What I’ve Accomplished in My Last Semester of Journalism School
As a Social Journalism student at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, I’ve focused on communities that, in different yet universal ways, are being taken advantage of by big corporations and their local governments. I engaged a community in Charlestown, Indiana, where the mayor was trying to kick out the poorest neighborhood in town entirely and replace it with a wealthy subdivision by levying astronomical property maintenance fines against them, and only forgiving the fines if they agreed to sell their houses to the developer. For my summer internship, I engaged the Mott Haven and Hunts Point communities in the South Bronx, which were up against rezoning projects that threatened to displace them and fighting a new jail that will enter the community across the street from a school. And finally, for my last semester, I engaged the community of Cancer Alley: an 85-mile stretch of area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where people are dying at disproportionate rates due to all the oil, gas, and petrochemical facilities that locate there. I’m going to tell you about this last semester’s work.
People in Cancer Alley are 50 times more likely to get cancer than the average person.
In my work I met people like Sharon Lavigne, who lives in the heart of Cancer Alley and personally knows 30 people who have died of cancer in the past 5 years. Sharon prayed to God about what to do about all of the death and said that he answered her by telling her to start the grassroots, faith-based activist group RISE St. James to fight the incoming plants. RISE St. James now has 2,300 likes on Facebook, dozens of active members, and is a force and a threat to the $9.4 billion plastics plant, Formosa Plastics, that is attempting to enter their already-oversaturated community. If it enters, it would triple the pollution in residents’ air, according to an estimate done by ProPublica.
Sharon is routinely on the phone with journalists, and says she wants to tell her community’s story to anyone who will listen. She told me she hardly has time to wash her hair, she’s so busy fighting this plant.
“My relatives work at the plants. But in the last ten years I sat down and wrote about 50 people that I know personally has died of cancer, my sister being one of them. She was 57 years old and she had metastatic lung cancer. And my prayer partner who went on to glory. She died from cancer. I get flak for this work I do. And I don’t want this fight. I didn’t want this fight. But every time I try to say I ain’t fighting, my old ancestors’ spirits rise up in me and say, “You’ve got to fight, you’ve got to fight.” My great-great-grandmother came out from slavery, and in 1874 she purchased 34 acres of land that is still in our family today. I can’t just sit down and let industry come in and do this to us. It just can’t happen. So I’m fighting. I’m fighting, and I’m going to keep on fighting. James Earl Jones said, his Daddy told him, “If you see a good fight, jump in.” This is a good fight, and I’m in. I’m in.”
— St. James resident Barbara Washington, at a rally in Tchoupitoulas Chapel
My approach to connect with people during the pandemic, when I couldn’t be there in person, was this: I read a ton of articles and watched a ton of videos on Cancer Alley, and then found the contact information for the people who were featured. I would not only try and speak with them, but ask them if they knew other people I could speak with.
What I created was a video series on different aspects of Cancer Alley, fossil fuel industry tactics, and residents’ battles with the plants. I posted the videos on two Facebook pages, “Protect Cancer Alley” and “Alexa In Your Town”. So far, I have 40 page likes, 52 follows, and 2,317 engagements. I did this by advertising my videos, and making page promos, on Facebook.
My product’s strength is my passion for the topic, and the content, which is rich. Its weaknesses are, and my challenge is, that I don’t have enough page likes yet to routinely get responses to my videos, so right now it sort of feels like I’m posting things into the void. Facebook advertising hasn’t brought me an efficient conversion rate. I think once I get my email list going, things will change.
My product’s value proposition is this: Our Facebook videos inform and enliven people living in Cancer Alley or who are interested in the fate of people in Cancer Alley, thus inspiring them to rise up against the plants and reducing the likelihood that residents will have to bury loved ones to cancer, enabling them and their loved ones to live long and prosperous lives.
As you can see from the statement, one of my major goals going into this project was to, through my content, inspire residents to become activists against the plants. I haven’t seen that happen so far. But I have hope. As I build up my audience, I plan to experiment with different calls to action and other techniques for inspiring people to make change.
Along the way, taking advice from my professor, I expanded my audience from just Cancer Alley residents, to people who would be interested in and enraged about Cancer Alley such as environmentalists and progressives. Although they’re two different groups with at times different priorities, this felt like a more realistic approach to who my audience is and can be. I attempted to post my videos in environmental Reddit groups, which failed — they all got deleted by the admins. I learned that the Reddit community can be very protective about what does and doesn’t get posted, and is often against self promotion. But there are so many other things I can try to gain traction for this product: I can try to find influential YouTubers who will plug my show, I can try environmental Facebook groups, and I can make contacts with nonprofits that advance the type of issues I want to talk about, make videos based off of their work, and share the videos with them — with the hope that some of them will share it on their page. Furthermore, I can keep setting up phone calls with residents, incorporate some of what they said, and then share the videos with them.
I started out thinking that it was best to make my videos in as few takes as possible — that this would make me seem well-versed and articulate. But I studied successful YouTubers, and found that their videos have a lot of cuts in them. They’ll say a few sentences, then it will cut, they’ll say something new, then another cut, and so on. This actually holds your attention for longer and eliminates many of the pauses people make when they’re just talking. I did this for my final video, and felt like it was better. It felt more like the YouTube videos I’ve seen, and made me feel like finally, I might be able to make a go at this video thing. It just felt like a world of possibility opened up.
During the semester I was greatly inspired by Jarrett Carter, who writes on Substack about Historically Black Colleges and Universities. His career feels like something I would like to have my own version of. Like him, I plan to start out building a free email list and then migrate it over to Substack once I have enough of a following. I will still continue to make some free content so I can keep getting new people. I studied my favorite online news show, The Young Turks, and learned that they have a $4.99 and $10/month membership fee, which gives members access to exclusive content including “Post Game” commentary, which draws more from their personal lives. So I became a member. This works because if you’re a big fan of them like I am, you want to hear them talking like they’re your friends. I plan to do my own version of that, offering political commentary and at times drawing from my personal life for my members.
Some questions I’m considering moving forward: what’s the most efficient and effective way to build an audience? How might I make my videos faster and snappier? How might I get my content published whether it’s through Medium publications or environmental justice publications? What are the most effective calls to action? How can I measure whether people get involved fighting the issues I’m telling them about? How can I engage two audiences: people these things are happening to, and people who are interested in these causes? Moreover, how can I build bridges between them?
I learned a ton from my course Startup Sprint, and my hope is just that I can take all of that learning and impute it into this project moving forward.
