For those of us who live in small towns, national news of coverage of something happening near our home is a relatively rare thing. And when the media does come to town, often drawn by some crisis or natural disaster, it can be a surprise what they do —and don’t— pick up on. This has been a theme in many of the towns SOTRU has visited that have weathered hurricanes or tornadoes, oil spills or destructive mining practices: the version of the story told to the American public is one heavily filtered through an outsider’s lens.

LaTosha Brown of the Gulf Coast Fund and Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives visit Rosina Phillipe of Grand Bayou on a video shoot for Bridge the Gulf

For residents, it often doesn’t feel like their story, the one they would choose to tell, if they were the ones with the television cameras and the microphones. On the Gulf Coast — a region so battered by disasters in recent years that the national news media is nearly omnipresent — some residents decided to seize those cameras and mics for themselves.

A group of community leaders, led by documentary filmmaker Leah Mahan, started Bridge the Gulf, a citizen journalism project intended to give residents more ownership over the telling of their stories. The project has been around for just over a year now, and has seen contributions from up and down the Gulf Coast. SOTRU’s Tina Antolini spoke with Bridge the Gulf’s Ada McMahon about the difference the project is making in the region.

SOTRU: Bridge the Gulf (BTG) was created to give Gulf Coast residents a voice in bringing their stories to the greater public. Now that the project is a year in, what range of perspectives has the Project given voice to, which might otherwise have gone unheard?

Ada McMahon: The perspectives on Bridge the Gulf are mostly about environmental issues and social injustices, and what community leaders are doing to create a more sustainable and just future.  The site covers the impacts of the BP disaster and community organizing for environmental justice, and also discussions about the prison system, housing issues and workers rights.  At BridgeTheGulfProject.org you can read the story of a casino waitress who quit her job rather than serve seafood from the oiled Gulf; you can watch a video about formerly incarcerated people who are learning legal skills to help their loved ones in the prison system; and, you can hear why people who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina are still living in Houston.

Covering these stories is important, but equally important is how they are told and who they are told by. The casino worker wrote her story herself with editing support from Bridge the Gulf.  The prison video was made by a community organizer who helps run the legal training program and learned how to produce a video through a Bridge the Gulf training session.  The interviews with displaced Katrina survivors were conducted by someone who was evacuated to the Houston Astrodome during the storm.

It’s important to Bridge the Gulf that each community has an opportunity to present stories from their own perspectives.  So on the site you’ll see fishermen and environmentalists, you’ll see contributors from Texas and from Alabama, you see African American, Native American, white, Cajun, Vietnamese and Latino contributors. The site is not just about the stories.  It is about giving ownership and control of media to Gulf Coast community members.  It provides a platform where they can use their stories and experience and expertise to make an impact.

SOTRU: How do you feel Bridge the Gulf has contributed to the coverage of ongoing events in the Gulf Coast region, like the impact of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill?

Ada McMahon with Bridge the Gulf contributors (and fishermen's advocates) Michael Roberts and Tracy Kuhns

Ada McMahon: Bridge the Gulf contributes a unique voice – that of people and communities who are directly facing social injustices and environmental issues.

For readers, it is a refreshing alternative to the mainstream media. For members of impacted communities, it is an opportunity to say what’s really going on, in their own words. 
In the case of the BP disaster, mainstream news is routinely based on BP press releases, statements or reports.   Bridge the Gulf’s coverage is centered on the people who are most impacted by the disaster – commercial fishermen, response workers who are falling ill from chemical exposure, coastal residents who are still seeing dead turtles and dolphins wash up. 
If we want to know how the Gulf Coast is recovering from the BP disaster, aren’t these the people we want to hear from?

SOTRU: Is what’s being covered on Bridge the Gulf related to the oil spill providing a different perspective than what’s in the mainstream media? How so?

Ada McMahon: You can get stories on Bridge the Gulf that you just won’t see elsewhere — commercial shrimpers like Mike Roberts and Tracy Kuhns, who live on the bayou and are trying to protect their waters and their livelihood. Andre Gaines, who saw so many safety and environmental violations as a supervisor on the clean-up operation and has fallen ill from his exposure to toxic oil and dispersants. Cherri Foytlin, the mother of six and wife of an oil worker who walked to Washington D.C. to raise awareness about the ongoing disaster.

Immediately after the BP disaster, the mainstream media covered some of these people and issues. You could find a few good stories about commercial fishermen, some good investigations into poor safety regulations.  But a lot of the coverage was focused on technical aspects of capping the well – remember “junk shot” and “static kill”?  Once the well was capped, mainstream media began to act like the story was over, which was the message coming from BP and government agencies.

Now, the mainstream media rarely covers the BP disaster. You won’t find many stories about the health issues – seizures, headaches, memory lapses, nausea – that people began experiencing after being exposed to BP’s oil and dispersants.   You won’t find stories in the mainstream media that are based on the lived experiences of communities on the Gulf Coast.  At Bridge the Gulf, we build our coverage on the stories and experiences of Gulf Coast communities, from people who have direct experience and knowledge of ongoing issues and events.

SOTRU: What sort of impact has Bridge the Gulf had on communities in the Gulf Coast? How can you measure such things?

Ada McMahon: We’ve seen material impacts, like community groups getting donations because someone read about them on Bridge the Gulf. Bridge the Gulf has also had an impact by connecting to larger media outlets.  For example, State of the Re:Union and the BBC picking up on stories from Gulf Coast communities and getting them to a larger audience. We measure our web traffic, so we can say 1,000 people visited this blog post, 20,000 people saw that video.  But we also measure our impact by just asking people how we are doing.

Mississippi Gulf Coast

We just finished an evaluation of our first year, based on in-depth interviews with community members who contribute to or read the site. They talked about being empowered by having their points of view valued and shared.  They talked about concrete skills they gained through one-on-one training and editing support – video production, writing, web editing.  For some, telling their story has been a first step, leading to deeper community organizing, advocacy and leadership.

 Bridge the Gulf also has had an impact for communities by connecting them to each other, keeping them informed of each others’ struggles and stories and issues and perspectives. It has been surprising to me how much Bridge the Gulf has really helped strengthen a movement for social and environmental justice on the Gulf Coast, by connecting people across geography, background and issue.

SOTRU: What are the Project’s goals going forward?

Ada McMahon: Our goal is to multiply those impacts. To grow. To reach more communities, cover more issues, train and support more community journalists.  Another key goal is to build our readership. We want hundreds of thousands of people to engage with our contributors and their views. 
We also want communities to be empowered to affect change. The story is just the beginning.  Once someone documents an injustice, how do they use that documentation to get justice?  Our goal is to have a project that is influential, so that community members have a strong voice in public debate.

How do we get there? We’re figuring it out as we go, but in the next several months we are working to build new partnerships, improve on our beta Website and expand the support we provide to community media-makers.

For more information on Bridge the Gulf, visit their Website. To hear more stories from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, listen to SOTRU’s recent episode there.

There’s a new study out on how we Americans get our local news, and the findings show that “word of mouth” ranks second among all sources after local TV news. This has important implications for how communities go about informing themselves, engaging people, and, ultimately solving public challenges.

Source: Yiftah

In one way, this finding is not surprising. Back in the mid 1990s, the Harwood Institute did a study on how and why people engage on public concerns, entitled “Meaningful Chaos.” What we found then (and which is echoed in this latest study done by the Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation), is that people use numerous information sources, piecing them together in an attempt to paint a picture of what’s happening in the world around them. And to do so, they rely on no one single news source – instead, people actively and intentionally draw on a collection of them.

In piecing together this picture, people are in search of three things: coherence, meaning, and a sense of possibility. These are each basic human yearnings – desires that each of us are seeking to satisfy as we make our way through life. At issue is how well different organizations and groups help people to do this.

To understand these sources and their interplay, the Knight Foundation has been doing great work on what they call “information ecologies” – the web of information sources people tap into and use in daily community life. On October 17, the Aspen Institute (with support from Knight) will release a new white paper I wrote on how to assess local information environments. Click here if you want to receive a copy. I’ll be writing future posts about the key insights and findings in the days ahead.

But, for now, I want to underscore this one finding about “word of mouth” and its implications for the various efforts to “mobilize” Americans around particular issues, such as education.

Many of these efforts are laudable. But the importance of “word of mouth” is a reminder to those organizations and groups seeking to mobilize people that simply pushing out top-down, heavily messaged, highly packaged campaigns will not work. They run the risk of smelling like (and being!) public relations hyperbole, in which national or even local organizations are seen as trying to amass individuals in support of their organizational agenda.

Whether it’s the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, or the Tea Party, people are sending a clear message that they want to be heard, they want to engage on things that matter to them, and in ways that enable them to take action together. Word of mouth is at the center of these activities, and at the center of people’s lives. Our task now is to engage people in ways that tap into that and honor it.

What informational resource/s work well in your community. Does the answer lie in your local news, social clubs, or places of worship? What role does word of mouth play in your day-to-day? Perhaps some prefer another method of garnering reliable information to proceed in better decision-making for the community. We’d be interested to hear some of your thoughts and ideas on what mobilizes you, so please send them our way.

A dynamic public speaker, Rich Harwood is a frequent keynote for foundations and national organizations. He is an expert contributor on national and syndicated media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN’s Inside Politics, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Special Report with Brit Hume, C-SPAN, and many others. He is also the author of Hope Unraveled: The people\’92s retreat and our way back (2005), Make Hope Real: How we can accelerate change for the public good (2008) and numerous studies, articles and essays chronicling vital issues of our time. His most recent written work, Why We\’92re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, is being published and distributed in Spring 2011. You can follow him on twitter @RichHarwood and facebook.com/richharwood.

You can read Rich’s posts every Tuesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

State of the Re:Union intern Brit McGinnis shares a product of her inspiration from a SOTRU tradition in “Letters to the City.” You can read the “Letters to the City” by visiting our Website (click here): under “Radio Episodes” you can choose which episode you would like to find out more about. Once you choose an episode, the “Letters to the City” will be available for your viewing pleasure on the right side of the page.

Dear Oregon,

Source: Cacophony The "Made in Oregon" sign located at the western end of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon.

This is really a sad farewell for me, due to my leaving you to take on an internship in Ireland, a country across the sea and much different than yourself. I will miss you, Oregon — you’re such a chill state to hang with! You’re one of the mild-tempered middle children of the Union, the nature-loving, sweater-wearing, sweet-tooth-possessing daughter born on Valentine’s Day.

I first came to know you in the depths of winter (during a record-breaking snowfall, to boot). I was a little girl from California who had never seen snow, and I was boggled by it. The world looked exactly like the black and white postcards I had seen at Christmastime, and the snow-made air was clean and pure. My brothers and I had to gather firewood to feed the burning hearth, and knocked icicles off the roof to munch on with the neighbor kids.

Farewell Bend Park, in Bend, Oregon

But your landscape changed dramatically once summer came around, and goodness knows I loved you for it. The air was clean and arid, especially around the lava fields. The local people retained their famous friendliness throughout the change of seasons, and my family adopted the state as our new home.

Now that I’m older, I see you through different eyes. I can appreciate your  urban wisdom, the street smarts you contain under your scruffy exterior. You are so beloved by your people, who work hard to retain your natural beauty.

People have sometimes tried to make you feel like you aren’t cool, that you are too backwoodsy or don’t have enough big cities. But you just smile to yourself, Oregon, because you know the truth. You’re as awesome as they come. You’re the perfect pit stop between Los Angeles and Seattle, and musicians love to be taken in by your chill, music connoisseur peeps in Eugene or Portland (even Bend sometimes!).

Source: B.D.'s World A replica of one of the original covered wagons that travelled to Oregon in the 1800s.

You are so multifaceted, Oregon. It’s one of the things I love most about you. Farmland, beaches, volcanoes, forests— you’ve got it all. Both the High Desert and the Silicon Forest reside within you. You’re a jill-of-all-trades, with plenty of wonderful things to offer.

I love you, Oregon. You took me in as a scrappy kid from the desert and gave me a home. You also gave me a new heritage, one of pioneers, adventurers and scientists. I will no doubt miss your toughness, confidence, and all-American creativity when I venture from your shores.

Always,

Brit

P.S. There is indeed an Oregonian accent! To achieve it, begin by speaking slowly. Emphasize all “o” sounds, stretch out your “n”s, and make your t- and k-sounds extra harsh. And never forget, it’s “OR-UH-GUN”- not “OAR-EE-GONE.”