12 minute read
BEYOND THE NEWSROOM
BEYOND THE NEWSROOM
A conversation with Steve Ahlquist
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The outlook for local news isn’t promising, as research and policy institutions, think tanks, and larger media outlets have repeatedly pointed out over the last few decades. News deserts, defined as areas with limited access to quality community journalism and reporting (often meaning few or no local news outlets, particularly in print), are growing across the country, leaving destructive effects on democracy in their wake.
My personal introduction to this phenomenon came in 2021, when I stumbled upon an issue of the Washington Post Magazine that opened with the headline “Since 2005, 2,200 local newspapers across America have closed.” Relying on data from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, the issue outlined the real danger posed to democratic institutions by the demise of local news. The Northeast corridor fares well in the Post’s headcount of operating daily papers per county— unsurprising, given the area’s population density and wealth; yet, judging the quality of the local reporting that remains is another story.
Providence’s reporting landscape, for example, is dominated by the Providence Journal, a handful of Boston Globe reporters dispatched to the Providence bureau, and WPRI 12. While it’s better than having no news organizations dedicated to serving the area at all, the priorities of these outlets are usually the ‘higher profile’ goings-on at city or state legislatures, not the grassroots organizing of marginalized communities or emerging issues in Rhode Island’s smaller towns.
“When I was younger, there used to be a Journal reporter for every town in the state,” says Steve Ahlquist, founder of local independent progressive news outlet Uprise Rhode Island, in an interview with the College Hill Independent. “So, there would be, for example, a group of reporters with an office in Westerly, covering all of the events there. Now, if I look at the Journal and try to find a story about Westerly, I pretty much can’t.”
“It’s not that I’m anti-mainstream media,” he continues, “I just think that, oftentimes, the companies that own them want a story that is part of the status quo, and if you upset the status quo too much, they’re not interested. Many of the people I interview might have very different ideas about race, economics, or the distribution of wealth. And some of that threatens people who are the corporate owners of this type of media.” A former comic book writer, Ahlquist has become one of the most prominent figures in Providence journalism and activist circles. Under his direction, Uprise has gathered something of a cult following, and Ahlquist himself hopes to lend his resources and platform to communities invisibilized by mainstream news discourses.
“The real deal is this,” Ahlquist says, switching from his usual excited tone to a more somber one, “check your privilege, show up, be quiet, listen, quote people accurately, and try to understand their point of view.”
His approach to reporting is simple: if he’s in a room with his peers from the major outlets, he feels he’s in the wrong place. “If the governor puts on a press release, all the major news outlets show up. But if a small group like D.A.R.E holds a protest for affordable housing, I’m very often the only reporter there.” As he tells me, he’d rather spend his time driving across the state to the various protests taking place on any given day than waste an afternoon at what is, effectively, a hollow ribbon-cutting ceremony. That’s not, he feels, what the people of Rhode Island need to know nor the founding purpose of Uprise.
A philosopher by training, Ahlquist had floated between various roles before he landed on journalism. When he finally made the transition, it was because he saw a gap in modern reporting: “When you think about what modern journalism is, they talk about things like neutrality and just giving you ‘the facts.’ I don’t believe that facts exist in a vacuum. There’s always context. And when you read about the history of journalists—people like Ida B. Wells or Upton Sinclair—they understand that. They’re somewhere between journalists and novelists. When you read about these people, they’re not just delivering raw facts, but have a point of view they’re trying to express.”
His writing career started with that ethos in mind, publishing the occasional op-ed for the Providence Journal, and later moving to write full time for the progressive blog Rhode Island Future. It was there, under the guidance of editor Bob Plain, that Ahlquist received an immersive training in the processes and practices of journalism. “I learned the basics of how to best ask questions, how to get your question through when you’re in a room of reporters and everyone is talking over you trying to get a soundbite for their piece,” he explains. But after enough time under the supervision of others, Ahlquist began to develop his own ideas on the direction he wanted his reporting to take—ideas that, at times, conflicted with those of his superiors. So, he set out on his own, starting Uprise Rhode Island, an outlet that, in technical terms, could be qualified as a ‘movement journalism’ publication, focusing mainly on the state’s progressive causes and grassroots groups. He started by purchasing a cheap domain to give his writing a place to live for the first few weeks, and then migrated the content to a more professional blog. For a while, Ahlquist essentially did it all—reporting, website maintenance, fundraising, photo and video editing. “I’d say I spend 60 to 80 hours a week working,” Ahlquist recalls. Between trips to the General Assembly to keep an eye on Rhode Island politics and attending various events around the state, his days fill up quickly. “I don’t think there’s a day that goes by when I don’t write for Uprise— except for maybe Easter.”
Over the last few years, he’s been able to bring on a few team members who can help ease the burden. And though the logistical challenge of running Uprise is still large, with their help, Ahlquist has more free time to spend on the road at events and talking to Rhode Islanders. Building these relationships with those he writes about has been paramount to both his success as a writer and Uprise’s success as an outlet.
Remembering one instance from around a decade ago, Ahlquist told the Indy about covering a group of Spanish-speaking hotel workers in Providence who were lobbying for a wage increase: “Because I was the only reporter showing up at their little events half the time, they were happy to translate what was going on in real time for me because they wanted to get their message out through my camera.” In another instance, Ahlquist remembers being the first call of a family whose three-year-old had been pepper-sprayed by the police. He was the only one in the room as her mother shared her story on the record. “People call me to report on their stories because I know the community, and I’ve managed to earn that trust after years of reporting,” he explains. In other words, Ahlquist has been able to build something of a symbiotic relationship with his readers and the people of Rhode Island; he is able to provide a platform for them, and in turn, they will turn to him before other outlets. Their trust in Uprise has allowed the outlet access to local events and enhanced the quality of the coverage they are able to produce and provide. “When I talk to local people,” Ahlquist says, “my interest is not to blow up their thoughts but to amplify their voices.”
Such is the major benefit of local—and, in particular, independent—journalism. Communities and journalists can build deep and real relationships with one another, relationships that are not merely based on extracting stories for the benefit of a headline. There comes with local reporting a meticulous attention to the fine print of daily life in small communities, fine print that doesn’t make the cut in national—or, often, even statewide—headlines.
“Part of an engaged democracy is that … we spend our days actively engaged in our local communities,” Erica Beshears Perel, the director of UNC’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the Hussman School of Journalism, told the Indy. “Local news is what covers those goings-on—things that truly affect everyday people’s lives. When there is local news coverage, that arms folks and empowers them with the ability to participate in the governance of their community.” Much of what Perel and her colleagues have observed is a media landscape that has become increasingly condensed, with smaller newspapers across the country being sold to entities such as media conglomerates and publicly traded companies. As a result, their performance is judged less by the quality of their reporting than by their ability to boost the margins and stock prices of their buyers. In this shuffle, local outlets have been hollowed out. Buyers are reducing staffing, shrinking physical office spaces, and moving bureaus from expensive downtown locations to cheaper ones on the outskirts of cities. Simply put, resources are no longer being directed towards local reporting. Instead, national coverage—and even sports and entertainment news—takes precedence. “What’s happened with the digitization of content and changes in the marketplace is that there are a lot of other ways now for advertisers to reach consumers in more direct and targeted ways than by putting an ad in a large newspaper that maybe 50% of a city reads,” Perel says.
It’s this major shift in advertising that has pulled so much funding away from reporting—funding that’s critical to keeping newsrooms open and publishing.
“The conversations we’ve been having recently here at Red Ink about media have been around the First Amendment—freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” says David Raileanu, co-founder of Providence’s Red Ink Community Library, a non-profit reading room and organizing space. After a Nazi attack at the library last February, Uprise was the first publication to break the story—largely, Raileanu says, because of the overlapping values between the two media institutions. “A lot of people are claiming that their freedom to speak in front of the public is being infringed. This is true, but it’s not necessarily always in the way that the First Amendment was created … These days, the ways that we speak in public and publish our thoughts are largely controlled instead by private corporations, and therefore the decision to speak or publish is determined not by people who are elected, but rather by shareholders and boards of directors.”
This question of the right to publish is one Ahlquist takes seriously, and one that he feels lucky to be able to avoid. Much of the reason he stepped out on his own was so that he could report and publish without the constant worry of his stories generating ad revenue, clicks, and returns. While running on a donation-based business model has its difficulties, it has afforded him editorial freedom.
This freedom comes not simply in the final decisions of what stories to run and which to hold, but in the pursuit of those stories themselves. During the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in the summer of 2020, Ahlquist recalls following a group of marchers for a story. As they walked on, they took a left turn to go up a ramp and onto the highway.
They were met—Ahlquist included—with police and pepper spray, forcing them to run in the opposite direction and hop a fence just to get away from the gas. “When I got back to the original route, everybody was regrouping and figuring out what was going on. I was talking to some people from one of the news stations, and they tell me: ‘My boss would have fired me if I had walked out on the highway to follow them.’ And I was like: ‘Wait, your boss would have fired you if you had to commit to following and recording the whole story?’” For Ahlquist, his independence means he doesn’t only cover the things he wants to cover, but also gets on record what others can’t.
Still, the challenges of running an organization with a mission like Ahlquist’s without substantial funding are steep. “There’s no single reporter doing this work in the way that I do it exactly … there are other groups, but they’re all pretty well funded. I work entirely off of donations, and I have a little bit of advertising, but I don’t get paid for that advertising at all,” Ahlquist says. And while the model is working for now, the question that remains is just how long Uprise can be sustained—or if it can live on past Ahlquist. “I don’t know where I’ll be five, ten years from now. I’m fortunate to be able to—barely—afford to do this. But other people aren’t,” Ahlquist says.
The disturbing reality is that many with an interest in journalism—particularly at the local level—are now faced with the choice of earning a living or serving their communities. What Rhode Island, and much of the country, needs now are more reporters like Ahlquist— willing to take up his mantle and both expand and sustain what he started. In the current political climate, it’s undeniable that the type of platform Ahlquist has created fills a critical need for underserved communities. There is the potential for an invaluable and irreplaceable symbiosis between communities and news outlets, if reporters can—as Ahlquist has—earn the trust of those that they cover.
LAURA DAVID B’24 should probably check the New York Times before TikTok when she wakes up, but oh well.
