I use a lot of technology and end up having a lot of unused or broken electronics and I have to figure out what to do with them.  The 44th Ward is having a electronics recycling pickup day on September 11, 2010.  This is what the alderman had to say about it in an e-mail blast:

On Saturday, September 11, our office, in conjunction with PC Rebuilders and Recyclers, will be conducting an electronic recycling pickup day. Anytime before 8am, residents can place electronic equipment in front of their homes to be picked up and taken to a recycling facility. Items to be collected include computers and computer equipment, TVs, DVD Players, VCRs, MP3 players, video equipment, and mobile phones. Additionally, residents can drop off electronic recyclables on this date between the hours of 8am and noon at the 44th Ward Streets and Sanitation office (1501 W. School St.).

I go to school at Northwestern University who also has an e-waste recycling program for students.  The city also has a drop-off facility at 1150 N. North Branch Street.  But, if you have functioning computers, I think the best place to donate them would be FreeGeek Chicago, a “not-for-profit community organization that recycles used computers and parts to provide functional computers, education, internet access and job skills training to those who want them.”

While it’s probably better to recycle computers than to send them to the landfill, I just saw a photo essay in the New York Times Magazine that showed the reality of what happens to e-waste at one site in Ghana.

Additional information

• More information about the 44th Ward Electronics Collection Day
• iCal file for the event

Photo by Mosman Council via Flickr using a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Me this week

Last week, I talked with Rhonda Jones-Gillespie, news editor at the Chicago Defender and I feel like I need to follow up with her.  It wasn’t until after our conversation that I realized why there seemed to be a disconnect around some of my questions.  While the Defender does report about African-American communities in Chicago, a big part of what they do, and what I didn’t really get, is ground city and national news stories in the African American experience in Chicago.  While I’ve been most interested in looking at how a story local to one community might connect with a broader audience, I’ve overlooked the opposite, but equally important, trajectory.  It’s one that journalists have been doing for a long time (though perhaps less so as news organizations become more resource bound) – taking a story and picking out the most important aspects for a local audience or looking at a broader policy’s impact on a particular community.

This week, I  was finally able to sit down with Icoi Johnson and Samuel Vega, the recipients of WBEZ’s Prizker Fellowship, which I had written about previously.  I found the fellows’ backgrounds and  outlooks to be pretty different, which was interesting and probably a good thing for WBEZ.  Vega, who is from Humboldt Park and seemed pretty involved in the community offered some interesting insight into WBEZ’s bureau in the neighborhood.  Vega said he  had noticed the storefront bureau, but had never been inside it until he toured it as part of his training for the fellowship.  He said it often appeared closed and that he was more familiar with the reporter who runs the bureau because of his coverage of events in Humboldt Park.  Vega’s anecdote indicates that connecting with different news  communities may be a little more complicated than simply setting up shop.

Coffee shop newsrooms – a cool idea but you have to pick the right shop

Setting up "bureaus" in coffee shops could help reporters connect with communities. But they have to pick the right one. GOOGLE STREET VIEW

Perhaps a better approach might be the coffee shop newsroom experiments that Poynter wrote about extensively at the beginning of this month.  Placing a reporter in an already trafficked space like a coffee shop may make reporters more accessible to the general public than a space exclusive to the news organization.  Some of the benefits of putting reporters or “newsrooms” in coffee shops seem pretty cool: more transparency/accountability, more audience understanding of the reporting process, developing new sources, getting new framings for stories or new dimensions for stories of which the reporter is already aware and recruiting citizen journalists.

This week I had my own experience with reporting and coffee shops.  I often work in coffee shops because I find them more convenient, and often less distracting than heading down to the Medill Newsroom.  While I use them primarily for convenience, they can still be a good way to connect with sources.  However, you have to go to the right coffee shop.  In reporting a story about LGBTQA youth of color in Boystown and a parking policy proposed by some residents designed to deter the youth, I did a lot of writing in Lakeview coffee shops.  I usually went to one close to my house a little east of Boystown or one close to Boystown but seemingly catering to a more particular customer demographic.  I liked the coffee shops I chose because they were locally owned and independent, there was interesting art on the wall and employees sometimes seemed like they were hanging out with friends or family as much as they were serving customers, creating a casual, comfortable atmosphere.

But, because they were somewhat more expensive and closed around 10 p.m., they didn’t really attract customers who were young people of color coming to hang out in the neighborhood.  The night I spent writing at the Starbucks at the corner of Belmont Avenue and Clark Street, a wide range of customers came in, including folks who could have been sources for my story.  While I could have gone out on the streets searching for people who could tell me their experience of coming to the neighborhood, a common thread in what youth I had interviewed told me is that they often feel profiled by police and neighborhood residents.  Both residents and youth described sidewalk confrontations that escalated and didn’t lead to a productive dialog.  As a reporter, I didn’t want to contribute to these dynamics. Spaces like coffee shops are important for reporting across dynamics like the ones in Boystown because they’re more neutral.  People from a variety of backgrounds can be on equal footing in the coffee shop as patrons and engaged in the same activities, like working on a laptop.  Had I spent the entire quarter working at that Starbucks, I might have been able to meet some sources with a good insight into the dynamic in a way that developed out of a more organic conversation, over music or helping someone reach a power outlet) rather than cornering people on the street.  Also, the public nature of the coffee shop could have attracted other people into the conversation, adding multiple perspectives to the reporting and perhaps even bridging the resident/visitor divide.

My experience with diversity and neighborhood coffee shops may be more universal.  Kim Feller, author of “Wrestling With Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino“, wrote about diversity and coffee shop clientèle on the Colorlines website:

While there are still funky independents eking out a living on the retail margins, most coffeehouses and designer roasters are niche markets, like purveyors of artisan cheeses, hand-painted T-shirts and limited-edition sneakers. They appeal to those on the trendy, cutting edge and survive by exclusivity—by pleasing a small, loyal and financially privileged. Starbucks, on the other hand, has been able to risk expansion from urban business cores and upscale suburbs into more modest settings, where it often provides the only meeting place that is neither a noisy fast-food restaurant nor a bar and that is often surprisingly multiracial.

Mosques and SEO

In terms of stories that sit across a cultural divide, nothing’s been bigger, or representative of journalism’s struggles to bridge those gaps, than reporting about the controversy over plans for a Muslim community center near the site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.  One idea that’s likely inflamed the debate is the use of the phrase “ground zero mosque” in the media, which suggests, incorrectly, that the community center is being constructed at the site of the former towers.  Mark Coddington at Nieman Labs has a good rundown of what a number of media critics have been saying about the use of this term.  While some blame cable news, others point to SEO.  As a term gains traction with the public, online news websites have to choose between using an incorrect term or making their content more difficult to find.  Coddington wrote:

Poynter ethicist Kelly McBride zeroed in on that idea of search-engine optimization, noting that the AP is being punished for their stand against the term “ground zero mosque” by not appearing very highly on the all-important news searches for that phrase. In order to stay relevant to search engines, news organizations have to continue using an inaccurate term once it’s taken hold, she concluded. In response, McBride suggested pre-emptively using factchecking resources to nip misconceptions in the bud. “Now that Google makes it impossible to move beyond our distortions — even when we know better — we should be prepared,” she said.

Coddington also pointed out that Online Journalism Review’s Brian McDermott pinpointed our news consumption patterns as the culprit for the proliferation of incorrect terms for things.  As we move more quickly from media to media, terms like “ground zero mosque” have more sticking power than Park51 or the Cordoba Center.

The tough choice of deciding between content discovery and accuracy is the same one I wrote about regarding the phrase “sissy bounce” and New Orleans artists’ distaste for the term.  In a pretty interesting, but unrelated thread, Anthony Neal, a scholar who studies Black popular culture, posted some tracks from New Orleans in the 1960s that refer to a dance called “The Sophisticated Cissy.”  Still, even if the term “sissy” may have some interesting connections to New Orleans musical history, it’s important to remember that contemporary artists don’t use the term to identify their work.

In the first of a two-part report about Chicago Public Radio’s Pritzker Fellowship, President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia describes the limitations of niche broadcasting, the journalism challenges that motivated the fellowships and his hopes for how the fellows will change WBEZ’s newsroom. In the second part, I plan to explore the perspectives of nominating community organizations and the fellows on reporting across boundaries.

Pritzker Fellows Icoi Johnson (left) and Samuel Vega (right) with Chicago Public Radio President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia. DONTE DEMONE TATUM

Reporting public affairs stories across a city as large and diverse as Chicago is no easy task, but new initiatives at Chicago Public Radio aim to meet this challenge.

President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia said the station has established neighborhood bureaus and is providing journalism training to citizen journalists to both expand the station’s news coverage and audience and change the way its journalists report.

As a broadcaster, the station has always been tasked with serving its coverage area, Malatia said, but given the size and broad interests of this population, the station has chosen to target listeners who are active in their communities, grounded in the region and seeking information about what is happening around them. Even with this focus, the station’s potential audience spans a wide spatial and social geography, though its measured audience doesn’t necessarily reflect this.

“If you look at the makeup of our audience, it leans just dramatically towards white,” around 83 percent, Malatia said, “which the city does not reflect.”

While the information needs for other groups in the city could be served by media targeting ethnic or geographic audiences, Malatia said super-serving such niche audiences has drawbacks. “They tend to reinforce the particular views of the audience that they’re attracting,” Malatia said of specialized media coverage or politics and public affairs issues. While specialized media often provides complex, nuanced coverage of issues within a community, he said, coverage of issues crossing communities, or placing them in conflict, becomes over-simplified.

“People then perceive issues as confrontational, us versus them or difficulties that can’t be bridged,

Malatia said. “You have to somehow find a way to be a broadcaster that is offering a much more inclusive discourse.”

While the station has recognized this need and seeks diversity in its board of directors, management, staff and story selection, inclusive reporting hasn’t always been successful. Trying to understand its audience, the station hired a research firm to talk to people who fit the station’s profile of grounded and community-engaged, but didn’t listen. A frequent response, Malatia said, was that non-listeners found the station’s coverage to be problematic.

“They hit the heart of it right away by just saying we really didn’t know what we were talking about,” Malatia said, explaining that some non-listeners said even award-winning reporting only scratched the surface or didn’t reflect a community’s understanding of an issue.

“There’s nothing worse you can hear from an audience member than you’re just hitting kind of like the Cliff Notes of a story,” Malatia said, “You don’t want that.”

Malatia said this problem stems from a combination of human nature and the parameters of reporting.

“We’re coming from the assumption that, as human beings, we tend to know what is familiar,” Malatia said. “As professionals who are in journalism – which has a kind of rhythm and a kind of process to writing and delivering stories, deadlines, things like that – we tend to also lean towards those techniques that have yielded success in the past.”

As an example of this tendency, Malatia explained that a reporter covering a new story on a topic that the station has covered extensively in the past, such as public housing, may be inclined to contact the same official and expert sources that have been used for past stories.

“If you actually are thinking about it, there’s probably a hundred different ways to cover that story that you’re not going to think about when you’re under pressure to get something done,” Malatia said.

One strategy to break out of reporting patterns is storefront neighborhood bureaus in Englewood, Humboldt Park, West Ridge and Northwest Indiana. Malatia said by starting and ending their days at the neighborhood bureaus, reporters can more easily build relationships with the communities they’re covering.

Just as the station has moved to create a more accessible presence for its reporters in Chicago’s neighborhoods, it is also trying to bring community members into its newsroom. Starting at the beginning of July, Icoi Johnson and Samuel Vega began an intensive mentorship with an experienced reporter. Johnson and Vega are the first recipients of the Pritzker Fellowship, which is offered to those interested in reporting but who have no formal journalism training or experience. The recipients of the fellowship were selected from a pool of people nominated by Chicago-area nonprofit organizations. “Everybody was very excited about the pool of candidates,” Malatia said. Chicago Public Media plans to begin accepting nominations for the next group of fellows in March 2011.

Working toward producing a long-form, in-depth report, the Pritzker Fellows report stories and work with editors in a similar manner to interns from journalism schools, but at a faster pace, Malatia said. While one goal of the fellowship is to offer journalism training to future reporters, he said, he also hopes the fellows will change practices in the newsroom.

“We’ll not only be building journalists who have a very different perspective of how to handle a story, approach a story and what is worthy to be a story. We will also learn from them and expand our horizons about that too,” Malatia said. Journalists from diverse backgrounds, Malatia said, may know of key sources in their communities that a reporter from outside the community would overlook.

Malatia acknowledges that these efforts are an experiment. “We don’t know if it’s going to make a difference, but we just felt we needed to try,” he said. The station will evaluate the impact of the fellowship program by looking for audience demographic changes and polling non-listeners to see if their perceptions of the station have changed.

But evaluating the impact of journalism on communities is difficult, Malatia said. “Can you prove that journalism, even well-done, really makes a more informed citizenry that’s making better decisions? Only history can tell you whether the decisions are good or not. But I believe that and I think a lot of people do.”

Related links:

• Chicago Public Media’s press release about the Pritzker Fellows
• Information about applying for the fellowships

I’ve always wanted to know how to project “stencils” on walls or sidewalks, as a lot of clubs or businesses have started to do.  After a lot of knowledge from the Chicago New Media list, I found out that these projectors are called gobo projectors.  I also found out that IKEA sold an inexpensive version of such a projector called Isbrytare.  Jim Dennewill has a good rundown of the projector.

My impression is that IKEA no longer makes this product.  I’m wondering if there are any other ~$40 projectors that are currently in production.

Photo by Jim via Flickr.

The last two weeks haven’t been very productive for my independent study as I’ve had stories or projects due for other classes.  Though I was too late to shadow youth reporters covering teen depression as part of a Community TV Network summer program, I was able to watch the youth film their introduction sequences, get a sense of the group dynamic and talk to some of the youth who produced this summer’s report.

This week, I plan to follow up with the community organizations who nominated people for WBEZ’s Pritzker Fellowship and finish synthesizing and writing stories based on the reporting that I’ve already done.  I still need to connect with news organizations focused on African-American communities such as WVON, the Defender and/or some south-side bloggers writing about community news.

On the topic of African-American news coverage, I took a look at a Pew Research Center report titled Media, Race and Obama’s First Year, which analyzed media coverage of African Americans during the past year.

This graph shows the way African Americans were covered in the media, “as a group, African Americans attracted relatively little attention in the U.S. mainstream news media during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency — and what coverage there was tended to focus more on specific episodes than on examining how broader issues and trends affected the lives of blacks generally.”

According to the study, African-American angles to broad national stories were covered as part of reporting on health care reform and the economy, though these topics made up less than 10 percent of coverage focused on African Americans.

The Pew Research Center also did analysis on coverage of Gates’ arrest in the African-American press.  According to Pew’s analysis:

the discussion and columns offered here took a starkly different angle than the commentary in the mainstream press. While the mainstream media largely assessed political implications for President Obama, the commentary in the black press considered the broader question of race relations in the U.S.  It was also evident that these papers saw themselves as a voice of the black community.  Even within the opinion columns, there was a clear sense of providing an African American perspective to the story. The tone, however, in many cases, came across as less “us” versus “them” and more of an assessment of steps needed from all sides.

This report gives me some background context for asking about coverage of Chicago stories, such as the slaying of Derrion Albert and how it was covered in different media.  I would love to see similar media analysis just for Chicago, but I think that’s beyond the scope of what I’m able to do.

On Tavis Smiley’s radio show this week, Smiley and CBS correspondent Byron Pitts discuss the need for more diverse news coverage.  Pitts said he was optimistic that the changing demographics of the U.S. would compel news organizations to have more diverse coverage and reporters that reflect the country’s diversity.  When I talked to a team of Tribune reporters, they offered a very nuanced account of race in the newsroom that I’m excited to write up.  The Tribune reporters said that race sometimes mediated their reporting but that a good reporter should be able to navigate racial boundaries on her beat.  Having a similar experience with race, the reporters said, could help connect with sources, but experiences with class could still be dramatically different, and were sometimes masked by assumptions about experiences tied to race.  One reporter said she still found a lack of economic diversity in the newsroom.

On a final race and reporting note, Colorlines analyzed some data about mentions of race in the news and argue that conservative publications explicitly mention race with greater frequency than other news organizations.  The data suggests that race gets mentioned across the media and Colorlines seems to think that controversy over, rather than experience with race gets the most coverage.  It makes me want to take a second look at how or if race was addressed in the Tribune’s reporting on youth violence.

Over the last few weeks I’ve spoken to a number of reporters about reporting outside of their neighborhoods or experience.  One common theme that I’ve heard is the importance of using people’s own language to describe places and institutions in their communities.  Patrick Barry, a senior scribe working with LISC/Chicago, said journalists documenting community development projects had to rethink their use of language when reporting on the low-to-middle-income communities that were the focus of the organization’s New Communities Program.  Even if a reporter’s impression of a neighborhood was that it was a “bombed out ghetto,” Barry said, they needed to be aware that neighborhood residents didn’t use that language to describe their neighborhood and didn’t necessarily think of their community with such an exclusively negative framing.  “We have learned a lot from neighborhood people about how to talk about places,” Barry said.

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a story about New Orleans rappers Big Freedia and Katey Red.  The print version of the story about Freedia ran under the clever headline like “Neither Straight Nor Out of Compton” (I can’t find my copy of the magazine to confirm the exact title).   However, the web version uses the (apparently) search-engine-optimized title “Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’ Gender-Bending Rap” in the title of the web page (the text that shows at the top of one’s browser window) and “New Orleans’ Gender-Bending Rap” on the page itself.  These different versions of the title reflect, perhaps, reflect the contentious use of the term “sissy bounce” to describe the music of Big Freedia and other gay, transgender, lesbian or bisexual rappers who perform New Orleans’ signature hip-hop style of “bounce.”

Jonathan Dee, the story’s author describes bounce like this:

Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it’s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it’s strictly party music, its beat is relentlessly fast and its rap quotient tends much less toward introspection or pure braggadocio than toward a call-and-response relationship with its audience, a dynamic borrowed in equal measure from Mardi Gras Indian chants and from the dawn of hip-hop itself. Many, if not most, bounce records announce their allegiance by sampling from one of just two sources: either Derek B.’s “Rock the Beat” or an infectious hook known as the “Triggaman,” from a 1986 Showboys record called “Drag Rap.” (That’s “drag” not as in cross-dressing but as in the theme to the old TV show “Dragnet.”)

Katey Red is quick to point out that LGBT artists in New Orleans are part of the larger bounce music culture, not a separate genre.  “Ain’t no such thing as ‘sissy bounce,’ ” she said. “It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it.”  In this video interview from Fader Magazine, Freedia expresses a similar sentiment:

Bounce music generally is just bounce music in New Orleans and you may have a gay rapper that does bounce music and you have straight rappers as well.  So I just really want to clarify that bounce music is not sissy bounce it’s bounce generally and you have some sissies that represent bounce music, you know, like myself, Sissy Nobby, Katey Red .  You know, there’s a few more.  It’s not called sissy bounce at home, it’s called bounce music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The story does explain that most artists object to the phrase.  “They have no desire to be typed within, or set apart from, bounce culture; and indeed, within New Orleans itself, they mostly are not,” Dee wrote.  And it also explains the origin of the label “sissy bounce,” New Orleans music writer Alison Fensterstock.  Still, the nuanced perspective of how the artists view gender and sexuality as part of their identities and the identity of their musical community falls under a web page title that acknowledges “their bookings elsewhere in the country are founded increasingly on the novelty of their sexual identities.”  Even if the artists eschew the term “sissy bounce,” the Times seems aware that people may search for information about this music using this term, and they want to make sure that people can find the article.

This forefronts a challenge for journalists when choosing words in their stories – should one use the language of those most involved in or affected by a story or terminology that may be more widely used?  Does using the popular language for something legitimize language that doesn’t accurately frame an idea?    The best approach is probably the one Dee took in the story about New Orleans rap, to explain disputed language, its origins and how it reflects the nuance of the subject.  This is possible, and even adds depth to a longer article, but can a writer do the same thing in a daily news article?

Being aware of and taking the time to explain complicated stories behind language are important obligations for journalists that will only become more difficult in the age of online news.  As more and more people seek news and information on the web and find it through search rather than visiting the news organization’s web site directly, there is greater pressure for journalists to include widely-used language in stories to make the stories discoverable.  One solution may be to link phrases in the story to pages that describe the origin of the phrases.  The New York Times website already allows users to access definitions of words in articles by clicking on the word.  Linking such functionality to user-contributed content, like urban dictionary, may give added insight into the origin of language used in stories, though it could make it more convoluted.

Photo by Incase via Flickr. It’s captioned as a photo of Big Freedia, but the performer more closely resembles Katey Red.

I finally realized that I needed business cards for my reporting at Medill, but I didn’t want to shell out dozens of dollars for hundreds of cards that I probably wouldn’t use.  I wanted to pay a few dollars for a few dozen cards and have the option of printing more.

So, I created my own using the open-source illustration program Inkscape.  My template is based on an excellent Inkscape business card tutorial.  The design is meant to be printed in black and white on colored cardstock, making the text colored and the background black.

It took me a while to figure out (and obtain) the font for the Medill Logo, but according to What the Font, it’s PF Din Text Pro Thin.  I converted the “Medill” text to a path in the template so you shouldn’t have to have the font in order to use the template.

If you want to get really slick, you can generate a QR code with your contact information in vCard format and print it on the back.

Download:

• SVG Medill business card template (editable in Inkscape, maybe Illustrator, uses clones to make it easy to change the design in all the cards in the 10-up layout)
• PDF Medill business card template (should be able to open this in any illustration program, but you’ll have to do more copying and pasting to edit all the cards)

This is a jQuery bookmarklet to extract an attribution string and link from a Flickr photo page.

To use the bookmarklet bookmark this link or drag it to your browser’s bookmarks bar: Flickr Attribution

The code is available at github.

At the time that I wrote this bookmarklet, I was using the the Monochrome Author theme (similar to the Monochrome Pro theme) by Graph Paper Press. It requires that you have an image associated with each post, so I frequently grab Creative Commons licensed photos for posts where I didn’t take a photo. I got tired of building the photo attribution string and link back to the photo by hand, so I made the bookmarklet to generate it with one click.

This is my first attempt at writing a bookmarklet and using jQuery.

I make use of the very helpful jQuery Bookmarklet by Brett Barros with modifications by Paul Irish as well as the zeroclipboard library for copying the text to the system clipboard.

There are probably some bugs with this code as well as lots of room for improvement. In particular, it would be nice to have the z-index of the bar displayed by the widget set so it covers all the FLickr page elements, but I couldn’t set a high z-index without messing up the zeroclipboard functionality.

Percent change per year of children in households facing food insecurity from "A Daily Fight to Find Food: One Family's Story".

Data can give important insight into what’s happening in the world, but charts and numbers alone aren’t always resonant.  One way that reporters ground the numbers in a story is by finding people whose experience matches the trend.  This was the case with “A Daily Fight To Find Food: One Family’s Story,” a report that was aired on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”  The story profiles the Williamson family of Carlisle, PA as an example of the growing number of families who struggle to meet their nutritional needs.  The Williamson family, the report said, “is among those who struggle for food. They’ve been in and out of poverty for years.”  The report goes on to describe a family whose experience includes limited education, teen pregnancy and joblessness due to health issues.

While the report tells the challenges facing the family and the mechanics of how they use a combination of government support and social services to meet their food needs, it doesn’t go very deep into the connections between the different elements of poverty beyond statements like this one from a woman who runs a food pantry in the Williamsons’ community: “But Livas, of the local food pantry, says a good diet is especially important for the poor, as a first step toward addressing their other problems, with things like work, health care and education. She says it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re hungry.” Unfortunately, this left a lot of room for listeners to speculate.

Devon Mann was one of the people who questioned the food the family bought and how they used it:

“Am I the only one that has a hard time believing that you can’t feed 5 people healthy home-made meals with $600/month in food stamps? I know exactly how much I spend on groceries (food only) each month–I buy local produce when available & strictly organic meats. I buy very little canned and essentially no processed/prepared foods. What exactly are these people cooking & eating? Why is there chocolate or pop & ice pops to choose from? We choose water in our home, & yes, we often add lemon to my toddler’s delight. I’m troubled by the ignorance and waste.”

Katherine Bittner made a similar observation that was also echoed in letters responding to story that were read on the air:

“I do not fill [sic] sorry for these people. I think the story would have benefitted [sic] from finding another family where people are really struggling to with food. $600 a month is a lot of money. My family makes six figures and we don’t buy juice (water is free), rarely buy brand name products, and junk food or sweets. We stick to generic store brand food at the local supermarket and clip coupons. Maybe instead of looking for the lean cuts of meat go for the cheaper cuts of meat that you can stretch out to make stews or for less than $20 you can buy 20 pounds of rice. It’s cheaper to buy a whole chicken or whole fish. You can make more meals out of them.”

These comments are judgmental, but also show listeners struggling to understand questions left unanswered by the story.  Did the reporter fall short of an obligation to the listeners and the Williamsons to address these questions?  By anticipating some of the listener responses, the  reporter could have gotten the family’s perspective on the perceived contradictions described in the story such as growing vegetables in a household while giving their thirsty child soda or having a full refrigerator yet sometimes needing to rely on a soup kitchen for meals.  This inquiry may have offered a deeper look into the problem of hunger, not just as a gap in food resources, but also in information and lifestyle.  Asking questions about this could have helped explain this situation instead of letting comments make assumptions about these dynamics.  Given, the emotional tone of some of the comments, it is easy to see how comments can steal focus away from the initial report.

Kathryn Geiszler, another commenter, exposed another challenge with using a single example to depict broader trends:

“I am surprised they need so much food. And, I agree with another commentor [sic] that if she is able to spend so much energy driving around with her food gathering routine, how come she can’t work? I am a single mother of two kids. We get by usually on $50 per week on food. We have no TV servie [sic], no HDTV, old video game consoles, ripped clothes, and taking the car anywhere depends if the gas gauge is near the bottom or half full. My little boy has Autism, so I stay home to school him. Not much luck even if I was a PhD looking for a job. 20% unemployment in my rural county. Moving to a better area would require thousands of dollars I don’t have. Therefore – I make do with the situation I’m in. It would be nice to get government help, but for some reason, I don’t.”

One role of the news is to help  the person reading or listening place herself within the events of the day.  From Geiszler’s description of her experience, her children may be very well be counted in the 17 million children living in households where getting enough food was a challenge.  However, because the report was framed in the Williamsons’ story, she may not feel the Obama administration’s request to Congress for $10 billion in additional spending on child nutrition programs, also mentioned in the report, as something she should engage in, either as a supporter, critic or inquirer.    Listeners may have been better served if the story was told through the lives of more families with different experiences with food insecurity to make it easier for listeners to identify with the issues instead of differentiate their experience from that of the Williamsons.

However, comments like Geiszler’s makes it easy for the reporter to talk to additional sources to get a deeper understanding of a complex issue like poverty.  While it may be unrealistic for reporters to get framings right the first time, it would be unfortunate to fail to take advantage of opportunities to report the stories or nuances that were missed.

Photo by Pam Fessler/NPR.

This has been a busy and productive week for my independent study.

On Tuesday, I interviewed Gordan Walek and Patrick Barry, who are involved with the Chicago Neighborhood News Bureau, a project of  Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC)/Chicago’s New Communities Program.  The program promotes development in 14 low-to-moderate-income communities in Chicago andnews bureau website aggregates news from these 14 communities as well as Chicago-wide news that intersects with community development issues.  Talking to Walek and Barry, I learned that the site is a visible face to reporting that has been ongoing since the start of the New Communities Program.

Our conversation surfaced the nuanced role of news produced by or in conjunction with community organizations instead of news organizations.  The news produced by lead agencies working with LISC/Chicago and by writers working for LISC/Chicago has the dual purpose of informing community members about the development projects happening in their neighborhoods and reporting the progress of these efforts to funders and the broader community interested in neighborhood development.  I thought it was interesting how Walek and Barry spoke about trying to factually report what was going on in the neighborhoods even when the stories are meant to serve specific goals.  As a result, this reporting produced some of the first web content about the communities in the New Communities Program and for communities affected by problems such as violence, some of the only stories about community response or resilience in the face of problems.

During the interview, Barry told me that he and other reporters try to use the language of  neighborhood residents to describe what’s happening there and how spending a considerable amount of time in the communities that they cover gives them a much deeper understanding of community issues and dynamics than reporters covering only the occasional story and even agency program managers.

I thought their initiative showed an interesting example of journalistic practice being applied outside of traditional media institutions and being able to serve information needs and provide insights into communities that don’t always get sustained engagement from the media.

On Thursday, I spoke with four reporters at the Tribune who wrote stories as part of the Seeking Safe Passage project.  They challenged my assumption that the Tribune would automatically cover youth violence in the wake of the street brawl that resulted in Derrion Albert’s death.  Instead, they felt that the Tribune made a very intentional decision to devote resources to in-depth, solutions-oriented reporting on youth violence in the city.

The reporters told me how they were conscious that the audience of the stories they wrote would be read by Chicago residents very far from areas most affected by youth violence and made a point to identify threads in their subject’s stories that the reporters felt were more universally resonant.  They also spoke of being very conscious of the language they used to describe youth and in being sure to describe violence in terms of the actions of the youth rather than being an innate quality of the youth.  As with the writers working with LISC/Chicago, the Tribune reporters also said they tried to use the language used by community members when writing about those communities.

Another thread of conversation in the interview that I found interesting was that most of the reporters said they could identify with some aspects of the experiences of the youth they interviewed but that other aspects were completely foreign.  I wonder if this offers the best possible perspective for a reporter, where someone is able to connect at a human level with the communities they’re covering but also able to maintain a critical perspective.  Deborah Shelton, one of the Tribune reporters, sent me a link to “Cross Cultural Reporting: Pairing Mainstream and Ethnic Media for Better Health Stories”, which describes how a collaboration between two reporters writing about mental health in immigrant communities used the different orientations of the reporters around the story to produce a nuanced story.

Finally, the Tribune reporters, a multi-racial team gave me a really interesting and nuanced account of how race mediates their reporting experience.  They said that a good reporter can get the story independent of racial barriers but that race did play a clear role their experiences reporting.  They also described how being able to spend considerable time reporting in a community gave them the opportunity to learn what they had missed in previous stories.

Preparing for next week, I e-mailed Cliff Kelley about an interview.  In particular, I’m interested in talking to him about cross-media collaborations like the Tribune-sponsored Seeking Safe Passage community forum which Kelley moderated along with his general perspective on his radio show’s role in meeting community information needs.  I also took a peek at the New News report by the Chicago Community Trust.  This report is from last summer, but a new version should be available soon.  It gives a good overview of innovators in the online media space, some of which I’ve already spoken with and some that I should follow up with.  Finally, I plan to get in touch with the coordinators of the youth reporters in the Community TV Network program to shadow the youth as they do their reporting.

Photo by Calsidyrose via Flickr.