“Nothing About Us Without Us”
Lessons from my trip to attend the People-Powered Publishing Conference at Columbia College Chicago.
With help from the News Integrity Initiative and the Newmark School’s Foundation, I, along with other classmates, was able to attend the People-Powered Publishing Conference 2019 last week in Chicago. The annual conference is a place for innovators, revolutionaries, and misfits to gather and discuss the waves of change rippling throughout the field of journalism. Naturally, we were right at home.
“This conference aims to provide a space for journalists, civic-engagement practitioners and community storytellers to work together on a shared goal: strengthening the connections between news organizations and the people they cover, in order to create a more collaborative and equitable news and information landscape.”
The focus of this year was on changing newsroom culture, with sessions like “How to Talk About Race” and “#FakeNews Ain’t New: How Media Organizations Run by People of Color Are Leading the Charge on Building, Maintaining Audience Trust.”
Despite the thematic focus, I don’t work in a newsroom and was more interested in what sorts of new engagement strategies I could learn to apply in my own community work, rather than ruminate on how we might make a better newsroom itself. For much of the conference, I participated in the clinic track to expand on the ideas that have been driving my efforts to work with health workers fighting the opioid crisis in the South Bronx.
Mapping Strengths
One of my favorite sessions, “Getting Engaged: Building the Community into Reporting Projects” focused on ‘asset mapping,’ posing the questions: 1) what are you building on? and 2) who are you building with? Oftentimes in journalism, we focus on the problems that exist in communities, i.e., deficits. Michelle Ferrier of Florida A&M University and Fiona Morgan of Branchhead Consulting encouraged everyone in the room to focus on the assets of a community instead, such that we need to realign our attention to the things that are already good and functioning in a community in order to build on them. I attempted to map the assets on a spectrum of power that ranged from things inside the community that might be players in the work that I’m attempting to do, to the outside forces that create the structure of the opioid crisis as it currently exists.
Some other principles that we learned in the session:
- “Speak truth to empower.” — It might not be our job to take on the issues, pains, or bullies of a community ourselves, but it certainly is our duty to use our power of truth-telling and conveying information to empower people to take action themselves.
- “Listening is our superpower.” — Community engagement requires intense, empathetic, and sincere listening without judgment. If you can’t or refuse to hear what people our saying, your work isn’t going to be useful to them.
- “Nothing about us without us.” — You can’t write about, publish, create, distribute, or destroy without involving the people who are at the center of whatever that content or process might be.
Transforming Systems
Another great clinic track session was “Working with Your Community to Inform Systems Change,” hosted by Cole Goins and Kayla Christopherson of the Journalism + Design program at The New School. Through invoking the old Freudian model of the unconscious, we discussed journalism in the context of the “iceberg.” At the top is the summary; what happened? Journalists traditionally like to add context with discussion of the patterns and trends that contributed to what happened, as well as the systems responsible for those patterns and trends. But rarely does our journalism dive into the level of transformation, where we ask ‘why is the system structured this way?’
“Systems aren’t broken — they’re generating the results they were designed to produce.”
When we question our own mental models that produce systems and structures, we can then work collaboratively to dismantle and transform them. Goins and Christopherson encouraged us to find our ‘North Star,’ or the collective goal that we share with the community in the process of our work together. Ask: “how could this system become more healthy and equitable?”
Getting Introspective
Outside of the clinic track, my favorite session was “Is Your Journalism a Luxury or a Necessity?” hosted collectively by Mike Rispoli of Free Press, Eve Pearlman of Spaceship Media, and Harry Backlund of City Bureau. The presenters told us of a central problem: journalism that is sustainable may not actually be meeting people’s needs. Invoking Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” model, we sought out to think of the way any product of journalism (e.g., stories, events, services, apps, etc.) might integrate a needs-based approach into its creation and distribution.
Backlund writes in an essay on this topic:
“One of the first things we noticed in sketching the information pyramid is that our priorities seem wildly out of balance: a huge amount of journalistic resources go into the top of the pyramid to serve the abstract needs of a comfortable few, completely passing over the basic information needs of a great many.”
Traditionally, the pyramid has “self-actualization” at the top, which includes needs of creative pursuits among others, and physiological needs at the bottom. In a rejection of the pyramidal structure, Spaceship Media created an alternate model that shows the interacting nature of each level of ‘The Shape.’
While I’m not sure that the top level ought to be “universal empathy,” I think their approach to reconsidering the way that we think about meeting communities’ information needs outside of hierarchies is important. Other participants offered visual models to think of ‘The Shape’ as an octopus, with its many legs related to a central concept, or a flower, with its many petals growing off of each other.
At the center of all of these models, lessons, clinics, breakout sessions, and exercises is a fundamental recognition from organizations all across the United States: power is inequitably distributed across the landscape of news, and reform is needed to be able to bring power back to the people.
I’m thankful for the opportunity to have gone to learn more about how to redistribute that power, and I’m looking forward to exploring these ideas more both in New York and wherever this journey of engagement journalism may bring me.
