News You Can Actually Use

Phillipe: Welcome to From Issues to Action. I'm your host, Philippe Kobland. In a world full of challenges, what can we do? Join me for conversations that answer this question. If you want to be informed and inspired, this podcast is for you. All right, so welcome, Deb, to From Issues to Action. Thank you for coming on the podcast today. Thanks for listening to From Issues to Action. If you've been informed and inspired by this episode, rate it, share it, and become a subscriber. You can find additional episodes on the podcast website, fromissuestoaction.riverside.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also follow me, Philippe Copeland, on social media. This episode features a conversation with Deborah Douglas. Deborah Douglas is an award-winning journalist and director of the Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub at Northwestern University. We talked about journalism that focuses more on solutions than problems, the power of authentic stories, and what happens when we highlight the assets to be found in marginalized communities. I hope you enjoy it.

Deborah Douglas: Thank you for having me, Philippe.

Phillipe: All right, great. So the first thing I wanted to do was to give you a chance to introduce yourself. I have the pleasure of knowing you, the listeners don't necessarily. So what I wanted to ask you to do is tell the listeners what you would most like them to know about you.

Deborah Douglas: ⁓ So I will say I'm the founding director of the Medill Midwest Solutions Hub, the Solutions Journalism Hub at Northwestern University. It's an inclusive storytelling framework, and I know people aren't doing inclusion these days, but I still am because it still matters. And among the most exciting things I've ever done in my life is ⁓ co-founded The ⁓ reimagining nation's first abolitionist newspaper. And I helped co-found MLK 50 Justice Through Journalism, ⁓ which focuses poverty, power, and policy in Memphis, Tennessee. ⁓ And I have a legacy journalism background. I worked in top management at legacy papers. But it's the startup ⁓ I'm most excited about ⁓ we're ⁓ gaps and serving that don't get the service and the ⁓ narration the shine that they need and deserve. also really excited about the second edition of my book, The Moon U.S. Civil Rights Trail, A Traveler's Guide to the People, Places, and Events that Made the Movement. It's the first ever travel guide to follow the official civil rights trail in the South. And black communities and black stories ⁓ not often ⁓ ⁓ ⁓ exploration and appreciation. ⁓ many times have you planned a trip and called the office to get some maps sent to you or brochures? ⁓ Have you gotten a brochure that sends you to a black neighborhood? ⁓ Probably not. brochures exist, but that's traditionally ⁓ what happens. ⁓ just really excited to do something that I call asset framing the black experience ⁓ sending people to our communities on purpose to see the love ⁓ we have there.

Phillipe: So one of the things I really wanted to talk about is your work in terms of solution journalism. In some ways, this podcast is very much in the spirit of that in terms of shifting conversation to what people are doing and what's working rather than just focusing on what's wrong, right? ⁓ could you just introduce the concept to the listeners?

Deborah Douglas: Absolutely, so I've been practicing journalism for 36 years This is a vocation that I chose when I was eight years old. So I'm very serious about it and excited that My profession the only profession that was not a public profession that's mentioned in the Constitution so it means something to ⁓ to for live in the country that ⁓ states that believes in the free press ⁓ and the press is important for accountability, ⁓ but over years ⁓

Phillipe: Hmm. you

Deborah Douglas: of working in traditional newsrooms and legacy newsrooms where the people who are traditionally in charge don't look like me and have an experience like me, I've often felt like something was missing. And so I fell into a community of people who are looking at ways to authentically cover marginalized communities and to cover responses to pressing social problems or systemic challenges. And so one of the fallacies of traditional journalism is that we're really great at narrating the problem frame. ⁓ can tell you all the different ways there's a problem with something thinking that we're doing such a great job. Look at this office doing the wrong thing. Over time, these stories or these problems that are presented and re-presented and repackaged has a demoralizing effect on audiences. And so we create a phenomenon called news avoidance. And so people either avoid the news altogether or if they're interfacing with a platform or an outlet, they will click past or swipe past particular topics that just make them feel bad. And also it kind of connects to the trust issue. So we have a lot of bad actors in the public conversation, ⁓ who are legitimately trying to confuse us so we don't understand ⁓ is real and what is not. And ⁓ when news... delivers information, credible information, in a problem frame, it feels not true because we live in our communities. We know that there are people who are marshaling all the resources that they can press into the service of addressing those problems, generating the people will, working on getting political will and the will of officials and institutions to work on those problems. So when you only tell us there are only problems and there are no solutions, nobody has a good idea, nobody's trying anything to anything, gets reduced to they're lying to me ⁓ it feels not true, ⁓ it's not the whole story. ⁓ the function of ⁓ program at Northwestern, the Solutions Journalism Hub, ⁓ to help ⁓ journalists, because you can be a storyteller and not be a journalist, and they matter too, to them understand how to ⁓ scope ⁓ people institutions and communities that are looking to work on responses ⁓ to pressing systemic issues and narrate those stories. And again, you're going to do it a slice at a time. There may be an intervention or a test on helping, I don't know, young black men matriculate through high school. There may be a story on a reentry program that is put together by a local university, community members, and city officials. This has actually happened in Philadelphia. To help, Black men who are reentering from ⁓ being in prison re-enter society to help them get a good solid start and stay on the beaten path to avoid what we call recidivism. There's a really great story that was crafted last year by a local writer here in Chicago by name of Jim Daly. ⁓ He a story about community violence intervention. And he to spend a lot of time on this story. ⁓ And so Journalism also invites you to be in community and be in relationship with community members so you can develop that trust to get to the real answers ⁓ about what's happening. ⁓ And this a vast story about communities on Chicago's West Side ⁓ that are to ⁓ address community-based violence. Some of it involves working with the people who actually commit the violence, be in a relationship with them, because the truth about community violence is that we know that Pookie and Ray Ray probably were involved in that thing that happened the other day. And so this is about how we break down the walls between the Pookies and the Ray Rays and our families to invite them into a potential solution. ⁓ And then there's just like taking up space in communities and reorienting young people to more positive activities so the story displayed a lot of different kinds of interventions on behalf of volunteers in the community like a physicist who deliberately moved to a marginalized community so he can make a difference a black male physicists ⁓ Organizations that are working on it ⁓ then there's like really great data because solutions journalism really wants ⁓ You know information on how the evidence is working. It's got really great data in the story and it's a perfect sort of distillation of the solutions journalism framework which covers a response to a pressing social problem, offers evidence of how it's working or not, that looks at insights which of course is your subject matter experts but it's also the people who are affected. by that social problem ⁓ experts on their own lived experience. We're not writing about them or around them. We're writing ⁓ filming ⁓ them, telling the story with them because they're the experts on their experience. ⁓ then solutions journalism invites you to cover the limitations. ⁓ sometimes the intervention ⁓ not work. Sometimes intervention may partially work. ⁓ But this is just one slice of it. So over time, if you cover a slice and another slice and another slice and another slice, you get a whole body of work showing all this effort. being applied to this thing that up until now we've thought, ⁓ we can't do anything about that. It's intractable. It's too big, right? And that's not true. And then the relationship between the audience member and the platform, the outlet, or even an institution telling the story, it's a different kind of relationship because you're honoring the person's intellect by showing them how systems work and narrating that story in a plain spoken way so they can see that. get ideas about how they want to be active in their communities and to bring solutions. They may get some ideas on, that's how you get that resource for that thing, right? There's a really great story that CNN covered. on the Denver basic income story. So when I say marginalized people, I don't know if people think black, but. This story covered white people who were in poverty. One of opening scenes this woman is opening her refrigerator ⁓ and it's just full of ⁓ Now she's talking about her but ⁓ she also is getting money, free money, I'm putting quotation marks, to address the issue of poverty. The to poverty is money. ⁓ And so ⁓ even the imagery in kind of or in this kind of storytelling is ⁓ framed intentionally.

Phillipe: Right.

Deborah Douglas: is framed towards looking at what the outcome could be or what the outcome ⁓ look like ⁓ opposed to filming scene where they're sitting down hungry one day because the refrigerator is empty and they don't have any food. And this of journalism, and this is research-based. I just wrote a book chapter about it. ⁓ It gives people a sense of hope. ⁓ It recognizes their inherent agency and it makes them feel like their dignity is recognized. They have dignity, but it's not always recognized in the way we narrate the world.

Phillipe: there's so much in there to unpack. Thank you for that. That was a very thorough answer to my question. ⁓ But ⁓ step in the time machine for a minute and take it back. So I know you had mentioned that you've been interested in journalism since you were eight years old. ⁓ I'm wondering, when you first get interested in solution journalism, particularly?

Deborah Douglas: Hahaha Okay. Yes. Yeah. I've worked around the country. I my career actually traveling to a different paper every four months ⁓ as part of a program with ⁓ Capital Cities ABC. ⁓ I stayed ⁓ I worked in Kansas City for four months. ⁓ Then I worked the Detroit suburbs for four months. Then I went Connecticut. It was a newspaper chain. So ⁓ I got out after two months and then interned in Memphis. I had worked in NEWS year of undergrad, so I had a lot of experience coming out of undergrad. ⁓ had the keys to the town paper at 17 years old, and then I went to work for other papers in that chain as a sophomore. ⁓ I at the Chicago Sun-Times where I ended up going back to ⁓ be manager, helming ⁓ ⁓ products. So, ⁓ you know, ⁓ I've had that kind of experience and I'm ⁓ in legacy journalism. I'm at the Chicago Sun Times. ⁓ I've had pretty good there ⁓ got to do lot of interesting things. ⁓ But over that time prior to, I just kind of felt like there was more I could be doing in my journalism. like a way of telling more authentic stories. And the issue kind of came to a head when we had this sort of like spate of youth violence in black and brown communities. And we were grappling with how to cover that. Like they would come to me, I was an editor, I dabbled in writing. I eventually became the deputy editorial page editor and a columnist. But they would come to me as the black person, the resident black person to ask. And I'm like, but I'm not that kind of person because we're not a monolith. Like ⁓ that's not my experience. But of course I cared about that community too. ⁓ But I just kind felt there was just something missing. even in my presence in that conversation and figuring out an authentic way to narrate this story. eventually I got downsized. It was 2008. I kept my column until 2009. for me, I was not like, I don't know, I wasn't crushed that I got downsized. I wasn't gonna finish my career at that paper. I felt like I was on a journey and this was an opportunity for me to figure out what that journey was about. and I started doing a lot of consulting. I started teaching before I got downsized, because it's something I always knew that I was gonna do.

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Deborah Douglas: And so one of my students, a graduate student, we met for coffee just to kind of hang out and talk. And she was like, yeah, I was going to go to this online news association meetup in Detroit this weekend, but my friend ⁓ ghosted me ⁓ and news association is the largest journalists Association in the country and then and their ⁓ conferences just like the best ⁓ I you want to go to this meetup in Detroit? She's like, yes free if we can get there we can just go in ⁓ so I said take you ⁓ And so we got in the car and we drove to this meetup. so looking around the room trying to figure out, you know, when you're a kid and on playground and you're trying to figure out what kids are ⁓ more likely to ⁓ be your group. ⁓ So ⁓ honestly, ⁓ when we were breaking out to breakout ⁓ I looked people who are little older seasoned ⁓ like me. ⁓ And I went a room and we had this robust conversation. ⁓ ⁓ And I just picked up right, right along, you know, and had the ideas and just cross pollinating with the editor of the Miami Herald and this other woman ⁓ who worked at this ⁓ radio concern, ⁓ Sarah Katanya, now the president and CEO of the Solutions Journalism Network. But at the time she was consulting too we like ⁓ we in this sort of like learning mode and at a later part of our careers ⁓ and stayed in contact because we wanted to figure out what works with ⁓ in this industry and how we were going to evolve our practice. And then she invited me to a solutions journalism, we call it UnConference, at Sundance. ⁓ then I feel like I found my people. ⁓ like, these are the people who had the answer to that nagging question I had about something's missing here ⁓ covering this phenomenon, this systemic issue. And I feel like ⁓ they it. This is a response to covering pressing social problems by covering their response, not belaboring the problem. You gotta talk about the problem, you're not belaboring it. And you're going through the work of showing how the response is working, and even if it doesn't. the only thing I felt like was missing was a analysis ⁓ on which, you know, that happens in so many other fields too. And so by that time, the time I got to my second on conference the next year, ⁓ was working as managing editor of MLK 50, Justice to Journalism in Memphis. ⁓ was a visiting professor at the time. I ⁓ and we're focusing on poverty, power, and policy. And just naturally, our team was embracing this approach.

Phillipe: Ha!

Deborah Douglas: covering their responses. But now I had a language for it. And then we were also bringing this racial lens because the publication was named MLK 50. It was established to cover the year leading into the 50th commemoration of Dr. King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. And it was the whole line and to make city officials and thought leaders accountable to the realities, the economic realities of Memphis, Tennessee. it's biggest blackest ⁓ in Tennessee ⁓ It's a large poor Metro and we're not let you in the year leading to the of dr. King's ⁓ Assassination in your town. We're not gonna let you pack yourself in the back ⁓ and tell a lot of about how great it is here ⁓ There's a lot to love about the culture and the people, but we're gonna help you tell the truth. And so that's how it all became clear for me.

Phillipe: That's really, really good. Thank you for that. something you said made me wonder, is solution journalism something new ⁓ or it people rediscovering what journalism is supposed to be?

Deborah Douglas: It's a name for something ⁓ and news organizations have done for a long time. I ⁓ posit the abolitionist press followed solutions journalism ⁓ because they showing what enfranchisement looks like. at a granular level, not like this big idea of people should be free. But once you get free, what does it look like to set up a business? What does it look like to establish your own institutions, your own schools? That's solutions journalism. The black press is always engaged in solutions journalism because it's about how do we optimize this opportunity that we have Chicago when it helped people in the South get access to the defense. to understand what the opportunities were in Chicago and to lure them onto those trains and to get them to come up the interstate to migrate as part of the great migration to Chicago, that was solutions journalism. Solutions journalism is practiced in Europe under the name of constructive journalism. There are a few slight tweaks to the definition, but it's generally the same thing. And so I guess the framework that I championed in my day to day at my job is informed by David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg who are the co-founders of the Solutions Journalism Network. They are, it's US based but they really do champion solutions journalism around the world. David and Tina, Tina wrote for the magazine. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and a MacArthur fellow. And she for the magazine. she applied the framework in the New York Times magazine. ⁓ But also David Tina co-authored a column many in the New York Times called The Fixes, ⁓ where they incubated this idea and developed idea. solutions journalism. So in terms of like it being mainstreamed, I credit that to Tina and David

Phillipe: Hmm. I'm wondering, ⁓ know, there's lots of news right now about all kinds of issues and topics. And wonder if there's anything that you've heard or read that you thought that would have been so much better if they did it in a solution oriented way.

Deborah Douglas: Mm-hmm. Yes. spent several months thinking about that. At the latter part of last year, I had the privilege of being able to fund Solutions Journalism projects for a handful of newsrooms here in ⁓ And so doing my check-ins with them. ⁓ Also, ⁓ am... I'm a mentor to a lot of journalists. I would say younger than me. They're not young, but they're younger than me. And then I'm just nosy. I'm always like, are you doing over there? ⁓ And so in conversations, what I was hearing, a recurring refrain was the presence of ICE in the city or in the area. And our staff ⁓ is having really stretch their on weekends and I mean it was a great opportunity to be able to cover you know this whatever it is you want to call it I don't active regression I don't know I started thinking about it ⁓ and ⁓ really looking at the quality of coverage. I'm like, it's not just one outlet, but there a lot of ⁓ that are using the Solutions Journalism framework to cover the response ice being in Chicago. And so I'm ⁓ You know, Chicago is a place of journalistic innovation. And so I'm like, you know, this is another to ⁓ really get a good ⁓ of what's happening here ⁓ because federal enforcement is going to ⁓ spread to cities ⁓ and storytellers journalists in other cities may be able to benefit ⁓ from the learnings in our approach here. ⁓ So I the Solutions Journalism Rapid Response Kit. ⁓ ⁓ It's a kid showing best practices for using the solutions journalism approach covering the response ⁓ opposed to ⁓ the problem over and over again. So what traditional journalism might do, especially in a normal time, is really lean into ⁓ You know getting a lot of data and anecdotes from the Department of Homeland Security or whatever office is narrating at the moment now we know we can see with our own eyes that we can't trust that information ⁓ so now so how do you how you ⁓ build evidence-based story? With if can't trust the official sources that ⁓ even if don't ⁓ you don't belong to a particular party or have a particular lens on something, you could trust the basic factual... ⁓ underpinning some things. ⁓ things are like changing in a big way and it's like how do we do this? ⁓ so what I noticed is a quick pivot to covering their response ⁓ ⁓ leaning on the community to narrate their experience by sharing their photos, ⁓ their testimonies, sharing their videos, crowdsourcing that, ⁓ then having newsrooms ⁓ the information amongst each other because it was happening. It was just so overwhelming ⁓ it's so much work to do and how we're going to cover everything so that They put the capitalism to the side, the competitiveness to the side. They work together, they work in community to make sure that they had the information, the evidence-based information to tell an authentic story proportionally, contextually, with the voices that needed to be in those stories. Okay? And so now the people who are being affected is what I said earlier. They are the experts in their own lived experience. And now local media is seeing that writ large. should they're having to heavily rely on the testimony of people and community. And stress tests the validation of the... We'll have everything, but especially the official sourcing that they're getting. And so I put this kit together. It's actually online a scrolly tell. And then there's a PDF version that can be downloaded too, if you want to download it and print it out and spend some time with it ⁓ put it under your pillow and sleep with it like I did. But there's a kit out there for recovery responses too. It's not just that crisis, but any crisis. ⁓ And be further developing this rapid response kit into other situations. ⁓ I'm in the process of planning something called the Solutions Journalism Educators Academy, ⁓ I'm inviting 20 ⁓ college collegiate educators from across the country ⁓ come and their mastery of how to teach ⁓ solutions journalism we want to build a stronger pipeline for this sort of storytelling. And ⁓ the response kit or a pedagogy around covering responses to crisis ⁓ be a part of curriculum.

Phillipe: Yeah, the way that you talk about it and the passion that you bring to it, there's real movement energy around what you're talking about, right? So would you say that solutions journalism is a movement?

Deborah Douglas: ⁓ wow. I guess I would say yes in the way that I know that there are a lot of journalists who have been looking for a way to do something different to atone for narrative crimes.

Phillipe: Nice way of putting it.

Deborah Douglas: Yes, I mean, I've actually audited my own work every other year or so I do a self audit so I can make a plan on how I want to evolve my storytelling. And one time I went to actually a library that had a bunch of my magazine writing. I went back to the 90s and I'm like, let me go way back to the beginning. And I looked at the quality of my writing and it was good for the time. But I'm like, but what could you do better? I could do better by narrating the how of things. I could do better about not leaning on the problem frame, So, yeah.

Phillipe: Yeah, you had mentioned that this work embraces both journalists and storytellers that you can be one or the other or both. ⁓ you just say a little bit about like ⁓ the distinction you make between the two?

Deborah Douglas: Yes. Yeah, well, you know, I was at a faculty meeting, I want to say maybe it was December and we were talking about all that is going on in the public conversation, what's happening in Washington and how that is trickling down and impacting local communities A lot of times when we start talking about what can we do or what can we fix or what can we address, a lot of conversations in industry go to what can we do to save our business, our institution, right? And I said, what I don't want to do in this conversation is get into a conversation about saving journalism. said, because that's in our best interest. ⁓ we need to do is be working on saving the civic information infrastructure, ⁓ theme that holds democracy together. ⁓ What we need to do is be working on saving the civic information infrastructure, ⁓ the theme that holds democracy together. That's the whole point of this. And we need to be able to support any framework, any community that is invested in telling. true, transparent, authentic stories about how to make good decisions for us to do that thing that we said we believed in, which is pursue happiness. true, transparent, authentic stories about how to make good decisions for us to do that thing that we said we believed in, which is pursue happiness. I like to just back it up and reorient to ⁓ the ⁓ information infrastructure and not focus so much on the business. ⁓ Because honestly, think, ⁓ you know, ⁓ I'm sad about proliferation of news deserts. People need access to credible information. But I think some media need to die in sense that in the way that it functions, ⁓ in way that it prioritizes, in the way that it gate keeps, ⁓ you're doing anyone any favors. Except maybe yourself and the tiny group of people that you care about which leads me to another thing I've been marinating on recently Like why why are we like this? I'm actually gonna have a session called. Why are we like this at my at my summer summit?

Phillipe: Sounds like a great session.

Deborah Douglas: Talking about the culture of media and why we frame things the way that we frame and to invite us to have the courage to do things differently. But I've been thinking about like when I was at the Sun Times, Lifestyles Editor, Deputy Editorial Page Editor, Library Director, Features Editor, columnist, like you know, was operating at the highest levels. ⁓ And I would go to the morning and afternoon, we call them budget meetings, basically it's the meetings where all the editors get together to talk about what's happening and to decide our priorities, how we're gonna play things, that we don't wanna miss. And a lot of those conversations when we're talking about our priorities. We talked about it through the lens of personal responsibility. Why did this person make this bad decision that created this thing that happened in this marginalized community? I'm gonna use a marginalized community for the example. That's not our only focus, but why did this violence happen in the black and brown community? Why did this boy do this thing? never the question about what is... the system this person is operating in that created these circumstances that funneled him into this thing. And so because the media is in trouble, we don't have a workable business model, right? We're in a state of crisis. We've been in a state of crisis for a very long time. We've been disrupted by the lack of a reliable economic model, but also technological disruption. And now we have the phenomenon of bad actors making it really difficult for us to do our jobs. But we never are really honest about the fact that our our economics are the reason why we choose the frames that we choose It's so much easier to just turn on a dime and write a story about personal responsibility in a day It's more of an investment to tell a system story It's not impossible to tell a system story And if you're dedicated if you're committed to telling story through the lens of systems You can set it up in a way where you're constantly building on it and getting smarter and deeper, deeper in community, deeper with expert sources so that you can, if you have to, ⁓ a breaking new situation or the ⁓ after, ⁓ a deeper system story, if you will. ⁓ there are some people who don't want to believe that the system is created for some people to live and some people to die. that the system is created for some people to strive always and for some people to never get a chance. And so we gotta get people to really like think about why do we do what we do and then make a change for that.

Phillipe: right, so when you think about the work that you've been doing, what impact do you feel like it's been having?

Deborah Douglas: I mean, there's research on solutions journalism that shows that people feel. a higher degree of self-efficacy when they leave a story framed through solutions journalism as opposed to a problem frame story. They're more likely to read those stories 2.7 times more likely to read a story according to one study. are more likely to ⁓ through to look for more information. It peaks the curiosity. ⁓ more likely to engage with your platform. They're the people who sign up for your newsletter, who come to your ⁓ community engagement events in real life. And so we need more of that to, A, to engender more trust with audience members, but also engage them in an experience of the news. It's not just this one way conversation where you're just pushing information out, which is what those of us who have been doing this for a while were trying to do. It's this kind of like this energy that's being circulated. And so that's the opportunity that we have now. And the research bears out that ⁓ we shift to this frame, we have ⁓ higher degree of trust and belief in self-efficacy and more willingness to engage with this kind of journalism.

Phillipe: So in addition to yourself, I'm wondering if there's any other folks out there that you're saying, listen, if you want to experience some good solution journalism, you need to be reading this person or looking at their work.

Deborah Douglas: Mm-hmm. ⁓ wow. so I think you should follow good conflict. So as an adjunct to solutions journalism is that we practice deep listening techniques because... As a part of this sort of economic tightening that we've experienced, we don't have enough journalists, like human bodies, to cover the amount of news that there is to tell. And so what happens is that people who are left telling the stories show up in community, don't have enough time to develop relationships, spend time, stop, breathe, and just be smooth and even about it. And so you can show up and ask questions in a way that feels extractive to get what you need to craft a story that you've already had. written in your head. And so we've had to like retrain ourselves to be deep listeners. so there is a framework. They ⁓ rebranded good conflict, but I teach it as Complicating the Narrative ⁓ developed Amanda Ripley. And she some time out of her career years ago to spend time with people who work in conflict zones and ⁓ intense situations and developed series of interviewing techniques designed to help us become good listeners even if we naturally are not. As a way of getting beneath the surface because you when you ask questions in a janky way you get surface level answers but if you want to get the real answers you have to the veil and and and have trust with the person that you're engaging with. And for so many reasons, people don't trust us. And so this is a process of that. So I would suggest going to TikTok and looking at the Good Conflict channel because Amanda Ripley and her partner, Helene B. Judy Hoffer, who comes out of television news, they founded this organization, Good Conflict Together. They have dispatches on that. I also love the News Literacy Project. It's not journalism. It's about journalism. But they have such an engaging social media message about how to do really great journalism that I think everybody needs to peek in every once in a while ⁓ learn something new. And in terms of actual journalists, I'm going outside of the country now, but there's this outlet in Toronto called the Green Line that is solely dedicated to solutions journalism. There is Charlottesville Tomorrow. There I mean honestly mlk-50 because they're looking at their they're responding to the crisis of economic disenfranchisement It's naturally In that space they do the problem frame, but they also do the response frame Let me see ⁓ in Chicago. We have the tribe It founded. I want to say in 2017 Could be wrong at that but around that time by two Northwestern graduates from a deal from the School of Communication. She's actually a filmmaker they didn't like the way that young black Chicago was being narrated. ⁓ they started a publication of their own ⁓ as a result of ⁓ them just, I don't know, just doing really great work and also because of pandemic and people just naturally trust this team. Now they basically are publication for, it still focuses on the black community, but ⁓ they the urban T. So even people who are not in Chicago, who ⁓ may be black, ⁓ like go to the tribe because there's just a very particular experience of living in a super big city in an urban area that no matter who you are, you want to know what's what and who's who and they have the urban team. So to go to them. Solutions Journalism Network is and they actually a story tracker and ⁓ can log on for free ⁓ and if there's anything you're interested in you can go look and see ⁓ who's doing what. and you know anything that's PBS ProPublica They're great at the problem frame, but they're also great at the response frame. another sort like piece of ⁓ the solutions journalism called asset framing. the framework is the framework. But the intention and the energy you bring into your reporting ⁓ and your packaging, it's something asset framing. ⁓ So I'm in Miami. ⁓ I'm working with the BME community would founded by Trayvon short was a vice president of the Knight Foundation. He a background as a journalist. Now he's a philanthropist and he founded the BME Communities, this black male empowerment initiative that's spread across the country. ⁓ And actually developed a language asset framing, ⁓ which is narrating ⁓ people and by their vision for their lives. not by the worst thing that ever happened to them in their life. So it's like giving the due respect to the people in the communities that you serve Another way I talk about it is equity framing but it's ⁓ Tribian says that nobody defines themselves as at risk this or at risk that when they talk about themselves. They talk about themselves in the best way they can, right? You don't to come to them in an interview. Like, well, you're at risk this, right? It's like every day people wake up for the most part wanting to be better this day than they were the day before. So if we bring that kind of framing to our questioning, to our queries, ⁓ get a different kind of story. And I had this transformation in my own work because I'm socialized in a very particular way. I'm an American girl, socialized. Like, as a girl, as a woman, there are responsibilities that I'm given that I never asked for. a black girl, I'm a black woman, and there's like expectations that come along with that. I come a family of preachers, so there's socialization that comes along with how I view the world as coming from in a religious family, and honestly, I feel like the whole project of adulthood is to deconstruct all of that. But so like, for example, there's a group of Southern nonprofit organizations that wanted to raise awareness about the fallacy of money bail. When people get arrested and they have to pay bail to get out to... Prepare for their defense or to keep their lives going if people who have resources can afford bail People who don't have resources are stuck lingering in jail they may be the most vulnerable people economically So they are torn from their families like maybe little children they have to take care of They lose their jobs and they can't prepare for their defense ⁓ because they couldn't afford bail money So poverty is being penalized like not for the crime that hasn't been tried yet, but they're being penalized for being poor, which is not against the law. So this group of organizations wanted to raise awareness about the need to reform money bail. so they host this initiative called Black Mamas Bailout. ⁓ And idea is to raise so much money ⁓ that they can bail women in time to get home from Mother's Day. ⁓ Maybe the lens I would bring to a story like that before is just based on my socialization. I'm the good girl. sit at the front of the class. I get good grades. I go to church every Sunday. Might be in the back of my mind, like in a subconscious way. ⁓ this person must have done something because they were arrested. Right? Which is all the wrong energy to bring to it. But if it's back there, if it's informing the way that I frame my questions, then I'm committing a narrative harm. Right? And so I had to, I had to like confront my fault lines, all the things that make me up understand this is my positioning, but this is not this person's positioning. to put take myself out of it and just deal with the human being and the issue and the story at hand, right? And frame my questions with that energy instead. And so I had to do that with Black Mamas bailout. it's transformed me in way. That's what asset framing has done for me. ⁓ And the of it is what media traditionally does, which is to deficit frame communities. ⁓ So it's taking something terrible that happened ⁓ and that story over and over again. ⁓ So it's like, when you give yourself permission to think differently and you have a framework that can help lead you to this kind of like narrative transformation, as a storyteller, you have a different relationship with the stories that you tell.

Phillipe: Yeah, really, I was really feeling that it seems like impact, the potential for transformation isn't just the people that you're talking about or people whose story you're trying to convey, but the storytellers well. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah.

Deborah Douglas: Yeah, actually, there's research that shows that journalists feel about the work they're doing when they do journalism through a solutions frame. And I just want to be clear, not every story is a solutions journalism story. A breaking news is breaking, so it may not be right for that. an accountability story might need to live in the accountability space for a minute before it moves to the next phase of the solutions frame. a really great ⁓ series ⁓ a reporter, Grace Hauck, here in Chicago at Illinois Answers Project reported last year ⁓ restraint chairs in small jails throughout the state of Illinois. ⁓ people were being abused by being locked in restraints for overly ⁓ long amounts of time. outside of what the law allows. so she had to cover the problem, ⁓ then later on she moved into the solutions frame. ⁓ the wonderful thing about solutions journalism is that ⁓ might go, well, if ⁓ a problem, then it's a problem. ⁓ the thing is that it invites you to look for where the answer may live anywhere in the world, right? ⁓ we call them positive deviance or looking for the outlier. ⁓ doing it better anywhere in the world? ⁓ so now you can use the narrative to compare and contrast what other people are doing and elsewhere to address this problem because there's nothing new under the sun. Sometimes place can be grappling with an issue that another place grappled with 20 years ago ⁓ there are key learnings to learn from that. And so sometimes we get as journalists we get so ⁓ up into ⁓ this is my audience or this is my target and we can only talk about people here ⁓ that's the wrong way to go about it. ⁓ You need to look and find the answer wherever it is in the world.

Phillipe: So as we move towards the end of this conversation, anything else that you want to leave the listeners with?

Deborah Douglas: mean, honestly, the second edition of my book, is Asset Framed, it asset frames black communities and it leads directly to a phenomenon that's happening in this country right now, which is the attempted erasure of the stories and contributions of marginalized people in this country. So I want to invite people to be intentional about embracing the asset frame in their own lives by stepping outside your front door and asking yourself, who lived here before I lived here and what do they help me to accomplish today? And go to the Women's Museum and go to the Black History Museum and go celebrate LGBTQ history and interface with the indigenous community. There are not a lot of them in terms of like dispersion across the country, but they're in every community and there may be a cultural institution that will allow you to interface and learn something more about the people who were here before we and got here to start building our own stories.

Phillipe: Thank you so much for being with me today.

Deborah Douglas: Okay, thank you.