Connecting Residents and Media
As outlined above, the outreach project centered primarily on the link between media and residents. Curious City sought to connect to a more geographically diverse pool of residents to solicit questions. By going out to communities and talking with people face to face, the outreach project connected to residents who had never heard of WBEZ. Many expressed surprise in seeing a producer come to their community to ask them what questions they wanted covered.
“I don’t see people walking through the neighborhood and talking to people,” said one woman in a park in a South Side neighborhood. “Quite honestly, I was like, ‘Why are these white people over here?’”28 However, this surprise quickly shifted to receptivity for her and many others. Much of this had to do with timing. For many, the simple act of showing up on an ordinary day resonated, and contrasted with conceptions of media only swooping in to cover negative events related to crime or violence. One young man advised journalists that “they should be out there keeping with the community.”29 He suggested they would learn more if they could get to know residents as people, and try to make them feel comfortable in their interactions. He contrasted this with the behavior he saw from reporters from local television news: “Instead of coming up, ‘Oh, what happened? What happened?’ Put your microphone down.”
Almost all residents of predominantly African-American South and West Side neighborhoods interviewed expressed a feeling that their community was misrepresented and misunderstood by the media overall. Several, including this resident of the West Side Austin neighborhood, expressed a sense of distrust, particularly regarding how violence is covered:
They’re not here to get the full detail of the story, so they take the story and put it in their own words. So, yeah, they come out, but they come out with a different story. . . . For example, if there’s a shooting and the shooting took place this way, they rewrite it up the way they want to write it up before they get to their next job. It’s all shenanigans.30
Many expressed frustration that their community was always portrayed negatively as “a lost cause.” Several attributed this to an impulse to sensationalize stories for business interests: “Because journalists are just trying to do a story. And you sensationalize, or you know, overlook important things, just to sell. And that’s not fair. Because it’s like a lot of things are going on in the neighborhoods that journalists don’t know about.”31
One resident explained that her relatively quiet and safe neighborhood was often stigmatized by broader negative coverage of the South Side—to the point that she had been woken up at one in the morning by out of town family calling to check on her safety. “I think journalists need to be more responsible, and need to really learn communities,” she said. She also called on residents to “play a bigger role in how their community is represented.”
This resident supplied a question that was eventually reported. She, and others in outreach communities, expressed an appreciation for the opportunity to share their perspectives with media. However, she and others who were not WBEZ listeners also expressed doubt that fellow residents would visit the Curious City website to participate without in-person encounters.
In a few cases, particularly in some of the majority-white suburbs, the outreach participants were already listeners. In these situations, by being invited to share questions, residents became more invested in voicing issues of interest in their community. In these suburban areas, residents were more likely to see their community as under-covered than misrepresented.
Overall, given the lack of marketing to build longer-term, two-way relationships, the outreach effort did more to strengthen the link between media and residents in one direction (from media to residents) than the other (from residents to media).