By Meredith Melland
Journalism is for the people, and barriers of access, reporter bias and loftiness should not exclude anyone from it.
In 2018, the Center for Media Engagement of the University of Texas at Austin released a survey of Chicagoans in collaboration with City Bureau that contained multiple revelations on how citizens view news coverage of their communities. It found that residents on the South and West sides were more likely to see coverage of their neighborhood as too negative or too often quoting the wrong people, less likely to have interacted with a reporter and more likely than North Side residents to volunteer to report on a public meeting (for more on public meeting reporting, see City Bureau’s Documenters program).
The survey answers show a clear disconnect between reporters and their subjects, often divided along the city’s segregation lines. To address this disconnect and reconcile ways for South and West side residents to see themselves reflected accurately in reporting, Chicago journalists need to seek out feedback and stay in conversation with these communities about what kind of news makes an impact in their lives.
As a journalist, I need to be intentional in making my coverage helpful, equitable and representative, so that my work is useful and relevant to people in all of Chicago. I see three steps reporters and editors can take to achieve this: we can engage communities to find their information needs, prioritize diverse sources and stories and make news as accessible as possible.
City Bureau co-founder Harry Backlund argues that the media in general needs a new structural way to rank news value in “Is Your Journalism a Luxury or a Necessity?” Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Backlund and colleagues sketched out an information pyramid where stories covering basic physiological needs stretch along the bottom and abstract ideals occupy the top triangle. They realized that journalistic institutions tended to pass over basic reporting on food and shelter and instead prioritized higher needs like ‘smarter living’ recommendations and legislation updates.
“These things matter, for sure, but they are abstract—something we engage with only when we have the time to think past our basic needs,” Backlund writes. “Yes, democracy dies in darkness. But so do people. Which are we prioritizing?”
This a bleak view, to be sure, but I think it’s valid to criticize journalists for only consistently meeting the information needs of communities that we assume can support journalism economically. We often create stories on things that will only directly impact the lives of the few and not the many. I’m not innocent here – my stories have often covered the top part of pyramid, or only one city community or have not reflected the racial and socioeconomic diversity of Chicagoans.
I recently performed an audit of my story sources – I looked over all of my reported stories in the last year and noted the gender, race, and role of each interviewee in a spreadsheet. Though I frequently think about the lack of diverse representation in newsrooms and stories, my sources skewed female and white. I never made a real plan to stop defaulting to easily accessible white sources and encourage diversity in my source selection, and change is hard to implement without one. Now, I have developed a plan to seek out sources of color at the start of my reporting to prioritize them from the start. This is an attempt both to produce equitable reporting in a city and nation that is systemically stacked against people of color and avoid boxing my work into my own little one-dimensional world.
It would easy to insulate myself within the subject areas on the North Side or DePaul; they are familiar to me and easy to get to. No matter what I’m reporting on or who my audience is, restricting my worldview to one part of the city would be a disservice because important stories happen all over and are captured most accurately in person.
Former DePaul CJIE student and current women’s health freelancer Ivana Rihter wrote in her blog that “the old timey saying ‘the news is what the editor sees on his way to work’ is not only dated but irresponsible.” This is especially true if most reporters and editors are coming from the same place and look the same. I look the same as a lot of journalists, but I can at least try to take the paths less travelled, gain community input and feature voices of people underrepresented in the media.
Once the news is in tune with the needs of citizens and reporters and editors are diversifying their sources, the next step to achieving meaningful reporting is to make news accessible. The roles of distribution, circulation and publishing are sometimes distanced from journalists because their responsibility is to the business, not the public. However, the model that journalism is produced in directly affects how many and which people receive it.
I think journalism has the most room for impact when it’s free and easy to find. Like Dan Sinker with his free impeachment newsletter, we will only be able to accomplish this if we think of new creative ways to fill an audience’s need that also produce some economic sustainability.
As journalism continues constantly vaulting forward, we need to think about which stories need to be told and how to tell them. I know I will be more fulfilled if people actually find value in my work, and I think that will happen if I provide information that they can access and use in everyday life. I don’t have all the answers, but I believe prioritizing the people is a start.