Pandemic or Not: 2020 Graduates Put Engagement Journalism into Practice
Learn more about what Engagement Journalism students at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY learned by listening to communities
*Editor’s Note: This roundup is overdue, but we are very proud of this class and their work! Roundup of the class of 2021’s presentations coming soon.
By Rawan Yaghi, Engagement Journalism Class of 2020
The 2020 cohort of Engagement Journalism students at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY worked through unprecedented times and still managed to produce creative and impactful projects.
Despite suddenly being forced online midway through their second semester, this class showed resilience, found ways to interact with each other and communities’ virtually, and closed out the program in December 2020 by presenting what they learned and how they used journalism to build trust and connections.
This work inspires us to challenge traditional journalistic practices, build trust and relationships with communities, and fill information gaps.
Below, you will learn to how students used the following tools in their engagement and reporting:
- Crowdsourcing
- Bots
- Facebook and Instagram
- Posters
- Art
- Open Newsroom events
- Zines
- Surveys
- Newsletters
- Video
- Photography
- Music
- And of course Zoom
Their work will offer insights into using different tools and methods to engage with a diverse range of communities.
Karla Arroyo
Karla Arroyo focused on Black or brown people who are subject to or have experienced hair discrimination in workplaces, schools and society.
For the past sixteen months, Karla Arroyo reported and built relationships with community members and leaders who are mobilizing against natural hair discrimination in different states. She created the “Deeper Than Hair Newsletter” in collaboration with the Crown Campaign with three goals in mind: educate, advocate, and uplift.
Karla’s reporting informed her engagement and vice versa. She attended the Crown Act Conference where she met with Crown Campaign leaders. She later joined the Crown Campaign Village as their inaugural fellow. She reported on Black hair discrimination in a Texas school. And she used Instagram in order to expand her reach to millennials.
Alexa Beyer
Alexa Beyer focused on Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch in Louisiana where people are dying of cancer due to the petrochemical, oil, and gas facilities located there.
Alexa Beyer has been listening to the community in Cancer Alley for the past two years. She identified key issues in the community, which guided her in making a video series. She also reported on conflict of interest when it comes to approving oil and gas projects in Louisiana.
In similar work she did in Indiana, she learned that she needs to “drum up a sense of urgency” in order for people to become involved in activism. This boosted the reach and engagement to her videos on social media. Even though she showed up to a mayor rally in order to report all sides of the story, she was escorted out of the venue by the mayor himself who told her she was not welcome there. That’s when Alexa knew she had made an impact.
You can read more about Alexa’s work here.
Kayla Boone
Kayla Boone focused on people who are struggling or have struggled with their mental health and are using music to overcome their challenges.
Kayla Boone used her own experience in therapy to guide her project. She wanted to help people who were struggling with mental health issues and wanted to seek alternative kinds of therapy. Being involved in the music industry, she decided to introduce music as a tool to heal.
She reached out to creatives in her network and asked them what helps them in their lowest times. During her summer internship with the Washington City Paper, she tuned in to music news and sent out a survey asking people for their music options when they have mental health problems. The result was two Spotify lists that were built on the responses to her survey. You can read more about Kayla’s work here.
Frank DiFiore
Frank DiFiore focused on public defense attorneys and the defendants they represent.
Frank DiFiore identified the main issues of importance to public defenders, which included how other people view them, their low budgets in comparison with district attorneys and the NYPD, and the lack of media presence to cover them. Writing stories is what Frank knows best, and he wanted to use his skill to tell theirs.
Frank created the Public Defense Informer, where he published a series of articles based on in-person meetings he had with public defenders working in The Bronx. He also created a Facebook page for Public Defense Informer. Moving forward, he continues to grow PDI’s presence on Facebook and Reddit in order to reach more people and open up a conversation about the public defense system in New York. Frank wrote about the steps he took making Public Defense Informer on Medium.
Allison Dikanovic
Allison Dikanovic engaged with people who are working to keep their homes in East New York.
Allison Dikanovic collaborated with THE CITY’s Open Newsroom to listen to East New Yorkers. Over the past year and a half she attended community events and built an expanding network to whom she sends weekly updates about rent and tenant rights in New York City.
She has written several articles for THE CITY highlighting issues related to rent and home ownership in East New York and has helped community members stay informed to protect their homes. She collaborated with artists to make a poster and put up some of her articles at a farmer’s market to reach community members who don’t have access to digital media.
Allison work on THE CITY’s Open Newsroom Rent Update can be found here. You can read more about her experience here.
Terrence Fraser
Terrence Fraser focused on Black and Brown renters in Brooklyn who are facing eviction, lack of needed repairs, or harassment from their landlord during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the past year and a half, Terrence Fraser has been producing video profiles on his community members. In the summer he started working with Brooklyn Movement, where he helped create digital platforms that keep residents informed about local government news. During his summer internship with VICE, he worked on several video projects and interviewed Julia Salazar, who introduced a bill to cancel rent in the Senate.
His multimedia project, BK Eviction Freeze, culminated in the production of artistic posters that provide information and guidance to renters who need them. He worked alongside the Flatbush Tenant Coalition where he did his listening during Zoom meetings and identified the community’s media needs. Next, his project involves creating a video series that explains the eviction and cancel rent bills. Because he wants to reach everyone in the community, the posters are up on social media but they will also be distributed in print in churches and via mail.
Simi Kadirgamar
Simi Kadirgamar focused on international journalists who want to cover the Jammu and Kashmir region.
For the past two years, Simi Kadirgamar has attended community meetings and talks organized by Kashmiri activists in the tristate area. From her listening and coverage of the region, she learned that Jammu and Kashmir is often covered from the point of view of the Indian military and only when there are sensational stories. She started by collaborating with community members in a podcast episode about Kashmir.
Her work resulted in “Kashmir, a Palmyra Zine” that outlined the story of Mir Suheil, a Kashmiri political cartoonist who has recently moved to the U.S. Simi collaborated with Suheil to storyboard the zine and she wrote and edited it and distributed it to international reporting students. She asked them to fill out entry and exit surveys where they reflected on how it informed their sourcing choices in contexts like Kashmir.
Victoria Mba-Jonas
Victoria Mba-Jonas focused on Black-owned cannabis businesses, particularly those owned by women.
Victoria Mba-Jonas used the listening tools and concepts she learned in her first semester to identify problems in the Black-owned cannabis business community. In her third semester, Victoria used the start-up sprint class to develop her cannabis brand Buddafly Effects, which aims to entertain, inform, engage, and change weed stigmas in Black communities.
Victoria developed an engaging social strategy to reach people on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. On YouTube she launched her video cannabis newsletter, Buddafly Buzz, where she updates her followers and clients on the latest news in cannabis. Victoria was also part of the documentary concentration, where she produced work about the Black cannabis community that premiered in January.
Zee Ngema
Zee Ngema focused on Black Transgender/Trans* femmes in the U.S.
TW: Murder, transphobia.
Zee Ngema started her listening process by being present in the spaces where Black Transgender women meet to discuss their needs. Though her in-person engagement plans were interrupted by COVID-19, she continued to connect with community members online.
The resulting project was a space on Instagram where the work of Transgender femmes was showcased in order to help bring them revenue. She also worked on “Africa is Queer!” for OkayAfrica, where she interned for the summer. She writes about her experience here.
John Philp
John Philp focused on the gun safety community, which is made up of gun violence survivors, their families, and other advocates.
John Philp created Gun Country which uses multiple mediums in order to inform, update, and restart the conversation about guns in the United States. It uses news, narrative, dialogue, and advocacy in order to achieve its goals.
During his final semester, John completed his project’s audio prototype as part of the start-up sprint class, where he identified the problem of a gap in storytelling and set out to create a solution for it. His prototype combines fictional and factual elements and fuses documentary and satire, making it more appealing to more audience groups. John tells us more about his experience in engagement journalism on Medium.
Michaela Román
Michaela Román focused on early-career Latinx journalists.
Michaela Román started working on a solutions journalism model of engagement when she covered rat infestations and people organizing around them in Brooklyn. During her summer internship, she worked with THE CITY’s Missing Them project, which honors people in New York City who died of COVID-19. She then carried the tools she learned about in the Social Journalism program to El Paso Matters and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Her project stemmed from her own experience as a junior Latina journalist. The result was a collaborative google doc which shared the experiences of Latinx journalists and offered advice and recommendations. You can read more about her project here.
Jake Wasserman
Jake Wasserman focused on underserved voters in West Virginia during the 2020 elections.
Jake Wasserman started engaging with West Virginians during his summer internship with Mountain State Spotlight, where he was able to hold community conversations and listen to local voters who informed his reporting and project.
In his final semester, he learned about new engagement tools in the design and development class. He used reporting and texting bots to answer voter questions about mail-in ballots in West Virginia. He collaborated with local print media in order to reach voters who did not have access to the internet. He writes about sustained listening and engagement here.
Rawan Yaghi
Rawan Yaghi focused on Arabic-speaking refugee mothers living in the U.S.
Rawan Yaghi spent the past year and a half listening to the community of refugees and people organizing around them in the U.S.. In her second semester she organized a writing workshop in collaboration with Neighbors for Refugees, a community-led organization in New York. She later started building her own community by hosting Zoom meetings and creating a Facebook group to host discussions and exchange knowledge. She used infographics and interviewed academics to fill information gaps. She also worked with three women closely, teaching them photography concepts and techniques.
The resulting project was a three-part self-portrait and narrative project that the refugee mothers created themselves. She managed to build trust in a community, and she used the concept of knowledge exchange in order to create her engagement project. During her summer internship she worked with Slate Magazine’s audience development team, and she used those skills to guide her social and engagement strategy. You can learn more about trust and engagement in the context of international reporting in her Medium post.
For more about the Engagement Journalism program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, visit our website. To hear from our alumni, watch the video below:
