Growing up, my family and classmates cemented in me the idea that school wasn’t just about learning — it was an extension of your neighborhood and your community. When you come to school, you bring a little piece of your home with you and swap with your classmates.
My mother wanted me to learn with students from a patchwork of different backgrounds. When I was 5, my family moved from rural Oregon to Aurora, Colorado, to be closer to family. My mom advocated for us to live within the boundaries of the high school she had attended years earlier. Returning to Overland High School was the clear choice, because my mom valued its diversity. When I was a student at Overland, I remember the administration boasting that our student body spoke more than 50 languages.
I started to recognize how news organizations outside our city perceived us differently. While other areas of the Denver metro area got cheerier coverage, like business spotlights and heartwarming features, Aurora frequently got the crime and poverty treatment. Aurora faces many challenges, and those issues deserve coverage. But news that focuses only on its detriments erases the nuances of my beloved hometown.
During my senior year of high school, I enrolled in my school’s broadcast journalism class. We reported on identity clubs in the school, notable alumni, and school events like culture night where students could showcase their culture through clothes, food, dances, and more. We were the counternarrative to the often one-note news coverage afforded to our community. Every brainstorming session, we turned the school upside down and inside out to shake out stories. It felt like honoring the passion my mom has passed on to me for my school and community.
Here I am, three years later, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and entering my senior year of college, and here, too, the local news coverage is full of crime and poverty stories.
As an adult, I’m faced with a similar question that I faced when I was 5: How do I learn about this new place?
One way I’m diving into my community is through the New Mexico News Map Project. My professor recruited me as an intern to help create a map of local news outlets across the state. I’ve found that the smallest news outlets can fill the most vital niches for readers, whether it’s telling people about the local arts scene in Grants, New Mexico, or explaining the implications of the Laguna pueblo’s budget.
As the media landscape shifts and more and more people spend their time online, it gets harder to stay connected to news outlets that are struggling to catch up. The outlets I logged had online presences that ranged from homemade websites featuring multimedia formats to print publications that were practically nonexistent online outside of LLC records. Communities that felt like their local coverage wasn’t accessible or complete responded by creating their own social media news content. We came across 411 Facebook groups where news is shared by local members and Instagram pages with memes sprinkled into their coverage. People want to stay connected to their community.
As I dig into my work this summer at Chalkbeat, research, accessibility, and visibility are top of mind. I’m excited to work with Chalkbeat and Civic News, knowing their reporting emphasizes the power of local news and creating impact in communities. My experiences in Aurora and New Mexico have shown me that mission-driven news organizations are essential to fulfill community and audience needs. I hope to ensure that the communities we cover get access to the high-quality news that the reporters here publish, and also for them to feel seen and heard, and to connect them to the information they are seeking.
This summer, Chalkbeat will experiment more with social media videos to meet our audience where they are. I’d love to hear from you and get your thoughts on Chalkbeat’s social media presence and how it can better meet your needs. Feel free to email me at fknowles@chalkbeat.org with any thoughts or questions.
Florian Knowles is a senior at the University of New Mexico studying video journalism. He is interning at Chalkbeat as the audience engagement intern as a part of the New Mexico Local News Internship program.
