Social Journalism in Action in Cancer Alley
For my last semester as a Social Journalism student at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, I focused on Cancer Alley: an 85-mile stretch of area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River where people are dying of cancer at disproportionate rates due to all the oil, gas, and petrochemical facilities that concentrate there.
I chose this community in part because of my own fear of dying accidentally. I can’t imagine how mad I’d be if a corporation was the cause of my cancer or my impending death. I also believe that when we see a group of people being taken advantage of by big corporations and their local governments, it’s our job as journalists to stand up and say something.
For my project, I made four, two-to-seven-minute videos about the pollution caused by the plants, residents’ fights against them, and the conflicts of interest through which these projects get approved time and time again. Here they are:
Video 1: “Here’s What You Need to Know About Formosa Plastics, the Giant Petrochemical Plant Trying to Enter St. James”
Video 2: “4 Conflicts of Interest When Approving Oil and Gas Projects in Louisiana”
Video 3: “Elvira Perrilloux Speaks About Losing Her Son and Sisters to Cancer”
Video 4: “This Land Use Plan Wants to Replace People With the Fossil Fuel Industry and Petrochemical Plants”
I got 13 page likes, 15 page follows, 21,480 post reaches, 1,342 post engagements, 23 reactions, 17 comments, and 7 shares. In my video about the plastics plant trying to enter St. James Parish, I got 5 shares, 3 of which were from people who lived in the affected communities (and 2 of which I could not see due to privacy settings). One of those sharers is an influential member of the community who was highlighted in a Vox piece on Cancer Alley, and shared the video after I sent it in a message to the citizen activist group RISE St. James. I also posted videos to my personal page. There, I got 29 page likes, 39 page follows, 18,540 reaches, 980 engagements, 39 reactions, 33 comments, and 14 shares.
Of these metrics, the ones I care the most about are the shares. This indicates, to me, more than merely tacit acceptance of what I’m contributing: it indicates a desire to attach oneself to my work.
Here is what the citizen activist group RISE St. James said on their account in response to my Formosa video:
“Dear Alexa, wow thank you for all the time you put into this. It means so much that people are getting the word out about Formosa and helping educate the public.”
Here is what a resident, Betty Edwards, wrote in response to my video featuring resident Elvira Perrilloux, who lost her son and sisters to cancer:
“We are from Port Allen La, my husband lost a kidney to cancer and now my daughter has stage 4 brain cancer on the brain stem!!!!!”
I also made a series of graphics on my Facebook page featuring quotes by community members. Here’s one example:
One of my goals was to funnel viewers into RISE St. James — to turn residents into activists. I have not gotten reports that there are any new members of RISE St. James, so I didn’t succeed in that respect. Moving forward, I am going to experiment with different calls to action.
I learned how challenging it can be to grow a page from scratch. I did so with a different community, Charlestown, Indiana, and got over 200 page likes, thousands of views per video, and shares in the 30s and 40s each video. A big difference between the two communities is that Charlestown had a number of issues percolating that were directly due to a corrupt mayor, and there was about to be an election between him and someone who stood for transparency and reform. I think I was in the right place at the right time with Charlestown. With Cancer Alley, on the other hand, the fossil fuel and petrochemical plants are facts of life — many of the plants have been there for decades. Even though the plants are clearly causing some cancer, there’s always the chance that someone gets cancer as a coincidence. So there might not be the same sense of direct blame and therefore urgency. I thus learned that it’s important to create this — to lay out my case of why I think the plants are to blame and why we should be talking about this issue right now.
My approach to connecting with people in the pandemic was to copiously read and watch everything I could that had already been done about Cancer Alley, find the people who were featured, and call them up — and through the course of our conversation, ask them if they knew other people I could call. This was effective. I learned that people often like to be called up and told that you liked what they had to say in whatever publication in which you read their words.
Here are some more key takeaways from my experience:
- You’re serving communities within your community
I learned that communities aren’t monolithic. Within a given community, there are at least two groups with different wants, needs, and beliefs. In my work with communities that are taken advantage of by big corporations and their local governments, this usually breaks down as such: “the reasonables”, who believe that the development (in this case, new fossil fuel or petrochemical plants) is going to come in no matter what — so they might as well accept it, and work with the company to get some concessions or benefits from them. And “the revolutionaries”, who believe that the incoming industry must be stopped altogether. I observed this with St. James Parish Council Member Clyde Cooper, who chastised the rest of the Parish Council about approving the plastics plant Formosa during council meetings, but ultimately voted in line with them because he said he wanted to get on the company’s good side. Residents like Sharon Lavigne and Barbara Washington, however, are trying to fight Formosa Plastics tooth and nail through their citizen activist group RISE St. James and believe the company must be stopped at all costs. Questions I’ve asked myself and will continue to ask myself moving forward include, ‘How can you dance with these two perspectives?’ and ‘How can you form bridges between these two perspectives?’
2. Putting trust in the observations of your community will get you far
Many of these residents face industry executives who tell them that the cancer is a coincidence unrelated to the company’s activity. I’ve heard stories of residents attending meetings held by oil companies and being handed out pamphlets on healthy eating and exercise, as if the lack of that is what’s giving them cancer. In traditional journalism, it’s drilled into you to check and double check to see if something is true — to never trust a source too much. But I think I was able to get the information that I got because I did believe my sources when they told me about cancer being caused by the plants. And while it’s still important to fact check, my community is at a juncture where they haven’t been able to definitively prove a cancer cluster in spite of how sky-high the cases are. If I were to come in as a reporter and immediately say, “Yeah but how do you know that?” they might be leery of me, like they are of the plant executives. While it’s important to know the limitations of something someone states, it’s just as important to convey trust in the people you’re speaking with.
3. Partner with advocacy organizations that already work with the community
I got a ton of great information and contacts through the advocacy organization The Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Its founder, Anne Rolfes, was able to give me a lot of great background on the community and really set the stage for what I was seeing. If I could do things over again I would have tried to form a more explicit partnership with them where they perhaps posted my videos on their page. I was too nervous to ask them to post my videos after I made them, but things could have been different if we had an explicit arrangement that we laid out at the outset.
Social journalism teaches us to deeply listen to communities, to build trust within those communities, to infiltrate the communication infrastructure that exists within a community, and to form bridges between different groups within a community. These are some of the things I learned firsthand in Cancer Alley.
