The NY Amsterdam News and The Objective are the first two featured publications on Infinite Patterns, a Kaleidoscope podcast brought to you by ZEAL, a worker-owned creative arts studio alliance, and the Racial Equity in Journalism (REJ) Fund at Borealis Philanthropy.
Constant cycles of interruption, degradation, and gentrification have, in many cases, eroded common narratives about communities of color, impacting the way native residents see their city and themselves. The story that one must leave to “be something” is a footnote to every dream. Many of us found our way to journalism through the understanding that stories like that are often some cocktail of experience and intentional erasure, through the understanding that the media we consume is often designed to curtail hope and hinder compassion, through a desire to repair and heal.
On our inaugural episode of Infinite Patterns, a Kaleidoscope podcast, we invited two journalism practitioners uniquely positioned to discuss reparative journalism as a cornerstone of social justice. Damaso Reyes is the Executive and Investigative Editor of the New York Amsterdam News, the oldest continuously running Black publication in the United States. Gabe Schneider is the Lead Editor and Co-Founder of The Objective, a nonprofit newsroom countering homogenous narratives and holding journalism accountable.
We invited Reyes and Schneider to explore a question central to our mission: So, what is reparative journalism? “Reparative journalism is about how the past influences the present…examining and interrogating the institutional problems that create an environment that allows for violence to happen in our communities,” says Damaso Reyes. Reparative journalism isn’t just about the content newsrooms create, but also about the staffing decisions they make. “A lot of the harms [of segregation inside the newsroom] have not been repaired at all,” Schneider adds.
The NY Amsterdam News’ series Beyond the Barrel took a hard introspective look at how the publication was covering gun violence, a phenomenon that has been allowed to largely define a generation and certain demographics. “When I saw my community represented in my local newspapers [growing up in Brooklyn], I almost exclusively saw it within the context of violence, so that motivated me to say hey, there is a bigger world that I live in that isn’t being shown.” Reyes helms one of the few legacy newsrooms that is reflective through a reparative lens. “Our history [in the Black press] is about repairing the damage of institutional racism in America and holding America accountable to its dreams and its anthology…[so] instead of being stenographers of sorrow, we have to dig deep and challenge the narrative[s] that have developed.’
The reduction of harm to statistics has cost communities decades, often generations, of stunted healing. Schneider and Reyes both emphasized the responsibility of journalism educators to train and retrain practitioners on following up with the impacted communities they cover. Schneider asserted that “there are so many frameworks for journalism, like movement journalism or solidarity journalism, [and] looking to frameworks like that is going to give us a better future of journalism and a better understanding of what’s actually happening.”
The Objective, steered by Schneider who also got into journalism because he was “pretty upset” with the status quo, is pushing mainstream newsrooms to do better through poignant media critiques and solutions. They also highlight what is working in what can feel like a pretty dismal era in the field. Schneider noted that the willingness of newer newsrooms to engage communities, ask what’s needed, and then experiment is key to their ability to generate buy-in and actually operate for the good of the public. Reparative journalism is a journalism that “connect [s] communities to the resources that their government is failing to.”
The NY Amsterdam News and The Objective are the first two featured publications on Infinite Patterns, a Kaleidoscope podcast brought to you by ZEAL, a worker-owned creative arts studio alliance, and the Racial Equity in Journalism (REJ) Fund at Borealis Philanthropy.
Check out episode 1 below and subscribe now on your favorite podcaster!
Episode 2 of Infinite Patterns will air on September 18, 2024 on YouTube! You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify and Apple Music.