From the editor
Back in April, when many Chicagoans were stuck at home during lockdown, a packed house party on the city’s West Side drew a lot of media attention. Most of the coverage scolded partygoers—most of them Black—for ignoring health guidelines during a time when African Americans were suffering disproportionately from the coronavirus.
But Vee L. Harrison, a reporter for The TRiiBE, a digital outlet covering Black Chicago, dug beneath the headlines to discover that the gathering was, in fact, a memorial for friends who had died from gun violence. And the young attendees weren’t ignoring health warnings so much as they were simply unaware of them—because the media weren’t reaching young, Black Chicagoans with that news.
The TRiiBE is one of the outlets featured in Deborah Douglas’s profile of the new Black press—nimble, mission-driven sites and initiatives telling stories about, and for, Black communities at a time when the coronavirus pandemic and the movement for racial justice are prompting newsrooms to fundamentally rethink how stories are covered and by whom.
The ethics of photojournalism is one aspect of reporting coming under fresh scrutiny. Christina Aushana and Tara Pixley argue that, as they document social justice movements, visual journalists must also reckon with the unintended harm news images could cause.
As these defining stories play out across the country, local journalists in smaller markets face the same blowback as those in larger ones. In his chronicle of the relationship between Black Lives Matter protesters and local outlets in Little Rock, Ark., Brent Renaud quotes Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine who integrated the city’s Central High School in 1957, whose words offer a kind of through line for coverage of unsettled times: “I try to get people to talk their truth because other people need to hear it. Let us see it.”
Sincerely,
James Geary
Editor, Nieman Reports
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