What Drives Us

We can’t count all the stories that are living inside of us. The communities that we call home in Philadelphia are rich with life and possibilities, something that we don’t always see reflected in the news.

Crime coverage is one of the oldest and most popular forms of news coverage, second only to weather updates when it comes to news consumption. Research shows that crime coverage can exacerbate and desensitize us to violence, distort perceptions about crime in local communities, and skew how people from distressed communities envision their futures and outcomes.

While status-quo journalism often aspires to be unbiased, we have to recognize that the impacts are certainly not neutral. Crime coverage brings particular harm to people of color, and in Philadelphia, roughly 85 percent of people lost to homicide are Black. We live with the ways these narratives stoke further harm, devalue the lives of the people we’ve lost, fail to explore systemic solutions, allow stereotypes to run rampant and impact policy in the process. This is not a mere debate to us; this is so much deeper than being right or getting it right. We need new ways to report on public safety because of the life-and-death impacts we know exist.

We are taking part in a generations-long conversation on the ways our news systems harm marginalized Philadelphians. Our experiences align with impacted groups across the country, and with Black and Indigenous folks around the world. Over and over we’ve heard that we can’t repair relationships between news outlets and our communities until we fully address and transform status-quo crime coverage. The Philadelphia Safer Journalism Project focuses on how we can change together and produce richer stories on the communities we know.

Since 2019, we have been collaborating with community members, therapists, researchers, legal experts, journalists, artists and media makers to improve how these stories show up in the news. We are a project of Free Press and Media 2070. We welcome all perspectives, but we center groups that have historically been excluded from ownership, production, media ethics and editorial policymaking.

LANGUAGE WE USE

Coloniality

Journalism, as we know it in the United States, is a colonial practice. Its lineage comes from European settlers who crossed the Atlantic and brought their media-making traditions with them. Through research, we can trace many current norms in status-quo crime coverage, from skewed perspectives on Black and Indigenous people to the symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and the press to colonization. We speak about coloniality, the ongoing values, mores, systems and power structures in a colonized society, because if we don’t address it, we are doomed to repeat the same harmful patterns.

Media Harm Reduction

This framework seeks to bridge the worlds of media production and harm reduction. Through the leadership and insights of journalist and harm reductionist aAliy A. Muhammad, the Philadelphia Safer Journalism Project has been co-developing recommendations for media harm reduction in partnership with a cohort of Black and Brown storytellers. Thanks to this process, we know that harm is inevitable, but that striving every day for safer journalism is always possible. We draw inspiration from “Philadelphia Principles — Radical Harm Reduction and the World We Want,” which the group Mad Ecologies published in 2023.

Politics of Deservingness

Newsworthiness and who deserves care in journalism often reflect social and cultural values, and thus can reflect bias and hierarchy. Our communities have invited us to move away from politics of deservingness, our notions of who carries worth and value in our society. (See a more in-depth explanation here.) They have done this to help us better align with journalistic values that our industries consider paramount but often stray from, like maintaining fairness, operating as a public service to all, and working to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” Journalism suffers from elite capture, and undoing our politics of deservingness is an important step toward making journalism the public good it can be.

Reparative History

News accounts often offer authority without any memory of what communities have experienced in years and generations prior. Community members have long called for news that’s better informed by history. We don’t just care about the history of Lenapehoking, which includes land that we now call Philadelphia, and the histories of the communities who dwell here. We uplift the lessons and memories from elders and ancestors who have done this work before us. We know that because of them and their wisdom, we can reframe and correct accounts that news outlets have gotten wrong, identify opportunities for repair, learn about ways they’ve already changed our industries and cultures for the better, reach collective understandings where we share power and seek with greater acuity the liberatory futures of our dreams.

Safer Journalism

We center safety in our work, as do many of our partners. We admire the journalists and media makers in our sector who have already made the shift from crime coverage to public-safety coverage. We practice what we call safer journalism, a form of journalism that we co-developed with a cohort of Black and Brown storytellers and more than a dozen guest contributors of diverse backgrounds. Safer journalism shifts the relationship between communities and newsmakers to increase accuracy, nuance and accountability, and to help keep communities safer.