The People’s Newsroom share their experiences of working with mission-led community organisations to explore what story-sharing means – and what its future could look like. This article is part of the People-Powered Storytelling collaborative series.
Deep within us, we know that our stories have the power to help create new ways of relating and being in the world, with one another, with past and future generations and with nature.
We, The People’s Newsroom, centre ourselves around the belief that these stories, when generated collectively, are at the heart of the transformational changes our society needs.
We look around at our current media system and see how far removed it is from providing this for our communities. Our existing media systems often make problems worse, rather than helping solve them. The business model of commercial – rather than public – gain isn’t working. Legacy journalism continues to lack diversity, and that’s played a significant role in amplifying discrimination, inequality and harm. Together, these foster conditions in which information is partial and incomplete, which in turn leads to poor decisions and outcomes at a societal level. Ultimately, there’s a big gap between the pain and beauty, the frustration and momentum for change and the bubbling hope in our communities, and that which is portrayed and cultivated in the dominant media.
We know of a different way though, one that we can all be part of. We know it is possible to have a thriving, diverse, locally-and-community-owned-and-led information ecosystem. We believe it is possible to generate values-driven, therapeutic, possibility-oriented and power-building stories. We know that together, we can build a movement that transitions us to an information ecosystem that serves us collectively at local, national and planetary levels. We know this because it's been done before and the seeds and buds of it are all around us.
The People’s Newsroom started as a project of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as an initiative aimed at unleashing community power through journalism that truly reflects and serves all of us and sparks positive change. It now lives under the umbrella of Opus Independents, a not-for-profit social enterprise which works to contribute upstream solutions to complex system problems.
At the heart of our mission is the centreing of, and leadership from, those who have been harmed by systems of oppression, including by the media itself. We are taking our experiences, stories and knowledge – once excluded or extracted from us – and using them for connection, healing and power building.
We know that to tell stories of what might be possible we first have to start with what's already possible. To seed generative and life-giving stories, we need to work with existing generative and life-giving practices.
We sought out a small group of mission-led community organisations from across the UK, those we know are currently holding enriching community practices, and explored with them what it might take and what it might mean to create and steward a storytelling commons. One where the new stories we create together can be shared between us and with the world for collective benefit.
We brought together representatives of AM, Civic Square, Greater Govanhill, MAIA, National Theatre Wales and Now Then Magazine to begin to lay the foundations of a storytelling commons and begin practising what story-sharing – not storytelling – might look like.
We spent six months learning from each other lessons on commoning, on infrastructures of care, doughnut economics, generative storytelling, shifting power in journalism, community investment and longevity (what it looks like to tell a story over four years!) and using physical space to not simply serve information gaps but connection ones too.
It led us to create a values system (below) and generate and influence new work, like Now Then’s Honest Conversation series, Right to Thrive series, pieces on shifting wealth, queer Palestinians, neighbourhood mapping and on a community land trust as well.
The result is a foundation of a storytelling practice that we hope to deepen locally while also sharing and growing a community that anyone can be part of. We’ve kicked things off on our digital commons on the AM platform which you can check out, here.
This, for us, is the future of news. You can help support these efforts by donating to Opus and you can get in touch with us to connect and collaborate at: peoplesnewsroom@weareopus.org
This piece, and the People’s Newsroom, is stewarded by: Shirish Kulkarni, Megan Lucero, Debs Grayson, Tchiyiwe Chihana and James Lock.
This article is part of People-Powered Storytelling, a new collaborative series showcasing the transformative impact of community-centred media initiatives in the UK. Read more about the series, and the other contributions that are part of it, here.
Comments