One Semester Down
I was in a department store when I got the email that I had been accepted to the Social Journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Which was anticlimactic — until I left and got myself a Crunchwrap Supreme. It feels like ages since then. But then again, it feels like ages since the beginning of this semester and my first Medium post too.
The point of the social journalism program is to help us learn a kind of journalism that is participatory and engaged with our community, the one we’ve elected to serve. I’ve chosen to work with the incarcerated community and their loved ones. Becoming engaged and connected to this community is actually even harder than it sounds. But I’ve had a lot of great help.
I’ve had most of my success engaging the community on forum-based websites; mostly Reddit and a site called PrisonTalk. PrisonTalk was suggested to me by a previous Social J student, Bee Lockwood (the GOAT), and it is one of, if not the most, comprehensive and extensive communities that covers the entirety of the U.S. prison system.
Finding the PrisonTalk community was one thing, actually becoming part of the community and earning their trust has been quite another. In my time circumnavigating the site, (I’m not joking, it is home to over seven million posts) I’ve come across posts from other journalists. A lot of the time they look like this: Journalist Looking for Interview About ___ or Journalist seeking ___ stories. The profile usually has one or two posts. This isn’t necessarily the root of all evil, but this isn’t engaged journalism.
Engaged journalism is more than popping onto a forum, asking for what you need for a story and popping back off and saying ‘see ya never!’ Engaged journalism isn’t really about stories at all. It’s about setting up shop on that forum and engaging and doing journalism with, not for communities.
OK, so how do we engage?
What I’ve tried to do with my community, through prison talk and Reddit specifically, is start by building trust and credibility. Jeff Jarvis gave me advice in the beginning of the semester to try and be of service.
On Reddit there are so many people asking questions about different aspects of the prison system. The US prison system is endlessly complicated; there are so many rules and regulations. If you’ve never navigated the system, why would you know that you can only mail 10 books at a time to an inmate in Seagoville, Texas? You wouldn’t know that you can’t drive onto Rikers Island in New York City, or that a visit to a NYC facility could take ALL day.
The only reason I know those things is because I’ve spent time with requests from the community. I’ve helped people write visitation appeals. I’ve done this just by googling the name of the warden at the facility and then “visitation appeal template.” I’m not doing anything groundbreaking, but I’m trying to reach out and help people that are part of the community. Showing them that I’m not just popping on for a quote and then disappearing forever. I’m trying to figure out what they need and build a relationship.
When I wrote that letter, I linked the person to the template I found. I link people that are new to the community to PrisonTalk so that they can find an even greater network of resources.
In this way, I’ve demonstrated that I can provide credible information. But there is another aspect of garnering trust from a community. On PrisonTalk, I was lucky that someone took an interest in my posts and asked me to explain myself. They gave me an opportunity to talk about why I care about the community and what my goals are. I still don’t think they’re sold on me yet, but I’m not giving up or going anywhere.
What have I learned?
I suppose this first semester has been like building a house of cards. I feel very confident in my foundation. I learned about different journalism tools this semester. Using those tools helped me learn more about the prison system and those that are affected by it.
Learning about tools like the Listening Post Collective, design thinking and community mapping have been so helpful. They’re all to say that we as journalists need to treat people like people.
I think this fits in with my community goals really well. It may sound simplistic, but something the world needs to know about incarcerated people is that they ARE still people. They have needs and thoughts and feelings. Every person is infinitely more complicated than the worst thing they have ever done. Focusing and learning about those complexities and nuanced stories and then telling them in a comprehensive way is the most important part of what I want to do.
This semester I worked on a story about televisits between families and incarcerated people on Rikers Island. I used a booleans search query on Twitter to find people that might have tweeted out their grievances with the new televisit system. I had a conversation that helped me learn about the complexities that come with visiting facilities Rikers Island, both before and now during the pandemic.
I’m really interested in communication between incarcerated people and their families, and what those relationships mean for each person. I’m also hoping to learn more about the social fabric of prisons, how networks of communication function within facilities. My plan for now is to get a little more focused on the prison system in New York specifically.
For someone with no experience in Doing Journalism there’s certainly been a learning curve this semester. But I truly loved every second learning about reaching communities, then getting to use those tools myself.
