Reaching the hard-to-reach

I expect journalists to be consumed in the coming year with the riddle of how to break through to people who don’t read or trust them. Easy answers elude our industry. We rightly bemoan the gutting of local news, and the sense of connection and trust the best of these places were able to build. Truth is, though, that some traditional local outlets only spoke for and about certain parts of their communities, leaving others alienated. But I’ve been heartened by the grit and ambition of local news organizations like Outlier in Detroit, Mississippi Today, Flatwater Free Press in Nebraska, and Arizona Luminaria, to name but a few.

Here at The Marshall Project, we’ve been experimenting for years with how to reach out to people who don’t ordinarily receive fact-based information or trust its source — the incarcerated, their families, people who live with fear both of crime and over-policing, people with literacy challenges and people who turn to unconventional or fragmented networks for information and help. We’ve found that it’s extremely powerful to ask communities what they don’t know and what they want to know about their criminal justice system, and then build some portion of our journalism — investigative, engagement, and service — around it. One example is judges’ guides for Cleveland/Cuyahoga County in Ohio and Jackson/Hinds County, Mississippi, which have been among our most-shared, most-read local products — a direct response to people who felt they didn’t understand who they were voting for even though local judges wield so much power over their fates.

That means finding people where they congregate — churches, community centers, Facebook groups — and convening public meetings to hear what people want to know. It means distribution and shared reporting through an extensive network of local partnerships, in outlets that have credibility even in small pockets of the community. It means collaborating with outlets like the Documenters, citizens who are trained to report on local government meetings and do interviews, as trusted messengers. It means going on local radio shows for open Q&As. At The Marshall Project, we decided to leave Twitter and work to find other outlets, be they Reddit (moderated), TikTok (if it’s still legal), or areas still to be discovered.

We now translate complex written investigations into more digestible forms, whether video, fliers, animations, 5-things summaries, or illustrated explainers. And in our new Investigate This! Project, we offer databases, investigative expertise, guidance on how to reach and interview incarcerated people and easy to use tool kits for local journalists across the country.

Many news outlets are experimenting along these lines, in inspiring and surprising ways, across the country. It’s an analogue of the grass-roots work done by community organizers — but without a partisan or prescriptive mission.

I hope and believe more journalists will approach their work with humility, compassion, openness and experimentation in the coming year. We can’t be intimidated by the attacks that are coming. We have to do the rigorous accountability journalism that pisses off people in power. We have to understand better how not only to share our work, but convince people of its profound value — now more than ever.