Medill’s social justice and local news partnerships: collaboration, investigation and education (CJS2022 Day 1): Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Medill’s social justice and local news partnerships: collaboration, investigation and education (CJS2022 Day 1)

Joe Amditis39min

Stefanie Murray

00:03

So, with that,

Stefanie Murray

00:04

and I would like to welcome folks from my alma mater Medill at Northwestern University to talk about a conversation about a really interesting student and professional partnership that the school runs. I'll hand it over to Tim Franklin. Great.

Tim Franklin

00:17

Thank you. Thanks very much for that introduction. Can you all hear me? Okay. All right. My name is Tim Franklin. I'm the senior associate dean and the local news chair at Medill. I also run the Medill local news initiative, and the Metro Media Lab project, which we're here to talk about today. It's great to be with you. And it's great to see so many old friends in person, isn't it great to see everybody in person again. Fantastic. So we want to talk about the potential of student collaborations with professional journalists and with professional news organizations, and specifically, a program that we haven't revealed that was really all about collaboration. So with the help of a grant two years ago from the Robert R McCormick Foundation, Medill launched a project that we call the Metro Media Lab. And the lab is all about collaborating to strengthen local news, and journalism education in Chicago. We're working directly with cohorts of Chicago news organizations on consumer research, on audience engagement, experimentation for new tools, and financial strategies to bolster long term sustainability. We're also working with high school journalism educators in Chicago to grow new media programs and schools and provide training for teachers and students. It's a program we call teach for Chicago, teach for Chicago journalism. And we're connecting Medill with Chicago high schools to try to inspire folks to careers in journalism. And part of the metro Media Lab, which we're going to talk about now also includes collaborations that connect Medill students, with professional journalists on enterprise stories on major topics like drug policy, mental health and housing. These in depth solutions oriented stories provide valuable reporting experiences for our students, which we care a lot about. But they also get news outlets, stories that they might not have bandwidth to do otherwise. And Chicagoans ultimately benefit from this work, because we're shedding light on important issues. So I'm going to shut up and turn it over to our moderator. And here to lead the discussion as my Medill faculty colleague, Carrie Watterson, who heads up our social justice news Nexus, Nexus fellowship program. Before joining Medill, about nine years ago, Carrie was a staff writer in the Midwest bureau with the Washington Post. She later became a reporter for the Chicago edition of The New York Times through the Chicago news collaborative. And in addition to her teaching at McGill, and I don't know how she has time to do this, I carry also covers energy for the Midwest energy news, and writes freelance still for The Washington Post for People magazine after the PGA and Discover Magazine and others. In a side note, I would just say that Kerry's probably the most physically, that person in this room. She's a former national champion, marathon swimmer, and she still competes in in marathons and triathlons. So I would not challenge her put money in a run or a swim. So please join me in welcoming Kari Lydersen.

Kari Lydersen

03:33

I didn't put that in my bio. So yeah, I mean, I've just felt really lucky I being at Medill, to work with these collaborations with students in the MFA program, and with some of the amazing local journalists and local outlets here. We got to start these collaborations about eight years ago with support from the McCormick Foundation, and then have been able to continue and build it with the solving for Chicago collaborative in the metro Media Lab. And so yeah, let me just introduce our panelists who've been part of some of the collaborations that we've done, and they're going to talk a little bit about those collaborations. And then if there's time, I have some questions for them too, or if anyone has questions. So Josh McGee, we worked with originally at the Chicago reporter, we've gotten to work with him a couple of times with students and he's a reporter for injustice watch covering the courts policing prosecution, with an emphasis on data and public records. And he's also worked for WB LN and DNA info and as I mentioned, the Chicago reporter, and coordinate Cooper's was one of our MSJ students in the social justice investigative specialization a few years ago, who I got to work with on the collaboration with Southside weekly and she's now a digital reporter and producer at WBC and has worked with WBEZ for a while even before taking on that job, and has been published in the Chicago Tribune. and the Chicago Reader and other outlets. And then apps. Nando. Erbitux is a current graduate student in the MFA program to graduate this summer in the social justice specialization. And she is doing one of these collaborations currently with Philippine Latino news with robots. Social talk a little bit about that. And ABS has done a great job covering education and other topics during her time in the program and actually was on a student reporting trip to New Orleans where she did an awesome story about the education system for Native American residents in Louisiana. And then you go balsa we're been really lucky to work with for the first time this year on one of these collaborations. He has 30 years of experience as a digital and broadcast media news executive with outlets like PBS, NBC, ABC, CBS, Telemundo, and ESPN. And he's the owner and publisher of Illinois are actually of Latino news network and Illinois Latino news. And twice the president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and also founded a not for profit organization in honor of his maternal grandmother that provides scholarships for students studying journalism. So yeah, thank you all for being here. And maybe I can ask Josh first, just to talk a little bit about the collaboration that we did. It's been three years since his collaboration, but it was a really successful fun one. So I asked him to dig into his memory and talk a little bit about that.

Josh McGhee

06:29

Yeah. So this was a project that kind of built on some of the beat reporting I was doing, I started with a pivot table of open data from the State's Attorney's Office. And basically, we looked at hate crimes, and we saw that the most likely defended were young African American men. And that didn't kind of fit with our narrative of what we thought hate crimes were. And from there, I kind of did some reporting, keeping it local, where we got this idea. Yeah, when there was a news found at the University of Illinois, and it got me thinking about my time when I was a student, I went to a school that wasn't that diverse. So it got me thinking about what how students kind of reacted to these these incidents and how they dealt with them. So basically, we were told about the class and they were looking for an opportunity we had, we had the idea to basically look at every single College in Illinois. This was a large project that I had never done something quite this big. In the scout report only had one or two reporters. Luckily, Olivia was there to organize everything for us, because otherwise this would not have been possible. But basically, we had the students come in, we wrote boilers, boilers for things like the incidents, how the schools reacted to the incidents, and their training around it. Basically, we took those where I had the students, cell for years, I hope them right, because the biggest thing about four years actually getting your boy back. So we had a lot of fun, making the phone calls, finding out who the boy was awkward sir was stalking them via the emails. And we got lots of things back, we kind of we use those to figure out what kind of focal points we should be looking in places we should be looking at. Students, they were really excited to help lawyers and public records to kind of look at, they really wanted to kind of dive into what was happening. So a lot of them may cause an interview, did interviews and gave a provide a lot of background so that we could look at the whole state of Illinois, it's very big. I think probably the best thing about having students kind of taken a project like this is they have a whole different experience than me. And they're very diverse. So they had all these other kinds of ideas of what is a hate crimes, or what should we should be looking at, and they brought that to the table. And I don't think you can really get that in a newsroom. You probably don't even have that upset. versity. And, you know, I think that was really what made this interesting was we got to look at a very vast school, I mean, their best state. And even Greece was in the class. She was at the University of Illinois when the incident happened. So we had the extra layer of student who was actually there. Um, so that was that was really

Kari Lydersen

09:21

good. And that was we had, I think, seven or eight students on that team that Josh was leading. So that was a really big investigation. And he had compiled all the colleges in Illinois, I think it's like 300 or something below or more that we were looking at. So yeah, that was a pretty, pretty interesting effort. Yeah, and then Courtney had a pretty different type of collaboration compact about

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