Lessons from the crime beat

What lessons can we learn from efforts to transform local crime reporting? For starters, says a journalist who’s helping lead the effort, we can question the assumption that our coverage is helpful.

By Alexander Russo

What lessons can we learn from efforts to transform other beats?

In this new interview, journalist Cheryl Thompson-Morton shares some useful lessons from her efforts to help newsrooms reconsider the crime beat.

The Black Media Initiative Director for the Center for Community Media at the Newmark J-School, Thompson-Morton co-leads the Poynter Institute’s course on reinventing the crime beat, which is launching its 3^rd cohort tomorrow.

“We try to push back on the assumption that covering crime in and of itself is helpful to the community,” Thompson-Morton told me in a recent phone call. 

We try to push back on the assumption that covering crime in and of itself is helpful.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

AR: For those who might not be familiar, what is the origin and the purpose of the course on reinventing the crime beat? What’s its backstory and its mission?

CTM: In many communities, news reporting on crime amplifies inaccurate narratives and harms the communities that are most affected by crime.

Poynter started this program to help newsrooms craft a custom policy on how to cover public safety in a more ethical, accurate, and constructive way. Poynter believes that this program can benefit both journalists and audiences by improving the quality and relevance of crime reporting, reducing the harm and stigma caused by sensationalized or biased stories, and fostering more trust and engagement between newsrooms and communities.

AR: How much progress have the newsrooms you’ve worked with been able to make?

CTM: We just finished the second go-round of the course so at this point, somewhere between 50 and 75 newsrooms have gone through the journey. Where they are depends on the newsroom and what was going on. But we have seen progress in terms of the types of conversations that newsrooms are having around crime and public safety.

We see now that people are having more conversations asking, “Is this even a story we should cover? Are we going to have the resources to follow up on this? Do we have the resources to get insight from people other than law enforcement? What trends can we tell our community to help them understand the way that crime and safety in a community is trending?” Because we know that sending out stories on one-off crimes that are happening can leave community members in a perpetual state of feeling like crime is increasing, even when it’s not.

Sending out stories on one-off crimes that are happening can leave community members in a perpetual state of feeling like crime is increasing.

AR: What are the obstacles you’ve seen?

CTM: Some people, you can share some of the facts about the way that crime coverage historically has harmed pretty much all communities, and that can be immediately helpful.

But other folks are like, “There is nothing we can do where everyone’s going to be satisfied. We can’t make everyone happy. You know, this type of public safety coverage means that we’re not telling the truth about the community.” These are some of the things you have to combat.
One of the hardest things to combat is “this is the way we’ve always done it. This is the easy way to do it.” Change is hard, and if we can’t put something in place that’s just as easy, it’s probably not going to stick. That’s really the difficulty.

One of the hardest things to combat is “This is the way we’ve always done it.”

So, we try to work on building dissatisfaction with the status quo in the course. But different people’s dissatisfaction might not be the same as yours. So you may see a digital team who’s like, “we still want to cover these crimes and put up the mug shots because they get great clicks, and my pain point is making sure we hit our numbers. If we don’t hit our numbers, I’m not satisfied.”

So how do we resolve that? Is it that the newsroom incentives need to be changed? Are there ways we can get to those numbers without practices that no longer align with our values? Those are the things we have to work through.

The centerpiece of all of this work is getting clear about your mission for covering the beat. We have newsrooms say why they cover crime in the first place. We try to push back on the assumption that covering crime in and of itself is helpful to the community.

AR: Understanding that education isn’t your area of expertise, can you speak to ways in which education coverage might not be helpful — or the benefits of questioning the assumption that all coverage is good coverage?

CTM: Sometimes, the coverage might not be helpful because it oversimplifies complex problems, promotes certain agendas or biases, or ignores the voices and perspectives of the people most affected by the issues. For example, coverage may focus on disparities without speaking to context, root causes, or proven solutions.

Or some coverage might present a one-sided view of a policy or reform without examining its potential impacts or alternatives. We also may defer to the formal public education system and not acknowledge alternate education experiences, such as homeschooling, or augmented educational experiences like the Saturday schools in the UK. Or some coverage might lean into the official voice while excluding the opinions and experiences of teachers, parents, or students who have a stake in the education system.

Some coverage might lean into the official voice while excluding the opinions and experiences of teachers, parents, or students

AR: Based on your experience helping newsrooms approach things differently, is there something that you used to do that you don’t do any longer?

CTM: I think there is a balance between pushing people to think more expansively about the topic or the beat and pushing them too far, where people feel attacked. And that’s a very fine line to walk at times. So, one of the things that we brought up later in the course is that we understand that many newsrooms have already been engaging in these discussions and starting to make those changes and we see you.

We’re trying to make these changes because we had a session specifically focused on the community coming and sharing what they saw as issues with public safety and they [the comments] were a bit harsh. One of the challenges the newsrooms have to reckon with and understand is that we’ve been covering this topic in a particular way for a very long time. This isn’t just your newsroom’s problem. This is a journalism issue.

The way that the community thinks about crime reporting is marred by the way we’ve done things over the past 50 years. So even if your newsroom has stopped using mug shots and has been more cautious about the types of stories they cover, the community is taking into account everything they’ve seen over their lifespan. And it takes a long time for them to catch up. So our work is to continue to improve but also to take that feedback into account.

Sometimes the journalists felt like the community feedback wasn’t informed enough about what it’s like to be a journalist day to day and the difficulty there. We understand and we know you’re doing this work for the right reasons. Here’s why some of the things that we thought 20 years ago were the right things to do, but now we have more reason to interrogate those assumptions. We’re with you. We understand. How can we improve and do it better?

Are there any useful insights from the changes in the move from crime to safety coverage that might be applicable to another beat like education?

CMT: I think a lot of the lessons from the crime and public safety course can be applied. Whose word do we just take at face value? What stories are we able to follow up on? Can we move away from covering the courthouse or the police station to covering the systems that people are interacting with every day, thinking about them in a more interconnected way?

You don’t have to change your beat to be exactly this way but public safety goes far beyond the local police force, and a lot of the crimes that we focus on are the crimes the local police are focused on. But there are other things that are of importance to our communities that affect safety that don’t have to do with that. So those are some things that we often try to help newsrooms think more expansively about.

You can find Thompson-Morton at @cthompsonmorton.

Previously from The Grade

When more education coverage isn’t better

How student journalists at an HBCU newspaper took on local media — and won

Reflections on covering a hazing death at a Florida HBCU