Community-Engaged Media Spotlight: Jersey Bee and Harvest
In this inaugural piece focused on Community-Engaged Media Makers, Simon Galperin, Executive Editor of the Jersey Bee and CEO of Community Info Co-Op, highlights the Harvest program, a technology solution developed to curate and disseminate local news and information. He also discusses how The Jersey Bee, which serves 12 New Jersey communities, has utilized newsletters and community listening to connect with residents. Galperin offers insights into the role of community-engaged media in promoting better societal outcomes for residents. This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. - Letrell Crittenden
Letrell Crittenden: I'm very excited to talk with you, because you've been doing a lot of work for years in the area of community-engaged media. When somebody comes up to you and talks about community-engaged media, what does that mean to you?
Simon Galperin: I think community-engaged media starts with asking people what they need to know. Community-engaged media can be art and culture, but for us, it's about meeting people's news information needs, and that begins with asking people what they want to know, figuring out how they get their news and information, and then delivering answers to their questions over the channels that they're already using.
Letrell: With your work in New Jersey, can you describe how you actually go about utilizing ideas around community engagement or community-engaged media?
Simon:Sure, so the Jersey Bee is a local news organization that works with the people we serve to meet information needs, increase civic participation, and improve quality of life. We focus on meeting people's basic information needs, so those are the sorts of things that allow them to civically engage in the community, whether that's voting, accessing food resources, going to school, getting a job, participating in leisure and recreation activities that build the sort of social connections that communities thrive on. These people have news and information needs around those things just as much as they have or want to hear about arts and culture, celebrity entertainment or national politics. People have this desire to understand what's happening in their community and how they can exist in this geographic space that they occupy. So our goal is to make it easier for people to engage with their neighbors, to know what's happening, to be a part of shaping life in the community that they live in. And that means that we show up, we ask people what they want to know about the issues that are impacting them.
We then help facilitate answers using the various media products that we produce. So that includes 13 daily newsletters, 12 that are for each of the towns and cities we serve, one that's for the county, and then a 14th newsletter that's once a week called New Jersey weekly. That's a statewide newsletter. We also produce web updates and events, calendar text messages, Food Pantry digests, and resource hubs online. We produce print zines. We do community events like celebratory joyful events. We do more serious events around issues like segregation and reparations. We host community media trainings to involve people in, you know, we teach them the skills they need to do community journalism with us, things like canvassing, interviewing, and documenting public meetings. We engage them in the process of making media for the purpose of engaging the broader community in the process of connection, access to information, building a culture of accountability and health and equity around a sense of common information, common values, common understanding of the world around us at a very local level. That's what's very important about community-engaged media. It's sort of the best way to do local media, and local media organizing and local journalism is using this lens.
Letrell: Why did you feel this approach was necessary in your community, and specifically in New Jersey.
Simon: So I come to this work as an immigrant. I was one of 60,000 political refugees from the Soviet Union who was let in to the United States in 1992. I know firsthand the power of information. It could literally lead to lives that your ancestors could not have imagined, and access to resources that allow you to end up in positions like I am. I'm able to now give back to the community that raised me by trying to make it easier for people to access the resources that help me succeed, but also the resources we know help so many succeed, and often with inequitable access to those resources. So for me, I come at this from very personal, deep social justice work. This is about changing the future of our community, and that begins with connection to each other and to information that allows us to build a shared identity. And from a more traditional journalism perspective, we really need to contend with the historic wrongs and failures of journalism to figure out how this sector continues to be relevant in people's lives. So I come at this from a personal lens of justice and equity work. For me, and from a professional lens, if we're going to talk about saving local journalism and saving local news jobs and preserving civic information sector, then we need to take a look at how we function and create models of service that align with public funding models, which are ultimately the way we're going to find a public good that the market has failed to support.
Letrell: One of the reasons I was very excited to speak with you is that a lot of people talk about developing ways to better serve communities using technology and other tools. And you recently debuted such a tool, called Harvest. Can you tell us a little bit about Harvest?
Simon: Absolutely. So Harvest is this piece of technology we were able to come up with after doing listening sessions and community engagement, where we asked people what they wanted to know about news and information in their community. We heard that, sure they need more accountability reporting. But often the main pain point that people were experiencing was that it was hard to navigate life in their community. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different places to have to follow for local news and information, to comprehensively understand what's going on and have access to the kind of stuff you need to do something in life, whether that's a free event for your kid this Sunday, a sewing circle for you to meet new neighbors on Tuesday or the food pantry line on Friday. That information is sort of lost in this huge sea of social media algorithms and news publications and government websites. So how do we as a local news organization meet that information? That was the question we asked ourselves.
What we did was we mapped the information ecosystem. This is common practice of engaged journalism, understanding what's out there, what are people's questions? What are the assets? What are the deficits? And then we tried to bridge the gap between those assets and deficits by curating all of that information. Information that we're following now hundreds of sources from across the state, and few dozen from across the country, where we're identifying valuable news and information and reproducing that for our community through newsletters, web updates, our events calendar. Our goal is to make good information as easy to access as the air, and we want you to be able to live in a place where you can access civic information freely and effectively. So last year, Harvest allowed us to curate 4900 news briefs from tens of thousands of news pieces of information that we reviewed that year. We select these things based on timeliness, proximity, utility. Is this going to meet the information needs of historically marginalized communities? We produce daily newsletters, unique newsletters for each community we serve based on this curated information, and then that allows us to serve 12 towns and cities in this incredibly diverse area with just one and a half editorial staff. So Harvest is this tool for scaling local news and information production across our region. I was recently talking to somebody who said it's a technology solution, a scalable technology solution to respond to local news deserts. So that's what we're ultimately trying to do, is use this tool to create a marketplace for local news and information for a growing audience so that we can sustain stronger engaged media operations here, whether that's more advanced reporting, or more of our community media training programs. So our goal is to sort of use this technology to provide a wealth of news and information to more people than traditional local news models can in order to get those folks involved.
Letrell: Why was this important to actually develop a tool that could do all of this?
Simon: So when we started, we were just one town, Bloomfield, which is a town of about 50,000 people. We started during the pandemic. So it was the first few months of the pandemic and a lot of sort of disaster scenarios for people, people start to look for places where they can get information that helps them navigate this specific issue. New Jersey also has a history of hurricanes or other natural disasters. So people were coming together and asking for how do I figure out what's closed, what's open, what's not, what are the hospitals working? Can I call 911, there was no singular place for all of this information to live. People were sort of navigating this jungle of information, unable to know what's real, what's not, what's the latest news. So we needed to be able to scale all of that listening. What are people publishing? What are they talking about? On social media groups, on government websites, on local business listings, other spaces. What are news publishers publishing around this, what's true, what's not, what do we need? What misinformation do we need to clarify? So what the tool does is allow us to scale social listening by tapping into the existing information ecosystem and then using that listening and leveraging it to produce a service for the community, or in this case, multiple services for the community. So there's this huge pain point around access to organized civic news information in this like very hectic digital information ecosystem. And and for us to be able to provide that to people, we needed to invent something that would allow a small staff to do this at scale.
Letrell: Thank you so much for your time. If people want to follow you or your work, how can they go ahead and go about doing that?
Simon: So if you live in New Jersey, check out our Jersey Bee Newsletter sign up. We produce daily newsletters in East Essex County, and one weekly for New Jersey, called NJ weekly. I'm also on LinkedIn.