[ad_1]
On June 3, Chicago Mayoress Lori Lightfoot agreed to a 15-minute virtual interview with Austin Weekly News.
She spoke about her controversial decision to only give interviews to colored journalists to the local media, the Loretto Hospital vaccine scandal and Invest South / West on the occasion of the 2-year anniversary of her inauguration.
AWN: I read the letter you sent to various newsrooms across Chicago asking them to diversify. I appreciate your bringing the topic to the fore, but while you mentioned large legacy outlets like the Chicago Tribune and Crain’s, you didn’t mention any smaller, neighborhood-based and / or nontraditional outlets, in which Black and Brown journalists are much more likely to have or even hold positions of influence.
How can the city ensure that small, hyperlocal publications like Austin Weekly News, where minority journalists are more likely editors and publishers, owners and other positions of authority, have equal access to your office and other city agencies?
LL: What I did started this important conversation about the lack of diversity in the mainstream press.
I hope that it will turn into something really good and powerful, ”the mayor continued. “I know I’ve spoken to a number of black journalists in particular who… really get it into the mainstream media, and really take the baton, if you will, and run with it to say, ‘You ‘You need to diversify your newsrooms.’ That is a requirement that must be met. ”
I started this conversation because … I’ve probably done nearly 55 stand-up press conferences this year and I rarely see diversity, a small handful. Almost all of them are white reporters for the mainstream press.
You know, one of the things that we started with before the pandemic and that we will pick up again when we get out of it is to go to the hyper-local neighborhood press and I hope you will join in. I think we did that with some success when we realized that a lot of the small, hyperlocal media outlets don’t have large capacities – maybe in many cases they have freelancers and part-time workers, but it really matters to me that we reach out to people in neighborhoods .
AWN: Jacqueline Serrato, the editor of South Side Weekly, tweeted that her outlet had asked for an interview, but despite being a haven for Black and Brown, they were turned down. Can you explain why this happened?
LL: I don’t know anything about that. When we started this conversation, we were inundated with requests that we are still processing. I am not aware of anyone being turned away.
AWN: Are you familiar with HB 134, a bill by Senator Steve Stadelman that recently passed the Illinois General Assembly and would create a statewide task force on local journalism? And do you think a similar task force would be helpful at the local level?
LL: I don’t know the legislation, but we are clearly in a transition period when it comes to the media and we have been in this place for a while. The consolidation of the media, fewer people getting their news from traditional media sources, so this is a really crucial time in the transition from what was to what will be, and much of that is market power. There has to be room for local journalism.
Do you remember DNAinfo? This was very popular because they took a hyper-local, neighborhood-based approach. I think we all know why this publication was dropped, but I think this opens up an opportunity for publications like yours … So we have to think about how we can create these types of spaces. I think it’s vital.
AWN: Here on the West Side we’ve covered quite a bit of your Invest South / West initiatives, particularly the renovation of the Laramie Bank Building in Austin. There were some community stakeholders who felt that the community engagement process related to the Laramie project was inadequate.
For example, only 37 of the approximately 100 participants in the community meetings took part in the community survey, which served as a key criterion in the selection of the selected developers. Nor is it a guarantee that they were all Austin residents. Can you address some of these concerns people had with the community engagement process?
LL: We do, and will continue to do, community engagement around these opportunities to restore the hidden treasures of these communities. This is vital to me.
Since the inception of Invest South / West, which launched on the West Side in October 2019, we’ve hosted literally hundreds of community meetings across the Invest South / West geography. The goal was to hear from the community what the needs were, did we get the area right, the corridors right.
AWN: Are you satisfied with attending these meetings?
LL: There’s always room for improvement and you never get it quite perfect, but I think the effort was there and we literally reached thousands of people through these community activations that have been going on for a while.
As for the West Side, we checked out the Laramie State Bank, this beautiful building that has been abandoned for years, maybe decades.
So the idea was to give us your best ideas on how to revive this particular structure in the area. Of course we wanted to know the budget, but in reality we wanted to know what the vision was for employing local residents, what the vision was to empower and assemble a design, architecture and construction team made up of black and brown, and that was very explicit in the tender. It’s never been done.
While the unsuccessful folks have a lot to say, of course, I think what we’re going to make of this is an exceptional investment on the West Side that we hope will spur other investments and this area .
AWN: How is the city that holds Loretto Hospital responsible for distributing vaccine doses to people outside of Austin, first reported on by the Chicago Block Club?
LL: We told them just this week that they were suspended from participating in the vaccination program. The reality is that since we saw these challenges after February and March, Loretto had been out of the vaccines business for a while and then re-entered under the strict supervision of the Chicago Department of Health, which continued to be very successful, in an in-depth review of what happened at Loretto.
This review identified a number of challenging problems at Loretto, not least the fact that over 2,500 vaccine doses were not considered, which means that Loretto, as the provider in the vaccine program, has a responsibility to record every single dose that is used whose arm it is went in, demographics about the person, and then reported it to a government record-keeping system.
When we did our audit, Loretto had no record of more than 2,500 cans. That is an important issue. We told them this week that they had been suspended from the vaccine program.
We will never let the West Side community down. We have had other hospitals and other providers closing the gap as Loretto has gone through different phases and we will continue to do so. We will do this with lots of mobile and pop-up vaccine distribution options on the west side.
AWN: Coming back to the lack of coverage during your press conferences, the city cannot use its resources to urge the private sector to invest in a fund, for example, that would help pay for more coverage of City Hall through non-obsolete neighborhood businesses – like Austin Weekly News, TriiBe, Block Club Chicago, City Bureau, AustinTalks, etc. – where minority journalists are concentrated and tend to be in leadership positions?
LL: “I think there would be interest from the philanthropic community now embroiled in a conversation about journalism in the media,” she said. “I could speak to a few people I’ve had these conversations with and really get your idea rolling, which I think is a great idea. And if they are interested, I would put you together. “
[ad_2]
