A great number of thoughtful people, organizations and projects are working to improve the future of local news. To help ground the work, CISLM compiled a database of projects already in progress.
Chelsea Reynolds is the inaugural Director of the Center for Culture & Inclusion in Media at the Arizona State University California Center. She is also an associate professor in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Reynolds’s research focuses on media representations of LGBTQ+ populations, online censorship of sexual communication and workplace wellbeing in media professions.
CISLM intern Sachi Akmal interviewed Reynolds via Zoom. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media: Can you talk about the purpose of the Center for Culture & Inclusion in Media at the ASU California Center and what it means to be its inaugural director?
Chelsea Reynolds: The Center for Culture and Inclusion in Media will really be a national think tank for all sorts of scholarship and journalistic work that attacks questions of identity, of power, of culture and its influences on the way stories are told. The center will also be partnering with community journalists from underrepresented groups — such as Latinx media, Indigenous journalists, queer reporters and the Black press — to develop training programs and interventions for better coverage of these populations.
My goal is to develop research teams with scholars across the country and to bring folks from all sorts of different backgrounds together to talk about issues of representation, which is one of the key factors in our political environment right now. It impacts the way that we understand social issues, from climate change to mass shootings. When we think about how communities are impacted by the news, we also need to think about the ways that stories are told and who is telling them.
CISLM: What makes Los Angeles a great location for the Center for Culture and Inclusion in Media?
CR: I think being in Los Angeles, this center has access to the richness of media communities, including Hollywood, as well as the underrepresented communities that we are concerned about in terms of representational issues in the press. Our opportunities to link with tribal nations here in Southern California are really important. Our proximity to the southern border is an important factor in our location. For me personally, most of my research tackles issues of LGBTQ representation, queer issues in the press, and we have one of the largest LGBTQ communities in the world here in Los Angeles. We have these mashups, these tensions, these opportunities for connection that I think are really unique to our place.
CISLM: What is a research topic you are currently investigating or are most excited to investigate next?
CR: I worked with three graduate students at my former university at Cal State-Fullerton recently on a project looking at Latinx mental health influencers on Instagram and how they tell cross-cultural stories about mental health and machismo and stigma and religion. Projects that look at the ways that young content creators use TikTok and Instagram to destigmatize these things that so many of our families have made taboo — I think that work is really important. The project is currently under review at the International Journal of Communication.
I’m working with another research team with Juan Mendel, a scholar at Michigan State, and Cody Hays, a PhD student at Arizona State University, looking how Drag Story Hour events at public libraries were impacted by bans in Tennessee and Montana, and how the news has, in some cases, enabled some of those political actions or condoned them. We’re doing a content analysis, so a big empirical study looking at how the drag queen bans were framed before that law was enacted in Tennessee, compared with after. I’m really excited to see what we find there because I think this question of drag bans falls into a larger cultural formation around stigma against queer people, stigma against sex (and) this idea of grooming. We’re seeing LGBTQ books being removed from public libraries all across the country, which I think is the same sort of phenomenon as we see with drag bans — this fear around queerness. I’ve never thought of that little rhyme before, but that’s what it is — it’s queer fear.
CISLM: Social media is filling a lot of media representation spaces that traditional media isn’t able to. What is the relationship between social media and traditional reporting?
CR: I think that there are multiple discourses happening. There’s TikTok and Instagram and social media influencing over here, reportage and traditional journalism (spaces) over here, and there’s a Venn diagram where those two things meet. I’m seeing the social media trend reporting happen primarily in lifestyle journalism. What I mean by that is the “soft news” or the entertainment space. I was just thinking, with regard to Hurricane Helene, that it would be so good if traditional journalists partnered with influencers or social media content creators on the ground at the scenes of disaster to tell stories about things like hurricanes or things like earthquakes.
I think that communities do tend to represent themselves more “accurately” in online spaces like TikTok or X, but it takes a lot of vetting to determine whether these representations are real. For example, when we think of Indigenous representation, there are a lot of legitimate decolonial accounts out there fighting for the rights of Native people, but there are also a lot of folks pretending to be Indigenous for clout. How would a journalist determine which perspective is the “real” one? This is one of the hardest things to determine when reporting or doing research on representation in online communities.
We have to keep in mind that social media platforms are (managed by) private companies, and at any moment, they could be de-platformed. They could go away, or they could change ownership like Twitter did, or face government censorship — I guess in the case of TikTok, for example, if the US government were to find that it’s a foreign agent.
CISLM: What are your recommendations for local journalists in terms of how they think about representation in their reporting?
CR: In my observations over the past five or 10 years, what I’m seeing is that especially college newspapers and university reporters are filling news holes in communities where local news has shrunk considerably. That is a lot of responsibility for people in their late teens or 20s who are learning this skill set and becoming reporters and are now shouldering the burden of what professional reporters used to do. We have to teach how to think about representation and how to do trauma-informed journalism at the college level and put those skills into practice immediately.
When you’re a reporter at UNC or at (University of Southern California) you’re reporting in communities that have been underserved by public resources, in some cases, that are very politically diverse, that may speak languages other than English. When you’re reporting on these communities, you have to be sensitive to them. You have to build trust. You can’t just parachute in, drop in and leave the day after, and not follow up.
I don’t know that we as academics have done a very good job of teaching these critical thinking skills as well as the human element of telling stories. We focus a lot on accuracy and objectivity. I think what’s more important is to focus on building trust and doing the care work of journalism. This is not a well-paying profession, so people who get into news work probably do so because they feel a personal investment in the work that they do. They feel that there’s a value in this. I think a lot of us come to journalism hoping to tell human stories and to hold people accountable in government, and to do so well. We really need to focus on trust and care first as we report on these pressing social issues of our time.
Chelsea Reynolds was invited to speak on Oct. 10 at the Mental Health in Journalism Summit, organized by The Self-Investigation. CISLM is an outreach partner of the summit. Learn more here.