Dear readers, 

Welcome to our last StoryLetter of the year! We hope each of you can take some time to rest, recuperate, and celebrate with your communities in the last days of 2020. 

The Racial Equity in Journalism Fund is here to ensure that communities of color have access to the critical information and stories they need to fully engage civically. This work is possible because of the brilliance of on-the-ground news organizations run by people of color, and the dedication of our core funders. Now, REJ Fund friend and supporter journalist Jason Del Ray has set up a new way for individuals to support the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. As the year comes to a draw, please consider sharing this link with anyone you think may be interested in supporting journalism by and for communities of color. Learn more here.

Finally, dive into this month’s StoryLetter below, with Angilee Shah’s deep dive into buzzwords to serve diverse audiences, and our roundup of grantee spotlights. Please keep in touch and let us know what’s new by following #RacialEquityJournalism.

Happy holidays, 

Tracie Powell & Angilee Shah

We have to get beyond buzzwords, but here’s a short glossary of terms to serve diverse audiences. 

By Angilee Shah, independent journalist and media entrepreneur. Research Ariam Alula, independent media strategist

By many accounts, it was the long organizing of people of color — decades of work building a new generation of voters and galvanizing those who have been disenfranchised or disillusioned from the political process — that brought us to this turning point in U.S. political history. And news media led by marginalized people have been part of that movement.

The conditions in which these media workers inform the public, though, have long been adverse, and unequal. When the government started regulating broadcasters in the 1920s, they gave a license to a mouthpiece of the Ku Klux Klan. It took 20 years for a single Black radio station owner to obtain a license. Today, people of color own less than 1% of the value of television and radio outlets. From the removal of second-class mailing privileges for the Black press in the 1910s and 20s to the lack of capitalization of diverse media today, there has been a resource redlining that concentrates power in the hands of white men.

And yet, through these decades, marginalized people have continued to build incredible organizations of immense value to the U.S. media landscape. People of color published more than 100 newspapers before the Civil War, and vibrant media companies endure and flourish today. These publishers practices of collaboration, and finding ways to empower the communities they serve has impacted society in critical ways for a long time. (Read this and this for more essential history.)

Now, we are building a new vocabulary for the kinds of journalism that serves diverse communities. These forms of work are being named more concretely, but they are not new. I’d like to challenge foundations and investors to give and give significantly to publishers of color. If you don’t know who to give to, do it through REJ.

Here are eight terms to get familiar with — and challenge — as you navigate the media investment space:

collaborative journalism
Work done across organizations to better inform communities. Andrew DeVigal of Agora describes collaboration as “amplifying the work instead of owning it.”

examples

• In the early 20th Century, the Black press partnered with Black pullman porters, who served on the luxury sleeper cars of America’s railways. Alissa Richardson writes, “They achieved modern notions of information crowdsourcing and collaborative news editing, which helped shape and convey political thought in the Black press after World War I.”
• The Potluck Podcast Collective formed in 2016 to empower audio storytelling by and for Asian American communities.
• Word in Black is a news collaborative of 10 Black publishers with a mission: “Word in Black frames the narrative and fosters solutions for racial inequities in America.”
• In October, Sahan Journal announced its collaboration with the Immigration History Research Center for “Immigrants in COVID America.”
• See also The rise of collaborative journalism, Strategies for building equity in collaborations and Collaboration in California’s diverse journalism ecosystem

engaged journalism
Doing journalism with communities and not just for them.

examples

• The News Voices team at Free Press circulated a phone tree guide to understand the information needs of communities at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
• In this service piece published in El Tecolote, students studying Latino Politics at San Francisco State University dived into 25 ballot propositions to inform and empower Latino voters this election season.
• See also participatory journalism.

impact
Change in the status quo as a result of direct intervention, be it a text article, a documentary film, or a live event. —Center for Investigative Reporting

examples

• MLK50: Justice Through Journalism led “Profiting from the Poor,” a year-long investigation into one of the largest hospital scandals out of Memphis. The nonprofit hospital said they erased the debt of over 6,000 patients, about $11.9 million.
• City Bureau asks, “If journalism is a public good, who is it accountable to?” in Metrics to Match Our Mission. Together with Bettina Chang’s TED Talk, the organization challenges how we define impact and gives examples for change.
• See also: The Impact Pack

innovation journalism
Building or improving on a system, product, process, and methods to meet the needs and wants of consumers.

examples

• Kyung Lah tweeted from Phoenix about the ways election officials tried to fight disinformation by putting up sandwich board QR codes so that protesters could see the live stream of ballot counting.
• Documented’s boletín en audio are short recordings of community members who share their stories of the pandemic: “What have I done to get through this? I have held on to God, and asked him to give me strength to keep going. Because there is no other option,” said one participant. The organization continues to find new forms of storytelling to resonate with immigrant communities.
• See also Frontline Solutions’ October report “Equity First: Transforming Journalism and Journalism Philanthropy in a New Civic Age” which says, “It is critical to reframe how we think about innovation so that the definition is grounded less in what funders think is intriguing and more in what consumers find helpful and uniquely informative.”

local journalism
Think of the three big C’s—community, connection, and change—which are core to local journalism. —Free Press

examples

• “Omaha’s Forgotten Panthers” is a local history story often left out of the national news cycle. Published by NOISE, it tells the story of Black Panthers Ed Poindexter and W.M.E. We Langa and their contributions to the struggle for Black liberation in Nebraska during the civil rights era.
• The Local That Works contest honors creative local journalism in public media. This year, voters selected Sahan Journal for their reporting on Minnesota. The publication was the only entry not part of a public radio station.

movement journalism
Thriving on the collaboration between journalists and grassroots organizations, movement journalism is journalism in service of liberation. —Press On

examples

• A worker with Workers’ Dignity/Obrera Dignidad in Nashville, Tennessee, told Project South in 2017 that the media misrepresented their movement: “They don’t want it to be about how workers in seven hotels came together and demanded and won better pay. The problem is the focus.” Later that year, Workers’ Dignity built its own radio station 104.1 FM WDYO.
• Lewis Raven Wallace keeps a Twitter list of “movement journalists.”
• Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Executive Director of the Highlander Research & Education Center, described movement journalism as the kind that doesn’t just tell people the line is long but tells people to bring water and snacks. Making Contact combines movement and solutions journalism in its broadcasts, such as this episode about fighting voter suppression.
• See also: Is Movement Journalism What’s Needed During this Reckoning over Race and Inequality?, Out of Struggle: Strengthening and Expanding Movement Journalism in the U.S. South, On Being Black, Southern And Rural In The Time Of COVID-19

participatory journalism
The practice of inviting communities into the reporting process that generates understanding, connection, and trust. —jesikah maria ross 

examples

• City Bureau’s Documenters trains and pays community members to track local governance and publish information about meetings and hearings for Chicago.
• See also the SRCCON Participatory Journalism Playbook,  engaged journalism

solutions journalism
Reporting on ideas and practices to address social problems, amplifying initiatives of people building a better world.

examples

• In YES! Magazine, Nicole Lewis interviewed experts in law, psychology, and community organizing about what a society without police could achieve for the wellbeing of its citizens. Among the proposals reported: track national data for deaths caused by a police officer, build resources to reduce harm to marginalized groups, and refunnel money into communities.
• Making Contact combines movement and solutions journalism in its broadcasts, such as this episode about how grassroots organizations fight voter suppression in the South.
• Ida B. Wells’ seminal 1982 work, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” includes a section called “Self-Help.” It’s almost 2,000 words of the ways “Afro-American” people across the South could halt the violence, including this gem: “The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.”

Kudos

Uplift the REJ Fund grantees! Tweet about their successes with the hashtag #RacialEquityJournalism.

• Documented designs its community engagement activities through a system of planning and following up with readers, says Engagement Editor Nicolás Rios on Medium. “Our journalism is guided by our community, but not created by them.” Other newsrooms will benefit from a similar approach.
• One year later, the award-winning investigation “Profiting from the Poor” is still making an impact. MLK50‘s and ProPublica obtained new information about Methodist Le Bonheur Hospital, a nonprofit hospital, that shows it had only given discounts to 1 percent of its former patients during its debt collections process. In 2021, Wendi C. Thomas will be one of six in ProPublica’s inaugural Distinguished Fellows Program.
• Last month, Columbia Journalism Review cited Sahan Journal among local newsrooms that used careful reporting to combat Trump’s claims of voter fraud. Twin Cities Business named founder and editor Mukhtar Ibrahim one of 100 people who will shape 2021.
• La Noticia, MLK50, Documented, Flint Beat and The Washington Informer are among partner newsrooms selected to host Report for America journalism fellows in 2021-22. 

Best,
Tracie and Angilee

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