Innovation in Local News as a Driver of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

This past week, we got a message from a reader: a local high school student, Madelyn Sanchez-Berra, had won a YMCA-sponsored essay contest and was presenting it at an annual event hosted in commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Madelyn had been known to us because recently, her high school club had been defunded due to alleged discrimination.

Madelyn and three other members of the Red Bank Regional High School Dreamers Club “filed a complaint with the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights alleging it has been ‘singled out for nine years’ of discrimination.”

The complaint sparked community outrage and a special session meeting of the Board of Education. At the meeting, the club was reinstated.

The story came in via an experimental service that we built at RedBankGreen called “Partyline.”

I mentioned it briefly in a Local Media Association Q&A here.

Right now, pre-approved readers can submit short stories by texting our website — hooked up to a registered number through Twilio which forwards messages to our Wordpress site— where the content is grammatically checked and formatted by AI and set up as a post draft.

Partyline is a play on the lower-cost, shared subscriber lines once offered by telephone companies. Our Partyline number uses the original Red Bank exchange, 747 or “Shadyside Seven.”

Without Partyline, and our community’s involvement, our team — now totaling three people — may not have known about Madelyn’s essay much less have been able to cover it so immediately.

This is beyond simply soliciting tips from readers. It more effectively puts the power of the press in the hands of the community — perhaps even better than the democratization of publishing that the internet has made possible via Wordpress and social media platforms—because with Partyline comes the ready audience.

…

During the summer, I met up with author and professor Jeff Jarvis at a New Jersey coffee shop.

I’d known Jeff for a while through our mutual participation in events hosted by the Center for Cooperative Media.

Jeff had just published The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet — and was about to head off for a talk at Google on it.

In the book, he deeply explores a theory originating from the University of Southern Denmark that, in Jeff’s summary on a recent podcast, argues:

1. Prior to the printed word, “ideas, thoughts, and information were passed around, mouth to mouth, in a conversational society. It changed along the way, there was no sense of ownership or authorship of stories.
2. With the dawn of print, “Our cognition of the world changes … inside these containers, or books — the Alpha and Omega neat beginning and a neat ending.” The printed word, and those in control of the press, become the authority.
3. Although we’re still in the midst of so-called “print culture,” with the dawn of social media and democratized publishing, things are beginning to look a lot like the pre-print days. Knowledge is passed around click by click. It changes along the way.

Jeff goes on, “We will have the opportunity to recapture some of what we might have lost in the age of print, though we will not forget what [we can] bring with us from print.”

As Jeff notes, his friend David Weinberger has stated that the “smartest person in the room is the room itself.”

…

As much as the press has radically spurred advances in literacy, education, science, government and more — it is still subject to a fundamental weakness that eventually emerges in all social and technological change: when a new status quo emerges, that same status quo will, with enough time, become resistance and block further progress.

And so, the “one-way” or “authority model” nature of local news media today has run into several problems that have emerged

• With declining staff, the press has fewer and fewer resources to accurately portray the story of the community it serves
• The stories that do get told are more frequently of those in power
• The psychological baggage of “what has worked in the past” is naturally blocking progress at legacy media companies

Fundamentally, the power of the press has always been in the hands of a few, and that favors those in power and the status quo.

Our vision for Partyline at RedBankGreen is to marry the printed word with the conversational dialogue of our past and future. To elevate voices that would otherwise go unheard and better tell the story of our community (see the ViBE model).

It is in the delta between today and tomorrow that an opportunity exists to hear those that we would otherwise not hear.

…

Madelyn’s essay recounts early and impactful experiences. One such experience:

But when a white man falsely accused me, a naive eight year-old, of stealing his daughter’s bracelet and called me a “dirty Mexican thief,” it became clear that I was somehow unwanted in America, my birthplace, my home. From then on, I developed a complicated relationship with my identity and I became fully aware of the fact that my journey towards achieving my dreams would be difficult.

She goes on to explain what the Dreamers Club meant to her, and why it was so important.

One club in particular made me feel most welcomed: the RBR Dreamers. In the Dreamers club, I felt safe, I was able to be myself, and my wildest dreams seemed to be at my grasp. I could make it into a selective school such as Cornell University and I could become an electrical engineer. My internal conflict with my identity disappeared whenever I walked into my room. I beamed with pride knowing that I am a Mexican-American, that we have some of the best food, that we are hard working and compassionate and take strength in our independence.

The publishing of this essay provides a powerful and unique perspective of someone that we need to hear. The sequence of events that ultimately led to its publishing began with a message from a Partyline user.

To add, the meeting where the Dreamers were reinstated was live-streamed in partnership with the high school newspaper partly due to a tip from someone who knew about our upcoming Partyline initiative.

This is the kind of community collaboration and conversation that we need to see in our post-parenthesis era. The smartest person in the room really is the room.

By continually innovating, breaking down and rebuilding our definitions of what local news is and how it's produced — we can consciously and continuously lift up those in our communities and around the world.

And there’s no higher purpose than that.

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Kenny Katzgrau is the Publisher of RedBankGreen, CEO of Broadstreet, and dad to two small but insane boys whose names, he recently realized, sound very optimistic: Ken and Will.

Red Bank Green for 100 years. Long live local news.