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- 12 April 2024
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Meet the Sheroe Championing Inclusive Journalism
By Richard Leiby courtesy BIPOCXChangeAlicia Bell has long been in the vanguard of the drive to diversify newsrooms and also to right the wrongs that media organizations have inflicted upon Black people. Her most recent position is as director of the influential Racial Equity in Journalism Fund housed at the Borealis Philanthropy, but her work goes back further.
She was founding director of the Media 2070 group at Free Press, which called in 2020 for media reparations and "a national reckoning on the history of systemic racism in U.S. media." It also noted that ”Consolidated media power has curtailed Black people’s ability to create and control the distribution of our own narratives. Instead, our stories are too often told by other people who get it wrong.”
The focus of the work, Ms, Bell says, came down to the question, "How do we repair past harm?"
"And how do we create these brilliant features of journalism that serve everyone? Where everyone's thriving?"
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That is where community-focused and inclusive journalism can come into play -- with the help of funders that make paradigm shifts possible.
"We're helping solve those problems right now so that folks can continue to exist long enough to see those futures and to experience those future journalists," Ms. Bell says. "So what we do is we mobilize, and we build community amongst a set of donors and funders."
"So whoever wants to come together and resource Black, Indigenous, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern journalism, we build community amongst those folks. And then from there we redistribute those resources to BIPOC-led and -serving newsrooms. We're also thinking about how to connect newsrooms to alternative, regenerative sources of revenue."
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Bell, who once worked with parents in the Head Start program, thinks in new ways about the human side of the profession: "We are resourcing practitioners, so connecting them to opportunities for rest. Because if anybody knows a journalist, you will know that they are tired. We try to connect them to opportunities for play and fellowship and community with each other."
"And then we also work on resourcing a culture of repair, because what we know is that we can't just build healthy, fat fish that are swimming in a dirty pond. So we try to clean the water and build healthy fat fish at the same time.”
Prior to her media reparations work, "we had a first foray into journalism through engagement journalism,” which entailed “supporting newsrooms in North Carolina and also across the United States to build community-engagement processes and practices in their newsroom.”
Click Photo to View MMCA 2024 Sheroes in Media Awards Interview Clip (Photo Credit MMCA)
One newsroom she was working with in North Carolina was doing “incredible” work, she says.
"We were bringing in artists and we were bringing in coffee shop partners. We were bringing in small businesses. We had education organizations that were joining politicians that were joining in these conversations. And so we're hosting these kinds of collective conversations around accurate holistic journalism across the city of Charlotte."
“Then, one night, we had an event around housing, and I met up with the editor ahead of time and she was crying…I was confused because nothing was going wrong. Everything seemed to be on point – all the logistics were right for the event.”
It turned out that the editor was crying because her staff had just been offered buyouts by the paper’s owners – which would later lead to a staff exodus, Ms. Bell says.
“They had a diversity of representation on the newsroom side,” she says. "As much as we tried, it was really difficult to regain that momentum."
“That core group of people dissipated. Some of them left journalism altogether. Some of them went to other news organizations. Some of them moved to other cities. There was also a lot of community trust that was lost."
Publishable article by Richard Leiby courtesy BIPOCXChange
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