How the community will guide our coverage

If you live or work in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, we want to give you editorial control. That means you’d determine the types of stories our forthcoming newsroom would publish.

But how would that actually work?

We’ve been figuring that out — and we don’t have all the answers yet. I’m here to tell you what our plan is so far.

We’d love any and all feedback. You might influence how we go about this! Email our general inbox: hello@newsrelaynetwork.org. You can also contact me directly: noah@newsrelaynetwork.org.

Early conversations, listening sessions drive coverage

For months, we’ve been meeting with individuals and small groups, getting a sense for the kind of coverage they want and that they think the Tenderloin needs. Soon we’ll host a larger listening session with dozens of attendees, in part to gather more ideas.

Certain themes are already standing out, and our initial stories will focus on them.

Editorial advisory committee

Soon after launching the newsroom, we’ll aim to form a small editorial advisory committee of engaged community members and news consumers — people who, as a group, understand and are in touch with broad swaths of the Tenderloin. We’ll consult them on a recurring basis, fielding their requests for and feedback on coverage.

We’re still thinking through many aspects of the committee, including the ideal number of members, how to choose them, whether membership should have time limits, and what their decision-making process will look like.

Collaborating with the community to sharpen ideas

When community members give us their story ideas or requests, we’ll default to trying to make them happen.

I’m certain this will often entail some back-and-forth, to figure out what’s driving interest in the topic and how to craft coverage about it. We don’t expect ideas to arrive fully formed — it’s our job to work with people to develop them.

For example, someone might say, “You need to publish stories about mental health!”

This is a good start. But it isn’t quite yet something that I could translate into a line of reporting.

So I might respond: “Why does that topic matter to you?”

Them: “Because it seems like a lot of homeless people suffer from mental illness. We need to talk more about mental health care so that we can improve it for the unhoused, which will help them move off the streets and find housing.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. I’d pitch a few lines of inquiry, feeling around for one or two that hit on the key ideas motivating the person:

What do current and prospective clients think of the available mental health programs, and are there ways they’d recommend improving them? Which programs do service providers think are most vital to helping people get and stay housed? In the Tenderloin, have those programs changed or evolved over time? Has funding from City Hall increased or waned? Why? And would scaling it up be an unalloyed good, or could that bring unintended consequences? 

By seeking answers to these questions, I’d likely find information that added to our collective understanding of homelessness and mental health treatment in the Tenderloin, and whether policy changes could improve the situation. This could yield fodder for many types of stories, from legislative analysis to more colorful “human interest” pieces that, say, followed a program participant for a day. Or maybe we’d produce a guide to help people determine whether certain programs might help them and, if so, how to access them.

This type of reporting-brainstorming process happens every day in newsrooms across the country. But it rarely, if ever, happens in collaboration with audience members.

Stories we couldn’t pursue

Sometimes people will demand stories that we simply can’t go after, due to legal or ethical concerns. It’ll be on us to clearly communicate when that’s the case, including through editorial standards that we make public.

We’re drafting those standards. We hope to circle back to you with them soon.

They’ll have two major goals:

1. Maximize fairness, within individual stories as well as across the broad sweep of our coverage.
2. Prevent us from getting sued into oblivion!

Our standards will ensure that we won’t publish false or misleading information; we’ll give people opportunities to respond to criticism prior to publication; and, rather than starting an inquiry with an assumption about what we’ll find, we’ll lead with an open mind.

I hope that 95% of the time we can workshop a problematic story idea into something that still gets at what’s driving the requester. But of course that won’t always happen, and we’ll have to reject ideas that we can’t salvage.

When people disagree with each other, or us, about a story

We already know people in the Tenderloin have well-informed and deeply held opinions on topics that affect them — and not all opinions are the same. What if community members disagree with each other over whether we should pursue a story? What if they disagree with us?

This might be our diciest consideration. We’re thinking through how we’d handle it. And I’m telling you that, because some community members have told us that they appreciate us showing up with questions and humility, and not just answers or decisions already made.

One idea is to have the editorial advisory committee vote on whether to pursue the story. 

This is absolutely something we’ll run by attendees at our upcoming listening session. Specific date and time are TBD, but expect it in the next month or so. We’ll announce it in an upcoming newsletter.

Community contributors

Depending on the story, as well as our budget and bandwidth, we’ll invite community members to take it on. And we’ll be open to their pitches about stories they’d like to tell.

This, too, is an aspect of the newsroom that we’re still designing.

Want to know more?

This is a new kind of relationship for us, as journalists, and there’s still a lot left to figure out.

If you’re interested in some examples of how it could work, check back next week. We’ll tell you about ideas that have come up in our conversations with community members so far — with their permission, of course.