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Hi! This week I’m turning this newsletter over to my colleague, Jon Greenberg. Jon is a former PolitiFact reporter, now a Poynter faculty member, who is leading a training I think you’ll find really valuable (and at $15 for two virtual sessions, super cheap).

Jon runs our Beat Academy, and this month he’s created two webinars on covering polarization and Christian nationalism ([link removed]) . People who attend the webinars can apply for one of 25 expenses-paid spots in an in-person workshop in Chicago in April, and those folks can apply for eight reporting grants of up to $6,500.

See? Pretty valuable. Here’s more from Jon:

As local reporters, just being who we are might be our superpower. Not who we are as journalists, but who we are in the rest of our lives. This came up when I was talking to S. Mitra Kalita, CEO of URL Media ([link removed]) . We were on the sidelines of URL Media’s post-election assessment at the National Press Club and Kalita shared an epiphany she had a few years ago.

It was May 2021 and the COVID-19 vaccine was rolling out nationwide. From her Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, she was about to pitch the benefits of getting jabbed to members of a Manhattan SeventhDay Adventist Church. Kalita had left her job as senior vice president at CNN Digital, and with her husband, had co-launched Epicenter NYC ([link removed]) , a newsletter to help New Yorkers navigate COVID.
Kalita believed in the vaccine, and so did the church pastor. She had invited Kalita to tape an interview for the online Sunday service. She asked Kalita what she wanted to do.
“I want to tell them they should get vaccinated,” Kalita told her.
“Don’t talk about the vaccine first,” the pastor said.
“OK.”
“And don’t tell them you’re a journalist.”
“Hmmm. What am I supposed to talk to them about?”
“I want you to talk about your community, like who you are. Why you live there. What you've been doing in the pandemic to help your community. And then we'll get around to your background in media and why you're doing this now, and then we'll come to vaccines.”
They taped the segment. In June, the church set up a series of pop-up vaccine clinics.
Kalita said this was a lesson in a different way to deliver news. She doesn’t argue that reporters at other, larger newsrooms can just take it and run with it. But she does see something here about letting people see you as a person first and a reporter second.
“If you go in saying there's this version of truth and you're shoving it down people's throats, before they even trust you, well, I think then you're set up to fail, which is basically what that pastor was trying to teach me,” she said.
The URL Media event “Covering a Divided Nation” ([link removed]) was an honest discussion of what the 2024 election revealed for Black and brown media organizations, and what it means for them going forward.
“(We’ve) been struggling forever. We know how to manage scarcity,” said Sara Lomax, president of URL Media and president and CEO of WURD ([link removed]) in Philadelphia.
Connecting and digging even deeper into the wider community was a dominant message.
I went to listen and learn more for our Beat Academy course on strategies for reporting on a polarized America ([link removed]) , coming up Feb. 20 and 27. We’ve got a great line-up both days, with opportunities for reporting grants up to $6,500 and a chance to come to Chicago for an expenses-paid workshop. Enroll for just $15 ([link removed]) .
Thanks, Jon, that’s it for him and for me. I have some work travel next week, so no newsletter, but I'll be back the week after. Hug your people.
Kristen
Kristen Hare
Faculty
The Poynter Institute
@kristenhare ([link removed])

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