Weekly Roundup February 10, 2023
A few interesting things I’ve seen, heard, read, or thought about this week. A little belated…
Best reads 📚
- Why There Was No Racial Reckoning: Systemic Problems Will Not Be Solved by Representational Victories by my colleague (how cool is that?) Wesley Lowery. “Racism can reside not just in the heart of a killer but also within the skeleton of the system that produces him. “The moral vacuum of any society,” Baldwin wrote two years before his death, “immediately creates an actual social chaos.”
- Doctors Aren’t Burned Out From Overwork. We’re Demoralized by Our Health System by Eric Reinhart. “What’s burning out health care workers is less the grueling conditions we practice under, and more our dwindling faith in the systems for which we work.”
- The Snitch in the Silver Hearse: The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement bonkers story by my friend Trevor Aaronson. “While on the FBI payroll, Windecker became an organizer of Denver’s racial justice demonstrations and ultimately undermined the social movement gaining momentum there by deploying the same controversial tactics the FBI used to devastating effect against Black political groups during the civil rights movement.”
- ‘She was somebody to us:’ Drug-related deaths haunt the streets of Chicago, but overdose is not inevitable. By Katie Prout. “Culturally, most of us shrug off overdose deaths as inevitable tragedies — the result of ravenous addiction, if we’re being bighearted, or the result of moral failing, if we’re not. What I need you to understand is that these deaths are policy choices; they are preventable, and we all are accountable for them.”
Thoughts 🤓
Dug into the excellent Roadmap for Local News, and I’m thrilled to see a movement coalescing for a journalism that prioritizes listening and working for and with communities. Organizations like City Bureau, Outlier Media and more have created impressive models for how to better meet people’s information needs, and the next step is to continue building on and spreading the lessons they have learned. The vision laid out in the report is exactly what our engagement journalism program at Newmark J School at CUNY is all about. It’s always a bit complicated for us, because in journalism education there is still demand to prepare students for more traditional newsroom jobs, and I do still believe that our students can not only add value in those spaces but also help them to evolve their practices. But I hope that we are slowly growing a strong network of journalists that can build on the framework laid out in this report.
“A key distinguishing feature of the civic media movement is that it arises from an understanding of the essential interconnectedness of every local civic ecosystem, rather than a false and damaging belief in separation between journalists and their communities.”
▶️ Not to get all academic up in here, but the glossary of terms on page five is particularly useful as it lays out a broader and better way of thinking about and describing journalism. It shifts the focus from traditional journalistic products like stories to “Civic Information” or “high-quality, verifiable information that enables people to respond to collective needs by enhancing local coordination, problem-solving, systems of public accountability, and connectedness.”
Photo 📸
Big L 😞
Anybody else still mad that Beyonce didn’t win album of the year? I like Harry and all, but come on.
🚨 Alarming
Keeping an eye on the thousands of books being removed from Florida libraries. This is…bad.
Engagement Journalism News
- Our school got a new associate dean. I’ve long been a fan of the New School’s design program and their excellent work on systems thinking and more, so really excited to welcome Alison Lichter!
- Engagement journalism class of 2023’s Divya Murthy pubs an excellent explainer on Community Education Councils and how to join one for THE CITY.
- Judith Marks, also class of 2023, got her first byline in the Mott Haven Herald.
