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.

Last week I spoke with WBEZ’s Torey Malatia about the station’s Pritzker Fellowship program whose first two fellows, nominated by community organizations, will soon begin intensive practice at the station.  Malatia said one of his hopes for the program was to counteract a dynamic where reporters would hit up the same sources again and again for recent developments in areas of ongoing coverage such as CHA tenant issues.  Perhaps, he said, bringing in reporters from different communities or without the training and mentality that comes with a j-school education, would lead to more varied sourcing or different ways of approaching, framing or identifying a story.

One thing that I thought was particularly interesting about Malatia’s analysis of the shortcomings of WBEZ’s reporting was that tight deadlines led reporters to go to the database for sources rather than finding new sources or framings for the story.  This led me to two questions: is there a way to alleviate some of the pressures of deadlines or is this an inevitable constraint of journalism?  Do newsrooms have to make a trade-off between timely coverage of news and in-depth reporting?  How much time does it take to prepare a segment on a show like 848 anyway?  Could someone develop a database that helped avoid using the same sources over and over or helped reporters find the most relevant sources?

Photo by tronixstuff via Flickr.