This week’s top story is the next column in Lewis Raven Wallace’s series making the case for movement journalism. In this installment, he writes about how the interview process can be the most pivotal part of movement journalists’ practice, particularly since they can’t always promise justice through a story’s publication.

In this issue:

And also: L.A. Press Club and Status Coup sue city of Los Angeles over attacks at immigration raid protests, an independent journalist deported from the U.S. shares his story, social media overtakes T.V. as Americans’ most-used news source, and a new worker-owned alt-weekly to launch in the California Bay Area. Plus, the resource of the week is a free digital security course offered online.

—James Salanga

Over the years, I have sat and held a microphone through hoarse sobbing, grief-filled and rageful venting. People have shared things they never shared before, and thanked me for listening and holding them. I’m not sure if healing can happen in a prison, and if it can, as wounds close, new ones open. Still, some of my most vivid memories of healing and catharsis took place in Dayton Correctional Institution, a women’s prison.

In 2015, I visited the Dayton, Ohio prison every two weeks for months. I was there to create a series of radio stories for WYSO, a community-driven public radio station in southwest Ohio, to reflect the women’s voices in the prison and allow participants to both learn radio skills and share stories with a larger audience. It was part of an ongoing program at WYSO, called Community Voices, that trains community members to make stories across the station’s diverse region.

I saw firsthand the potential power movement journalism has to be a part of someone’s healing or to provide the experience of catharsis — in a final listening session after months of work on these stories, many, many tears were shed as we listened to each person’s delicate, crushing, or amusing story. Afterwards, people described both the listening and the sharing as healing.

Sometimes the moment that makes the most change is an intimate one, like our listening session in the prison. To propose that movement journalists or practices of community journalism are going to heal people is a big claim. But to be aware of the potential power that journalism has to be a part of someone else’s healing, or to provide an experience of catharsis, is a key awareness. It means we are responsible not just for the resulting stories, but for the ways in which we listen to them, for the space we create in the process.

Read the full column on The Objective.

—Lewis Raven Wallace

Our next print magazine is coming soon! If you’re interested in getting it in the mail, and you’re not already a member, consider supporting us today with a monthly donation! We’re a small organization and rely on readers like you to help us challenge newsrooms to do better.

Support The Objective today!

Leaving the notebook at home after 16 years at newspapers. Read more in The Objective.

LA Press Club sues city of Los Angeles over attacks on journalists at immigration raid protests: Along with investigative reporting site Status Coup, the press group filed a lawsuit Monday against the city of Los Angeles and the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department alleging that officers present at protests are “routinely violating journalists’ rights.”

⚖️ Read the story in NPR.

A journalist on how reporting on Columbia University students’ Palestine solidarity protests led to his deportation: Independent  journalist Alistair Kitchen shares his experience being detained at the airport and investigated for reporting, which “was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but … comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia.” As he writes: “That, of course, was the problem.”

🎙️ Read the story in the New Yorker.

Social media overtakes TV as the most-used news source in the U.S.: That’s per the 13th annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) report, which surveyed 100,000 people across 48 countries. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”

📱 Read the story in Nieman Lab.

Worker-owned alt-weekly to launch in California’s San Francisco Bay Area: Longtime Bay Area journalists and media workers “tired of corporate newsrooms dominating the narrative, and sapping all the joy out of journalism in pursuit of profit” are launching COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) Media Collective, meant to inform people and have fun while doing it. They’re hoping to launch later this summer and are seeking to raise $80,000 before doing so.

🐺 Read the launch announcement on Givebutter.

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

This week’s resource is … a free digital safety course created by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Designed for journalists without prior cybersecurity experience, the online course will offer skill-building around navigating censorship, handling online harassment, and using encryption. It’s intended to help journalists protect their accounts, devices, communications, and sensitive information during a time where digital surveillance and online threats are at an all-time high.

Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

— 30 —