August 28, 2023: of anniversaries and beginning again

Monday, August 28, 1963 marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the occasion most remembered for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” oration. Over the weekend, thousands of people returned to the Lincoln Memorial for what organizers described as a “Not a commemoration – a continuation” of the Freedom Movement. (I am using “Freedom Movement” to what is generally known as the Civil Rights Movement after conversations with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran Ruby Sales. Sales notes that this is the way the activists referred to their work, seeing it as part of a long tradition of advocacy and resistance stretching backwards and forwards across time and distance.)

Current events have a cruel way of underscoring the need to stay in the fight against hatred and oppression. As the thousands gathered in Washington, police say a 21-year-old White man who hated Black people walked into a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, shot three Black strangers to death, then turned the gun on himself. The next day, mourners gathered at Jacksonville’s St. Paul’s AME Church. According to a report in The Guardian, Rev. Willie Barnes exhorted congregants to hold on to Jesus’ hands but confessed, “I’m fighting, trying not to be angry.” Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan wept, saying, “It feels some days like we’re going backward.”

In about one month, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) plans to hold its 108th Annual Conference in Jacksonville. For several months, ASALH leaders have criticized Florida’s political leaders for the restrictions they have imposed on the teaching American history in its public schools. Most recently, Dr. Johnetta Betsch Cole, president emerita of Spelman College and Bennett College, decried the Florida Board of Education’s imposition of new middle school standards demanding that children be taught “how slaves developed skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit.”  Noting the decades of scholarship documenting that enslaved Africans came to these shores with a wealth of skills and knowledge, Cole concludes,

Throughout my life that began in Jacksonville, Florida during the days of legal segregation, I have built positive relationships with White people who unequivocally admit to the injustice of enslavement.  I am left wondering who Florida’s new academic standards are meant to serve, because they clearly do not serve Black children, White children or any other children who are capable of far more honesty and courage than Florida’s school system seems to be willing to admit. We must do all that we can to stop the Florida Board of Education from requiring middle schools to teach these new so called academic standards that perpetuate ignorant and bigoted ideas about enslaved Africans who with their descendants have helped to build our country and are committed to continuing the struggle toward a more perfect union.”

Johnetta Betsch Cole, Ph.D. “Florida’s New Middle School Standards Will Harm All of Florida’s Children”

Reflecting this weekend on the anniversary, the news, and the work ahead, I found valuable insight in several episodes of Prof. Meacham’s “It Was Said” podcast. The podcast places great speeches from the 20th century in the context of their historical moment, and two excellent episodes give particular attention to the March. One, future Congressman John Lewis‘ “We Want Our Freedom Now,” illuminates how the young president of SNCC navigated the pressure from the older March leaders and even the White House to tone down criticism of the Kennedy administration and demands for immediate action in his draft. You can watch the speech below and hear the podcast episode here.

Lewis began, “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of…,”

The other episode, MLK Jr., The Last Speech, is actually focused on Dr. King’s April 3, 1968 “Mountaintop” speech, delivered the day before his assassination, but it includes the “I Have a Dream” speech as well, focusing on its little-discussed argument for economic justice – an argument that he would repeat and refine until the end of his life.

It was also at the 1963 March that Roy Wilkins, Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, announced the death of the protean scholar and activist William Edward Burghardt DuBois, a cofounder of the organization Wilkins led. Not long before, from his home in Accra, Ghana, Du Bois had been one of the many senders of congratulatory telegrams to the march organizers.According to a published excerpt from Charles Euchner’s book, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the March on Washington (Penguin/RandomHouse, 2011), Du Bois wrote, “One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long.” Nonetheless, Wilkins’ tribute had been begrudging. He had been sharply critical of Du Bois’ turn toward Marxism, initially saying, “I’m not going to announce that Communist’s death.” Fellow March leaders Bayard Rustin and Asa Phillip Randolph changed his mind, and Wilkins said,

“Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause. If you want to read something that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, published in 1903.”

Roy Wilkins cf Charles Euchner Nobody Turn Me Around

In a 1961 oral history recorded with Smithsonian Folkways, Du Bois recalled his turn from pure scholarship to activism. You can hear him tell his story in his own voice:

As Euchner and others have documented, Wilkins want Bayard Rustin to have a leadership role in the March because he was gay. He wasn’t alone in his antipathy. I couldn’t help but think of him when I opened my podcast feed this morning and found the final installments of the searing and thoughtful limited-edition podcast series After Broad and Market, helmed by veteran journalist Jenna Flanagan. (As of this writing, the website doesn’t have the most recent episodes posted, but they can be heard if you click on any of the podcast hosting links, and I imagine the website will be updated soon.) In June, Flanagan made a TikTok video introducing the series and explaining what the series was about and why it mattered so much to her.

@jflannys Say her name! Sakia Gunn! Sakia Gunn! Sakia Gunn! I have been waiting 20-years to unpack and retell this story. I was shook when I learned of the murder of 15-year old Sakia Gunn for being an out and proud lesbian in Newark, NJ. But I was more shook by the lack of attention and interest her story garnered. Black girls have the right to live openly, move freely and love unapologetically and my new Podcast, After Broad and Market explores why we still struggle to let that happen AND how Newarks Queer community is working tirelessly to keep Sakia’s name alive. Follow anywhere you get podcasts! #sakiagunn #pride #sayhername ♬ original sound – Jenna Flanagan

I have personal and professional connections to each of these stories – I’ve written in the past about how my parents, aunt and uncle attended the 1963 March on Washington (I was in the city but considered to young to March, so I saw it on TV.) I serve on the editorial board of ASALH’s Black History Bulletin. And when Sakia Gunn was murdered, I felt led to track the press coverage for the next two years on my blog, up to the time of the conviction and sentencing of her killer. Having learned about the murder from an email from a former student who had spent part of her adolescence hanging out at the Chelsea Piers and coming back to her Newark-area home in the wee hours, I had a visceral reaction as a woman, a mother, and educator that led me to write a poem, A Libation for Sakia.

Both the media monitoring work and the poem got some attention from activists, scholars and journalists at the time, and like Flanagan, Sakia’s story never left me, even as I went on to study, write and teach about other issues. So I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised when Flanagan and her colleagues contacted me for an interview about the work I did back then, but I was. You hear my voice in the first episode of the series, and in a bonus episode in which I read the poem. But that’s not the reason to listen to the series.

Listen to the series because Flanagan does a beautiful job of letting the people who were close to Sakia Gunn tell her story, and their own. She also gives center stage to the activists and community leaders who have been working to make Newark safer over the last 20 years. Listen, too, as she reflects on how Sakia’s story challenged her as a Black woman journalist, and it affected the thinking of scholars and artists. And listen as she connects the dots between what happened to Sakia and the depressingly similar murder of Philadelphia-born dancer O’Shea Sibley at a gas station in New York City earlier this summer.

In a June, 2023 interview about the podcast series, Flanagan told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, “As a young Black woman, [Sakia’s story] was one of those reminders that no, people don’t value your life in the same way. I think that’s part of the reason why the story just never left me.” Yeah, that part.

Bayard Rustin said, “When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” By that definition, Sakia Gunn died with dignity, but she shouldn’t have had to. Ella Baker, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and guiding spirit behind the creation of SNCC, said, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest,” and SNCC Freedom Singer Berniece Johnson Reagon put that in a song. This is the charge to us today.

Leveraging a usable past: family history and the epistemology of civic life

Editorial note: I started this essay in 2018 as I was working my way into the ideas behind my current project-in-progress American Storyworlds. I’ve revised it 116 times and it’s still a work in progress. I’m publishing it now, in its imperfect form, as I’m starting to make that project public. Also, I chose not to engage the current attacks on race scholarship, because that is a separate argument and this is already a very long post.

Nations are built on narratives. So much of the turmoil in which we Americans find ourselves has to do with the battle for control of the historical narrative on which our civic life is built. Whether individually or collectively, the way that we remember history has important implications for the way we constitute community, assess media credibility, and conduct civic life. In the wake of profound political, social, technological, and economic dislocations since the end of World War II, generations of scholarship unearthing the suppressed history of oppressed communities have helped to undermine grand narratives of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. They have also engendered backlash and cultural fragmentation.

In 1995, technical communications theorist Johndan Johnson-Eilola contemplated how networked, hypertext communications technologies would alter our ways of constituting identity and community. In an essay that was highly influential (and novel in form) for its time, he argued that we needed to understand this shift in the larger context of the shift from modernism to post-modernism and its concomitant loss of faith in the institutions, technologies, and social arrangements that were supposed to have put us on the inexorable path to progress. According to him, “Postmodernism can help explain such concepts as the rise of contract over permanent labor, the growth of global markets and information networks, interdisciplinary teams in business and industry, among other things. But we will gain productive and valued positions in the workplace only if we begin to understand these cultural developments in new ways.”

The backlash against both shifting circumstances and norms of discourse has been broad and deep: Hate crimes are on the rise; authoritarianism is resurgent. Violent protests over Civil War monuments, calls to change the faces on US currency, the debate over reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans, and arguments over social studies curricula are visible reminders of both our fragmented understanding of the past, and the divergent ways in which we harness the past to envision possible futures.

The historical narratives that frame our everyday lives come from our schools, our religious institutions, our civic and fraternal organizations, our families, the media we consume and the networks we create. Increasingly, they also come from information that is served to by opaque algorithms – search engines, social media platforms, and genealogy platforms that mine public records and members’ text, media, and DNA inputs to give subscribers a version of where they come from and to whom they are connected.

I’ve found that there are two sets of competing meta-narratives of American history: a dominant narrative held by the acknowledged descendants of (mostly European) voluntary immigrants, and a set of counter-narratives held by descendants of the indigenous people and of those who were brought here involuntarily from Africa. I refer to the “acknowledged” descendants of voluntary immigrants because many of us who are descended from those Native Americans and Africans also have European ancestors, many of whom raped our foremothers to produce children that they regarded as mere chattel. I refer to voluntary immigrants to account for those who came to the United States of their own volition from Africa, Asia and Latin America believing that there would be greater opportunities for them than there were in their countries of origin. The narratives don’t map neatly on to facile narratives of liberal, conservative or progressive ideologies, which is why I personally find most of the discourse about political polarization and tribalism incredibly unhelpful.

The dominant narratives hold that the United States was founded on noble ideals of liberty and equality, and while we haven’t always lived up to those ideals, we’ve been on a path of inexorable progress. To them, the system is fundamentally sound, and anyone who works hard and plays by the rules will eventually succeed. Failure is usually assumed to be a failure of individual character, poor parenting, or a degenerate subculture.

The counter-narratives hold that like the Athenians of old, the Founders only intended for the blessings of liberty to be available to men such as themselves, using wealth they extracted from the property and labor of indigenous people, indentured people, women, and enslaved people. Any progress we’ve achieved toward becoming a real democracy has been the result of agitation, that agitation must continue. Abolitionist and suffragist Frederick Douglas told us,“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Now, what that “agitation” should look like, what constitutes progress, and how any of this should be articulated are matters of considerable debate. One only has to ponder Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ oft-cited identification with the protagonist of Richard Wright’s protest novel Native Son to understand that agreeing that there is a thing called racism that limits people’s life chances is a far cry from agreeing on what the response to that empirical reality should be.

Journalism’s limits in facilitating public conversations

Journalists play a role in the development of collective memory and national identity, and the ways in which historical memory affects intercultural relations, public policy and the body politic. As Elizabeth Le has demonstrated, journalists ground their news analysis in culturally-specific historical narratives. For much of American history, mainstream journalism has upheld the dominant narrative – a narrative suffused with a belief in Black deviance and the importance of ensuring that the expansion of rights and social benefits are restricted to those who are deserving. For example, in her 2014 book, Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story, Natalie Byfield connects press participation in the rush to judgment of five Black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted for the brutal rape and beating of young investment banker to racist myths that justified 19th century lynchings. . Eric Deggans’ 2012 book, Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, documented ways in which mainstream news and opinion media exacerbated prejudice and xenophobia. Amy Alexander’s 2015 memoir, Uncovering Race: A Black Woman’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention, connected the lack of diversity in mainstream newsrooms to their failure to reflect the diversity of the communities they covered.

Mainstream news publications’ efforts to go beyond the dominant historical narrative have gained some traction in recent years. For example, Ta-Nehesi Coates’ 2014 essay,”The Case for Reparations” traced the historical roots of housing discrimination in Chicago as an example of generations of policies and practices that stole wealth from African Americans. The article sparked wide debate leading to a Congressional hearing and support from Democratic presidential candidates.

In a 2019 interview with New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, Coates said, “When I wrote ‘The Case for Reparations,’ my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing,” According to Coates, what’s needed is a thorough examination of the damage wrought by white supremacy, accompanied by “a policy of repair.” Even conservative pundit David Brooks agreed:

The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known. That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.

David Brooks, The Case for Reparations, March 7, 2019

A diverse and inclusive American polity requires the creation of more effective face-to-face and virtual spaces that permit an honest reckoning with our divergent understandings of history. The creation of such spaces poses challenges to journalists, historians and civic media designers that have yet to be fully articulated. We haven’t fully reckoned with the ways in which “the people formerly known as the audience” use media technologies to construct their own knowledge frameworks, and the ways in the owners of those technologies and malign actors exploit exploit those efforts.

In the classroom, I have encouraged students to use research methods derived from journalism, history and African American studies to develop family and community histories that inform a personal articulation of what it means to be American. I’ve then asked them to listen to other student and community members’ experiences to consider how their individual perspectives might be integrated into a collective vision of American identity. Students have responded positively to this approach, saying that it has broadened their understanding of their own intersectional identities in relation to others. These anecdotal experiences lead me to wonder whether there are ways that journalists and civic media creators might use similar methods to facilitate informed dialog and community building around historical memory.

Mediating family history

Genealogical research is one way that many of us construct personal knowledge frameworks. Over the last decade, the advent of such services as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org has accelerated that interest, with millions of people contributing records, photographs, family stories and DNA, giving rise to discourse communities in which evidence is shared and vetted among people who would not otherwise encounter each other. These massive databases have also attracted other interested parties, such as scholars and law enforcement, leading to debates over ethics and privacy in some instances.

Finding Your Roots, a television show on the PBS network hosted by Harvard University African American Studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, advances an optimistic vision of the potential of genealogical research to undermine prejudice:

“By decoding our DNA, and untangling the branches of our family, we’ll discover how blurred the lines that divide us truly are.” Henry Louis Gates, Finding Your Roots

“[W]e have more in common than we have differences, and color doesn’t mean a thing.” Joe Madison, radio host, on Finding Your Roots https://www.thecrisismagazine.com/single-post/2019/04/09/Radio-Host-Joe-Madison-Finds-His-Roots

With the expansion of digital archives and commercially-owned genealogy databases, I am alert to both the possibilities and dangers of these emergent technologies: algorithmic bias, surveillance and “sousveillance,” and the crafting of false, mythic histories in the service of ethno-nationalist ideologies. (Browne, 2014, Noble, 2016) At the same time, communities of practice such as the restorative narrative movement, the racial dialog work of David Campt and others, along with theorists such as Ramesh Srinivasan and Michelle Ferrier suggest design processes and computing architectures that might lead to the creation of constructive and non- exploitative spaces.

While I approach this topic from my own standpoint as an African American woman, I’m aware that many people with other backgrounds feel impelled to make similar explorations. Journalist, scholar and civic media entrepreneur Michelle Ferrier notes:


As bell hooks suggests, the overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance (hooks, 2481). So the task of my narratives was and continues to be to provide a space for those “shared sensibilities” that cut across gender, race, class and sexual practice.

The Signifying Quilt: A Patchwork-Type of Narrative

Communication scholar Peter Lunt has observed that explorations of family history have become one popular means of addressing this dislocation:

“[T]he idea of finding out about oneself through an exploration of the character and lives of ancestors is a growing social practice reflected in popular culture. Tracing one’s personal traits through past family members and extending the sense of family and identity back in time potentially enriches personal identity and link personal, social and cultural memory.”


Lunt, P. (2017). The media construction of family history: An analysis of “Who do you think you are?” Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research, 42(3), 293–307. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2017-0034

For all of the import that these meaning-making and community-building practices have for the people who engage in genealogical research and consuming media about it, attention from journalists has been limited. In a 2008 article for Memory Studies, journalism historian Carol Kitch notes that until recently, journalists and scholars have held the mundane interests and lore of their audiences in low regard, thinking “we are the ones who know what matters most.” However, the collapse of traditional journalism’s business model and the critiques of extractive journalistic practices advanced by such critics as Lewis Raven-Wallace have created a new openness to new ways of understanding and centering community information needs and collaborating with communities to meet those needs. (For examples, see Andrea Wenzel, Freepress, Sue Robinson) Might these epistemic communities of family historians be allies in journalists’ efforts to report true stories that are considered useful and trustworthy?

My interest in these possibilities are informed by my own experiences as a cisgender, middle-class, African American woman three generations removed from slavery, educated in elite, predominantly white universities, with a professional background as a journalist and professional communicator in corporate, non-profit and academic settings. My efforts to make sense of the places in which I found myself led to explorations of family and community history that made me acutely aware of the ways in white supremacy, patriarchy and class bias distort the knowledge that is available to us. But they also make me aware of the liberating potential of recovered ancestral memory.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I was a college student when I first became fascinated with researching my family history while watching the 70s miniseries “Roots” with my father. Although I knew that we had descended from enslaved people, I was shocked when my father casually remarked that his grandfather had not only been enslaved — he’d talked about seeing people get whipped and having their feet chopped off for running away. None of my elders had talked about knowing any family members who had been enslaved. I had no idea that I had grown up with a grandmother, great-aunts and great-uncles who were children of enslaved people. Roots loosened their stammering tongues. I had been interested in African American history since elementary school, but now I was animated by the possibility that there might be a way to understand how my family and I were, as Helen Epstein put it, “possessed by a past that [we] had not lived.”

As Roy Campanella II noted in an appreciation of Haley after the latter’s sudden death in 1992, Roots was an “astonishing feat of genealogical detective work across three continents” that began with his grandmother’s oral history about “the African” and reportedly resulted in Haley being able to trace his family back to the Gambian village from which his ancestor had been abducted. “In doing so,” Campanella added, “he told the story of 30 million Americans of African descent, made it possible for us to share in his profound journey of discovery, and won our admiration and respect.”

Or perhaps he told the story that we wanted to believe – that somehow it might be possible to reconnect what had been sundered by slavery and circumstance, and by so doing, build a high ground on which we too could stand, hoist our babies to the stars and declare, “Behold! The only thing greater than yourself!” While Roots was a pop culture phenomenon and a media sensation, historians and professional genealogists cast doubt on the accuracy of the the book. A plagiarism lawsuit was filed and settled.

Historian Donald Wright has reported that the power of Roots and resulting miniseries has been such that Haley’s putative ancestral village remade itself in the image of the novel and marketed itself as a tourist attraction. Despite its failings, the Roots phenomenon did help inspire a new generation of African American historians and genealogists to take up the task of finding and popularizing methods for excavating family histories. These included the founding of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in 1977, as well as the publication of Charles Blockson’s guide, Black Genealogy, the same year. Blockson’s work was part of larger movement of black scholars and activists – black studies, ethnic studies and women’s studies were fledgling fields during my college years. By placing the experiences and intellectual production of oppressed people at the center of their analysis, these scholars theorized new knowledge frameworks – such as intersectionality, queer theory and feminist theory – for understanding ourselves and our relationships to each other.

Learning to “read against the archive”

Blockson’s book gave readers lessons in archival research and his life’s work of archive-building sought to correct gaps, omissions and distortions in the archival records. His work was part of the intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 70s, but it echoed calls by earlier generations of social scientists, historians to undertake systematic studies of the lives African Americans with the goal of developing policies to support their progress in the years after Reconstruction. As far back as 1898, W.EB. Du Bois, considered one of the founding fathers of black studies, opined:


Americans are born in many cases with deep, fierce convictions on the Negro question, and in other cases imbibe them from their environment. When such men come to write on the subject, without technical training, without breadth of view, and in some cases without a deep sense of the sanctity of scientific truth, their testimony, however interesting as opinion, must of necessity be worthless as science ([1898] 1978:76)

cf Earl Wright, II and Thomas Calhoun, “Jim Crow Sociology: Toward an understanding of the origin and principles of black sociology via the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory

Sociologist Elliot Rudwick supported Du Bois’ indictment:


[T]he “general point of view” of the first sociologists to study the black man was that “the Negro is an inferior race because of either biological or social hereditary or both.” . . . These conclusions were generally supported by the marshalling of a vast amount of statistical data on the pathological aspects of Negro life.In short, “The sociological theories which were implicit in the writings on the Negro problem were merely rationalizations of the existing racial situation.” (P. 48)


cf Earl Wright, II and Thomas Calhoun, “Jim Crow Sociology: Toward an understanding of the origin and principles of black sociology via the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory

The fruits of this labor are evident throughout the academy and among serious journalists. There lies, at its heart, an expanded definition of intellectual activity coupled with the adaptation of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Speaking of the evolution of black studies, sociologist Abdul Alkalimat says:

Black intellectual history is rich and dynamic. It is constituted by the rich intellectual culture of black people, encoded in the political culture of everyday life. This includes messages in the quilts, in drum beats, and in children’s stories, popular music, presentation of self strategies and esthetic rituals in hair, dress and body motion, style and plain old conversation in the vernacular.

eBlack, Reflections and Research Practices, 2000

Commenting on the methods employed by Du Bois and other sociologists, historians and anthropologists who shared his commitment to antiracist scholarship, Alkalimat identifies five research practices at the core of their scholarship:

  • Compiling bibliographies
  • Archiving
  • Building data sets
  • Setting up sustainable organizations
  • Theory building

Before the 1990s, most of this work was generally ignored or dismissed by mainstream institutions, journals and publications. Du Bois’ Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, is now recognized as “America’s first major empirical sociological study” – combining ethnographic interviews, comprehensive data collection and analysis, archival material, data visualizations, and participant observation. Du Bois and his colleagues extended that methodology to the design and execution of the Atlanta University Studies, a series of systematic examinations of various aspects of black life conducted from 1897-1914. However, C.W. Anderson notes that Du Bois and other reform-minded urban sociologists “were systematically erased from the remembered history of sociology for more than a hundred years.” Instead, Robert Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago were credited with the creation of the first laboratory in urban sociology. In contrast to Du Bois and his contemporaries, the “Chicago School “ sociologists favored theory over empiricism, and statistical sampling over comprehensive data collection. (Also see Wright, 2016)

Had I spent my undergraduate years at a historically Black college or university (HBCU), there’s a chance that I would have learned about DuBois in my classes instead of seeking him out on my own. There’s a chance that I might even have learned about Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History with its Journal of African American History. However, I matriculated at Princeton. Consequently, the canonical sources I was trained to consult and the methods of inquiry I was taught were created by people who were unlikely to have been exposed to scholarship created by people of color. The canonical secondary sources penned by the people WEB DuBois derided as “the car-window sociologist[s]” either do not know or do not credit Black scholars and my community’s ways of knowing.

A case in point: In the semester before I learned about Great-grandfather, I did an independent research paper on the Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company (MESBIC) under the direction of Prof. Barbara Nelson, then on the faculty Princeton’s school of public policy and international affairs. MESBICS were investment firms licensed by the federal Small Business Administration that offered both equity and debt financing to entrepreneurs of color. SBICs still exist, but the MESBIC program went by the wayside some time ago. My interest stemmed from growing up in Philadelphia, where Rev. Leon Sullivan‘s church was doing transformational work through its job training center, affordable housing development, shopping center and a foray into light manufacturing.

It was these tensions – between what we were taught and what we lived, between what was prescribed and what we needed, between the interests we were being trained to uphold and the needs we hoped to address, that propelled the agitation for new academic disciplines that built on the work of such institutions as Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Freedom Schools and the Highlander Folk School. These were institutions that valued scholarship and rigor in the ultimate service of social justice. Pedigreed scholars partnered with organic intellectuals, journalists, and activists to combat miseducation and engender progressive change.

Thus, the first generation of African American Studies scholars didn’t just challenge the racist distortions and omissions of the established disciplines – they were championing a model of scholarship that the had already been rejected. As Abdul Alkalimat has noted, as African American Studies evolved, many of its leading scholars would also eschew community engagement and activism in favor of more traditional teaching, publishing and service. It is, however, this set of research practices and community engagement that holds promise for community-centered journalists today.

Finding my roots

Like most people, my own foray into genealogy was a personal quest to make sense of myself by understanding my family’s past.

Digging into census records and probate records made any pretense to dispassionate inquiry impossible. Because our existence was most frequently recorded in relation to our property value, with only as much detail as was required for the pecuniary or political purposes of the people who called themselves our masters. The slave census schedules only include the owner’s names, so I was forced to rely on family lore to find the records that most likely referred to my Great-grandpa and his family. Seeing that document was a gut punch, as I explained in this 2016 interview with Princeton University undergraduates studying the relationship between the University and slavery.

Facts, methods and mysteries

Genealogical research becomes guesswork when the subjects of the research were considered unimportant by the people who generated the records. Oral histories, family photographs and documents are essential, as is contact and information-sharing between scattered branches of the family. My father’s generation started organizing reunions in the 1980s to ensure that my generation would know his generation’s first cousins, and we could begin to document the family story. Two cousins built an extensive family tree that we published and disseminated in 1990. One of my cousins even went to Utah to dig into the Mormon archives there. In 1988, I teamed up with a photographer to create a photo essay exhibit that traced the arc of our family’s story from slavery to the late 1980s. So we had a great deal of information even before the advent of Ancestry.com and similar databases.

The advent of computerized genealogy search services has been both a blessing and a challenge. The cousins who had done the original genealogical research became our fact-checkers. Census records often misspelled names: Jordan Mitchell is variously referred to as Jordin and Jerfin and he’s given a non-existent son named Grover, who we’ve determined is actually George. Nelson Mitchell’s son Frayforan doesn’t appear at all, but his sister’s testimony led us to understand that he had been renamed either Frank or Frazier in various records, including his death certificate. One grandfather doesn’t show up as a member of the household in which we know he was raised – except, possibly as a “servant” in the 1900 census. And if that listing is accurate, his birthday was actually three years earlier than he thought. According to my uncle, that’s a possibility – he said my grandmother told him that my grandfather chose a birthdate because he wasn’t sure when he was born. Poor rural Georgians didn’t commonly have birth certificates. One of my uncles, born in 1921, learned that when he went to apply for a passport.

Between the oral histories and uncertain documents, this is what I’ve been able to confirm about my father’s family. My paternal great-great grandparents were Holland and Judy Priscilla Mitchell from Hancock County, Georgia. Holland was born around 1811; Judy Priscilla was born around 1824. According to my late Cousin Ella, either Holland or Judy Priscilla’s father might have been an Indian who was forced out of Georgia during the Trail of Tears. She didn’t know his name. The census records say that their parents were Negroes. Their slave master was a man named John HW Mitchell. According to their son Jordan, my great-grandfather, Holland was a barrel maker, a craft requiring considerable strength and skill. According to their daughter Elsie, all the slaves on the Mitchell plantation had to eat their meals from a horse trough. As small children, they saw whippings, beatings, mutilations. Elsie recalled that when news came that the Civil War had ended, they ran about the plantation shouting, “We are free!”

Jordan married Martha Holsey. Her father worked for Mrs. Linton Stephens – the wife of the former state Supreme Court judge and the sister-in-law of Jefferson Davis’ Vice President. It appears Lucius Holsey, bishop of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, was a cousin. Lucius’ white father acknowledged him and that left him in a somewhat privileged position. He became a leading advocate for Black rights in the wake of the Atlanta riots of 1906. One of Elsie’s sons might have gone into ministry and advocacy work with him in Atlanta. Most members of the family were farmers, though.

Jordan’s youngest daughter, Mattie, married Jesse Pearson. Not long before their marriage Jesse lived with his sister Christine and her husband Abraham. They worked on land owned by Abraham’s father, Guy. Abraham’s sister, Nettie, was a wardrobe mistress for Ma Rainey. She married Rainey’s piano player, who was known as Georgia Tom. The young couple moved to Chicago, where Nettie died in a car accident that also the baby she was carrying. Her heartbroken young husband turned wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” and Thomas A Dorsey became one of the founding fathers of Gospel Music.

Meanwhile, my mother told me that I should investigate her father’s lineage, although I didn’t make headway there until after her death in 2009. My grandfather, Owen Barnes, Sr., was drafted into World War II when my mother was a toddler. He died in a VA hospital when she was seven. She never got to know him, but she was right that his family was fascinating. Of course, by the time I started digging into his story, I had the benefit of Ancestry.com and other genealogical databases, and that would lead to a few surprises.

My grandmother kept a family Bible that had the name of Owen’s parents, so that was my starting point. Fortunately, there’s a sizable group of relatives on Ancestry researching this family. Through their shared trees, photos, census records and death certificates, I learned that, Owen Barnes, Sr.’s maternal grandparents, Lewis and Mary Smith McLaine, were born in 1847 and 1852, respectively, in Cecil County, Maryland. In the photos below, they both look to be of mixed race. Although we have the name of Lewis’ parents, it’s not clear what happened to them. By the time of the 1860 census, he is living with an unrelated group of people. He is, however, listed as a free person. He became a cobbler.

Mary’s father, Alfred G. Smith (1811-1884), was a millwright, and the 1870 census identifies him as a mulatto. Cecil County Maryland is home to the Perry Point Mansion House and Mill. It’s likely that Alfred worked there. The grist mill had been built by Henry Stump (1734-1814), whose daughter Mary married a man named Hugh Smith (1754-1839). Hugh Smith’s father, Thomas, had managed the mill, and Hugh took it over after his father died. They had a son named William, born in 1785. Ancestry’s algorithm suggested that William might have been Alfred’s father. If that’s correct, then part of the family’s lineage goes back to at least 14th century England.

At some point, Alfred and Mary found their way to Haverford, Pennsylvania, where they started their family. That’s where my great-grandmother Elva was born. Elva’s brother, Smith McLaine, married a schoolteacher who had, at some point, worked for the Institute for Colored Youth, now known as Cheyney University. Two of their daughters became STEM pioneers – although their contributions have only recently been acknowledged. I didn’t know these women, although I recall my mother referring to two of my grandfather’s cousins who were still living in the Philadelphia area. She couldn’t remember their names and I couldn’t find them before they died.

The daughters, Alyce Mc Laine Hall and Alma Mc Laine White, were gifted at math. A 1928 graduate of West Chester University, Alyce was hired by the War Department to be part of a secret team of women mathematicians who calculated the ballistics of missiles during World War II. She was the only African American on the team. They were known as the Top Secret Rosies, as in Rosie the Riveter. At war’s end, Alyce eventually returned to her earlier career as a math teacher in Philadelphia, but Alma had a 40 year-career working for the Navy.

Documentary filmmaker LeAnn Ericson first learned about Alyce Hall in the course of producing her 2010 film, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II. She interviewed four of the ten women who had been part of the project, but all she was to learn about Alyce was her name. As this Winter, 2014 article in the magazine of the Society of Women Engineers explains, Ericson eventually found and interviewed Alyce Hall’s family with the help of forensic genealogists. That’s how she learned about Alma’s accomplishments as well.

I’ve been in touch with a distant maternal cousin who did know these women. He credits them as a formative influence on his own decision to become a scientist. My grandfather died long before I was born – hence my mother’s sketchy memory of his cousins. The sisters lived into the early years of the 21st century, so it’s possible that members of our branch of the family could have gotten to know them. I don’t know how we became disconnected from grandfather’s family. Now that we have this history, I think about how it might help my younger cousins think more expansively about their own life possibilities.

The meaning of all this

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal Hurston’s character Nanny says, “Us colored people is branches without roots, and that makes things come round in queer ways.” Rootlessness is endemic in this postmodern age. Journalists trained in such disciplines as African American Studies and emerging practices of community-centered journalism and restorative narrative are equipped to collaborate with communities as they seek to forge individual and collective understandings of the past that permit constructive visions of the future. My next projects will be devoted to understanding what that might look like in practice.

Notes

  1. See W.E.B. Du Bois’ recollections of his student days at Harvard and his short story, Of the Coming of John, Harold Cruse’s contentious Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and its critics, Jill Nelson’s Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, Nell Painter’s Regrets, Pamela Newkirk’s Within the Veil, Amy Alexander’s Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention and the admirable collection,Presumed Incompetent for examples of the ongoing salience of this issue in both journalism and the academy.)

Building community by meeting information needs

This presentation was created for the 2021 ALJA convention in Trenton, New Jersey on September 24. This is a presentation for the Association of Liberian Journalists in the Americas centering upon new strategies for community engagement with audiences. Here are links to the projects referred to in the video:

Community-Centered Journalism – Andrea Wenzel

NPR’s Hypothesis-Driven Design guide to immersive storytelling

Free Press’ tools for creating stronger connections between newsrooms and communities

Trenton Makes Music

Outlier Media

What do 21st-century journalism educators need to know?

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Knight-Carnegie Initiative report on the Future of Journalism Education. A collaboration between two foundations and 11 prominent journalism schools and institutes, the initiative was formed in 2005 to address both long-standing concerns about the intellectual depth and breadth of journalism education and contemporary questions about how to add digital skills and entrepreneurship to the curriculum.

In 2007, I wrote my own short essay for Nieman Reports calling for a new approach to journalism education. I argued that, “The challenge for journalists—and journalism educators—is to think about ways to create dynamic curricula to enhance the practice of journalism. Such a challenge lends itself to the development of new and closer partnerships among journalists, technology specialists involved with communications tools, economists looking at new business models, and educators working with the next generation of potential journalists. ” Specifically, I called for:

  • the creation of an undergraduate journalism education major and related certification that would support the teaching of media literacy and multimedia technology skills in secondary schools,
  • the infusion of what has come to be known as computational thinking (the ability to formulate, analyze, and solve problems in ways that optimize what humans and computers do best) in our undergraduate and graduate curricula,
  • an alertness to the ways in which emerging and evolving computing and communications technologies will reshape our industry. I urged journalism educators to engage in interdisciplinary research and teaching collaborations and called for attention to the likely impact of artificial intelligence on our news distribution and consumption practices.

Some of this seems obvious now. No one argues whether computational thinking is important or whether newsrooms need technologists and multimedia specialists, for example. Similarly, no one argues the need for greater media literacy to combat disinformation and to foster greater civic participation. Every journalism program understands the need for digital and multimedia faculty – and that big data and AI matter. Data journalism and interactive journalism are recognized occupational specialties, and a fertile area of scholarship (See Nikki Usher, C.W. Anderson). Something akin to the open source software movement is emerging among journalism educators focused on innovation, with texts on such urgent topics as media entrepreneurship, data journalism, coding pedagogy, and verification. And no one argues the need for the new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and research partnerships.

Despite this, none of the articles in that Nieman special issue on Teaching Journalism in the Digital Age anticipated the degree to which the knowledge, values and skills required to deliver a 21st century journalism education require a fundamental rethinking of the requirements journalism educators should be expected to meet. What we are confronted with goes beyond the need to incorporate new specialties within the existing structure of journalism and mass communications departments. The transformation of our news and information ecosystems changes the nature of everything we do, and the contexts in which we do it.

We debate whether aspiring journalism educators actually need a PhD (and if so, in what?) , and how we should value professional experience, vs. academic credentials. We’re trying to get at the question of what all journalism educators should be expected to know, how specialties within the field can be defined, and come to conclusions about the academic and professional preparation best suited to the tasks.

The purpose of this essay is twofold: to instigate a conversation about areas of practice and pedagogy that are central to the challenges confronting us, and to highlight examples of work intended to confront these challenges. In particular, I want to focus on three areas that have been a focus of my own re-education over the last 30 years: journalism’s epistemologies, ontologies, and literacies. Ultimately, I hope this will inform our approach to designing curricula for graduate programs for journalism educators, and for thinking through strategies and standards for their ongoing professional development.

A bit about me: I’ve been teaching Journalism and Professional Writing for 30 years in a small undergraduate program. (We have a separate Communication Studies department with whom we work closely.) I came to academia with a background in science communications, corporate PR, and freelance magazine writing, During the 1980s, I witnessed the pervasive effects of hollowing out of the manufacturing economy. I was also part of a generation of people with minoritized identities (in my case, Black, female, a mother, urban, newly middle-class, newly disabled) who had gained entrée to spaces previously denied them (in my case, the Ivy League, the tech industry, affluent suburbs). I thought I might be able to help journalism and PR students understand what this emerging economy would look like and what it would demand of them.

I was also impelled by a larger set of public policy debates crystallized in a 1987 report by the US Department of Labor – Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century. Based on its demographic analysis, the report’s writers concluded that the America’s future required finding, cultivating and making space for people with backgrounds like mine. Specifically, it argued:

If the United States is to continue to prosper, policymakers must find ways to accomplish the following: stimulate balanced growth; accelerate productivity increase in service industries; maintain the dynamism of an aging workforce; reconcile the conflicting needs of women, work and families; integrate Black and Hispanic workers fully into the economy; and improve the educational preparation for all workers.

William B. Johnston et. al., https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED290887.pdf

I started teaching online journalism in 1996 and co-founded a department of Interactive Multimedia in 2003, partially hoping to create an environment for interdisciplinary learning and reflective practice. What I know about communications theory and journalism history beyond my Master’s degree is largely self-taught. What I know about programming, scripting, and design is either self-taught, a by-product of the eight years I spent at AT&T in the 1980s where even word processing required writing in Unix, or the product of two decades of research and teaching collaborations with computer scientists, media scholars and designers.

I do recognize that I am writing this at a time of existential crisis for journalism as a civic institution and as a financially viable industry. I’m also writing at a time when a global pandemic has accelerated and exacerbated threats to the existence of many colleges and universities. However, if democracy and civil society is to survive, some form of independent journalism must be part of the social contract. Whatever form that journalism takes, these questions will need to be addressed.

Challenge 1: Journalism’s epistemologies

How do we know what’s worth reporting and how do we get and vet what we report? These are essential questions that we attempt to address by hewing to a discipline of verification. The computational turn in journalism is the latest of a series of movements that can create more comprehensive, engaging, and more accurate reporting through the development and deployment of new tools for mining, analyzing and presenting information. It’s also a movement whose failings highlight the ways in which the news industry continues to grapple with unresolved historical rifts over objectivity, fairness, and the nature and needs of the publics journalists serve. And it’s empowered malign actors with tools to amplify violent ideologies, lies, and dangerous fringe ideas.

This June, 2019 Pew Research poll is just the latest of a long list of studies confirming that news consumers recognize the credibility crisis in journalism.

A chart showing Journalists are not blamed most for creating made-up news and information, but Americans say the news media are most responsible for fixing it

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Avid Ovadya advances a framework for he calls the credibility assessment model: “In summary,” he writes, ‘the answer to the question ‘What should we investigate if we want to determine whether something is credible?’ is that we need to investigate the evidence supporting the claims, the reputation of the network purveying the information, or some combination of the two. Journalists have created a number of fact-checking and verification operations to guide news consumers to credible information, But the problems of fake news and public skepticism persist.

Computational journalist and educator Jonathan Stray notes that the strategies that governmental agencies, platforms and news organizations vary widely in their effectiveness in combating misinformation. The most effective strategies and tools may be incompatible with the values of a free press and free speech. In 2019 paper (.pdf) presented to an international conference on the issue, Stray argued, “In societies with a free press, there is no one with the power to direct all media outlets and platforms to refute or ignore or publish particular items, and it seems unlikely that people across different sectors of society would agree on what is disinformation and what is not.” You can see Stray’s presentation to an international conference on countering misinformation.

Ovadya hopes the framework that his team is developing will be used to create fact-checking systems that can be run by networks of bots on large data sets. But finding reliable measures of evidence and reputation that are free of implicit bias and accepted in a wide range of contexts is proving to be a wicked problem. As Cathy O’Neil notes in her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, data that appears unbiased is often anything but:

The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

Blurb for Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction

While the definition of journalistic objectivity has never been stable, there’s no current consensus on what it means and whether it is attainable and desirable. David Mindich, Pamela Newkirk, Natalie Byfield and Lewis Raven-Wallace are among those who have persuasively argued that even in the good old days when journalism was more trusted, news organizations often failed to meet their own standards for credible sourcing, representative coverage and political independence. These failures, in large measure, were failures to accord epistemic authority to those on the less privileged side of the Robert Maynard’s “fault lines” of race, class, gender, geography and generation. (As Mark Dery has noted, this failure persisted has into the digital era.)

All journalism educators should be conversant with these debates and the evolving standards of practice that emerge from them. This especially applies to professors of the practice who might have absorbed the facile notion that the most objective reporting “plays it down the middle.”

Challenge 2: Journalism’s ontologies

Ontology is that branch of philosophy that seeks to name what “is” in the world. To say that in the past, journalists were gatekeepers is to make an ontological statement. So are definitional distinctions between “news,” “features,” “entertainment,” etc.

Similarly, In computer science, ontology refers to the act of defining the categories and hierarchies that are used to structure information in algorithms and databases. In a digital age, journalism’s ontologies are represented in both the human and technological structures of news ecosystems.

David Ryfe argues that the fundamental crisis facing American journalism in particular, and Western journalism, generally, is ontological:

Today, in the field they once dominated, journalists find themselves standing cheek by jowl with a vast array of other news producers: from community blogs to corporate communications offices, and from nonprofit organizations to advocacy groups. Many of these organizations have little interest in or knowledge of journalism. Yet, they produce and distribute as much if not more news as journalists.

In this context, the question of what journalism is, and is for, and how it is to be distinguished from an array of other news produces, is raised anew.

Ryfe, D. (2019). The ontology of journalism. Journalism, 20(1), 206–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/8756087918809246

One of the challenges to journalists’ efforts to convey those distinctions is that many members of the public they seek to serve don’t see journalists the way they see themselves. Brendan Nyhan and George Lakoff are among the researchers who have taught us that the simplest claims of fact can land differently with different audiences. To a disturbing degree, substantial percentages of Americans agree with former Pres. Donald Trump’s assertion that mainstream news organizations are the “enemy of the people.” Take the topline results of this August, 2018 Ipsos online poll, for example:

While a plurality – 46% — agree “most news outlets try their best to produce honest reporting”, there are very stark splits by the partisan identification of the respondent with most Democrats (68%) generally believing in the good intent of journalists, but comparatively few Republicans (29%). And when we ask questions with specific partisan cues, the political split is very wide. For instance, 80% of Republicans but only 23% of Democrats agree that “most news outlets have a liberal bias,” and 79% of Republicans but only 11% of Democrats agree, “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly”. Returning to President Trump’s views on the press, almost a third of the American people (29%) agree with the idea that “the news media is the enemy of the American people,” including a plurality of Republicans (48%).

Americans’ Views on the Media: Ipsos poll shows almost a third of the American people agree that the news media is the enemy, August 7, 2018. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-media-2018-08-07

Similarly, public perceptions of the degree to which journalists fulfill such traditional roles as serving as watchdogs holding the powerful to account are divided along sharply partisan lines. This 2018 poll from Pew Research illustrates that division.

In 2017 and 2018, partisan divides in support of the news media's watchdog role largest ever measured

There’s a broad agreement that rebuilding trust in journalism requires finding new ways to connect with communities – and that requires developing products and approaches that respond to specific community needs. Monica Guzman offers this guide for engaging audiences. The Democracy Fund has engaged in a multi-year effort to identify best practices, tools and funding mechanisms for inclusive, community-driven journalism. Free Press offers guides to help communities and news organizations collaborate to improve news coverage.

These efforts are as effective as the depth and breadth of the constituencies they engage. There is evidence that news organizations aren’t meeting that bar now. A May, 2019 Pew survey found that the people most likely to be interviewed by local news outlets are most likely to be older, educated, white men.

The same survey found that the percentage of Americans who had spoken to a local journalist declined between 2016 and 2019.

Sue Robinson has produced a guide for journalists seeking to diversify their sources, drawing upon research conducted in cities across the United States. Resource constraints are major issue, Robinson reports: “With contracting newsrooms, journalists of all colors find themselves stretched thin in reporting on local communities such that all voices and perspectives can be represented.” Noting that many members of marginalized communities have justifiable fears about opening up to the press, she calls for, “rethinking traditional journalistic notions such as “critical distance” and re-conceptualizing established relationships to sources and audiences so that source networks expand. ”

Similarly, improved reporting on rural America also requires a fundamental rethink. Letrell Deshan Crittenden and Andrea Wenzel underscored this in their April 2020 Tow Center report, The road to making small-town news more inclusive. Crittenden and Wenzel conducted focus group research in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a rural community that New York Times columnist David Brooks depicted in a 2001 book as uniformly pastoral, conservative and white. But Chambersburg is diverse, and the lack of a common and inclusive local news source has reinforced racial divisions and impeded civic dialogue. Black and Latinx community members argued that news coverage of their community is either stereotypical or nonexistent, with deleterious consequences for local governance. White respondents downplayed racial tensions and decried perceived liberal media bias. Latinx participants called for more Spanish-language news sources.

This kind of qualitative research informs the movement to integrate design thinking into journalism practice and pedagogy. Design thinking can be a great entry point to developing and teaching strategies for more inclusive news reporting, presentation, and community-building. It also opens the door to deeper questions about the affordances and limits of the technologies at our disposal. Computer scientist Ramesh Srinavasan has argued that if we approach the development of information technologies with cultural humility, our databases and content management systems might be reimagined to reflect how the communities we are designing for create and preserve knowledge. Journalists, designers and computer science ought to be in collaborative conversation about the ideas that Srinivasan is advancing. You can learn more by reading the summaries of his projects and the elaboration of his ideas in his books as Whose Global Village? , After the Internet, and Beyond the Valley.

Challenge 3: Journalism’s literacies

In a 2018 Nieman Reports essay, Cindy Royal, a leading scholar and curriculum developer in the area of coding pedagogy for journalism, argues persuasively that too many journalism faculty resist learning and teaching the skills students need to meet employers’ growing needs. Royal notes a 2018 study by Amanda Bright documenting this bottleneck, and noting that innovation, to the degree that it is happening, is concentrated in larger, better funded programs. Royal calls for the inclusion of digital technology design and development in Communications PhD curricula and a reworking of institutional recruitment, tenure, and promotion practices to place greater value on teaching, research and practice in these emerging critical areas. In a separate Nieman essay she argues that, at the very least, every journalism faculty member needs to know how to teach some fundamental technical skills, such as how to scrape a website.

Mindy McAdams agrees. McAdams is a pioneer in online journalism practice and teaching who has influenced thousands of online journalists with her workshops, blog posts and books. In an October, 2019 telephone interview, she observed that too many journalism educators who don’t consider themselves technology specialists “think they don’t need to know about the tech.”

“I feel like if you are In the field of chemistry you take it upon yourself to know what’s happening in the whole field,” McAdams said. For example, “As AI becomes such a buzzword, how many people who are journalism educators even know what is meant by that? They could know more about it if they follow it as a news topic.”

Royal created CodeActually, a coding curriculum for journalism and communications students. And if you are baffled by AI, McAdams has a helpful lecture series on YouTube, AI in Media and Society, that will bring you up to speed.

My own thinking about what Royal and McAdams are saying is “yes, and.” The technological transformation of news gathering has changed every aspect of journalism practice, and I can’t conceive of an aspect of the curriculum that can be taught without rethinking tech’s role. That role is more profound than I realized back in 2009, when I argued that journalists needed to understand computational thinking.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that knowing how technology affects what journalists can do and how that’s received is more important than knowing how to “do” the technology. And it’s equally important to understand what the technologies, and the thinking behind them, do – especially to people and communities in information deserts or who are targets of disinformation. (This reading list necessarily starts with Meredith Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence, but we need journalism-relevant analyses of the work of Simone Browne, Cathy Davidson, Safiya Noble, Ruha Benjamin, Virginia Eubanks,, Mar Hicks, and Andre Brock, for starters.

Here are four examples that might give pause to faculty who think that their teaching and practice are unaffected by technological change :

Journalists have had to rethink the inverted pyramid in light of research on the impact of linguistic framing. Journalists’ assumption that audiences trust a dispassionate recitation of facts in perceived order of importance is no match for a media ecosystem dominated by social platforms that make it easy to publish and amplify all kinds of misinformation and disinformation. That’s why linguist George Lakoff advises that journalists substitute the “truth sandwich” for stories about lies and misinformation:

Truth Sandwich:
1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the specific language if possible.
3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.
Hear more in Ep 14 of FrameLab w/@gilduran76

Originally tweeted by George Lakoff (@GeorgeLakoff) on December 1, 2018.

Lakoff’s recommendation is grounded in his decades of work in linguistics, cognition and neuroscience. This video provides a helpful introduction.

To create content that will be understood as truthful and gathered in good faith, we have to understand how our brains process information and evaluate its credibility.

Our audience engagement strategies and technologies aren’t value neutral. Journalism practitioners, educators and scholars need to be able to engage the questions Andrew Losowsky and Jennifer Brandel raised in their session on audience engagement ethics at the 2018 Online News Association conference:

‘Audience engagement’ is the hot new thing in journalism; but most journalists are pursuing it without understanding the risks – for the community and for the newsroom – of inviting the audience into a conversation. What happens when people who aren’t used to being sources share a sensitive, deeply personal story? What happens when we reach out to communities for information, but don’t stick around to answer questions or address concerns? How do we build trust authentically, without resorting to a journalistic sleight of hand to get reluctant sources to talk? 

We urgently need to establish ethical frameworks around this work, or we risk further erosion of trust in journalism, and could even be endangering people’s lives.

Optimizing engagement tools to promote accurate information and constructive discourse is no mean feat. A March, 2019 article in Recode detailed Twitter’s stymied efforts to create incentives for constructive conversations on the platform. One fundamental challenge is understanding how to gauge the “health” of a conversation.

Technology has breached the church-state divide between the business and editorial sides of news in subtle and overt ways. The Columbia Journalism Review has argued that journalists need to understand how advertising technologies “influence the practice, distribution, and perception of journalism.”

Efforts to assess address the information needs of underserved communities can be facilitated or impeded by the way we deploy audience engagement technologies and related strategies. For example, Sue Robinson studied how mainstream journalists’ narrow sourcing and reliance on social media posts to gauge African American community views of a charter school controversy in Madison Wisconsin contributed to important blind spots in their reporting. She notes, “Despite the optimism that digital networks will diffuse power through entrenched structures, scholarly evidence has shown how online networks act as echo chambers for the powerful. In these spaces, offline inequalities not only persist but are exacerbated in digital spaces,”

We need to analyze journalism technologies and storytelling methods through the lens of critical computing. In his 2013 book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation and Expression, D. Fox Harrell explains that

“[C]ritical computing entails critically assessing the potential of the technology being researched and developed to engender conceptual change in users and the potential of the technology to engender real-world change in society….. Critical computing systems are built on cultural computing groundings, which in turn are informed by subjective computing research aims.”

D, Fox Harrell

Because those subjective aims can reinforce oppressive systems, Harrell stresses the importance of bringing diverse perspectives to the tech development process. As we embrace various dynamic storytelling tools for journalism – augmented reality, virtual reality and gamification, for example – we need to be cognizant of these cultural groundings and subjective aims, and we need well-researched pedagogies that address them.

Those pedagogies need to address not only how we tell individual stories in an ethical, accessible and inclusive way, but also how we help members of vulnerable communities harden their media ecosystems against propaganda and disinformation. For example, Howard University’s Truth Be Told News project has been combatting misinformation in and about African Americans for years in the tradition of the historic Black press. But it’s unlikely that the project’s creators ever envisioned the troll-powered Russian disinformation campaigns unleashed on social media in 2016 and 2020 to discourage African Americans and Latinx voters from participating in the electoral process. In December, 2020, Facebook and the National Association of Black Journalists launched a Fact-checking Fellowship that will fund journalists for one year’s work with an established fact-checking outfit. It would be wonderful if there were parallel initiatives supporting basic research on these issues at institutions such as Howard that are deeply connected to the communities being targeted. At the University of Buffalo, Siwei Lyu is doing NSF-funded research on helping people and systems detect deepfakes. Computational journalists need to be part of these research projects.

Conclusion

It’s hard to think about what journalism educators will need to know when we don’t know what journalism will become. Nic Neumann’s January 2021 report on journalism’s trends and predictions for the Reuters Institute identifies far-reaching changes in editorial practices and business structure:

2021 will be a year of profound and rapid digital change following the shock delivered by Covid-19. Lockdowns and other restrictions have broken old habits and created new ones, but it is only this year that we’ll discover how fundamental those changes have been. While many of us crave a return to ‘normal’, the reality is likely to be different as we emerge warily into a world where the physical and virtual coexist in new ways.

Nic Neumann, Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2021

However, we do know that the survival of democratic civic values requires a cadre of educators and leaders who can serve as advocates, defenders and innovators of the best that journalism has to offer. This will require more robust research and debate that goes beyond the “Do you need a PhD?” debate.

A 21st-century journalism department or school requires faculty with newsroom experience and expertise in the rhetorical and literary forms underpinning storytelling across platforms and in social environments. (Yes, that means writing and shoe-leather reporting skills are still necessary. They’re just no longer sufficient.) It also requires both data journalists and computational journalists who understand and adhere to principles of algorithmic justice. It needs social scientists who can teach the quantitative and qualitative skills needed to assess community information needs and translate those needs into reporting that will be seen as trustworthy and useful. It needs specialists in media psychology and ecology who are conversant with emerging technologies. It continues to need legal specialists and ethicists. It needs specialists in entrepreneurship and tech management, because news organizations are tech enterprises now. And it still needs historians – although the journalism history canon needs substantial revision and expansion. I don’t know of a Masters or Ph.D. program that does all of those things well. However, the areas I’ve outlined here may be a way of invigorating the imagination about what’s needed and what’s possible.