Intersection 1: Shared authority and engagement journalism
How public history and journalism are shifting toward community and toward each other.
Hi and happy new year. First, thank you all for subscribing and following this work. I had no idea how interested people would be in reading about the intersections of public history and journalism, and I’m excited about the mix of people and professions who have decided to tune in. With minimal promotion, we’ve got nearly 100 people signed up for the newsletter so far; subscribers include local and national journalists, editors, librarians, a few educators and professors (including the two whose classes I took last semester, ha), some government people in history/preservation-related fields, and some museum professionals. I like this new group. It feels … new. Welcome, everyone.
In my first post from a few weeks ago, I laid out what to expect from this newsletter. I wasn’t sure at the time how I’d structure the newsletter as a whole, but for now I’m trying something fairly straightforward: Each post will simply be about one particular intersection I’m noticing between the two fields, and I’ll title each post as clearly as possible so they can be easily used as references if needed. So, let’s start.
Intersection 1: Shared authority and engagement journalism
In a prediction for what the year 2024 will bring for journalism, I recently wrote for Nieman Lab about my belief that public history and journalism are shifting toward each other. In that piece, I wrote about the importance of place in local news, and how a new generation of local newsrooms and civic media organizations can redefine their relationships to place as they serve new readers and build community. I believe this also presents a unique opportunity to create new histories, and wrote that:
This is especially exciting, as newer outlets and movement journalists are decidedly uninterested in replicating the traditional power roles of newsrooms past; they are less interested in claiming authority and more interested in sharing it. That is the hallmark of new journalism — and that is exactly the makings of effective public history.
Now, I want to explain where that idea of “a shared authority” in public history comes from — or at least how I learned about it in school last semester, and how the concept to me immediately echoed what I’ve learned and know about engagement reporting. The concepts are so synonymous to me that when explaining to a journalism colleague what public history is, I one time said “what engagement reporting is to journalism, public history is to history,” and he understood enough of what I meant by it.
Public historians are likely well-aware of the principle and practice of sharing authority. Perhaps like many of you, I first heard the term via Michael Frisch’s 1990 book, “A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.” In the Introduction to the book (which we read in class), Frisch offers some introspection on his experience as an oral historian, and how the process of making oral histories led him to question academically traditional notions of authorship (oral histories in public history are co-authored works among the interviewer and the interviewee, we learned). Following this thread, Frisch wrote that
“… what is most compelling about oral and public history is a capacity to redefine and redistribute intellectual authority, so that this might be shared more broadly in historical research and communication rather than continuing to serve as an instrument of power and hierarchy.”
Broadly speaking, Frisch advocated in 1990 to open the gates of history academia, museums and historic sites to invite the public to contribute their knowledge and experience of the past, how it works and what it means to them. By democratizing how history is done, new scholarship and storytelling methods can emerge — and that new scholarship would hopefully be more useful and relevant to both the public historian and the participating publics.
What sharing authority in public history has looked like in practice runs the gamut. I’m still learning from case studies about what this looks like in practice and the varying degrees of success such projects have, but one examples that has stood out to me is the Bracero History Project’s multifaceted collaboration to “uncover, record, preserve, and provide access to the history of bracero guest workers,” part of a massive “temporary worker program” between the U.S. and Mexico in the mid-20th century.
In a May 2016 piece by Mireya Loza published in The Public Historian (which we also read in class), Loza describes how the project collaborated with Bracero Justice Movement organizations like Bracero Pro-A, which “sought to recuperate back wages” owed to Mexican guest workers by the government. The social justice goal of the movement helped former Bracero program workers generate a collective memory that included ways in which they had been wronged by the U.S. program; the Bracero History Project was better able to collect information and oral histories in part because of its collaboration with specific activist and community-led networks, Loza explained.
For the journalists reading this … sounds familiar, right? Try swapping out “the Bracero History Project” with your or your organization’s name and swapping “oral histories” with “do journalism” and that could be a sentence you’ve heard at a recent conference.
For the public historians reading this, engagement journalism (or engaged journalism, or engagement reporting), is the practice of doing journalism informed by and with the public; it is the practice of cultivating space to allow people and communities with the most at stake in your work to shape what you report on, how you report on it, and how you deliver those stories and information back to those communities so that that the work is useful and relevant to them.
Engagement journalism often functions within the field of journalism as sort of a separate, inner practice within legacy and institutional outlets; some newer journalism organizations embody the practice of engagement journalism on a fundamental level, prioritizing stories and projects posed by community members in various ways. Since the phrase took off in the 2010s, defining what engagement journalism is has been widely discussed (see this post on Medium from Carrie Brown and this one by Ashley Alvarado, for example).
Like public history projects designed to share authority, engagement reporting projects and engagement-based journalism organizations take many forms. See: The CITY’s searchable archive of New Yorkers who lost their lives to COVID-19, written by journalists and family members; Documented’s community-powered investigations and cultivation of its WhatsApp group, how organizations like the Prison Journalism Project train incarcerated writers and publish their work, and how City Bureau creates resources and guides along with reporting projects to *equip* communities with vital information.
Some of the overlaps between “a shared authority” and engagement journalism:
An acknowledgement of power and dynamics
Practicing sharing authority and engagement journalism both require an understanding that institutions have power and they can choose what to do with it. Sharing their authority is a choice. Within that choice are various motivations, spanning from the genuine belief that their work will be better off if they invite the public to share their knowledge, experience and expertise to the disingenuous motivation that “shared authority” and “engaged” are only good words to put on a grant application (ie, an institution does not actually intend to change or be changed by a new process). Regardless, both journalism and public history to various degrees are expressing through new methods the interest and need to shift away from institutional power and toward community for the better. This is promising.
A focus on process
Both “shared authority” and engagement journalism require more than an inversion of top-down power to be bottom-up (the frame of shifting power from “the bottom-up” still implies that the institution or organization maintains a legitimate power hierarchy by default). Instead, both benefit most from a redistribution of power from one of hierarchy to one of networks and collectivity. That necessity requires a respect and attention to process — to how the work is done, and how and why that strategy is shaped the way it is. In public history, we learned about the “reflective process” and wrote about our own experience at the end of a semester-long project to write a proposal for a tour project and pitch it to the board of directors of a neighborhood historical society (whew — that merits a blog post on its own some other time).
Shared goals of building trust and better reflecting community
The journalism world loves to talk about “-trust” — reader-trust, audience-trust, community-trust, local-trust, nearly always in the context of “rebuilding” it. I’ve noticed similar rhetoric from museums in particular but more in the context of “gaining” trust, and particularly from younger audiences that museums need to engage to keep justifying their existence. Legacy newsrooms have similar problems. One thing that’s interesting to me with this, though, is that newer journalism outlets can benefit in many ways from not having the baggage of historic harm from legacy-named journalism institutions (don’t get me wrong — they get plenty of baggage from just being a journalist regardless). Is there a parallel in the museum/public history/cultural heritage world? Are there newer organizations or efforts that similarly benefit from being … new? Genuine question, please let me know.
As you can probably tell, I do also have some questions and bones to pick with both how shared authority and engagement journalism sometimes work in practice.
Both sound nice in theory, but sometimes both museums and journalism organizations lean into the vocabulary and do-gooder essence of both shared authority and engagement journalism while still retaining the same power they never actually intended to change or share.
Both “shared authority” in public history and “engagement journalism” in journalism are often positioned as outside, external or differentiated efforts than simply being just “history” or “journalism.” I can say with confidence that engagement journalism is simply just good journalism. I’m fairly confident that’s the case for public history as well — that doing public history is simply doing good history, in part because sharing authority necessitates an understanding that people outside one’s own work may also have a lot at stake in it.
Both “shared authority” and “engaged journalism” have had their time as buzzwords of their fields and are meant to imply positive relationships. There are likely far more published examples of shared authority and engaged journalism working than there are stories and case studies of them not working. In journalism, we don’t reflect enough as to why we sometimes fail on engagement efforts. I wish we did so we could better learn from those examples and not replicate potential harm within communities in the future (journalism could definitely benefit from the reflective practice of public history).
I know there are more ways these ideas overlap, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how and what I am missing, and also just on this post in general. I believe it’s long overdue to have this conversation and to keep having it. Excited to speak more with you all and build this community together.
-Logan