This nonprofit startup is fighting for inclusive media in one of America’s oldest cities
Majority white newsrooms are still the norm in New Orleans, a majority Black city. Lede New Orleans wants to change that.
By Jennifer Larino
It had been a dry, mild day in New Orleans, but we recognized the cool, mineral smell of rain as soon as it hit the air. I and Ejaaz Mason, my co-founder at Lede New Orleans, stood in the small parking lot behind my Mid-City apartment squinting up at the gray clouds gathering overhead.
We had just spent an hour setting up plastic folding tables, extension cords and monitors for an outdoor video editing workshop for the young adults in Lede New Orleans’ multimedia journalism training program. This was one of the first in-person training sessions we were offering since launching the program in March 2020, just days before the pandemic shutdowns. We were determined.
“We should probably set up the tent, huh?” Ejaaz said, turning to look at me.
“Yup,” I said.
An hour later, reporting fellows Alexis Reed, Trevon Cole and Lanece Webb huddled underneath, their masked faces lit up by the glow of their laptops. Ejaaz walked them through the basics of Adobe Premiere Pro as a light rainfall dripped around us. I ran around handing out towels and moving phones and bookbags out of the rain. It wasn’t ideal, but it was happening. At the time, that counted for everything.
Looking back, I’m struck by how the question for us and the fellows was never whether we’d move forward, but how. I suppose that’s the kind of mindset required when tackling a problem like representation in journalism. It was around that time I knew Lede New Orleans was graduating from a wild idea into a movement.
We launched a pilot of the 14-week reporting fellowship in March 2020 with the help of a pivotal $3,000 grant from the Hacks/Hackers Diversity Fund. The program trains local BIPOC and LGBTQ+ young adults, age 18–25, to tell the stories of marginalized communities in and around New Orleans. Last summer, we partnered with Internews to land an additional $100,000 in funding from W.K. Kellogg Foundation to help us scale our idea.
Since then, we’ve trained 17 fellows over three fellowship cohorts; served more than 60 youth through free, public media skills workshops; and hired four professional journalists as coaches and mentors. Our fellows have logged more than 150 hours of hands-on, practical experience in interviewing, writing, and shooting and editing video. They’ve produced multimedia stories documenting voices of the COVID-19 pandemic, including local youth processing virtual school and last summer’s protests and virtual school, a dancer trying out for an NFL dance squad from her living room, and a praline maker finding healing in growing his business. We also launched Lede Voices, a YouTube series highlighting young creators and changemakers of color in New Orleans, which youth in the fellowship program help produce.
More than half of the sources Lede New Orleans fellows have interviewed for their stories have never spoken with a journalist before. That’s huge. It underscores why small, community-driven organizations like Lede New Orleans remain a vital ingredient in ensuring a strong, sustainable future for local journalism.
2020 forced a reckoning in newsrooms that remain predominantly white and predominantly male, even in majority Black cities like New Orleans. Here in New Orleans, a failure to nurture, hire and retain diverse, local journalism talent has an impact on how and when communities of color are covered. Local news is filled with stories about crime and poverty that center Black and Brown communities, but fall short in documenting the full range of lived experiences in our city. The pandemic heightened that reality.
Ejaaz and I brought these observations with us when we first met over a beer at Voodoo Two Lounge in New Orleans’ Central Business District back in 2019. I was among 160 staffers laid off that summer in a crushing buyout of The Times-Picayune, the local paper. Ejaaz was a filmmaker and film teacher at a local high school, burnt out on the limitations of traditional schools.
We recognized that New Orleans needed news stories and documentaries that better reflected the full range of lived experiences of residents in Black, Latinx and other historically marginalized communities in our city. At the same time, young BIPOC and LGBTQ+ adults in New Orleans wanted to learn how to tell the stories of their communities in nuanced ways, but they lacked access to real training and opportunities. “I just want a chance,” said Cole, who graduated to serve as a Lede Senior Fellow this spring.
Fortunately, Lede New Orleans has graduated from our pop-up tent days. The New Orleans Career Center was gracious enough to welcome us into their space late last year. We now have a small newsroom, complete with computer stations for video editing, dry-erase boards full of notes and story ideas, and, of course, a healthy selection of snacks.
The Lede newsroom has been bustling this summer as the latest cohort ran through interview transcripts, wrote profiles and edited video for a reporting project documenting stories of local K-12 students, parents, educators and social workers returning to in-person school after months of online learning. Their stories include a first-grade teacher who used TikTok videos to help students learn how to log into email during virtual school; high school students who found liberation from isolation through painting, trumpet and dance; and a school social worker pushing to make pandemic services like food drives and mental health check-ins a regular part of school life for families. We’ll spend July editing and fact-checking their work, and aim to publish later this summer.
The past year has been about prototyping Lede New Orleans. Now it’s time to launch in a more full way. We have a big vision: By 2030, half of journalists, editors, documentarians and other media creators working in New Orleans will be Black and Brown people who were educated locally. To get there we plan to continue our reporting fellowship, starting up again this fall, and expand our workshop offerings.
We need to research the local media landscape and what information needs exist. We want to deepen our community-driven mission by establishing an advisory committee of community members to help guide the topics and stories our fellows report on. We also seek to establish an incubator program for BIPOC- and LGBTQ-led journalism projects and platforms in our city. This is the kind of slow, intentional work our communities need, but that media companies just aren’t doing. It’s up to us to do the work. Join our email newsletter to read and watch.
Jennifer Larino is a journalist and executive director/co-founder of Lede New Orleans.
