Our newsroom is finding its place in this community

Six months into running this experimental newsroom, we’re starting to grasp the special role it can play in a community.

We’ve wanted to do much more than inform; our goal is to serve the people who live and work in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood by spotlighting the issues that matter most to them. You can see that in our work, from a story about locals lobbying state officials to protect their farmers’ market, to a profile of an organization recently formed to help people battling addiction. And as promised, we’ve empowered community members to tell their stories themselves. Niko Clark wrote about how he’s no longer ashamed of living here, despite the area’s rough reputation. And we’ve just published a piece by trans artist Kaylan Rose who, in her late 60s, has embraced her gender identity. We don’t merely host their stories; we work with these writers, edit them, to help them find their voice and their message.

We’ve discovered yet another way we can support the Tenderloin: We can help it politically organize.

This began to click into place in May. At nearly every community meeting that we attended, people kept expressing concern about City Hall’s budget, which was under negotiation. San Francisco’s mayor needed to close a two-year deficit projected to be in the hundreds of millions, and word on the street was that he’d slice funding to service providers to make his numbers work. In the Tenderloin, where services and their clients are concentrated, that would mean deep pain for immigrants, refugees, the unhoused, people struggling with substance-use disorders, and many other vulnerable groups.

So we sat down with a local leader who was game-planning how to keep those funds in the neighborhood. We asked him what the Tenderloin Voice could do to help. After some feeling around, we arrived at this: We’d produce information about which services and clients were under threat, and how the public could pressure electeds to change course. We ran our ideas by another key leader, who endorsed them.

On its face, this approach may sound rather journalistically orthodox. Yes, we published coverage that might resemble what you’d find in other outlets, on budget wranglings and political actions. But this body of work both implicitly and explicitly encouraged civic engagement and protest, arming people with knowledge and talking points and reassuring them that they wouldn't be turning out alone. 

We zeroed in and, for many weeks, didn’t look away. We produced a schedule of upcoming actions. When amendments to the proposed budget spared some service providers, we underlined the cuts that remained so that people knew the neighborhood wasn’t in the clear yet. We solicited, edited, and published testimonies by the heads of major organizations about how the cuts would affect their clients, with knock-on consequences for the neighborhood and the city. We created flyers urging people to attend rallies and government meetings, and printed them in the Tenderloin’s dominant languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Arabic. We paid local youths and our various contacts to hand out the flyers, including them as inserts in the roughly 1,000 copies that we distributed of our zine’s Issue No. 3. We went on local radio station KALW 91.7 FM to spread the word even farther. And we put all our coverage and the printable flyer files in a resource page, so that anyone could quickly get up to speed and enter this fight alongside their neighbors. 

To maximize our impact, we knew we’d need outside funding for this work. Months into our newsroom’s operations, we’d garnered enough local trust that community groups collaborated with us to apply for a rapid-response grant from the San Francisco Foundation — and the philanthropic organization approved us.

In other words, we closed a gap between our newsroom and its audience. We joined the Tenderloin in mobilizing to protect critical resources.

The community organizing worked. Nearly all the cuts were averted. We feel confident we played a role in that.

We’re reflecting on this experience, and on which of our tactics were more effective, how we could begin to measure that, how we might iterate on our approach. It is becoming clear that we reside in a space where journalism is uncomfortable and sometimes unwelcome. It’s a space adjacent to advocacy, but not for any one cause, I think. We take our cues from the community about what to focus on, and then we bring the type of focus that seems to meet the need. Sometimes that looks like an explanatory article. Other times it’s a direct call to action. It’s freeing to set aside many of my presumptions and reflexes from years of conventional reporting, which have determined how I approached this job.

But for now? No more work. We need to rest. We’re taking a month off, starting next week. We launched News Relay Network over a year ago, then opened the newsroom in January, and it’s felt like a mad dash the whole way. Also, I just turned 40. The knees, they are buckling.

While we’re away, here’s my request to you: Tell someone about us, someone you think might really care.

Share this article with them and, if the moment seems right, encourage them to consider donating. We’ve prioritized our scarce dollars for community contributors and printing the zine, while volunteering our time — and that last part can’t continue indefinitely. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we had proper financial support?

Because if there’s one lesson I’ve fully absorbed by now, it’s that none of us can accomplish the big things on our own. We need to work together.