Team Reflections on Process

It is worth noting that all Curious City questions go through a rigorous editorial process, as was illustrated at team meetings. Meetings were held around a table in the project’s corner of WBEZ’s buzzing, open floor plan newsroom. Behind them, Post-it notes affixed to a computer monitor seemed to satirize the jargon of audience metrics: “1) Grow audience. 2) Kill audience. 3) Eat audience.” The editor, Allee, and the multimedia producer spent nearly an hour vetting which questions should be selected for upcoming voting rounds. Each round contained three questions clustered by an overarching theme. During the meeting, the producer shared several possible groupings of questions with internal working themes such as business, the natural world, and sub-communities. Questions under consideration were a mix of the newly submitted and second-place runners-up from previous voting rounds.

Over the course of discussing the pros and cons of each category, several editorial considerations were raised. Allee rejected a question related to a lead contamination incident, as the newsroom was already covering a similar story. A question that would have required gathering sound outside was tabled due to the dictates of Chicago weather. A series of questions related to Chicago bars was held for later out of concern for its tone. “We can only do so many of a particular topic or tone,” explained Allee, adding that his team tried to include a mix of “fun” stories versus “reporter-y” stories, history stories versus accountability stories, etc.

Going through some of the questions, Allee occasionally noted that such-and-such staff reporter or regular freelancer had interest or expertise related to a particular question. Questions were also considered with an eye toward expanding geographical coverage. When looking at a question tied to Lake Michigan, Allee noted that they could cover the story regionally by basing the story in Indiana or a northern suburb. The discussion was also mindful of who was asking the question. When three different listeners asked the same question, they chose the version proposed by a question-asker who appeared to be Latino (when the other two question-askers appeared to be non-Hispanic white). When they had to makes choices between equally valuable questions, they would attempt to include a listener who either came from a location in the city they heard from less frequently, or from a listener who was a person of color or other less represented group. They would then notify the other question-askers that a question similar to theirs was going to be addressed.

The team members also considered the perceptions of audience members when questions were tied to specific cultural backgrounds. For example, they rejected a grouping of questions that would have pitted a question related to Koreatown against a question related to Chinatown, explaining that they did not want to create situations which could be perceived as setting ethnic groups up to compete against one another.

Interestingly, many questions from outreach areas focused on issues of accountability (regarding the distribution of resources across the region and issues within local governance, for example). All three outreach stories produced to date have been accountability stories. Nevertheless, Allee and Curious City’s outreach producer said that while it was not surprising to receive accountability questions from areas they were targeting, which included Black and Latino communities with histories of disinvestment, they sought to be open to all types of questions from residents of these areas: “Sometimes, a lot of times, they’ll say something that is meaningful and local to them. But sometimes they won’t,” said Allee. “Sometimes you’ll go to a park on the West Side or South Side or suburb or something and they’ll ask about something downtown.”¹¹

He explained that when they were starting the project, many station staff assumed that the goal of expanding coverage geographies would dictate topics. In particular, given that the areas included primarily African-American and Latino neighborhoods with a history of inequalities, it was presumed that the show would be more likely to cover issues such as poverty, racism, and segregation. Said Allee:

And I said I haven’t heard from these folks yet. I don’t know what they’re going to ask. . . . I can’t predict for sure. What I can predict is that if we ask more people from these communities, we’ll get more questions. We’ll get more voices. And since part of our job is to be genuine and listening to them, then, I can sleep better at night at least knowing that I listened—and that it informed my editorial decision-making.¹²

They did not want to be “tipping the scales” on what topics people’s questions covered, added Allee. He pointed out that if the station felt it should be doing more coverage of specific issues as an organization, WBEZ should be assigning those stories directly. He wanted Curious City to remain open to all kinds of questions from residents of these communities.

While Curious City staff members framed their initiative as an experiment, they acknowledged their approach was more subjective than “scientific.” For example, when the outreach producer went to a target area to seek questions, he acknowledged that the locations he chose skewed whose voices were represented: “It’s limiting because of who is at a park at eleven o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday. So, in that way, I think you’ve got a certain subset of people that’s not representative of the entire population.”¹³

Walking next to a park in a northern suburb, the producer also reflected on how he chose whom to approach. Allowing a group of power walkers to pass, he explained that he weighed the “kind of barriers you have to get through for the reward.” He calculated the amount of work and time required to get a group of residents to agree to participate and share questions. In the case of the walkers, he decided he would be unlikely to win them over in an efficient way. Other residents were not pursued for other reasons: “It’s all happening kind of at a subconscious level. I’m not doing it on purpose. Like, did you see that [pointing to a couple who disappeared behind some bushes]? Did that look promising?” ¹⁴

The producer attempted to be mindful of how the combination of his own implicit bias and how residents perceived him shaped their interactions. He talked to people with a personable and informal manner. Nevertheless, some awkwardness is unavoidable when approaching strangers, uninvited, in public spaces, particularly when the reporter is a visible outsider in terms of race and/or geography.