Step one in reporting the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story “For local nonprofits, need and support swells,” was to define our focus. A 2021 report from the Giving USA Foundation indicated that charities had an uptick in giving in 2020 as compared with 2019, particularly in human service organizations such as shelters, food services and affordable housing groups. It was important to check this trend on a local level to see how much COVID-19 disruptions impacted vulnerable communities in metro Atlanta and how well nonprofits maintained needed support systems.
We looked at Charity Navigator to find representative nonprofits in several of the top AJC coverage areas: Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties. We contacted four local groups with different service areas (housing, food and financial services), as well as two larger statewide groups: Habitat for Humanity and United Way. A diverse sample of organizations was key to see how the nationwide trend broke down based on nonprofits’ missions and level of resources.
We interviewed leaders at the six organizations about the start of the pandemic, the increase in need, the increase in support and the outlook for the rest of this year. Each group shared impressive data and documents, which we reviewed for relevance and accuracy.
For a feature story, it was important for us to synthesize the trends across the organizations to provide an overall narrative for readers but not oversimplify the message. From Dwight Reighard at MUST Ministries in Marietta to Laura Drake at the Southeast Gwinnett co-op, varied anecdotes and personal experiences created an intimacy that balanced our inclusion of data. That was important given the human fears and struggles at the core of this story. Finally, we edited the story several times for clarity, removing repetitive sections that didn’t move the narrative along.
Double-check data – both at the national and local levels – by looking at documents such as the Giving USA report and the individual nonprofit’s annual reports from 2020.
Be cognizant of word choice when writing about services, particularly connotations around food services, affordable housing and financial support. It was important to remain human-centric at all times.
Look at the beat guides around topics such as housing and health care for the services that were covered in this article.
Carolyn Crist is a graduate of the University of Georgia. Her byline appears in The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Reuters and WebMD.
William Newlin is a graduate student at the University of Georgia with work appearing in Georgia Health News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Red & Black.
From left to right: R.L. Nave from Reckon South; Josephine Bennett from Georgia Public Broadcasting; Liam Dillon from the Los Angeles Times; Caitlyn Stroh-Page from the Athens Banner-Herald.
Editors and content directors say a focused newsroom, prioritizing context and an equipped staff are necessary to ensure that their organization covers poverty and low-income communities well.
The effects of poverty reach far and wide into educational systems, courts and legal systems, housing, social services and throughout many more corners of life. Poverty intersects with environmental concerns, collective mental health, and the success or failure of local businesses.
“We are all affected by the adverse effects of poverty,” said Caitlyn Stroh-Page, executive editor at the Athens Banner-Herald.
The Banner-Herald received a grant from Report for America in 2021 to add a reporter and visual journalist focused on issues of equity, equality, diversity and inclusivity. Writer DJ Simmons and visual journalist Kayla Renie have covered stories about homeless camps, new nonprofits that support children in low-income communities and local residents known for their outreach efforts.
It’s also oftentimes difficult to determine who is experiencing poverty in our communities. In Athens, Georgia census statistics show that about one third of residents live in federally defined poverty.
“In our community, a third of our population is either at the poverty line or below the poverty line, so we’re not serving a third of our community if we aren’t covering people who are in poverty. Those are our readers,” Stroh-Page said.
And in order to serve a publication’s community, it’s important that coverage of people in poverty is done through a realistic lens, with the reader in mind.
“Those people that we know who are our neighbors, and who come from those communities, they’re also a part of the conversation,” said R.L. Nave, director of content at Reckon South, a news brand dedicated to covering stories that aren’t normally found in traditional media.
If editors and newsroom leaders are intentional about prioritizing poverty coverage, a larger segment of their audience will be served. Editors can use these five action items to ensure that low-income communities are being covered ethically and professionally.
Be in the Community
To center your newsroom around strong community journalism, focus on building and maintaining professional relationships with a diverse set of community leaders. Regularly seek feedback from community members about what matters to them and what stories they would find valuable.
“I think the first thing that our reporters do is actually speak to somebody that lives in the community they’re covering,” said Josephine Bennett, director of news at Georgia Public Broadcasting. “If you gain trust in communities, where you’re not just parachuting in, then you can really get a sense of what that community is going through.”
Stroh-Page advises avoiding fly-by journalism and instead opting for deep-rooted community journalism. She explains the importance of sharing the human element of often complex issues. She focuses on leading a newsroom that covers poverty in a rich way, instead of a passing way.
“There’s a human to every story,” Stroh-Page said.
Focus Your Newsroom
With certain editorial priorities, editors can help focus how the newsroom covers people living in poverty. Stroh-Page suggests placing a strong emphasis on solutions journalism and challenging staff to report on the response to social issues, not just the issues themselves.
When considering how natural disasters, such as the recent Hurricane Ida, affects its readers and people in poverty, Reckon South considers what guides and resources will actually help its readers. Whenever the newsroom takes a solutions journalism approach, it engages voices in the affected community.
The newsroom recently went through an exercise where it put together a research group of 20 southerners across political and ideological spectrums as well as across different races, ethnicities and genders, and worked to determine whether Reckon South’s stories would work for any of the real individuals of the group.
“Who is the real human being that the story is for?” Nave said. “And a lot of times, if we can’t figure out who that person is, then maybe it’s not a working story.”
This exercise, along with the lens that its news should serve its “underdog” audience of people who haven’t had a voice in traditional media, help the newsroom stay focused in its poverty coverage and beyond.
When reporters begin reporting on a story about poverty or housing issues, editors can emphasize taking a step back and considering the wider context of the story.
Through collaboration with the Poynter Institute, Street Sense Media has created a guide for covering the homelessness crisis.
When Los Angeles Times housing reporter Liam Dillon begins reporting a story, he takes a step back to consider how individual anecdotes tie in to broader fact-based data, a broader conversation in the region, or a wider context.
For example, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard multiple anecdotes about tenants being illegally evicted from their homes. To add context, he used data from the Los Angeles Police Department to determine whether these anecdotes represented a wider problem of landlord-tenant disputes surging after eviction protections went into place. He found that reported disputes happened in the lowest income and poorest communities in Los Angeles.
“When you focus narrowly on a particular project and you do these one-off stories, you really miss the forest through the trees,” Dillon said. “And I really think that writing about housing issues and affordability benefits way more people from a wider scope. Connect to historical narratives, history about governmental and private race practices that prevented people from being able to access housing, and you’re able to write about that in ways that are still acting on the housing market today.”
Covering neighborhoods and communities that aren’t usually covered also better serve a newsroom’s audience and ensure a wide scope of poverty coverage.
“Even in fairly well-funded newsrooms, neighborhood coverage has gone away,” Nave said. “It’s even worse in rural states where, for some newspapers, it’s a question of whether they can cover communities and neighborhoods in the cities where they are, but also about getting out 50 miles from where the newsroom actually is.”
After evaluating communities which needed better coverage, Reckon South assigned a reporter to spend a lot of time on covering Arkansas.
“Offer a product nobody else is offering,” Nave said. “Once you undergo self reflection, and say that we can own coverage of these particular communities, it’ll probably pay double dividends.”
Bennett, with GPB, also advises reporting the stories that nobody else is talking about.
“Go after those stories, because it used to be that there were reporters crawling out of the woodwork 20 years ago to cover those things,” she said. “There’s nobody now.”
In neighborhood coverage, editors should also emphasize understanding the past.
“Step back and understand what happened, and what was the history of this neighborhood,” Dillon said. “What are the broader affordability issues, and how would this affect existing residents?”
Be Aware of Staff Needs
The goal is to have a newsroom staffed with a diverse set of journalists who work with a high level of empathy and integrity. When hiring new employees, Stroh-Page said she looks for candidates who are intentional, empathetic, have good conversation skills, are committed to covering all communities in an equal fashion and are aware of systemic current issues.
Another important aspect is an ability to interact with sensitivity and understanding with guarded communities.
But some editors also acknowledge the toll these stories take on reporters and visual journalists.
“It’s hard because you take on the burden of the stories you’re telling all the time,” Stroh-Page said.
Bennett makes empathetic leadership a priority. She’s attended webinars on trauma and reporting after she began to notice burnout in the newsroom. When she notices that a reporter might be struggling with burnout and a heavy workload, she allows them to take a day off that doesn’t count as vacation time. She also calls her reporters to check in with their workload.
Editors can support their staff by encouraging them to take time off and set boundaries for work and personal time. Often, a healthy workplace culture is created when editors and newsroom leaders publicly do these things for themselves, modeling healthy boundaries.
This could mean routinely and visibly taking time off, using the schedule send feature on emails to avoid sending messages on nights or weekends, and sticking to set hours for non-emergency correspondence.
“I always tell them: if I see you struggling, it’s much better for you to have leave than for us to go to this place where you’re producing nothing,” Bennett said. “I think it’s about being observant, staying in touch with your staff and talking to them.”
Kyra Posey is a graduate student studying journalism at the University of Georgia. Taylor Gerlach contributed to this story.
Students return to school at Barrow Elementary School on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020 in Athens, Georgia. (Photo/Taylor Gerlach; taylormckenziephotography.com)
In order to explore the world of child care for my Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, How to find affordable child care, I had to talk directly with state leaders who work in the industry. I first reached out to the Department of Early Childcare and Development and the Georgia Association of Childcare Research and Referral Agencies. From there, leaders such as Pam Tatum, president and CEO of Quality Care for Children, and DECAL’s chief communications officer, Reg Griffin, put me in touch with more industry contacts.
Initially I interviewed sources about what first steps they thought families should take to find affordable child care. As I learned about the different programs and information and spoke with multiple sources, it was important to keep the information clear and comprehensive.
For an explainer story, it was important to double check the information so that readers and users wouldn’t run into trouble as they followed the guidance.
Sources also used specific terms to refer to different types of child care such as “licensed” and “quality rated.” I asked them to define the terms and later verified those definitions as part of the fact checking process, which is recommended in Covering Poverty toolkit’s piece, The Tip Sheet.
Data specificto Georgia’s affordable childcare situation was crucial. While DECAL’s data was slightly older, it was the most recently verified source. The data gave a comprehensive look at how much childcare could cost in different areas of the state.
Prior to this piece, I had never covered child care before and I had never written an explainer. Having worked on this piece, I learned that explainers are important because they can provide verified and accessible information to individuals who may not know where to start. Having done my research beforehand on the Covering Poverty site, I knew I needed to immerse myself in the industry first. I didn’t want to make assumptions that could lead to confusion and errors. I wanted this piece to be as accurate and as helpful as possible.
Anila Yoganathan is a graduate of the University of Georgia. Her byline appears on the Associated Press website, on The Atlanta-Journal Constitution website, and in The Red & Black.
Because my reporting was done remotely and I simply couldn’t visit the pantries at the schools to ask questions, it was important for me to establish a newsworthy angle before I started my reporting process for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, Colleges expand pantries to curb hunger for students in need.
Social media and university press releases quickly helped me discover a trend in the development of new or expanded student pantries in the Atlanta area, specifically as a result of increased poverty due to the pandemic. I followed that trend back to the schools and counties of origin.
Reporting on university-run initiatives requires a direct line of communication with higher education officials. Identifying and reaching out to the universities’ media contacts was the first step in my reporting process. Becausestudent privacy is crucial, my reporting primarily focused on the expertise of pantry supervisors and organizers. They provided me with data and information on the operations of each student pantry, in addition to firsthand experiences and observations.
In addition to these conversations, analyzing data from each area was essential to my big picture reporting. I looked at COVID data throughthe CDC Data Tracker and unemployment statistics by county using the Georgia Department of Labor.
Covering Poverty emphasizes getting the data, especially in pieces such as its education beat guide. For this piece, the College Navigator database on the National Center for Education Statistics website was a helpful resource when it came to student demographics, including the percentage of financial aid recipients.
Sofi Gratas is a graduate of the University of Georgia. Her byline appears on The Atlanta-Journal Constitution website, the Georgia Public Broadcasting website, and in The Red & Black.
Here’s one idea for service journalism on poverty-related matters.
Check out the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s explainer below about child tax credit payments. The AJC created the one-page document from a piece published on AJC.com and in print in summer 2021, just as the monthly payments began.
This guide — using an ASF (alternative story form) with the Q&A setup — is intended to be shared with people who need to know whether they qualify, what it takes to receive it and more information about the child tax credit.
Download and share the document (with AJC credit) with readers/viewers, community groups, nonprofits, individuals and families.
If you do so, please let us know (email coveringpovertysite@gmail.com) so we can keep track of efforts to spread the information.
The issue of poverty is complicated, oftentimes convoluted, and has an effect in many arenas, including writing about economics and money.
It is important to keep the human interest element in these stories in order to respectfully discuss the role of economics in poverty. If you lose the human interest element, you are doing those experiencing poverty a disservice.
Money and economics are the reason those experiencing poverty are in their situation, but economics cannot be separated from issues such as politics and human rights. Venise Wagner, co-author of “Reporting Inequality: Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity,” said she sees all of the issues being connected. Economic issues cannot be completely separated from racial inequality issues.
The components of our society add up to the issue of inequality as a whole. You should not cover poverty without covering the economic and social justice beat at the same time, added Wagner, a journalism professor at San Francisco State University.
Wagner gave an example about home ownership. She said that we know there is a wealth gap, and we know the wealth gap is tied to home ownership. The wealth gap is the systemic problem in the United States of unequal distribution of assets amongst citizens of the country. Home values are often worth less in communities of color than in white neighborhoods. She said economic and racial issues cannot be separated.
“They’re all tied together and I don’t see covering them differently,” she said.
Poverty is a social justice issue just as much as it is an economic and political issue. Co-author Sally Lehrman described these tightly bound issues as “interlocking structures.” She said that often, journalists cover the issue of poverty in one of two ways. They play it as a human interest story or as an economic story for the business beat.
“We often have these two extremes. We rarely bring them together in an individual story, and that’s a real disservice,” said Lehrman, who has covered social issues related to the science beat and is CEO of The Trust Project.
Stories involving poverty should not just be about a single human experience or just about economic policy. Every economic policy and situation has effects on human beings, and the story is incomplete without talking about both, she said.
The authors say it is unfair to those in poverty to not cover the stories from every angle.
“With racial inequality, usually economic inequality is tied into that. The policy that is going to dictate where people are going to be living, for example, also dictates the value of their homes, if they own their homes. Policies end up having racialized outcomes,” said Wagner, a journalism professor at San Francisco State University and a previous reporter for both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.
The beats and coverage areas cannot be separated when covering poverty, and humanizing the issue while explaining to readers its economic and political impact is a critical step for credibility when covering poverty today and in the future.
Savannah Ware is a fourth year majoring in journalism at the University of Georgia.
Photojournalists covering poverty face a specific set of challenges and responsibilities. Use these seven tips from photojournalists to focus on the ethics behind your images.
Recognize power dynamics
Photographers’ tools hold gravity and power. To use these tools well and use them in ways that serve the communities you work in, it is important to acknowledge the power and privilege inherent in showing up with a camera.
Photographers need to acknowledge the fact that in many settings covering the topic of poverty, cameras can make people feel uncomfortable or degraded.
Even if photojournalists have no intention of making a photo that would cast someone in a bad light, a power dynamic exists that puts you in charge of that decision, not the people on the other side of your lens.
You decide what the outside world sees of personal lives. That is an enormous amount of power, and it needs to be held delicately.
Independent photojournalist Danielle Villasana suggests leading with the person and making sure that you’re telling the story that they want to tell.
“Make sure that you’re not making any assumptions about who they are, what they go through or what they face,” she said.
Listen to Villasana, whose images have appeared in National Geographic, discuss the importance of covering poverty as photojournalists, stereotypes to avoid, and the work of visual journalists that she admires.
Photographers must realize that the effect of images is separate from the intentions while making and publishing them. It does not matter if you personally extend dignity and respect to every person you photograph; if the published photos feed into stereotypes or fail to honor the people living inside your frames, that is all the world will see.
Photographers cannot control the culture they live in or that there is a stigma around needing assistance with food, housing or clothing. They can, however, control the images they make and share of people living in these situations.
Asumi, left, and Oriana, right, stand in the light of a police car during a nightly patrol in Lima, Peru. (Photo courtesy of Danielle Villasana)
Tell the whole story
“Oftentimes in photojournalism, especially when we’re focusing on human rights issues, I believe there is a tendency to focus on only one side of the story, which is oftentimes the most urgent or pressing aspect of an issue, but I strive to tell the whole story so it’s a more balanced narrative and representation of that person. I feel that when stories are told narrowly or only focus on one aspect of the issue, then we run the risk of upholding and maintaining stereotypes,” Villasana said.
When possible, Villasana takes a long-term approach to documentary photojournalism that allows her to fully understand and present complex stories.
New York Times photojournalist Ryan Christopher Jones stressed in a 2020 interview that photojournalists are supposed to photograph reality, even when it is harsh. Photojournalists should not avoid making images of devastation, but they should question how they go about doing so.
“When suffering is coupled with exploitation, those who are photographed are never allowed to live outside of the pain they’re in, because those photos turn a single behavior into an identity that exists in perpetuity,” Jones wrote.
Instead of creating a shock-value image that exploits the humans inside our frames, photographers must work to humanize those affected. They need to employ the patience needed to capture connection, relationships and resilience, even among suffering.
“It is difficult to make sensitive stories, and journalists cannot create redemption. But we can find where it lives and make it louder,” Jones wrote in a 2018 opinion piece.
Branch out
Look at the coverage that exists and ask questions about it. What is missing from the current body of work? Do you see the humanity of those affected by these issues or just their pain?
Villasana identified one of the goals of her work as “challenging people’s perceptions or misconceptions of issues, people and places.”
Often, the suffering of minority communities is visible and more accessible for journalists, which leads to images of these communities being attached to issues of poverty or suffering. Investigate the places and people these issues affect, especially those that have not been covered in depth before. If you need direction in this area, talk with editors who have knowledge of the community.
Shortly after getting on HIV medication, Tamara is diagnosed with Tuberculosis. Here, a doctor examines a CT scan of her lungs. (Photo courtesy of Danielle Villasana)
Practice transparency
Be transparent when you approach people about a photo story on a sensitive topic. Explain the story topic and angle so that sources can determine if they are comfortable being included in the story. Be clear about what you need from them, how much time you expect it to take and what you’re doing to protect them. These steps show respect for sources.
“Transparency and communication are always key,” Villasana explained. “I’m very upfront about what consent actually means.”
When Villasana approaches a potential source for a photo story, she thoroughly explains who she is, what she is doing, where the photos could end up and the possibility of the photos never making it into print. In an effort to provide potential sources with the information needed to consent, Villasana explains the full scope of possibilities, such as images being on display in an exhibit, part of a published book or on the side of a building.
Transparency is an important aspect of communicating to people that you will not exploit them, their pain or their loss.
Broken down, this means finding people who want their story to be told, explaining why their story matters to the public, acting with sensitivity to the situation, and explaining that you are safe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the safety piece meant sharing precautions you are taking to ensure the safety of sources and respecting additional boundaries each individual may have.
Listen to Villasana discuss evaluating your role and authority as a photographer and storyteller, as well as the importance increasing the diversity of our newsrooms and photojournalism staff, and read the Photo Bill of Rights, an ethical code published in June 2020 as a call to action to “assert the rights of all lens-based workers and define actions that build a safer, healthier, more inclusive, and transparent industry.”
Briss’s room is left in shambles after a fight with her boyfriend, who punched the mirrors and threw furniture. Eighty percent of homicides of trans people worldwide occur in Latin America. (Photo courtesy of Danielle Villasana)
Engage with humans, not props
Jones stressed the importance of “photographing people as people first and not as props to a story.”
In every stage of a story — in pitching, planning, researching, sourcing, photographing, captioning and editing — photographers should engage with people, and their images should show that.
Photograph, plan and edit with intentionality and sensitivity, thinking toward how the end product will affect the public at large and the specific individuals in each frame.
Edit wisely
Marie de Jesús, a staff photographer with the Houston Chronicle, said documentary photojournalists must be intentional.
“Documentary photography has to be a conscientious exercise every single time,” de Jesús said.
You can make great photos that are sharp and perfectly composed. But if a photo is not helpful in telling the specific context of the story and pushing the conversation forward, it doesn’t make the cut. If the photo feeds into stereotypes, it doesn’t make the cut. If the image just shows off your photography skills, how great our access was or the advanced equipment you used, it doesn’t make the cut.
Compassionate, humanizing documentary photojournalism is about putting the story and those in it above any personal desire to showcase your access or skill as a photographer.
Be where your lens is
“A big part of my process is simply going up to people and talking to them,” Villasana explained, using her nearly decade-long project working with transgender women in Latin America as an example.
Don’t rush this. Get to know the people that form the pixels on your camera screens. Walk the neighborhoods; meet community leaders; ask people what stories are important here and now.
If nothing else, this will get people accustomed to seeing your cameras. It will allow sources time to trust you and trust that you will use those powerful tools with integrity and sensitivity.
“Trust and communication are aspects of a relationship that should be continuously revisited and built on,” Villasana said. “It’s not something that you gain once and then you’re done. It’s something that’s continuously gained over and over again.”
Taylor Gerlach is a fourth year majoring in journalism and sociology at the University of Georgia.
Lehrman is an award-winning journalist who has covered the science beat, as well as social issues related to that beat. She is also the CEO of The Trust Project, a nonprofit whose goal is to, “amplify journalism’s commitment to transparency, accuracy, inclusion and fairness so that the public can make informed news choices.”
Wagner is a journalism professor at San Francisco State University and was previously a reporter for both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.
They talked with Covering Poverty’s Savannah Ware about how to use careful word choice and how to visually represent poverty in journalism coverage. Their comments were trimmed for length and clarity.
“Reporting Inequality” is authored by Venise Wagner and Sally Lehrman. The 2019 book is a tool for journalists to refer back to when covering race and ethnicity. (Credit/Venise Wagner)
What are your thoughts on the importance of word choice in this sector of journalism?
Wagner: I think word choice is super important. The thing I tried to avoid is adding a label on a person because I think that is dehumanizing. So for example, I would not say he is a homeless person. He is a person who is experiencing being homelessness. I would try to change that nomenclature. I think emphasizing that they are people, that helps. They’re not labels. I even have a problem with some of the acronyms that are being used right now with people of color like when people say POC. I don’t mind saying the word people of color but when you reduce people to an acronym, it’s so dehumanizing.
Lehrman: This happened in covering things like health. I was early on in the coverage of AIDS. We talked about people with AIDS, not AIDS victims or patients.
What are your thoughts on terms such as homelessness versus houselessness?
Lehrman: It makes you think a lot about: What is a home? You can definitely make a home on your own but at the same time there are certain external factors that enable you to make that home. Maybe there are other terms that we need to come up with. I think there’s an idea about trying to empower people, but at the same time there’s these external factors and institutions that are shaping our lives that are often based on geography, gender, and so on that we really want people to understand and think about.
What are your thoughts on photojournalism in this sector of journalism? Should people experiencing homelessness be pictured at all?
Lehrman: I’m thinking of a story we used in one of our workshops where there was an image of a man in a tent, he was formerly a sommelier, and he had a bottle of wine on the table, we don’t know why. We don’t know anything more than it was sitting on the table. People went right to, “Oh it’s his fault. Clearly his homelessness is his fault.” Be really careful about what is being communicated in that photo that you may not even be thinking about. I don’t know if we always apply the same level of scrutiny to our photographs as we do to our stories. What kind of things are there that your audiences may pick up on and attach to their existing stereotypes or their existing ways of thinking and models?
Wagner: I think the key here is making sure you don’t replicate stereotypes, but that’s tricky. For example, here in the Bay area African Americans are more likely to be homeless than whites or Latinos, but the pictures that you see often are not of African Americans and so you kind of get this sense that the problem of homelessness does not hit one community more than the other. At the same time there’s concern that you don’t want to stigmatize an entire race of people. How do you deal with that? You have to be really careful about what the photo is communicating. Is it perpetuating a stereotype? Photos can’t stand alone. The photos are part of the story, which hopefully is explaining why what’s happening is happening in the photo.
Lehrman: If there were primarily African Americans being depicted in these photos about people who are experiencing homelessness, that’s fine if the story is actually explaining why that predominance is happening.
Wagner: You want to get the context. It just points again toward making sure that those photos can’t be used to perpetuate stereotypes and also don’t trigger implicit stereotypes.
Lehrman: Photographers can’t be passive in taking their photos. They have to be active reporters taking those photos, asking those questions why.
Savannah Ware is a fourth year majoring in journalism at the University of Georgia.
Local, regional and national reporters have had to adapt their storytelling, sourcing and safety because of the worldwide effects of COVID-19.
Notably, the economic effects of the pandemic since it reached the U.S. in early 2020 have resulted in massive layoffs across newsrooms. In April 2020, The New York Times reported an estimated 36,000 employees of news media companies had been laid off, furloughed or received pay cuts, including major corporations such as Gannett, Slate and Tribune Publishing. Poynter has also tracked layoffs, print suspensions, pay cuts and closures since April among small and medium newsrooms across the country.
As a result, many newsrooms have transitioned to digital formats and local reporters — including student-led newsrooms — have taken the lead in COVID-19 reporting for their communities. The spectrum of storytelling has expanded in tandem with major realizations about economic inequality and social disparities in the United States.
Vianna Davila, reporter with the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative, authored a guide for reporters on covering homelessness specifically during the pandemic. Davila works within a poverty and homelessness beat. She encourages journalists to ask questions about outreach, Homeless Point in Time (PIT) counts and housing efforts, for example, in their own communities and learn relevant terms. Davila also makes a note about visibility.
“COVID-19 may result in homeless people becoming more visible,” Davila wrote in the presentation, posted by the National Press Foundation. “It doesn’t mean there’s a sudden increase in homelessness in a community … but, be mindful, that this situation could eventually result in more people being homeless.”
The “Broke in Philly” collaborative reporting project is an example of a regional approach to information gathering. Emphasizing reporting about poverty and economic mobility in Philadelphia, 19 news organizations are part of this collaborative where reporting is collectively presented on the “Broke in Philly” webpage.
Topics range from health and finance to housing and education, and there are bilingual media outlets involved. The reporting produced within this project has been important in starting conversations about the intersections of COVID-19 with food insecurity, environmental vulnerability and access to health care among Philadelphia’s at-risk communities.
Efforts like this show how journalists have adapted to covering poverty during a pandemic. The Pulitzer Center held a discussion on “Reporting on Disparities Across Vulnerable Communities During COVID-19” with three Pulitzer grantees who produced stories from within this focus point. They all had something to say about how safety concerns changed their approach to the reporting process, and how their approaches had to change as circumstances evolved.
Claire Napier Galoforo discussed her story for the Associated Press on the rural town of Dawson, Georgia, where she focussed on the impact of COVID-19 on a predominantly impoverished, Black community without affordable and accessible health care.
Claire Napier Galoforo discussing her story for the Associated Press during The Pulitzer Center held discussion on “Reporting on Disparities Across Vulnerable Communities During COVID-19.”
“It is a very careful calculation of risk and work. What value can we get in the field that we could not get over the phone?” Galoforo said during a Q&A segment. “Of course our worst fear is to go into a marginalized community and make things worse … I think that it’s something that we as an industry are going to be facing for a really long time as this virus continues to spread and continues to surge.”
Reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aisha Sultan, discussed her story on a single-mother in St. Louis, who in addition to experiencing poverty during the pandemic, had to home-school her kids in a dangerous neighborhood. She argued that the ability to connect virtually with people rather than relying on sporadic visits was helpful in her storytelling process.
Aisha Sultan, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had her story published as part of the Pulitzer Center’s “63106” project.
“As a reporter, you need to be able to see certain things. I’ve asked Tyra to take me on a tour of the house on FaceTime,” Sultan said during a Q&A segment. “What ends up developing is a relationship that feels more intimate than me just showing up and then going away and then showing back up.”
Both reporters had to problem-solve and calculate risks when it came to reporting on these complex stories. This isn’t a new phenomena, but it’s especially relevant when stories depend on in-depth reporting and developing relationships with sources who might not have access to life-saving resources. When it comes to working with people experiencing homelessness or poverty, reporters have had to grapple with all of this.
A reporter in Jackson, Mississippi, Anna Wolfe, won a National Press Foundation award for her story and photo essay “Are the kids alright?” emphasizing the experiences of families and children adapting to an upended public education system. In a city with a 27% poverty rate — according to the U.S. Census Bureau — and where Wolfe reports four in 10 children live in poverty, Wolfe’s story analyzes how the pandemic exacerbated an already dire problem.
Wolfe was one of the first reporters to receive the NPF’s new Poverty and Inequality award for reporting on children in poverty in the U.S. But where Wolfe’s story focussed on inequality, it also presented solutions being led by people in the Jackson, Mississippi, community.
As important as reporting on empirical data has been to the public’s understanding of how this pandemic affects people living in poverty — daily case numbers and tracking federal funding comes to mind — this shift toward solutions journalism in many newsrooms has been just as essential in order to show community responses in a larger context.
The Solutions Journalism Network is a nonprofit organization that emphasizes resources to help reporters cover stories from a solutions journalism perspective. Through the solutions journalism “Story Tracker,” reporting can be narrowed down by issue areas, location of response and media type, among others.
COVID-19 reporting has its own place on this website, highlighting stories about a “Racial Equity Rapid Response Team” in Chicago and food banks in Minnesota that switched to a delivery model to address food insecurity in rural and suburban communities. In an article published by the International Center for Journalists in discussion with Linda Shaw, editorial director at the SJN, this kind of “evidence-based reporting” on responses to local and regional problems is suggested as “essential” for communities to learn from one another.
Sofia Gratas graduated in fall 2020 with a journalism degree from the University of Georgia.
