Rethinking local news in New York City by collaborating with residents and libraries
How THE CITY’s Open Newsroom initiative is creating a “two-way street” of information sharing on issues like food insecurity, tenants rights and unemployment
Audience engagement in journalism can refer to everything from social media outreach to innovative methods of distributing information for greater impact. At THE CITY, a non-profit newsroom covering New York City, one project launched in collaboration with engagement journalism students at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY is reframing what local news can look like.
“Oftentimes, local news is parachuting in on some sort of issue around crime, providing no context,” said Terry Parris Jr., Engagement Director at THE CITY. “There’s a lot of reporters and a lot of folks who are stuck in that journalism bubble.”
Parris launched The Open Newsroom, a series of community gatherings aimed at creating a “two-way street” of information between the news outlet and its audience, with both sides asking questions and sharing expertise in equal balance. Some of the meetings focus on hyperlocal issues, such as neighborhood-specific concerns in Brooklyn, while others explore topics like special education in New York City’s public schools.
Mekdela Maskal, an alumna of Newmark’s engagement journalism program and currently Engagement Editor at Covering Climate, joined the Open Newsroom as an intern when it began in the summer of 2019, when she was still a student. She says she reached out to other outlets that have worked on innovative public forums to learn some best practices, including Free Press’s News Voices Program, City Bureau’s Public Newsroom, and El Tímpano’s community microphone.
“We are approaching journalism as a service for a community, rather than like a product to deliver to an audience,” said Danny Laplaza, another Engagement-J alum who began working on the Open Newsroom at the beginning.
From the start, The Open Newsroom partnered with Brooklyn Public Library to host their local events, in the neighborhoods of Bedford–Stuyvesant, East New York and Red Hook. Libraries are a natural partner, said Parris, because their work so closely aligns with the goals of engaged journalism.
“I believe that libraries in a lot of ways are what local newsrooms want to be,” he said. “They want to be hubs of conversation, of community, of collaboration, but oftentimes they fall short of many of those things.”
In the meetings in these neighborhoods, The Open Newsroom found that most people were not learning primarily from news outlets, but from an informal network of local information sources and personal connections. More official news sources were often inaccessible, in either form of delivery or language.
“If anything, folks have to work extra hard to find useful information in the abstract story that is written about them,” said Laplaza. “Instead of just being like, ‘Hey, I want to know where to find fresh food. Where do I go? I don’t need a dissertation on food deserts or food apartheid.’”
Between June of 2019 and March of 2020, The Open Newsroom held 11 neighborhood meetings. The purpose of these sessions was to ask residents broad questions about their lived experiences, such as “What do you need to know to live in your neighborhood?” and “Who else needs to know this information?”
“And we continue to ask questions or create this structured conversation, that’s almost like an archeological dig, that we’re trying to get down deeper and deeper to a concept or an idea or a gap of information,” said Parris.
After each meeting, all notes taken by facilitators and answers provided by participants were put into a spreadsheet and analyzed for keywords and themes. This allowed common ideas to rise to the surface, which would inform future sessions. One-sheet recaps were also sent to all attendees, to help build relationships and encourage people to return to future meetings.
After the initial meetings in the neighborhoods, common themes emerged. In Red Hook, residents were particularly interested in food access and food insecurity. In Bed Stuy, issues surrounding tenants rights came to the fore, while in East New York, homeownership and loss were topics that many wanted to discuss.
Each meeting had a different agenda and a variety of activities. Here’s a snapshot of what a discussion about education looked like.
“[We’d] say, tell me about a time when you felt included in a decision that was being made at your school or at your child’s school? What did that look like? What did that communication look like?” said Lauren Costantino, another alumna who worked at THE CITY as an intern and focused on the education session. “Okay, so write down that story. And then, highlight the parts where it went wrong, or highlight the parts where it went right.” Conversations like these helped shape THE CITY’s coverage to be more relevant and useful.
The Open Newsroom was also attended by reporters from THE CITY, some of whom were initially skeptical about this method of information gathering.
“They would think about it more as community members coming and just complaining about all kinds of things,” said Maskal. “And come to the meetings, and walk away with notebooks of information from community members about information that they need, about issues that are happening, that they could take back and turn into stories that could have real impact.”
After three sessions in each Brooklyn neighborhood, staff at THE CITY had begun to develop ideas for how to bring the information shared in The Open Newsrooms back to the community. In Red Hook, there were plans for art installations about the history of the neighborhood; in East New York, plays told from the perspective of homeowners who had lost property were in the works.
But in March of 2020, as COVID-19 hit New York, the focus of The Open Newsroom changed. All in-person sessions were cancelled, and the meetings moved online. Without neighborhood barriers, the forums were open to residents from around the city and elsewhere.
The goal, Parris said, was “not just to create a space for people to come together and talk. That’s what we wanted. But also to understand, what was our best use? What is our role in this community? And what is the use of a journalist? It started to mirror, in a lot of ways, mutual aid.”
Food security and housing rights — already issues that The Open Newsroom was discussing — became even more prominent during the pandemic, alongside concerns about jobs and unemployment. The online sessions focused on these three issues, encouraging participants to discuss their questions and concerns.
“As we collected questions and concerns, we then went out and found experts who could answer those questions and respond to those concerns,” said Parris. “And we then brought them into the meetings.”
One of the tactics that facilitators used in the early pandemic meetings is known as the rose, bud and thorn method. This encouraged all participants to think about one good thing — the rose — that happened to them that week, one promising thing — the bud — from that week, and one unfortunate thing — the thorn. The group also added a new component, the gardener, to solicit information on a person that helped them during that week.
“I just loved that because if we just ask them, ‘What’s going on?’” said Costantino. “It’s gonna be a really heavy, depressing meeting. We wanted to bring some lightness and talk about what are things that are working.”
These kinds of techniques grew out of the lessons that the program’s interns learned at the Engagement Journalism (previously known as Social Journalism) program at Newmark. Students brought a passion for wanting to connect with communities and expand the boundaries of news and information, while also learning the basic pillars of journalism.
Students began working on The Open Newsroom in their first semester in the program, attending some of the early meetings and doing some of the initial research on the neighborhoods’ information needs. In their second semester, they also helped monitor neighborhood Facebook groups to identify common pandemic-related concerns and any misinformation that could be debunked.
Interns were responsible for every step of the process — from promoting and marketing the meetings, to creating agendas and moderating sessions, to following up with participants afterwards. “The Open Newsroom doesn’t exist without the Social J [now Engagement J] students that I’ve worked with at The City,” said Parris, who also teaches at the school.
For Laplaza, the Engagement J program’s focus on trust was key to building relationships in The Open Newsrooms. Most people don’t personally know a journalist, and that can breed a lack of trust in the media. Building transparency into the process, he said, helped both journalists and participants understand each others motivations and goals.
In many ways, The Open Newsroom draws on a multitude of traditions, and Maskal says that she appreciated the time at Newmark spent learning from community organizers. For Costantino, who now works as an audience engagement producer for the Miami Herald, the forums were a way to put into practice theories and ideas that she had learned about in school.
“This whole idea of rethinking news, and not putting so much emphasis on the journalist as a gatekeeper of information, or the one who decides what’s important and what’s newsworthy,” Costantino explained. “Creating more avenues of engagement with readers and with people to foster a better relationship with them. Make our coverage better, more relevant, more responsive to things that they want and need — all of that stuff that’s encompassed in engagement journalism or social journalism at CUNY is in The Open Newsroom.”
Now, almost two years into the program, The Open Newsroom is still evolving. During the pandemic, Parris realized there was a need for more consistent information delivery, outside of the virtual meetings. This led to two information services — one about unemployment and work, the other about rent and tenants’ rights — which are distributed as newsletters and text messages.
“Because things are changing all the time,” said Parris. “Each week, we would go back to our experts or the community and ask one, what is new? What’s changed? And ask new questions from the community that need answering.”
Going forward, The Open Newsroom is again branching into new topics. In 2021, the Civic Newsroom is focusing on local elections in New York, when both the mayor’s office and dozens of city council seats are up for grabs. The Civic Newsroom won’t focus on the “inside baseball” or horse race of the campaigns, but on the basic logistical issues of helping people vote.
“It’s really understanding, what are the barriers that prevent people from voting?” said Laplaza, who now works with The Open Newsroom as a fellow. “And it’s not always just information. It’s like, the fucking weather was bad, right? It was, I didn’t have a ride. It’s really understanding on a micro level, what are the barriers of entry to voting?”
Civic Newsroom was awarded a grant from the Online News Association, and students in Parris’s Metrics and Outcomes course in the Engagement Journalism program as well as students in Judy Watson’s reporting class are involved in the project. It focuses on three neighborhoods in New York that had some of the lowest voter turnout for the 2020 presidential election, with the hopes that engagement efforts will get THE CITY’s reporting in front of more people, build trust with audiences and give more New Yorkers a say in how the city is run.
“This is a great opportunity for our students to work with local journalists to apply their skills and test the efficacy of different engagement strategies,” said Carrie Brown, director of the Engagement Journalism program.
Parris said he hopes the lessons learned so far from The Open Newsroom about information sharing and listening can apply to the election.
“It made journalism feel more limitless in its possibilities,” said Maskal. “In our meetings, there were a lot of really exciting moments, where people were brought together that wouldn’t normally interface with one another, and that were sharing information, right then and there. It was really exciting to think — I, as a journalist, am facilitating information sharing right now. It’s happening.”
Elise Czajkowski is a writer/editor who regularly writes about the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s executive and professional education programs. Based in New York, she was previously a Tow Knight Fellow in Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Newmark J-School. She launched a non-profit called Sidewalk News, which uses outdoor advertising to distribute local news.
