What learning to save lives taught me about saving journalism

“So, what classes are you taking?”

It’s the question I get the most when people learn I’m a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. Those same people are always surprised when I tell them one of my favorite classes has been a six month EMT training course. Us fellows are supposed to be thinking big thoughts and/or figuring out how to save journalism, aren’t we? Well yes… but the point of the fellowship is also to help us grow as human beings (yup, journalists are people too despite what you’ve heard to the contrary).

For years I’ve wanted to learn some kind of basic emergency medicine. When my best friend died of an overdose, I was the one who found his body. The 911 operator told me to do chest compressions as we waited for an ambulance to arrive. I felt both terrified and helpless. After the EMTs arrived and pronounced my friend dead, I wondered if there was something more I could have done (there wasn’t).

So when I saw this course in the catalogue, I decided to challenge myself to learn how to help people if I ever find myself in an emergency situation again. Being back in a university setting has been unreal and taking this class with students less than half my age has been challenging, to say the least. But what I’ve found most empowering is how the lessons of emergency medicine can be applied to the work we all need to do to make sure that journalism survives the current crisis.

Big Sick vs. Little Sick

One of the first things we learn is to ask questions, lots questions, which is right in my wheelhouse as a journalist. When we encounter a patient we ask them (or any bystanders): What is their medical history? What happened to prompt the 911 call? And, most importantly, how are they feeling? Also, what are their symptoms? When did they start? Are they feeling any pain?

Journalism, as a field, is in a state of crisis but that crisis is being experienced by individual journalists and newsrooms and those individual experiences count. We need to ask ourselves: How did we get here? What symptoms are our newsrooms experiencing? How long have these symptoms been going on and do they get better or worse over time? When I founded the Blacklight, the first investigative unit at a legacy Black Newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News, I understood that our readership had fallen dramatically since its heights in the 1960’s. As I explored the idea of an investigative unit, I also began to confront the reality that our influence had also waned, which was the cause in no small part to our decline in readership.

Much like a patient, I had to be honest with my colleagues. Our approach to coverage was not providing our readers and community with the information they needed, so they stopped coming to us for news. We often wrote stories that weren’t as interesting or as deep as our competitors’, and because we were still a print-focused weekly, those stories came out later. I knew that we needed to change our approach and that investigative journalism would need to be a central part of our transformation.

Our Publisher, Elinor Tatum, agreed and pointed to our gun violence reporting. Every summer, we wrote many versions of the same story: someone was shot, usually at night or over a weekend, and the community was tired of it. Our coverage didn’t differ from anyone else’s except for the fact that we chose to cover some of these shootings at all.

So I pushed for us to deepen our coverage. We looked at the root causes of gun violence. Its impact on Black and Brown communities, and we explore solutions. Out of this effort, came our ongoing project, Beyond the Barrel of the Gun.

We wrote numerous cover stories, held in person convenings and produced an award winning documentary. It all has helped push forward a deeper and more nuanced understanding of gun violence. This work, alongside our climate coverage and other reporting, has not just helped us win awards and gain access to grant funding, it has helped us increase our print and digital readership. Once again the New York Amsterdam News became an important destination for news for members of our community.

As we continue to do the hard work of ensuring that journalism remains relevant and sustainable, we should take a page from another group of underpaid, overworked and undervalued professionals: EMTs. We need to take the time to understand the mechanism of injury before we can come up with a treatment plan. How did we get here as a field? How can we help the public better understand the importance of the work that we do and how can we move away from the “we know best” mentality that still pervades our profession and better listen to what our audience is telling us that they need.

Training to become an EMT has taught me the importance of slowing down, asking the right questions and engaging with those who need my help. I hope I can remember to apply these lessons after I leave Stanford, both in an ambulance and in a newsroom.