Can’t we find a good way to tell this story now

October 11, 2009 at 5:31 pm · Filed under our neighborhoods, our streets, reporting on crime and safety

A few days ago I was sitting in a room in central Egypt talking with reporters and NGO officials about how to tell the story about child brides, and child labor and all the bad things that happen when poverty swallows hopes and ambitions.

We talked about campaigns where the news media work with the NGOs to get things done and after some grumbling, some complaints and some uncertainty, folks agree that their problems were too important not to do anything. That was in Egypt.

And that is what I’m thinking about now and about Chicago. We’ve had a heap of violence lately and so isn’t this time to do something special?

 Why can’t the news media that serves Chicago’s black and Latino neighbors form partnerships and set a goal of telling this story and telling it in as many ways as possible until it is not a story of heartbreak and loss anymore. Amen.

Any thoughts? Any suggestions?

Stephen

And here is a wonderfully thought out story about immigrant workers. It takes place in Decatur, Ill. It can be a good guide for another one of the hundreds of tales of immigrant workers who die or suffer severe losses on the job and who suffer from the lack of justice.

http://tinyurl.com/yfm7aju

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Walking in the crowd we know

June 30, 2009 at 6:58 am · Filed under our neighborhoods, our stories - story telling we need to do, our streets, videos as salvation

http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/the-parade/?th&emc=th

You are walking on a street. You know the man in the car repair store, and the two women in the bakery, and the old man in the grocery who smiles everyday to you, and who has been there for ever, and the shoe repair man who never has business but who is always happy, and you see one, no, two, no 10 people you know well from the neighborhood, and you see another 20 who you think you know and then you notice a few who must be new to the neighborhood and you study their faces and you wonder who they are and you keep staring and wondering as you walk on the street in your neighborhood that you know and that defines you and this is what a local newspaper, a radio station, a media connection does and can do when it talks to us in the places where we live – we look around us, as we walk in the crowd we know.

Read this small article in the New York Times and follow the video and I think you’ll get the message.

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