Cassie Owens: I look at crime coverage in other places, but with this being a Philly project, I look at Philly media more than anything else.

If we look at The [Philadelphia] Inquirer, they still had mugshots until 2020. As a post–George Floyd thing, they made the decision to stop that practice, and I was still at the Inquirer when that decision came down.

Unfortunately, crime briefs are very much alive and well in Philly media. While a lot of places aren’t doing mugshots anymore, crime briefs continue to survive. Different newsrooms have tried to adjust how they happen and what they look like. But as a tool to actually get information about what happened and to respond in a way that could lead to civic engagement, or care, or anything like a positive outcome — a crime brief is just not a good vessel for that.

I think one of the things that is tough with local news is that the coverage that we all know would be better in terms of informational value — and that we all know is possible — takes more resources to produce than crime briefs.

Reporters at the Inquirer have to do weekend rotations and sometimes night rotations. I would [sometimes] have to write crime briefs on a rotation. There wasn’t always time to go to the scene — much less track down family members, have conversations with them, and write a story that speaks about the loss of human life and community impact. As someone who abhors crime briefs, I think one of the big barriers is the resources to do it better.

Owens: I think something that’s true in Philly and also in other places is that what reporters are willing to do — especially reporters who are talking to people in the community a lot — and what newsroom leaders are willing to do are two different things.

You can have, among reporters, widespread opprobrium around a thing. But if the editors at the very top don’t agree with that, that’s not going to shift.

It’s not simply that newsrooms don’t always reflect the communities we serve. Newsroom leaders certainly don’t — but even after that, the community mores around something and the newsroom standards around something are different. Sometimes as journalists, we move around with an attitude that the community is just not going to [understand] us. Or that people who aren’t journalists — who haven’t had to be in the craft of it and handle these things day in and day out — aren’t going to understand some of these nuances. I think that’s a huge obstacle to being able to do this better.

There has to be an understanding that someone does not have to be the most media-literate person or, like, an expert on journalism to say this is harmful and shouldn’t happen. I think that a lot of times in conversation, even when journalists are trying to listen to community, there’s still a filtering that happens. There are still people who say, “Well, we tried on these things, but it’s not great that the community doesn’t trust us just because we didn’t do everything they wanted.”

There’s a difference between having journalistic autonomy and not being fully accountable to harms that you’ve acknowledged. If there’s a mutual understanding that certain practices generate harm, that they don’t really have much informational value, [and] that they can lead to patterns that desensitize people to violence and also exacerbate violence — then there shouldn’t be barriers to listening to the things that would reverse that.

But we do have a norm in the industry that continues to make full accountability to the community difficult. There is a cycle of apologizing, maybe changing certain things in an incremental way, but we’re not actually experiencing the full transformation.

Owens: I think that’s asking: If you have community accountability, what does that look like? Right? There’s a difference between having a community board that you are directly accountable to and having a listening session or making yourself available for a 30-minute virtual coffee. The latter is listening, but it’s not necessarily a process where people in the community can actually tell you, “No, you still haven’t made it all the way there yet.”

There are places that have community boards. I know that [the nonprofit newsroom serving North Philadelphia] Kensington Voice does, for example.

There’s a longstanding dynamic embedded into traditional newsroom culture that [says] if you’re too close to the community, it can compromise your journalistic integrity. I don’t think that mindset engenders the results that we want to see. Additionally, we have a norm in the industry on all levels of news — not just national news, but local news too — where a lot of journalists don’t come from the communities they serve in.

The reality is that if you aren’t centering how these things are registering culturally and psychologically with the people from the communities — plural — who live there, then you’re going to be wrong a lot. There are going to be areas of experience that you can’t know or see from that vantage point. You’re setting yourself up for a dynamic that is more driven by debate or argumentation or saying, “Well, the community feels this but I feel that.”

Owens: We have to think about how traditional news reporting works. I’ve seen reporters who have more of a focus on economic inequality; I’ve never met a residential segregation reporter in my entire career. I don’t think it’s something you can just fold into one 700-word story with 50 or 100 words in order to give the situation justice, editorially.

I’m a native Philadelphian and what really strikes me is something I call “authority without memory.” It’s what I hear from other people who grew up in Philly, too. When there is news coverage, it’s [only about] a particular incident, even if we can [understand] that the incident might have a century or centuries of information behind it that led to it happening.

I don’t think we have a journalistic practice for encapsulating that, for doing it quickly, for doing it on deadline. I don’t think that, culturally, newsrooms have space in production schedules for that to happen. I don’t think that a lot of reporters are coming into the newsroom with experience or training on how we interview people to bring that to the stories.

Those underlying causes — a lot of the most common structural ones we talk about — reflect centuries of history that is very complicated, very nuanced, and, often in this country, very difficult. People don’t like talking about them all the time. There would have to be a full paradigm shift of how the reporting even happens.

Owens: I think it’s a very positive shift. It’s language that we use and encourage at Free Press. We have a cohort of Black and brown folks who are interested in launching their own public safety news projects or supporting projects in that way.

I think it both expands and changes the lens of how you approach it. You’re not necessarily going to focus as much on the crime itself as you are on what’s impacting safety in a community — and that can be a much larger list of things. If typical crime coverage has a lot of reporting on gun violence or theft, that’s not necessarily speaking to, say, if a street is lit properly, or if there’s an overabundance of trash, or what’s happening environmentally in a space, or if there’s enough economic stability in a community, and so on and so forth. Those are all factors that can impact public safety positively or negatively.

A lot of coverage on undocumented folks, especially in this election cycle, singles out specific undocumented folks who committed violence and uses very dehumanizing and stigmatizing language to describe them and to extrapolate and paint a picture of undocumented people in general. That coverage will not lead to a conversation about what actually keeps a community that has a number of undocumented people safe.

Of course, I think that it’s totally possible to do public safety coverage that still doesn’t have a good grasp on the local and national histories and the structural and underlying causes. People interpret public safety very differently, which makes sense, right? What one person or another person or what one community or another community would consider safety is not going to be the same and universal everywhere. I think that’s a dynamic that’s much more difficult to tackle.

Owens: I love that you use that term “all swimming in this water.” One of the things that I’ve been learning and seeing is that these things have basically always been intertwined. We can look back at the earliest forms of news coverage about murders. After Gutenberg invented the printing press, there was a tradition of sharing pamphlets, and in these pamphlets, what you’d consider true crime and what you would consider journalism is completely all [intertwined].

Something that journalists — and people who work in media, period — are really adept at doing is being very particular and knowing the differences in media production standards or editorial standards. They can say, “This is journalism, but that’s nonfiction media. That’s fiction. That’s a TV show. This is a video game.” But even with the standards and media production practices being different, the ways that we’re engaging around death, the human condition, and fear have a lot of similarities, whether we’re talking about a cop show or a report on someone who’s been convicted of murder. There’s still commonalities around “if it bleeds, it leads” and expectations about when an audience may respond with fear and why they will continue watching. You’re still having to navigate sensibilities in ways that might make people feel both afraid and exploited.

I think for journalists, specifically, there are a lot of questions there. Do we want to move beyond those “good guy versus bad guy” narratives? Do we want to move beyond economic models that are based on fear? Do we want to move beyond expectations of being able to profit from harm that happens to Black and brown people? That is older than the country, in a journalism context, if you think about what Media 2070 [from Free Press] has looked at [in terms of how] newspapers economically were able to rely on slave advertisements.

Do we actually want to break away and tell the stories differently? Because we’re very much in conversation with the podcasts and the video games and the TV shows that we might sometimes think that we are different than — and, in some cases, better than — because of our editorial standards. We’re singing a lot of the same notes, but we don’t have to.

Owens: Just thinking about the different sides of my life as someone who is both a journalist and a community person ….I think that journalists would say “absolutely.” Journalists would be able to point to a lot of work that took a lot of effort, a lot of conversation, a lot of commitment, and was really hard to do. It’s work that they didn’t necessarily imagine seeing when they first, you know, began reporting or editing or whatever role they have in their newsroom.

For the community, I think that it’s “no.” Accountability should bring about transformation. That’s a framing that I’ve heard quite frequently. Accountability is actually an opportunity for closer connection after harm happens. And those small tweaks that we talked about, I think journalists would point to that. At the end of the day, the community wants not just transformation, but to have a say in what the conditions of satisfaction are. Until that happens, there’s still going to be this divide.

Owens: I think about how power in the social hierarchies and in our society impact storytelling. Since 2020, I think it is easier to have conversations among journalists about how race or gender or class might shift what happens in the story. But we still haven’t reached an endemic [stage] where it’s understood that every single one of us is taught and ingrained along lines of social hierarchy [about] who deserves complexity, who deserves grace, who deserves redemption, and who gets to have a more nuanced story — and not just on the bases of race, gender and class.

It still feels really, really difficult to get to a space where we can look in the mirror about what we do every day. I wish we could get to that space more easily. I don’t think these patterns are of any one person, but a lot of times it turns into a defensive conversation about whether you individually are a good person. I think that’s a distraction. We should be able to have more room to get down to the nitty-gritty of why we tell stories the way that we do and why certain stories are more mobilizing than others.

Is it okay for me to add just one more thing?

Owens: Something a lot of journalists like is that we have a form that essentially allows us to mess up and then get back out there. There’s a real beauty to that — compared to, say, a novelist who might not produce as many books in their career or people in other fields where they don’t get another at bat as quickly. But I think that it makes some of this accountability tougher in journalism. I don’t think that it’s always ingrained in us to actually take that time, to not just metabolize what happened, but to change the way that we get back out there. I think that really impacts the way that we talk about accountability and I think it also is impacting the way that some of the efforts to change this are being funded.

It’s never a big deal to give a huge chunk of cash to a newsroom that hasn’t totally transformed to get out there and try to do better. I think that it’s not just that the community has to have a say in what the conditions of satisfaction are — I think that the funding decisions should shift as well too. Like, no, don’t give a newsroom that you yourself feel like hasn’t changed a million dollars to get a different result. You said they haven’t changed; they’re not going to get that different result.

I think there’s a responsibility for newsrooms to take more time and to ensure that transformation is happening. But I also think there are a lot of really rich opportunities to give storytellers that are telling things differently already more of a shot. There are disparities where, in smaller newsrooms or news projects, even if people are super-duper qualified, they don’t get the same opportunities as the big places that have done harm over and over and over again.

Across media — journalism included — a lot of us are engaging with short form stuff on our phones and having a different experience with digital ecosystems. I think that there should be more space for nonfiction media with verification and more opportunities for the people who want to do it differently from the outset.

Owens: I think for certain stories, it’s possible. For a lot of the stories that we’re talking about — that are hard and challenging — it’s just not. You’re not going to be able to get a story that can encapsulate, you know, the drivers of systemic violence in a distressed community or the grief of a mother who just lost their child in 700 words. I think that we are asking too much of the format. I think that there should be openness to different formats.

This came up at the last meeting of our [public safety] cohort, but the cohort would really like to see the freedom for reporters and new storytellers of different forms to say, “We know that we have a deadline, and we know that we want to respond to this immediately, but it would be irresponsible to do it like this.” That can bring tension with you and your editor or you and the producers that you’re working with. It would be a shift in newsroom culture. Part of what the cohort has been talking about and developing is our own code of ethics for the work that we would do together and individually.

Owens: Something that Free Press has been pushing for a really long time is for coverage to be more in line with community information needs. There’s a lot of stories in our news ecosystem that, frankly, are not.

Even if people say, like, we have more suburban subscribers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to people in the suburbs who feel completely ignored while people in newsrooms say that they are the prized news consumer. And feel that, unless they’re on Facebook or NextDoor or particular digital forums, they can’t understand what’s happening in their community.

We have to be able, as journalists, to get real that we haven’t been meeting those needs consistently. This is reminding me of a conversation that I had with a former editor — but, you know, a lot of journalism and how we decide what stories need to be told, some of that is coming from direct community interaction and thoughtful communication and lived experience. And some of it is happening off vibes — and we have to actually acknowledge that.

I think in terms of what the [public safety] cohort is developing, the code of ethics is a way to respond to all of those things. I’m not doing it justice here because there are a lot of different principles and nuances. But one of the through lines is trying to move away from a politics of deservingness, if you will, over when there’s a nuanced story. Basically, one of the main things is that it is possible to tell harder stories. It’s the question of whether or not we can give ourselves permission to do that every single time.