A couple of days ago, I had the privilege of attending a meeting with community leaders who were concerned about the loss of local news. The conversation was vibrant, impassioned and focused on finding sustainable solutions to a problem that so many feel is deeply impacting the community.
For all the talk of civic engagement and covering city and town councils, there was also a desire to unpack the importance of news stories that simply represented the flavor of the community.
Much of what I write about is from the perspective of local news and civic engagement. Of course, sometimes I venture into other intersections. For example, last week, I wrote about how loneliness manifests itself in the context of access to local news, at least in what we can identify through correlations. It is undeniable that we need journalists covering city hall, school boards and elections.
We know this, and we have studied the implications of not having this available. We are witnessing the consequences in real time as well. But communities are also made up of stories that have little to do with formal civic life. They are the smaller things that tell us something about where we live and how we live there.
The discussion in this meeting reminded me of a New York Times photo essay someone shared with me last year. It was entirely about the strange makeshift ramps outside bodegas and other small storefronts throughout New York City. The photographer had spent years noticing and documenting them.
The person who sent me the story did so somewhat disgruntled. Given the condition of the world, how could we be spending time and money publishing stories like this? Was there a point?
I, however, thought the piece was wonderful.
There was plenty of substance beneath the photographs. The ramps raised questions about accessibility, infrastructure, regulation and the ways people alter a built environment that does not always accommodate them.
But I was also interested in something more basic. Someone noticed them.
Observation is among the most fundamental parts of journalism. Reporters are taught to watch, listen and pay attention to details that might otherwise go unnoticed. Observation is a way of knowing something about a community. When we take the time to observe and understand the environments in which we live, we become more connected to the intentionality of the space, or perhaps the lack thereof, and it forces questions about how we exist within it.
We can live somewhere for years and be remarkably unaware of it. We often find ourselves on autopilot, using the same route to get to and from work or the grocery store. Perhaps we frequent a particular park because we know its trails whilst others remain unexplored. We often interact with the same buildings, sidewalks, signs and public spaces so routinely that eventually we stop noticing anything about them at all, or thinking about how they came to be.
The bodega ramps are interesting because each is a small human response to a physical problem. Different people encountered versions of the same obstacle and created different solutions. Those solutions became part of the landscape. There is a history and a culture within that.
Scholars who study the importance that places maintain have long distinguished between physical space and the meaning people attach to it through experience, memory and use. Journalism contributes to that understanding. It documents not only the major events that happen somewhere, but the accumulated details through which a place becomes uniquely itself. The culture it builds. The things that define it.
This is a particularly important role now because so much of the information we encounter has become detached from geography. We can know considerably more about something happening thousands of miles away than about the peculiarities of the street we travel every day. And so, we find ourselves untethered and, ultimately, unbothered by the concerns of our local communities.
Local reporting has the ability to ground us and provide us with seemingly mundane observation that actually reveals the needs and wants of our community.
The conversation at that meeting reminded me that despite urgent and reasonable concern over the loss of serious investigative and political journalism, the stories that we deem far less serious are a necessary part of understanding place and, subsequently, building community. We should not dismiss them so quickly.
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