WHY: This question often comes up when Mike asks people from the Portland area’s Black communities if they’d like to participate in our outreach efforts. We hope to learn where Oregonians get their local news and information, and what they think about it. But why does a group of white journalists care about improving the state of Black media in Oregon?

It’s a reasonable question.

HORRID HISTORY: America’s white media industry has a long, sordid history of stereotyping Black people, deliberate distortions, caustic caricatures, overt and inadvertent omissions, and outright willful ignorance of issues, events and topics of importance to Black communities. This isn’t ancient history. It’s descriptive of the entire history leading up to the present day. We inherited this current condition, which is widespread across a media industry that hasn’t earned the trust of Americans across communities of color. Our work is to create a different future.

OUR OPPORTUNITY: With each generation, another opportunity emerges to redesign, reform and reconstruct the societal conditions we all inherited. As Oregon journalists, we believe it is our responsibility to do all we can to ensure the media landscape in Oregon reflects the values we hold as media professionals and serves to benefit all communities across a multiracial, multicultural landscape. Our ideal doesn’t match the actual condition of the Oregon media environment that we’ve worked in. But it can be the future, if we collaboratively work to create it.

That’s why we need your help.

CURRENT CONDITION: The Oregon News Exploration formed in 2021 to research how the news media in Oregon could respond to a lack of diversity in our newsrooms, growing news gaps, misinformation, a slow pipeline for new journalistic talent and a need for training. With support from the Oregon Community Foundation and donors, ONE surveyed more than 2,300 Oregonians and conducted in-depth interviews with a cross-section of journalists to understand these problems and how they relate to community needs. In 2023, ONE was funded by the American Journalism Project to create a collaborative newsroom in Oregon that addresses these issues.

If there’s one thing we know from researching news gaps over the last two years, it’s that the national news media is overwhelmingly white, as is the landscape of Oregon news media. We all inherited this environmental condition. After all, the state joined the Union in 1859 with explicit language in its constitution that prohibited Black people from residing in this state, working here or owning property.

One hundred years later, Oregon was still blanketed by sundown towns and redlined neighborhoods. There are generations of Black Oregonians who lived through the more recent decades of deliberate targeting and destruction of Black communities, businesses and lives.

The so-called mainstream media throughout those eras remained virtually white. So-called ethnic media arose to serve communities of color and fill the void of news and information to empower communities to survive. Unfortunately, the “white lens” of the media industry across Oregon has concentrated its gaze upon issues and concerns of the white population to the exclusion and detriment of other groups, which remains a current concern among communities of color.    

We know that many Oregonians, particularly Oregonians of color, believe that was a problem then, and remains a problem now. We agree. And equally important, we agree that condition must change.

OUR RESEARCH: Last year, when we asked people if they feel represented by local news, an alarming percentage of Oregonians of color told us they felt their race or ethnicity were negatively stereotyped by local news. They were also far more likely than white Oregonians to be able to name something important to them that wasn’t covered, and could point to times when that omission caused them actual harm. In those instances, they used words like “angry,” “invisible,” and “frustrated” to describe how they feel about the news in Oregon.

It was easy to connect those feelings to an increased distrust of media altogether.

WHITE LENS: The white journalists who founded Oregon News Exploration realize that we have contributed to the “white lens” through which most Oregon news is viewed. So, we know that whatever newsroom we build has to, at a minimum, be diverse in a lot of different ways. We live in a multiracial, multicultural society that has been fragmented by laws, systems, public policies and private sector practices for the vast majority of the life of this country, and throughout the majority of the life of this state.

As Oregon becomes more multiracial and multicultural (like the country as a whole), the media industry across Oregon must evolve quickly to serve the needs of communities of color wherever they reside across the state, using the platforms they prefer. That includes building a racially and ethnically diverse media staff and leadership team that know and understand the needs of the communities they serve.

ONE VISION: Apart from building our own news team, we also envision collaborating with local partners that produce media. And that means we need to learn how to be good partners in supporting Black journalists and storytellers who are already serving their communities, and those who will do so in the future in unique ways that may still be emerging.

ONE INQUIRY: This question—how to be good partners to people already doing excellent work—is what needs more exploration. We need your help in our process of discovery.

ONE APPROACH: We’ve previously learned some things about how to be partners to legacy newsrooms that have long been staples across the Black media landscape in Oregon. But we are less clear about how we might be capable partners to the next generation of Black media entrepreneurs who are charting the next iteration of the Black media landscape across the greater Portland region. The question regarding the future of Black media in greater Portland is at the core of our current inquiry. Black communities themselves will determine the direction and vision of what they want, need and value in media that empowers them to thrive.

By paying attention to the work of Black storytellers, media innovators, entrepreneurs and small businesses media owner/operators, we know they’re up against a history and sustained legacy of racial discrimination today, inherited from a 20th century of segregationist policies and practices. We know there’s a current lack of: sufficient capital, profitable business models, organized mentorship and training, infrastructure and institutional support that helps local Black media tell important stories, in addition to a need for access to more Black editors, among other things.

Now it’s important for us to work with a cross-section of the communities, not just media professionals, and learn more about what they need and want from local media to empower Black residents to thrive. Sometimes the views help us look beyond what media professionals need from their industry to discover what the community needs from it, too. The distinction can be important, helping direct efforts in ways that really serve the lives of people in the community.

ONE GOAL: ONE’s primary aim is that our surveys and upcoming in-person convenings will provide early input/feedback from the Black communities toward developing a collaborative newsroom. Our next step is to assist in the process of envisioning a future for Black media in Portland. We want to offer a space for members of the communities to candidly and transparently discuss the kinds of information they are most interested in, and various ways in which local residents prefer to receive and access news and information.

ONE LESSON: In our work with other communities of color, and white rural communities across Oregon, we’ve learned that such listening sessions can be invaluable in catalyzing momentum and crystalizing ideas into plans. This process of engaging the beneficiaries of media-produced news and information can help organizations like ours better understand how to more effectively direct resources toward storytellers, media innovators and organizations that can succeed in the future. Success for us looks like people in the community actually wanting, needing and benefiting from the information we produce, both directly and through our network of community partners.

We don’t intend to swoop in, extract some market research, and complicate the efforts of the Black journalists and storytellers already doing great work. On the contrary, we want to know how best to assist those engaged in the work of producing media today and in the future. We also want to understand how much assistance from us is truly helpful.

MUTUAL BENEFITS: We intend to collect opinions directly from Black communities and organize them into a digestible report that will be shared back with them and others working to address these challenges. The report can help inform, empower and support efforts to build a local Black media network and infrastructure. This approach can include using the report’s findings to attract funds that can be used to shore up areas of immediate need and support areas of progress toward outcomes envisioned by the communities. Effective community participation ensures that the report can be used by any organization or person the communities find best suited to lead that work. This is how community feedback will help direct the creation of a local infrastructure that could support the development and sustained success of local Black media today and in the future to serve the greater Portland region.

STEP ONE: We think the most productive first thing we can do is to learn from the Black communities what they want, and share what we hear in a feedback loop to ensure we are working with the communities toward mutually aligned outcomes that the communities says they want. We look forward to working in collaboration with Portland’s Black communities toward this goal and to learning more about how we might best assist in supporting this vision. We’re currently wrapping up a survey to get those conversations started. If you’re a community member, feel free to weigh in.