June 20, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Police Brawl in DC: A Case for Citizen Journalism
COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Washington, DC, June 20, 2007
Pandemonium.
Lights flashing, a spiral of screaming, hysterical phone calls, a flash fire - combustible Columbia Heights - ignited.
It was a war zone, ground zero - not a neighborhood, not even anything physical - hate.rage.fear.heat, low hanging, oppressive smoldering chemicals, waiting for the spark, flash point fire.
I got off the metro at the Columbia Heights stop at around 8:30pm June 19, 2007.
The explosion was before me: complete chaos, nearly 25 cop cars, blocking 14th St. NW, lights blazing, satanic disco, and everywhere people screaming: into cell phones, at cops, at each other.
Sirens, screams, and DC’s inescapable heat.
Near me, a woman screamed the story into a phone; she was shaking, near hysterical: Two teenage girls had been fighting, the cops had arrived to bust things up, and then [allegedly] taken the arm of a bystander - a teenage girl, a ‘chile’ - and busted her head against a car and started roughing her up.
From there it had exploded; everyone screaming at everyone.
I whipped out my camera, shaky from the 4 hours of sleep I’d managed to snag on my way back from Portland, through Phoenix, Vegas and finally DC.
Get that the fuck out of here! Get on with yourself! Don’t point that at me! screamed one woman - I’m not! I’m taking pictures of the cops! ((I’m on your side! - I didn’t say - I’m press! - I didn’t say!!)) - Keep walking! Keep walking! she screamed, and I did, because I was tired, and this was not my fight.
I could have circulated, taking notes, more pictures, trying to get the story, but I knew she was right. The story was what that woman was screaming into her phone - not my transcription of it. People talk about citizen journalism, and they talk mostly of the elites - white soccer moms contributing play by plays of their children, pictures and videos galore; lawyers posting nuanced descriptions of the latest city council development.
But this - sweat, fear, alleged police brutality, raw emotion, a neighborhood terrorized by gunshots and intermittent police presence that now was as frightening as the drive-bys murdering 13 year olds - this is the stuff that “citizen journalism” should be made of, not yuppies posting restaurant reviews.
A search of Google News turns up nothing about last night - a terrifying night in Columbia Heights - my community message board has nothing.
Background on the Columbia Heights violence:
- Columbia Heights Shootings Cause Alarm, WashingtonPost.com
- Three Shot, One Killed, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
- In Face of Losses, A Fight to Save Area, WashingtonPost.com
- ‘Ghetto sun’ burns bright, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
- Teen Charged in Youth’s Slaying in ‘Shooting Melee’, WashingtonPost.com
The Washington Post has written some amazing pieces about Columbia Heights violence recently, but it’s impossible for one reporter to capture everything - and never with the intensity of last night, with women screaming the story into their phones and the muggy night air.
This is the story of the summer.
If I was the editor of a local publication, with reporters at my disposal, this is what I’d do.
I’d send my people out into the community for the summer. It would be their job to make friends with trusted community leaders, in the churches, community services, and schools. It would be their job to comb every source: every community newsletter, bulletin board, barber shop, church social and blog where citizens were spreading the news themselves. It would be the reporter’s job to earn trust and build sources.
From there, I’d ask them to deputize community voices - precocious writing students, the empassioned families of shooting victims. Give people the means of telling their own stories. Give people hope - that when something truly horrible happens in their community, that they have the means to document it; that [alleged] police brutality doesn’t begin and end with a rough shove onto sizzling summer concrete.
I’d set up easy ways for citizens to contribute their stories - a voice mail box where they could tell the story as it happened, an easy way to email the pictures that nearly everyone was snapping on their cell phones last night.
I’d have my reporters perform a number of roles - soliciting content from their community, while creating it themselves. Reporters would weave together pictures from the fight, combined with user-contributed audio accounts of the brawl, into slideshows for the website. They would interview community members while encouraging them to contribute content themselves; in effect turning interview subjects into viral marketers for the publication.
And because the community I was trying to serve would have limited access to the web, I’d be sure to create a print-product that my reporters and trusted community members could circulate as they did their jobs of reporting and source-gathering. Even something as simple as a 8.5×11 newsletter that others could photocopy and distribute themselves would serve multiple purposes: 1) reporting the news in a medium that was accessible to the community it was serving, 2) soliciting user contributions, and 3) creating a feedback loop between community and publication.
In collaboration with the community, my reporters would eventually be able to create a number of media products:
- Traditional reporting in a newspaper
- A rapidly-updated website, with professional and citizen content
- A micro-distribution newsletter
It’s a lot of work - no denying it. But if you lived, like I do, in Columbia Heights, afraid to walk home at night, distrustful of the police you [allegedly] see brutalizing teenage girls, hearing the gunshots that are kids killing kids, you’d be happy to find even a 8.5×11 piece of paper on your doorstep, telling you that at least somebody was paying attention, and you had the means to fight back.
Tags: citizen, community, conversation, journalism
Wayne Garcia:
June 20, 2007 at 1:08 pm
damned interesting and a perfect case for open source journalism, with citizens and trained journos working to craft info that can change the status quo. You just know that every single day, millions of events big and little occur all over our nation, in our neighborhoods, that get no notice from the MSM. That biz model can no longer accommodate covering stories like this.
cresmer:
June 20, 2007 at 1:31 pm
It’s inspiring to read this.
I think there are two reasons why this sort of work is not happening more at our papers:
1) it’s expensive.
2) the people who pay the bills, for the most part, still don’t get why they should invest in it. They’re afraid of it, and most importantly, most of them just don’t understand it, or web 2.0. Which is probably why they’re afraid of it.
I think if we want this to happen at our “papers”, we just have to do it ourselves, for free if that’s what it takes, because the work needs to be done. Eventually someone will pay for it. And we have to keep encouraging the bean counters to get online and look at this stuff. Like I said, it’s inspiring.
I wish you had told that woman you were with the press.
LauraFries.com:
June 20, 2007 at 2:05 pm
I don’t think this is expensive - it just requires people willing to work hard because they believe in what they are doing. (Ahem: journalists.)
EQUIPMENT: I use a 3 year old camera that’s been dropped in (literally) 15 countries and a dozen states. My Powerbook is equally abused.
The people I saw on the street were taking photos and videos with their cell phones - I think it’s our job as journalists to cull their material and present it professionally.
ONLINE COMMUNITY: Creating an online community using open-sourced blog software is incredibly cheap - the software is free, and either a house designer or a freelancer should be able to build templates for such a blog in a matter of hours.
[Integrating it into your site and publicizing it requires work, of course, but we’ll skip that for now.]
PRINT MICRODISTRIBUTION PRODUCT: Heck, this is easy! AAN commissioned the creation of a Wordpress plugin (from the wonderfully talented Ben Millen, arcticsounds.com) that exports WP content directly to PDF, creating a microdistribution product in seconds. The plugin needs refinement, but that’s what open source is for.
This is how we created the first edition of our convention newsletter. Due to time constraints and software bugs, we created the following with InDesign templates; editor Jon Whiten adapted web content for print, and ran off the product at Kinko’s.
MANPOWER: Yeah, this is where time is a factor. It definitely takes an editor willing to commit one or more reporter’s time to a story like this, to really let themselves become involved in a community. But is that any different than allowing a reporter to spend weeks on an in-depth cover story?
Violence in Columbia Heights is one of the stories of DC summer - it gets to the heart of gentrification, youth violence, drug abuse, police presence and governance issues in DC. It’s my opinion that it’s worth a reporter’s time.
Community-sourced reporting is different - one might even call it alternative.
cresmer:
June 20, 2007 at 2:25 pm
I completely agree with you that this story is worth a reporter’s time. Completely. Totally. In fact, I agree with everything you said about how easy it is to use the tools you described.
That said, the kind of deep involvement you’re talking about is non-existent at our paper. Our reporters never spend that much time on a story (sad but true).
Of course, we’re a teeny tiny weekly in one of the smallest markets in the country. Somebody in DC should be able to afford to task a reporter to that story.
But I think we reflect the reality of many altweeklies. We just can’t spare the reporting staff time for stories like this. Which is why, if we’re going to do them, reporters (and, ahem, web editors) have to be willing to go above and beyond to make it happen.
LauraFries.com:
June 20, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Also - a caveat: I was in this situation as a resident, not as a reporter. I’ve told the story above from my limited vantage point of living on this street, and reading published news reports. I employed a non-newsy voice and told the story from my perspective as someone walking home after work - someone whose full time job includes writing a blog on web publishing. The violence I saw last night seemed to be an apt object lesson on the value of citizen journalism to tell untold stories that matter to communities.
Jeff Fobes:
June 21, 2007 at 10:31 am
What a great argument for exploring fresh approaches that build on
street savvy, tech savvy and a love for empowering the grassroots.
Gannett sees the glimmer of it with their citizen-journalism efforts.
But I seriously doubt that mega-business will ever grasp the import of decentralization.
Maybe all we have to do to get started is hire young (or young minded) journalists who are ready to share the power, rather than build their own portfolio of bylined clips. And I think here lies a key hurdle: getting reporters to see their work as a community service that empowers others, helps *others* tell the stories.