Moderator: Katy Naples-Mitchell (Harvard Kennedy School)

Speakers: Rahsaan "New York" Thomas (Independent Journalist, Ear Hustle podcast), Yawu Miller (former editor of The Bay State Banner),  Morgan Elise Johnson (The Triibe), Adrienne Johnson Martin (MLK50)

Summary: Panelists spoke about how editorial vision and community accountability function differently in independent media and, in particular, Black-led newsrooms and prison journalism. There is a different level of care and of humanity woven into the coverage, trying to paint the complexities of people’s lives; trying to tell stories about the crimes of the state; trying to expose broader social policy ills as the root causes of and needed context for harm in communities. Panelists spoke about the need for academics to partner with journalists, and the benefit of pairing data and research with lived experience to create more richness in a story and to foster policy debates in a way that will move policymakers. Panelists also spoke about audience and accountability, and how being accountable to readers and watchers and listeners requires more planning, more time, and more on-the-ground relationship-building. Panelists again problematized the need to come up with new funding streams, and lamented that mainstream outlets and media beyond the news infrastructure, including television and film, have so many resources to endlessly re-paint preexisting narratives about crime and violence but independent efforts require way less money to produce potentially better content and yet are still just scraping by.

 

Click here to download the transcript of Panel 5

Highlights from the panel:
 

  • “[T]here are certain cycles of storytelling that happen[], and when the warmer months come we know that a certain type of crime spikes. And so we started to call that in our newsroom ‘crime narrative season,’ where, just like all of the crime reporting was going to start and proliferate all these terrible stereotypes specifically about Black people.” – Morgan Elise Johnson
     
  • “Last year, we decided, let's be proactive about this. Why don't we just prepare a bunch of narratives to counteract and challenge crime narrative season which we know is going to start Memorial Day weekend. ... So we wanted to get ahead of crime narrative season by preparing a series of articles that can just spark productive conversations about crime and like, why these cycles of crime happen, and also to do some more solutions-oriented approaches, to let people know that, like, there are people in the community working towards this, and like you can do something to be proactive about making your community safer.” – Morgan Elise Johnson
     
  • “[I]f you don't see people as a human being, then you don't see why crime happens. You think people are evil, or you disregard the humanity of people, then we never identify root causes and never deal with them.” – Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
     
  • “[E]verybody's making stories about us, but not with us, and profiting off and winning awards. And we're not getting our cut, and the story's not being told as accurately as it could be.” – Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
     
  • “[B]ecause we interrogate power, because we investigate poverty as if it is a crime, we end up looking at systems, and systems are layered right? And they're connected. And so we really wanted to align our beats ... to reflect that, to show that housing is connected to health and … everything is sort of working together under that umbrella of poverty. ... it helps us work more collaboratively when our beats sort of overlap and makes us a more powerful force in the community as reporters...” – Adrienne Johnson Martin
     
  • “[T]he first time I got pulled over I was 10, I was riding through Brookline, which is a wealthy suburb of Boston, and a cop pulled over to the curb and said, you know, “Wait. I'm going to see if any bikes were stolen.” ... [I]t kept happening to me as I got older. I understood that police, the policing that you read about in the newspapers wasn't the experience, the lived experience of people in the community. And you know, [] as a Black newspaper, our job is to write from the perspective of the community, so the other papers left -- the daily papers, all the other news publications -- left a big hole [] that we could occupy, where we reported on criminal justice policy. We reported on police practices. And that was primarily [] our coverage of crime. ... [W]e got to be known more for reporting on police abuse and overreach.” – Yawu Miller
     
  • “I have to make sure that people on the block saw it, which is much more difficult. So we have to take the steps to go out into the community and do much more engagement work around the series, because it's more in-depth. And it's not ... the certain media diet that people are used to.” – Morgan Elise Johnson
     
  • “[I]t's really hard to reach people in print. And so we need the resources to reach people in other mediums. Like film. But even with print. We need the resources to market and promote. ... how do we get those resources? ... We need to figure out ways to generate revenue. So we can be self-sufficient, because that business model’s in place and it benefits who it benefits, and I don't think they're gonna let it go or share resources just to empower somebody else.” – Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
     
  • “If you're working in a model that's not extractive, and that these stories belong to all of us, then you can pull in all different kinds of people to help tell these stories, and also they'll understand the value of them.” – Adrienne Johnson Martin
     
  • “[W]e're named as one of the most powerful organizations in Chicago ... And it's simply because we just do truth telling ... Be prepared. We know what mainstream media is going to do. Have stories ready to counter them, make them evergreen, promote the same stories over and over again until they reach your audience. They don't have to be reactive. You know, they can just be stories with a long shelf life. And that's how we work and survive.” – Morgan Elise Johnson
     
  • “These police officers were… the youngest was 24, and the oldest was like 32. So two of them had been on the force 2 years, I think the longest had been like 7 years, so it didn't take very long for them to be the kind of people that would beat literally their peer to death in the street. Right? People understood that right away and understood that that means something is wrong … That's not individuals. That's a thing that's happening. That's a culture. Not to mention, this police force is led by a Black woman. So you know all of that was exposed. And I think that helped with people, with the work that we do, and helping people understand it and think through it, and see, and led to eventually the ordinance against pretextual stops.” – Adrienne Johnson Martin
     
  • “I come from film and documentary. So my approach to community comes from that. We think about audience, really, as we're thinking of crafting stories and films like, who is this film for? So I take that approach to the TRiiBE. I think about. You know, every story that we do is not for the same audience. We think about audience for every single story, and then that shapes how we ask our questions and our impact strategy, because we also have impact strategies for the articles that we put out as well. So during seasons like election seasons, our impact strategy may look like: first of all, we lead with explainers. We want people to understand the language that is going to come with the more in-depth investigative stories. So we start with language, graphic cards that go out on social media, of like, here's what this means. Here's what this means. Here's what this type of institution does. So we start with that. Then we tell the stories, we do the reporting, and then we go out into the community to bring the story to people. And I think that's what makes the difference.” – Morgan Elise Johnson
     
  • “I mean, if you don't see me as human, like where can we go from there? Right We can't go nowhere if you don't at least see me as human, as equal, as -- as worthy of anything. And so I'm hoping to get past that issue and move on to the next thing right. But we still stuck after all this time, and this is something [that's] been going on since the sixties. I didn’t invent this stuff, you know. This is crazy. So yeah, I don't have an answer for that, except that I keep using it and keep letting reporters know that this is the way we're supposed to do it. Not out of sympathy. Just being neutral. You know what I mean? Like as a journalist, you're not supposed to parrot the words of the state. And the COs need to see us as inmates, in order to have a conscience, in order to lock us in ourselves, and or be ready to shoot us or pepper spray us. They can't see us as human beings. They needed that language.” – Rahsaan “New York” Thomas