This is a really nice Poynter article today about Karen Gadbois. The implication is that she's (maybe... possibly.. soon.. eventually) planning to step back from regular involvement at The Lens.
Gadbois said she’s focused on two things: keeping The Lens going by building a better organization and mastering the skill of weaving. By late January, Gadbois said the vision plan for The Lens was “pretty done.”
But when asked if she will be stepping down from staff, Gadbois said she feels like she can’t.
“I really feel like when the time comes, and I know that that time will come, I’ll know what I should do next,” she said.
It’s difficult for anyone involved in The Lens to imagine a future without Karen Gadbois, because in many ways she and The Lens have been inseparable since the day she fired up her laptop from a chemo chair in 2006.
Reading this brought me back a little. I know I don't post here as often as I used to. (Or as often as I'd like to even now.) But I do occasionally click through the old "blogroll" to see if any of those disused sites has happened to pop back to life. Every now and then one of them does and it's a little bit thrilling. Squandered Heritage used to be on that list but I culled the link a long time ago when it went blank. Anyway, the Poynter article talks about that a bit.
On New Year’s Eve in 2005 — four months after Katrina hit — Gadbois returned to Louisiana. Her downstairs had flooded. The upstairs was spared. Other homeowners weren’t as lucky. Demolitions began sprouting all over the city.
“At that point, I felt like I had to do something,” Gadbois said. “It was like wild town — ‘do what you want.’”
She began blogging on Squandered Heritage, cobbling together information on proposed demolitions and attending hearings. “They were crazy. The craziest public hearings ever,” she said. “They’d have like 26 properties on the docket, and the meeting would literally take 10 minutes.”
“I would post daily pretty much,” she said. “And then, occasionally, I would write essays. Sometimes just, ‘Here’s the house. And here’s the proposed demolition.’”
Twenty years later, it can still very much be wild town around here. There's a lot of shitty stuff that goes on that can only be slowed down or stopped (sometimes) if someone happens to get a lot of people to pay attention.
In some ways, it's actually worse now. New Orleans in 2024 is a more spiritually broken place than it was even then in the wake of the Katrina disaster. Two decades of displacement and gentrification can do that to a place. I'm sure I could articulate this better with time to think it out but there are days when I feel like we've lost a collective sense of what it means to live in a city together. Karen talks in this article about what drew her here from Mexico City.
She decided on New Orleans. In both cities, she felt, people congregated within their families and celebrated with the larger community. “They were both places that had long-rooted traditions,” she said, “and people weren’t as interested in what you did for a living.”
Insofar as those rooted community traditions even exist today, they aren't nearly as deep as they were before 2005. If there's one theme to the succeeding decades here, it has been the slow squeezing of the humanity out of our home. Let's put a pin in that for now, though. I'm just trying to say that it's harder to mobilize the fragmented community around civic issues than it was when we had a more natural communion together.
The state of our media is one symptom (and reflexive cause) of this cultural diminishing. Which brings us to the non-profit newsroom model the Poynter article is attempting to champion. We're meant to get from this article that the non-profits have added more in-depth, textured, "explanatory" news product to the local market than the commercial outlets are willing to provide. In a way, that is true. But it's more true that they're merely filling part of the massive vacuum left by "legacy media" as it dissolves.
Taken together, I'd say The Lens, Verite, and the Louisiana Illuminator give us about half the reporting capacity one whole newspaper ought to have in South Louisiana. As good a job as they do with what they have, they're still overmatched. There's enough happening on the New Orleans City Hall beat alone to fill at least two proper daily papers...or whatever the commensurate format is to a daily newspaper today. At least two entities of that size, I mean. The point is we're not getting nearly enough of what we need. The scrappy little websites get us more than we would have otherwise, but we're not where we need to be.
They've also got their own weaknesses. See, for example, the case of The Lens's "Charter School Reporting Corps" described here.
Another shining moment came with the launch of the award-winning Charter School Reporting Corps in 2011. Beatty, then The Lens’ publisher and chief executive officer, wrote that the project’s goal was to “provide school news to students, parents and others who are invested and interested in charter schools in New Orleans.” At the time, Beatty wrote, 45 boards ran 65 charter schools — in addition to the Orleans Parish School Board and the Recovery School District, which ran more than 20 schools combined.
“And no one was covering those board meetings, which were public meetings,” said Moseley, who at one point coordinated the corps. “And a lot of times, significant decisions were being made about the direction of the school, or facilities, or other things.”
The Lens hired a corps of stringers and part-time reporters to attend and cover the meetings.
“It’s probably one of the best ideas The Lens has had, in my opinion, and I was privileged to manage it,” said Moseley.
It was! It was a fantastic and quite necessary project. But sufficient resources were never mustered to fully realize its potential. The reason for that is only mildly stated here.
Gadbois said people loved the project, but it was “a beast to maintain” because of issues with funding and working with freelance reporters, some of whom would skip out on the meetings at the last minute. Gadbois said the corps also came early in the charter schools movement. She recalled some animosity from people who felt what The Lens was doing was anti-charter schools. In 2017, the project was placed on hiatus due to funding.
It turns out that the elite donor classes in New Orleans can have just as much veto power over the content produced by "independent" non-profit newsrooms as they do over the corporate newspaper owned by a billionaire if they really want it. But, until we figure out a better model, by all means, support the non-profits if you can because they're still the best thing we've got going right now.
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