Election Reporting is Stronger with Local Reporters. Director of Communications Jehangir Khattak and editor-mentor Mythili Sampathkumar at Center for Community Media spoke to Widening the Pipeline fellows about local news and election reporting.
by Madeleine Sherer, National Press Foundation
Shrinking newsrooms and the spread of misinformation are problems that affect the entire country, but they hit vulnerable populations the hardest. To combat these issues, CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism Center for Community Media provides support to small news organizations in New York that cover communities underrepresented in mainstream media. It offers training, mentorship and other resources to reporters covering local news.
At the center of CCM’s strategy is the City Elections Reporting Initiative launched in 2021, which connected local reporters to political candidates and publishers. They expanded the initiative to state elections in 2022, and this year, it incorporated coverage of the 2024 national elections on a hyperlocal level.
Jehangir Khattak, the director of communications for CCM, was joined by Mythili Sampathkumar, a freelance reporter and editor-mentor for CCM, for a virtual conversation with Widening the Pipeline fellows on May 13. Khattak described community media as news coverage of immigrants, people of color and specific regions of the United States. He said that the CCM also helps local news organizations adapt to the changing media environment by training them in AI, digital advertisements and online publication. “At the heart of our work is media sustainability,” Khattak said.
Sampathkumar said that community media is crucial because its reporters know what their neighborhoods need. While mainstream media covered the broad strokes of an issue like COVID-19, local media gave their communities information about how school shutdowns or new boosters would affect them.
“You couldn’t get that from New York 1, or CNN, or NBC,” Sampathkumar said. “Those weren’t available in terms of getting an actual address, the name of a doctor, the name of a clinic where you could go to get a COVID vaccine.”
Sampathkumar said that community media becomes all the more important during elections. It can be difficult to staunch the flow of misinformation, especially in places lacking strong local media organizations. In New York City, almost 1.8 million of its residents are not proficient in English, making most mainstream media inaccessible to this population.
“A publication which is in-language publication, and it is producing something which is based on very weak information, which is basically disinformation, it can misguide people,” Sampathkumar said. “So the end user has very few avenues where he or she can update, and be aware of it.”
Khattak said that community news organizations themselves can be vulnerable to misinformation if they are not provided with enough resources or training.
“The knowledge gap is the most dangerous gap,” Khattak said. “If people don’t know or people are not aware, or if people are not trained. In either case, they are vulnerable, and they can cause a lot of misinformation, disinformation, misunderstanding. And even, this can cause detachment from the mainstream.”
Speakers:
Jehangir Khattak, Director of Communications, Center for Community Media, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism
Mythili Sampathkumar, Editor-Mentor, Center for Community Media's Elections Reporting Fellowship, CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism
Summary, transcript and resources: nationalpress.org/topic/local...
The Widening the Pipeline Fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation and Lenovo. NPF is solely responsible for the content. This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios.
15 май 2024
