Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: A mobile newsroom offers authentic and organic opportunities to connect with historically underrepresented communities and report on them in ways we never have before.
A mobile newsroom might evoke visions of a traveling band of journalists in an RV making pit stops along a chosen route. As adventurous as that might have been, what we set out to do was to establish a stronger presence in Black and brown communities that have been historically underreported on by The Charlotte Observer. We did that by bringing the newsroom to the people. Many people have never met a journalist, and many don’t understand how we work to produce the news, the choices we make. Not knowing who we are is the main fuel of distrust and we wanted to change that. We also wanted to hear what stories people thought were missing from the news cycle and to do a better job of covering these communities more completely, beyond parachuting in when something bad happens.
