‘It Matters Who Tells the Story’: Feet in 2 Worlds Goes National
When people talk about unintended consequences what they usually mean is, “Uh-oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen.” But that’s not always the case, and Feet in 2 Worlds is an example of how sometimes unintended consequences can be a good thing.
Feet in 2 Worlds (Fi2W) will soon leave the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, our home for the last 17 years, and become an independent non-profit news and journalism training organization. As we make this transition, it’s worth taking a look at what we’ve learned and how we’ve taken directions we never intended, evolving from a New York City-focused radio production team to a nationally recognized leader in centering the voices of immigrants in journalism.
In 2004, I started working on a project that had been percolating in my imagination for several years: a radio documentary about new immigrants in New York City. All the documentaries I had produced up to that point in my career featured my reporting and my voice, but this one was going to be different.
I’m three generations removed from my family’s immigration to the U.S. I wanted this program to be told from the perspective of journalists who were closer to their own immigrant experience: people who lived in immigrant neighborhoods, spoke the language of the country where they were born, and whose lives straddled cultures, customs, and geography. They would be able to tell stories about today’s immigrants in ways I never could.
The documentary, Feet in Two Worlds: Immigrants in a Global City, was broadcast on public radio stations across the country in 2005. It featured the work of three immigrant newspaper reporters in New York – from the Polish, Haitian, and Indian communities – all making their debut as radio journalists. The show won two prestigious journalism awards, and one of the reporters was offered a job at WNYC, the nation’s largest public radio station.
Those of us who worked on the program soon realized that we had done more than just produce a good story. By recruiting and training immigrant journalists and bringing their work to audiences that had not heard them before we were helping to change journalism. We were making public radio more reflective of its increasingly diverse audience. Fi2W was born. The Center for New York City Affairs became our home and WNYC became our first and most important media partner.
Fi2W established an ongoing program of fellowships and workshops for immigrant and Black journalists, many of whom went on to assignments and jobs at leading news organizations. In addition to great storytelling, we were changing the storytellers. “It matters who tells the story,” became our mantra. We built a path for people who have historically been underrepresented in journalism to take their rightful place in newsrooms.
Two years ago, we built on that work by creating our first editing fellowships, to train a new generation of newsroom leaders.
In the process, another unintended consequence has emerged. Feet in 2 Worlds itself has changed and broadened in scope. Our latest podcast series, A Better Life?, features stories from across the U.S. Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language news service we helped create last year, is based in Phoenix. Half our staff is now located in Los Angeles, and we have deep connections in Detroit, Boston, and other cities.
Now it’s time to embrace our transformation at a new home, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) an organization that supports a wide range of nonprofit news outlets across the U.S.
At INN we are joining a community of editors, publishers, reporters, and entrepreneurs. INN will also help us achieve a longstanding goal: To transform Fi2W into a self-supported non-profit organization, with its own administration and board of directors that will chart a path for future growth and activities.
(In the process, we’ll maintain our relationship with The Center for New York City Affairs, and report from the city’s immigrant communities as they emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic.)
The immigrant and Black journalists we’ve brought together often want to tell stories about the consequences of structural racism. And they want to talk about the impact it has on their lives, careers, families, and communities.
At Fi2W, our conversations around race, racial reckoning, and identity, while rarely easy, are almost always productive. I think there are a few reasons for this.
First, we always focus on the work, not personalities. In our case the work is how to tell the best, most compelling stories that advance the search for truth and support democracy. That’s our job as journalists.
Second, we stress mutual respect. We have lots of disagreements. We bring together people from very different lived experiences, of different ages, with different cultural backgrounds. But we listen to each other with open minds, and with a genuine desire to learn from each other. When we offer criticism, it is with the intention of making our work better, not tearing down another person.
Third, we are intentional in what we do. It is not enough to say to journalists who have historically been excluded from newsrooms, “Hey, here’s an opportunity, come take it.” You need policies and practices to make it real. Because too often many immigrants and Black people have been hired by mainstream news organizations only to find that they are discriminated against inside those organizations. They are denied advancement, their ideas are ignored, or they are exploited. For example, I have heard many Latinx journalists talk about how in addition to doing their own work they are expected to step in as translators for their co-workers who are assigned stories in Latinx communities but don’t speak Spanish. The Latinx journalists don’t get paid more for their bilingual skills. It’s just what they are expected to do. The result is that a lot of immigrant, Black, and Latinx journalists have left news organizations.
By contrast, Fi2W strives to find talented people at various stages in their careers and give them the tools they need to advance. We encourage them to cover stories that have been ignored, to follow their instincts, and to value their knowledge and experience.
I’m excited by our transformation and the opportunities it offers to touch the lives of more journalists, bring their work to even wider audiences, and have an even greater impact on American journalism. Those will be the very happy unintended consequences of a radio documentary about new immigrants in New York City that went into production nearly two decades ago.