The study “Mutual aid for local journalism?: A public media collaborative” by Andrea Wenzel from Temple University, Philadelphia investigated a local project starting from local radio, News and Information Community Exchange (N.I.C.E.) and how the project challenged traditional journalistic norms, strengthened the connections between public media and grassroot influencers, and what sort of challenges it faced.
N.I.C.E. was started by WHYY, a public radio station, and its stated aim was “increasing the capacity and sustainability of partners’ media work, and helping them reach a broader audience.” In particular, the project aimed to counter the disproportionate whiteness of public radio especially in terms of the newsroom staff, which was twice as white as the demographics of the surrounding area.
Philadelphia has a history of collaborative initiatives, which have been documented in past research. The past initiatives have, for example, sought to challenge the competitive nature of journalism and expand who participates. They have been organized by newsrooms, external journalism support organizations and funders.
The difference in N.I.C.E. is that many of the cohort members do not self-identify as journalists, and that rather than exchange or developing of content, the focus here was on ‘mutual aid’: supporting and building the capacity of other actors.
The method of the study was ethnographic and qualitative. The data was drawn from prolonged observation combined with 11 interviews of N.I.C.E. partners and staff. In addition, the author explored perspectives on the project through four focus groups and 21 interviews of WHYY staff.
The study occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, so the focus groups and interviews were adapted to the online format using Zoom. NVivo coding platform was used to analyze the field notes and the interviews.
The first research question centered on how mutual aid shaped the project design by N.I.C.E. Although the participants sought to distance themselves from the political history of mutual aid (from Kropotkin originally), they did have an analysis of the problem the project sought to address and aimed to intervene.
In answer, while N.I.C.E. was following the mutual aid playbook, there were still moments of friction as the project was structurally administered by the majority white news organization, which created its uncertainties.
The second research question sought to explore how N.I.C.E. challenged the norms on whose voice was centered and resourced as local journalism. The example of including Terrence, the founder of No Gun Zone, showed that it had been occasionally successful in its objective of including and empowering community voices.
However, some felt that the programs, such as the Latinx The 47 was more about the community than for them. It was appreciated by the community members, but WHYY was not brought up independently when discussing how they found news centering on the community.
The second question also dealt with resourcing, and there were tensions about resources between the ones engaged in community outreach and those in daily news production. Some felt the project was in risk of becoming performative if the promises were not fulfilled.
The third and final question dealt with influencing the connections between the N.I.C.E. local actors. The project went father than the previous ones in having multidirectional connections rather than one way, but the network had a habit of treating the partners as proxies for the community they represented.
In conclusion, N.I.C.E. represented an interesting case of a departure from traditional norms of local journalism by hiring community organizers rather than journalists to head the project. Although traditional scholars of ‘mutual aid’ might not recognize it as such due to having a vertical power structure having a funder, the project nevertheless was mindful of power dynamics and sought to recenter whose voice was being heard.
The article “Mutual aid for local journalism?: A public media collaborative” by Andrea Wenzel is in Journalism. (free abstract).
Picture: Untitled by Chris Murray.
License: Unsplash.