to fund diverse entrepreneurs. I’ve gone into loan meetings when I was applying for loans and I have to meet with the loan committee and I am the only person in that room that looks like me. Not that I didn’t know that that was the case before, but it’s one thing to know it and it’s a very different thing to experience. It is very easy for me to understand why white boys get funded and other people don’t. Because if you walk into a room and you look like everyone in the room then I think there is this kinship that people can feel with you like, ‘I don’t know about what it is about this boy. He just reminds of myself.’ When I’m walking into a meeting I’m not reminding anybody of anybody. All of that works against people who do not fit a mold. So look for diverse products and make sure your decision-maker team is diverse. So you’re not just in a room full of white people when you’re trying to make those financial decisions.”
Amalgam owner Ariell Johnson depicted on Marvel cover. Image from Marvel.
For other media funders seeking to follow suit, Johnson advises: “I think it is not considered sexy to provide support for operations to help businesses stay open but I believe it’s more impactful to support organizations that are already doing the work and just need help to continue doing it.”
Develop a Presence in Collaborative Work Environments
Pipeline Philadelphia: Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
Tayyib Smith is a Philadelphia based entrepreneur behind several ventures including Little Giant Creative, 215 Magazine and the Institute for Hip Hop Entrepreneurship. He is one of the partners of Pipeline Philly, a collaborative co-working space that overlooks Philadelphia’s City Hall.
Pipeline Philadelphia: Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
The space is home to companies and organizations of a range of missions and sizes, including civic organizations and hyperlocal news startups. In an interview with me for this research, Smith observed that Pipeline’s success in supporting diverse and growing organizations is due, in part, because the team of people stewarding the space were made up of individuals who have built diverse businesses and companies. “The thing that separates Pipeline probably from most co-working spaces not just in Philly, but nationally, is that we have a really keen eye for aesthetics and for a concierge level of service. I think being an entrepreneur, you know what other small businesses and moderate sized businesses may want. It probably gave us a bit of an advantage in the marketplace.”
Pipeline Philadelphia: Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
The Knight Foundation became Pipeline Philadelphia’s first marquee tenant. On a tour of Pipeline for this research, I observed with Pipeline’s community manager Lindsay Tillery, how programming reinforces collaborative partnerships among companies and organizations hosted at the space. Proximity enriches context and in this context; journalists, makers, developers, strategists, marketers and educators all working in proximity to one another has added dimensions of depth and in most cases, high-levels of growth to their work. For many, the space is not intended as a fixed solution. In our tour Tillery noted many civic media and local news startups seeded at Pipeline eventually grew out of the space as their teams expanded.
Partner with Overlapping Ecosystems in Reinvention
The technology sector is no stranger to disruption and flux. Amazon Web Services rendered racked server space unnecessary and distributed agile teams have slowly become more commonplace than fixed, co-located engineering bases. It is an evolution that is not dissimilar to how grandiose newspaper buildings slowly hollowed out as printing presses gave away to digital distribution.
Like the media industry, the cost and infrastructure necessary to build and scale a modern technology company has changed the landscape of possibility and the profile of who can afford to become technology entrepreneurs. Like the media industry, the technology sector is at odds with it’s role and responsibility to confront the structural and systemic conditions that have fueled the industry’s homogeneity; specifically a severe lack of racial, ethnic, gender diversity.
Startups can launch from anywhere and a few Silicon Valley leaders have seized this opportunity to steer the tech sector toward reimagining itself, specifically in regards to improving diversity among its very homogenous talent pools and positioning emerging companies to thrive beyond Silicon Valley.
Leslie Miley is a veteran Silicon Valley engineer, an alum of the engineering teams at Twitter, Apple, Google and most recently, Director of Engineering at Slack. In addition to his roles in engineering leadership, Miley is a longtime outspoken champion for improving diversityand inclusion in the technology sector and has regularly challenged Silicon Valley companies to build products and company culture in accordance with integrity, principles and values.
At the beginning of the 2017, Miley announced he was taking a leave from his role at Slack to join Venture for America (VFA), a nonprofit that works with recent grads who want to work in startups and create jobs in American cities. Miley will be working to launch VFA’s Executive-in-Residence (EIR) program that will embed senior-level Silicon Valley talent with VFA companies in cities around the country with emerging, diverse startup ecosystems.
Image from Venture for America
The technology industry shares the media industry’s well-documented challenges with diversity, inclusion, fostering leadership opportunities for leaders from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds against ever-changing business constraints. The tech sector also holds tremendous, outsized influence to shape of local economies, dominant culture and civic life. For philanthropy, it is worth observing how senior leaders within the technology sector are building solutions designed to integrate diversity and inclusion as an imperative and prerequisite for continued industry growth.
Miley wrote on Medium in a post announcing his role, “I listened to the frustrations of countless founders of all races and genders on how hard it is to raise funds, to find and retain good talent, and grow their companies in their communities due to the scarcity of what we take for granted in Silicon Valley. It is painfully obvious that this very talent is being systematically drained from most of America’s hardest hit cities. A large percentage of this entrepreneurial talent ends up in New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Denying these communities the talent and resources they need to create and grow their start-up communities. By encouraging and enabling a population of non-diverse entrepreneurs to relocate to Silicon Valley, and disrupt and innovate in the technology space with little thought to the scope or impact of their platforms, we have successfully created the means to disrupt not only industries but also communities, and countries. And we do this with little, if any, empathy when it comes to the impact on the well being of people, particularly women and people of color.”
In an interview with me for this research, Miley describes how community shifts the nature of the innovation VFA startups and other tech companies based beyond Silicon Valley drives, “The problems that are going to be solved in Cleveland, Philly, Detroit are going to be different than the problems that we will solve here [in Silicon Valley]. Where the pain point in the community is going to be different so the problem space is going to be different. Innovation isn’t about getting two guys together and giving them a bunch of money and hoping they change the world. It is sometimes just solving a problem that impacts a large group of people and that problem space is different from community to community. Community is based upon a lot of different things.”
The community dynamic Miley speaks to points to an opportunity for media funders seeking to support stronger local journalism.
Community drives context. It changes the nature of place and for journalists, the stories we tell about innovation.
The resilience and future relevance of the technology sector relies upon the industry growing, evolving and meaningfully supporting diversity and inclusion. What are the narratives media funders can support from local community industries actively attempting to revitalize itself?
Miley explains in an interview with me,
“I intimately understand, based on where my parents lived and where a lot of my friends lived in other parts of the United States, what happens when you don’t have economic opportunities. What happens to communities that don’t have economic opportunities? One of the things that happens to communities that don’t have economic opportunities for a prolong periods of time is that they become extremely desperate. They are desperate for jobs. They are desperate for anything that’s going to change the decline of their communities, of their friends of the family and their loved ones…We have such an amazing economic engine in Silicon Valley. How can we export that to parts of the United States that aren’t partaking in the economic resurgence that we are experiencing so vividly here.”
Accelerating the nature of this change through seeding experienced senior-level Silicon Valley talent in an EIR program will ramp up the speed and maturation of startup ecosystems around the country. It will present different and diverse innovation narratives and it will develop, as Miley explains, companies trying to solve different problems, serve diverse communities and surface more expansive stories.
“You are seeding an ecosystem to grow. The story I’d like to see is the ability to be a part of an ecosystem that is not just changing the economic activities in an area but is actually changing people’s lives,” Miley explains.
Change is constant and for media funders, so are the opportunities to invest new stories, storytellers and communities living through flux. In order to meet this moment, the stories we tell about change within our industry and communities we cover must also shift.
These shifts present opportunities to reimagine media within communities as vehicle for co-investment in community.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to championing the rights of survivors of sexual violence.
“We need stories of hope and possibility, stories that reflect the reality of our lived experiences.”
— Janet Mock, Redefining Realness
There is a necessity to ground community journalism in community truths. Those truths are not always as cut and dry as facts, but rather are negotiated through deep listening and engagement with the people you are trying to serve. Community truths makes space for, and recognize the diversity of lived experiences that shape how we understand our place and how we respond to the issues that face us.
A critical responsibility of journalism is to bear witness. Yet newsrooms large and small struggle routinely with the simple practice of listening and holding up an accurate mirror to complicated, nuanced truths in their communities. The causes of this are varied; staffing, time constraints, cultural bias, risk aversion, language barriers, just to name a few. But the end results are the same: Important stories go untold, or are told through a narrow lens that doesn’t reflect the lived experiences of the community.
Kassi Underwood, author of the book May Cause Love, spoke to this issue on a recent podcast. “I can hear journalists over the phone stop typing when I say something new. When I say something that is already part of the public conversation on abortion, I can hear them typing. And the minute I say something different — it’s silence,” Underwood said. “I don’t know if that’s because they’re listening or because they think ‘Oh that’s not useable or something like that’. But that has been frustrating because that was part of my loneliness — not being able to say everything.”
Underwood was sharing her story on the podcast The Abortion Diary, a project created by Dr. Melissa Madera in the summer of 2013. The project operates under a simple premise: “What if millions of people broke their silence and told the truth about their lives and their choices?” Madera’s podcast has created a container for listening to individual truths about a subject matter where listening and open dialogue are often replaced by talking points and heated debate. As such it is an interesting example to explore how difficult issues can be better covered in journalism and discussed in community.
Image from The Abortion Diary.
Through her podcast, Madera has traveled around the country physically bearing witness and recording the personal stories of more than 240 people. The podcast stands out for the way it presents personal stories in their full complexity without judgement. “Every experience is different,” Madera told me. “We’re not one person or one group. We’re a community of people just like any community of people with different people inside of it. […] It’s not one kind of story. It’s all kinds of stories.” Each episode follows a similar format: the person with the lived experience narrates their story, speaking for however long they wish and at their own pace. There is no framing, no leading questions, no judgement, just listening. On each episode Madera is not credited as the show’s ‘Host’ but rather the ‘Listener.
This kind of verbatim story sharing is more closely aligned with documentary film than traditional journalism, but there are important lessons here that journalists and media funders should take seriously. Listening builds trust. When journalists and newsrooms deepen their capacity for listening they are investing in trust. As journalists work more intentionally and thoughtfully with communities to bear witness, the deepened trust in communities will lead to more trusted journalism. This is an arc that cannot be driven by generating clicks or shares, but rather, it is anchored in service to community. That trust can help reposition newsrooms as partners and leaders in communities. Investing in listening is investing in leadership — a form of leadership forged from journalists and communities working together.
Community is often described around a sense of place, not a shared experience. However, Madera’s Abortion Diary is an example of how community can form around shared experience and through bearing witness. Madera describes seeking community as a catalyst for the project:
“This project really came from a need to listen. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to listen to other people’s stories. I wanted a physical community. I was actually looking for a physical space where I can be in community with other people who’ve had abortions and I couldn’t find that. So then I looked for an online space where I could listen. […] I wanted to hear people’s voices, and that’s where the podcast came to be. And I didn’t know anything about podcasting, so I had to learn that part, but I knew I wanted to be in a situation where — or in a place where I would be listening to people share their stories.”
As part of my research for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts and community groups, sat with journalists and listened. This included sitting with professional listeners like Madera to understand how philanthropy can better support deep listening and diverse stories across different issues and mediums. There is an opportunity for media funders to support mechanisms and models for deep listening.
Podcasts are obviously associated with listening, but in fact, there is a growing collection of community listening projects across the country such as The Listening Post in New Orleans and tools like GroundSource. In many cases, the journalists are the ones in search of community, not vice versa. Madera highlights the power of also building community among those seeking community. When she failed to find media that featured complicated, nuanced truths about abortion experiences, Madera slowly and story by story, created one of the most robust, deep and diverse media platforms on one of the most contentious issues of our time. The project is entirely funded by listeners.
For media funders, it is worth examining how forums for listening can fill a void in communities and how journalists in diverse communities can become better listening stewards. Madera says funders seeking to support this work should understand that they are investing in facilitating a process, not a product. Process is not quick, building trust requires time.
“I can see the difference in people through telling their stories, but it’s not a quick fix. It’s like people share their stories and then they start feeling comfortable sharing their stories with other people,” Medera told me. “I keep on telling people that my project is not about changing people’s minds. That is never why I started this project… it’s about people being able to tell a story they normally would not have shared, and about feeling like it’s part of their life that they can talk about in the world. That only happens in their own community, so this is a community project.”
Building community through listening is leadership. Finding people who want to share their story, and treating it with respect is leadership. Media funders should invest in models of listening leadership that are anchored in service, building trust over time and reflective of diverse experiences.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.
“Recognizing the challenges of leadership, along with the pains of change, shouldn’t diminish anyone’s eagerness to reap the rewards of creating value and meaning in other people’s lives.” — Ronald Heifetz, Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School
‘What is the future of news?’ is an evergreen question in journalism. Over the course of conducting this research, I continuously encountered the leadership and labor of individuals in journalism who did not wait for someone else to answer that question for them in order to execute necessary critical work to create the future of news we all deserve.
These solutions builders understand the nature of newsroom systems and practice adaptive leadership, a “… leadership framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and thrive in challenging environments. It is being able, both individually and collectively, to take on the gradual but meaningful process of change. It is about diagnosing the essential from the expendable and bringing about a real challenge to the status quo.” Developing adaptive leadership is a model that is philanthropy supports in other sectors such as in education, healthcare and technology.
Often for media funders, support for initiatives intended to improve diversity in journalism are delivered to programs with explicit focus, such as skills training, leaving gaps of support for initiatives to address the implicit systems that undermine newsroom efforts to recruit, retain and promote diverse journalists; bias, discrimination, managers ill-equipped to support diverse direct reports, targeted harassment, pay inequity, burnout, and advocating for oneself, to name a few.
In newsrooms, adaptive leaders steward progress through complex systems. The adaptive leaders interviewed for this research who witnessed or experienced systemic failures went to work to fill this gap in order to improve the field, often did so without institutional support and in addition to current workload, creating a double burden and accelerating rates of burnout.
Invest in Systems Stewards & Possibility Builders
Tara Pixley was a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow and is one of the founding members of Reclaim, a project alliance of five organizations dedicated to “amplifying the voices of underrepresented photographers and decolonizing the photojournalism industry.”
“I believe deeply in journalism as a tool for democracy and as an imperative in our everyday lives and with that respect and that love and that passion for journalism in general, and photojournalism specifically, I want to make it better,” she said in a New York Times piece announcing the project. A PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, Pixley is approaching designing solutions with the expertise of a trained social scientist: she is collecting the missing datasets and has an open survey for photojournalists, a design approach supported in an earlier piece of reported research for media funders seeking to support diverse journalism ecosystems. There is an opportunity for media funders to support adaptive leadership initiatives from diverse journalists building solutions and practicing a form of industry intrapreneurship that should be cultivated and invested in.
Rachel Wedinger shared with me in an interview for this research:
“It’s important to support individuals who have a very high level of comfort with complexity because we are going to act in values-based way within a complex system. I don’t really see the point of understanding a complex system if you continue from the other side of that understanding to act in the same kind of simplistic ways. Come to understand the landscape, come to understand the complex system that you’re trying to make change in and then make sure that your approach is taking into account that complexity in a real way.”
Project Alloy is another case for adaptive solutions-building from leaders within a different complex system struggling with diversity: the technology sector. Three leaders, Starr Simpson, Ian Smith and Brooke Jarrett, created the nonprofit to provide grants to underrepresented individuals in the industry to attend technical conferences otherwise financially inaccessible to them.
Simpson explains the impetus behind Project Alloy at GraceNotes, a convening created by another adaptive leader Tess Rinearson.
“When we give grants through Project Alloy, we give directly to people for whom we wish to open doors of opportunity. This approach is change we believe in, and also change within reach — we, as individuals who work in the tech industry, are capable of making this kind of difference for others. So we decided to form a nonprofit to centralize and scale the process so we could reach even more people.”
Image from Project Alloy
For media funders, there is opportunity to create agile grants that will support efforts from adaptive leaders like Pixby, Simpson and Rinearson. Their leadership is not only filling critical structural gaps within their respective sectors but also cultivates talent from underrepresented backgrounds to create a community of people who will ultimately support one another down the line and over the arc of their careers. Yet these efforts are unfunded, underfunded or side projects added to already demanding workloads.
Simpson explains the level of volunteer labor in her GraceNotes talk: “All three of us are volunteers. We have accomplished what we have so far by meeting every single week for over a year and a half for an hour in our free time,”
There is room to invest in those stewarding inclusion in their fields and there is a substantial need to invest in individual leaders who have entrepreneurial tendencies for solutions building.
Invest in Implicit Needs for Underrepresented Leaders
I reached out to Medina for an interview on this subject as I knew her reputation as the driving force behind major organizational shifts and internal innovation within an institution known for a deeply entrenched resistance to change: the CIA.
Medina’s analysis of change and development balances leadership needs that are both macro and micro in nature, she explains the importance for an individual to understand the system they operate in and invest in making those systems better but also recognizes the need for the organization to invest in the growth of individual employees.
As a change agent and leader of color, Medina recalls, “I wish I had had mentors. I wish that there had been people before me who had been Latina and female who could have said, ‘Watch for this. Don’t watch for that. Don’t do this, do that.’ So, I think the lack of a mentor was a real problem. I wish I had really understood better how people saw me or heard me.” But, as Medina goes on to explain, she was not completely lacking for mentors, “I did have mentors but they were white males, great people. I don’t think that they ever felt that they could have had a conversation with me to say, ‘Tone that down’ because for them, of course, it’s a hazardous conversation to have. I was completely sympathetic to where they were coming from.”
In this context, there was not an explicit need for mentorship but rather an implicit need for support from another woman of color within the ranks. For funders seeking to support diverse ecosystems, adaptive leaders from underrepresented backgrounds often have unique experiences, workplace vulnerabilities and needs that tie back to inequitable structures within organizations. To solve for that, we must name and address that the systems these leaders operate in, that are already inherently unbalanced and drive resources for corrective adjustments.
Emily May, Executive Director of Hollaback an organization dedicated to ending harassment, spoke to me about the experience designing solutions with journalists of color targeted for online harassment. “Women and people of color across the board were more severely impacted because it was worse and it came loaded with an entire lifetime of harassment and discrimination that this sat on top of it of these attacks.” May’s organization, nationally known for its bystander intervention programs, created a program to support newsrooms and media companies in addressing online harassment of journalists from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds experience at alarming rates. In this case there is an explicit urgency to address this implicit need, as harassment campaigns targeting journalists from vulnerable and underrepresented communities are actively creating unsafe work conditions and driving talent from the field. May shared that in surveying journalists in Hollaback’s trainings, “most people reported that they had no idea how bad online harassment was going to be and that it made them consider leaving journalism.”
It is difficult to surface to higher and higher levels of leadership when your mere presence, as a person from an underrepresented background, creates a hypervisibility. Medina speaks to her experience navigating those dynamics as a senior-level official within the CIA:
“Often times when you’re a minority in an organization, you come across as a rebel or a dissident even if that is never your intent. That was a big learning for me that, by definition, people would see me as disruptive of the status quo just by my heritage. I didn’t even have to speak up. Then when you do speak up, you will actually have a greater chance of seeing things differently from the prevailing norms. However distant you are from the prevailing norms, that’s how greater your likelihood is of being disruptive in what you say.”
For adaptive leaders from underrepresented backgrounds, visibility is a double-edged sword: there is both a power and a vulnerability to being seen. It is incumbent upon newsrooms and funders supporting news organizations to name these structural barriers and invest in systems that mitigate its negative impact so that diverse talent at all levels of newsrooms can thrive.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.
“Media in Indian Country are grappling with many of the same challenges around sustainability that face the rest of the journalism industry, but it is exacerbated by low levels of philanthropic support.”
This double-edged challenge is what led us to commission leading researchers and practitioners from around the country to write a series of reports featuring American Indian, African American, and Hispanic media in the United States.
We wanted to shine a light on the important role of media by and for diverse communities in the United States and learn more about the unique issues these various sectors of media are facing. And as funders who are invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion in media—both internally in newsroom staff and leadership, but also in the communities these outlets serve—we wanted to listen to media makers of color and identify opportunities to sustain ethnic media into the future.
We believe that every community member must have access to accurate, diverse, and representative sources of news to inform their everyday lives and enable them to fully participate in our democracy. Our hope is that other funders and advocates will join us in recognizing and supporting the important role ethnic media plays in fulfilling these needs.
Here is the full series:
American Indian Media Today. Through a series of interviews with Native media practitioners and experts, Jodi Rave of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance reports on the major trends and challenges for American Indian media today. The report also offers recommendations for funders and advocates who want to support the growth of independent news media in Indian Country.
African American Media Today. Angela Ford, Kevin McFall, and Bob Dabney of The Obsidian Collection provide a brief history of African-American and black legacy media, an overview of current trends and challenges, and offer recommendations for funders and advocates who want to support the growth and strength of Black publishers across the country.
Hispanic Media Today. Jessica Retis, Associate Professor of Journalism at California State University Northridge, provides a brief history of Hispanic media in the United States, an overview of current trends and challenges, and offers recommendations for funders and advocates who want to help support and sustain Hispanic media.
Democracy Fund has been working to build a robust infrastructure of support for these newsrooms through investments in organizations like the Center for Community and Ethnic Media, the Obsidian Collection, and our ongoing support of journalism associations serving journalists and media makers of color. In addition, our Ecosystem News strategy works with local communities around the US to support ethnic and community media locally, and our NewsMatch campaign helps build the long term capacity of newsrooms to build support from their communities. However, as these reports show, there is still a long way to go and much more work to do. In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about how we are building on the lessons from these reports and deepening our support for media makers of color across the country.
Today we’re releasing Hispanic Media Today: Serving Bilingual and Bicultural Audiences in the Digital Age, a new report that explores the origins of Hispanic* media in the United States, its growth in recent decades, the complex nature of Latino media and its diverse audiences. The report is an exploration into the challenges and opportunities to sustain Hispanic media in the future.
As with other media sectors, Hispanic media is facing significant financial hurdles due to the virtual disappearance of traditional advertising. Following rapid growth in the 1990s and 2000s, Hispanic daily newspapers have seen more than a 10 percent decline in circulation over the past five years, consistent with other media sectors. On top of financial shortfalls, traditional Hispanic media has also grappled with adapting to the digital transformation and meeting the demands of an increasingly digital audience.
A survey by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have found that 42 percent of Latinx journalists reported downsizing or cutbacks in staff hours at work, and more than 75 percent say they have been asked to do more with less resources. And 40 percent are concerned about job security.
In addition to financial challenges, Latino media also must take into account the complex diversity of the Hispanic population, which means that local audiences can differ from the shared history and culture of the Spanish-speaking outlet which serves that region. In spite of these struggles, Hispanic media has weathered the downturn better than many mainstream media because of its deep connection to community. And in the past decade, amidst a digital divide across language, age, and immigrant status, a number of bilingual and English-language digital media for younger Latinx audiences have emerged.
Spanish-language media in the U.S. has varied greatly in its more than 200 years of existence, and has served many roles. Publications have ranged from politically conservative to liberal, with varied readerships composed of exile, immigrant, or native Latinx communities. While disseminating local, regional, national and international news according to audience interests and needs, Hispanic media has also highlighted cultural and patriotic activities and served as a forum for public expression.
Hispanic media has also shaped and promoted social and political activism advocating for civil rights and defending Latinx communities against abuse from authorities. For example, Spanish-language radio programs in the early 1920s provided not only entertainment but also information and political advocacy. Spanish-language T.V. programming has also grown over the last 50 years, and provides information on issues of interest to Latinx communities, such as immigration, politics, health, education, and culture, as well as imported Latin American entertainment.
The story of Hispanic media in America is not a simple linear story and there are enormous opportunities to invest in this space and elevate the work of these journalists.
Philanthropic funders and investors should continue to provide critical operating resources to Spanish-language media and invest in helping them develop and design new revenue models. In addition to solidifying revenue, several recommendations to help grow Latino media became apparent during our research. For example, funders should also engage in initiatives to help the next generation of bilingual and bicultural journalism students when they enter the job market, as they make grants to keep Hispanic media afloat. An infusion of youth and fresh ideas into Hispanic media companies would help organizations become more sustainable.
Diversity of newsroom stories, staff, opinion, revenue and ownership is a crucial part of making sure the news reflects the communities it serves. We must do our part to uplift and better serve Hispanic media, to ensure that Americans have access to accurate, diverse sources of information that foster the full participation of every individual in our democracy.
It is our hope that the recommendations outlined in this report further support Hispanic media today, so that diverse, bicultural, bilingual stories can be told tomorrow.
*Hispanic and Latino are used interchangeably in this post by request of the author, as both pan-ethnic labels tend to be used throughout the United States.
Jessica Retis is an Associate Professor of Journalism at California State University Northridge, a current Democracy Fund grantee, and co-editor of the recently released book, The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture. To learn more about Jessica’s work, visit http://csun.academia.edu/JessicaRetis or follow @jretis.
“Diversity is essential to the success of the news industry, and journalists must include diverse voices in their coverage in order to reach a broader audience. We have stories to tell, but many in our audience have stopped listening because they can tell that we’re not talking about them.”
— Gwen Ifill
As part of research conducted for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts, technical practitioners and community groups, sat with journalists and listened.
Many opportunities for philanthropy to fund stronger, more resilient and diverse journalism ecosystems involves backtracking and investing in critical infrastructure to support those ecosystems and to formalize heretofore informal mechanisms that serve diverse audiences and communities. To date, this project has unpacked opportunities for media funders to support data infrastructure, adaptive leaders, reimagined newsroom spaces and how national issues are reported in local community narratives.
As Ifill’s quote explains and significant data pointing to the consistent struggle to develop and grow audience share in local communities where populations are steadily increasing, it can be argued that diverse audiences have “stopped listening” to mainstream news. But that does not mean diverse communities have stopped communicating messages, stories and narratives that deserve attention. For many communities that public square now lives online.
There is safety in small numbers and low levels of trust in technology platforms mean many meaningful conversations are unfolding in silo’ed corners of the Internet. It is up to journalists to meet diverse communities where they are and to invest in engagement not as a means for audience growth, but as mechanisms for listening to the voices gathered there and producing quality journalism that serves the public.
For the purposes of this research, listening infrastructure is defined as a collection of explicit processes, systems and tools intended to support a journalist’s capacity to monitor meaningful public conversations in online communities in order to increase human dimensions and depth in reporting.
The intention is essentially the definition and can be reverse-engineered through three questions:
1. How do journalists find meaningful conversations in online communities beyond their own?
2. How do journalists show up/conduct themselves in online communities beyond their own?
3. What do journalists use to continuously listen and learn from online communities beyond their own?
All of this can be boiled down to one question: How do you pay attention?
For local newsrooms the mechanisms to pay for resources that can systemize, improve and boost journalists ability to pay attention are cost-intensive, both in staff time and budget resources. The listening infrastructure that does exist is far from structured, effective or formalized and essentially boils down to social media monitoring subscriptions. As a result, individual reporters have their own individual systems and their own methods for discerning what gets their limited time, attention and energy. Often this boils down to attention being determined by push notifications, Nuzzel and curated Tweetdeck columns. In my research, I occasionally came across groups of journalists who covered similar beats, such as gun violence, and shared pooled resources as a means to both boost one another’s listening infrastructure and better cover a wide, disparate community with increasingly growing online community silos.
This is a challenge that exists in industry spaces beyond newsrooms. A substantial part of this research has involved scanning similar fields and communities also undergoing deep transitions and shifts to surface what lessons, patterns and practices in those spaces can be applied in the newsroom context. In the social change movement space, there is also a critical listening infrastructure gap. Social change movement organizations also tend to serve communities that largely exist online and struggle with continual misalignment between which communities they exist to serve and which communities their campaigns ultimately pay attention to.
In the ocean conservation space, those silos are even more prevalent and with extreme scarcity in funding, the barriers for collaboration among competitive organizations are even higher. In 2011 Rachel Weidinger founded Upwell, an effort to build a backbone for listening and measurement for the ocean conservation space that had previously not existed. The intention was to build listening infrastructure to be shared across organizations in order to better inform online campaigns, information sharing and collaborative community building. Upwell billed itself as the ‘PR agency for the ocean’ and broke ground developing innovative big listening practice: sifting through high volumes of news and online conversations for movements and pairing that big data with analysis and distributed network building.
Image via Upwell.us
What was the outcome for all these buzzwords?
Conversation metrics rather than individual campaign level metrics. In a newsroom context, the outcome of an infrastructure like Upwell would look similar to this MIT Media Lab report analyzing the collective impact in online conversation and attention resulting from press coverage of stories like the shooting death of Trayvon Martinevery single week. It also allowed for amplification and networking building on top of the analysis of online conversational metrics.
The existence of Upwell allowed online engagement within the ocean conservation space to shift from a micro to a macro level and for campaigners to strategically and authentically participate in online conversations already in progress. It created, through a set of tools and processes, capacity for paying attention at scale that was not previously possible.
In an interview with me for this research Weidinger, now a Future for Good Fellow at the Institute for the Future, explained Upwell’s approach that was grounded in both offline community engagement (meeting the ocean conservation digital managers where they are) and online community management (sourcing rich conversation metrics in unlikely places through listening to social conversations about the ocean).
Image of Rachel Weidinger – https://www.rachelweidinger.com/about
Collectively the practices that powered Upwell was in service to answering the question:
Can we use the momentum of focused attention to raise an issue above the noise?
Creating a Values-Based Listening Infrastructure
Weidinger explains the first step to building listening infrastructure is to recognize there will be many dimensions to a single issue and to embed intentional values into systems design.
“I think because whatever story we’re telling about an issue, if that’s voting rates or ocean acidification, it has a lot of facets. It has a lot of variability across communities. It has usually narrative about issues and are very deeply tied into cultural perspectives. So you will see different cultural perspectives reflecting different understandings of social ramifications of what impacts them in their community.”
There is a critical role for media funders to use their position as a collaborative convener to leverage insights pulled from big listening practices and support collectives of newsrooms or groups of journalists in building listening infrastructure aligned with the intention to support shared resource collaboration across newsrooms covering serve diverse communities.
“It is possible to have very targeted niche conversation, but because it’s a very laborious research method and because they’re going to turn up so much value in that research method, you might as well have a bigger lens. So, I think coalitions of collaboratives that will get an issue for multiple perspectives are able to take full advantage of what comes out of it. I think working with funders before because they can take the confirmation, learn from it, change their funding pattern potentially, and offer share that with their grantee networks and the larger networks they’re a part of. That’s when I think this information is valuable. You can create a weather report and you can have a weather report for an entire country and keep it to yourself if you want to. But that feels like a spectacularly inefficient approach to me because if there are really high value assets and if you’re only using it to reshape your own incoming patterns, you’re not getting anywhere near the value you could get out of that investment.”
Weidinger explained the three building blocks to Upwell’s listening infrastructure:
1. The System, monitoring and analyzing online conversations
“Designing a system that supported the ability to pay attention to the large conversation in a deeper way more than anyone else working in the field. That depended on building trust over time, following conversations, trending keywords and Radian6 type of practices that we developed for understanding the conversation at a large scale over time and being able to look at the historic conversation and also people within over time.”
“For big listening to go deep, you have to build the network for the very beginning. It involved face-to-face meetings with influencers and leaders and senior management and all of the big blue and green organizations with scientists and government officials. We are only able to do that because Upwell was initially fiscally sponsored under the umbrella of Ocean Conservancy before spinning out independently which is one of the two large ocean conservation and organization that at that time was 40 years old and had a great reputation with lots of people so we were able to leverage their network in addition to building a network on our own.”
3. The Tide Report newsletter, sharing knowledge with the sector
“Our goal with the newsletter was to recount. We wanted to have the hottest ocean news of the day so that if nothing else it could standalone with a — ‘This is your professional news roundup for today’ utility. This gave us the eyeopener that we wanted and it made it easier to get people on our list and it meant that people would trust their colleagues and their peers, other organizations and conversations we were amplifying.”
The second piece of the newsletter was to get as close to one click sharing as possible. This probably feels like less revolutionary today, but it felt like a crazy project that we started doing in 2012… because people are super busy and we knew that most of the network of influencers and social media managers we were working with were going to give that email, if we were lucky, 30 seconds. If they saw something cool that they think would benefit their personal brand or their organization’s brand, that felt like were vital and important to them then they are going to share it. All of this was in service to building trust by regularly illustrating our commitment to listening back to our community.”
After Upwell: Open Sourcing Infrastructure
Upwell concluded operations in March 2015. All of the intellectual property, reports, content, learnings were open-sourced and licensed Creative Commons. The project was unable to secure sustainable funding and winded down its programming the same way it began it all: through listening, sharing and amplifying for the movement it was created to serve. Weidinger said she sought to “leave as much of the learning infrastructure methods of the project available to the movement as possible.”
The tools and systems Upwell used is commonplace in digital newsrooms but formalizing the infrastructure: the intentionality, values-based metrics and sharing methodologies has led to Upwell continuing to deliver value long after it has shuttered. Ultimately the lesson in Upwell is a lesson in impermanence, that while we design for the long game, things that go up must come down and yet there is still immense knowledge to be gained in studying the heart that went into the scaffolding.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.
Today, as we close Black History Month, we’re releasing African American Media Today: Building the Future from the Past, a look at the origins of the Black press in the United States and its future, offering recommendations for better practices moving forward.
Black newspapers were essential in providing information to freed slaves and sharecroppers who sought better lives than those offered on plantations. The safe passage, potential opportunities, marriages and deaths of the new, evolving culture of a recently freed people were realized and reported on through Black legacy newspapers.The Black press has played a crucial role in the Fourth Estate since its inception in the early 19th century. In the early days, the Black press reported mainly on issues affecting the newly-formed African American community and identity. African American news organizations highlighted the challenges and triumphs of the Black community, while providing a more nuanced portrait of the lives of Black Americans when mainstream media would report predominately negative or otherwise bigoted stories of Black Americans.
Today, the Black press struggles to remain in operation. While the virtual disappearance of traditional advertising has challenged the news industry as a whole, it has been particularly damaging to the Black newspaper industry. Shrinking staffs have left many operations without tech savvy or the manpower to quickly pivot to new revenue building operations. And while some mainstream news institutions establish paywalls for their digital media platforms, many in the African American community understand that readers are unlikely to accept news through the paywall model.
We know that diversity within journalism—in stories, in staff, and media ownership—is a vital part of ensuring the news reflects the communities which it serves. Therefore, we must do our part in supporting independent Black media outlets to make sure the multitude of stories existing in the Black community continues to have a platform.
The National Newspapers Publishers Association (NNPA), a 70+-year-old trade association comprised of African American publishers, reports its current readership at 20.1 million per week. And its demographic is 99 percent African American. Furthermore, the Black digital audience has strong numbers among Millennials and Generation Z. Some legacy outlets and NNPA members are shifting business models to appeal to an online audience, while several young entrepreneurs have launched digital-only platforms. No matter the approach or solution, Black Americans agree – almost unanimously – we must maintain independent Black media outlets. Mainstream media does not always capture news and information that is actually relevant in as much as it does write about Black Americans. And even then, these outlets are often one-note in their depictions of the Black community.
In response to the challenges facing the Black press, the Obsidian Collection is developing four potential revenue models for Black Legacy Press and digital media platforms targeting African American audiences. As our organization grows, we are attracting new media members to this movement. We will embrace emergent technologies and innovative practices to ensure the independent lack voice remains an integral part of the American conversation and news landscape, and we hope you’ll join us.
Angela Ford is the Founder and Executive Director of The Obsidian Collection Archives, a Democracy Fund grantee. This report was written by Angela with her colleagues Kevin McFall and Bob Dabney. To learn more about their work, visit www.theobsidiancollection.org or follow @ObsidianCollec1.
Once a year, during American Indian Heritage Month in November, American citizens pause to recognize the Indigenous peoples of lands now known as the United States. But what happens to Native people during the other 11 months of the year? Answer: They’re often rendered invisible. That invisibility is complicated by a shrinking Native American news that faces a range of unique challenges today.
My new report, American Indian Media Today: Tribes Maintain Majority Media Ownership as Independent Journalists Seek Growth, gives an overview of the state of Native American media and the challenges we face in telling our own stories. The report is one in a series commissioned by the Democracy Fund to shine a spotlight on the important role of media by and for diverse communities in the United States.
In so much of mainstream media American Indians are invisible as contemporary people or romanticized as relics of a bygone era. The invisibility affects how policymakers make decisions about Native people whose lives are often struck by high rates of poverty, suicide, poor health care, and missing and murdered Indigenous women.
This has made Native media a critical source not only to inform and engage our communities but also to lift up our stories in the broader culture. Yet, for several reasons, we face a lack of news in our own backyards. Media in Indian Country are grappling with many of the same challenges around sustainability that face the rest of the journalism industry, but it is exacerbated by low levels of philanthropic support.
Tribal governments can also be obstacles to independent reporting in Indian Country. An estimated 72% of all print and radio outlets in Indian Country are owned and controlled by tribal governments or tribe-owned entities, and according to a preliminary survey from the Native American Journalists Association’s RED Press Initiative, 83% of tribal journalists face intimidation and harassment when covering tribal affairs. This means modern-day tribal citizens receive news that is mostly censored and controlled by tribal governments. Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and a free flow of information remain hampered without specific legal provisions rooted in tribal constitutions.
However, a small, but devoted cadre of independent media practitioners are working to create new alternatives and share their stories, free of Native government influence. I profile many of them in this new report and describe the important contributions they are making their communities. These local journalists deserve more attention and need more support. There is much to be learned from how they build and serve communities across often rural and expansive tribal lands.
Jodi’s organization, the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, is one of 155 newsrooms participating in the 2018 NewsMatch campaign. Right now every donation will be doubled by NewsMatch through the end of the year.
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