Kaia Sand | Good journalism is worth the investment

OPINION | Street Roots editorial team continues in-depth coverage in 2023

by Kaia Sand | 4 Jan 2023

The election of George Santos is a story of a depleted media landscape, argues Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. George Santos is the newly elected New York Congressman who has proven to be a lush fabulist of his own biography. While voters could have been informed about his lies before the election — after all, the small local Long Island paper, the North Shore Leader, had started to sound the alarms — no larger newspapers picked up the story.


        Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. This column represents her views.

Ellison argues this is the result of a depleted media landscape where, since 2005, the nation lost a quarter of its newspapers and faces a 60% decline in journalists. In her telling, the “hyper local” newspapers do much of the legwork, and then regional papers expand this coverage that then moves to the national stage. On average, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, two newspapers disappear in the United States every week. This week, an email popped in my inbox from the Editor and Publisher magazine announcing Advance Publications shut down three Alabama newspapers.

This is the media landscape in which Street Roots produces our newspaper, and we do it with a particular, difficult commitment. When K. Rambo became editor in chief 14 months ago, they came in with a brave vision for investigative journalism. This is not a flashy or cost-cutting approach. The opposite of clickbait, investigative journalism requires sustained attention from reporters and faith that our readers care about getting to the root of problems and understanding systems in order to, if necessary, change them.

We do have that faith in our readers.

Whether through our journalism, our daily work with hundreds of people experiencing homelessness and poverty who sell our paper to earn income, or our advocacy — which is managed separately from journalism to maintain journalistic independence — we confront the inequities of wealth distribution and housing occupation. As an organization, we’re fortunate to have these very different modes. The poet Amiri Baraka once described his ability to move from poems to essays as having access to both “daggers and javelins,” and Street Roots has something akin to this for making systemic change through our vendor program, our journalism and our advocacy. All three were deployed several years ago, for instance, when Street Roots pursued the creation of Portland Street Response.

Piper McDaniel joined our newspaper one year ago this month, moving to Street Roots from a Mother Jones fellowship in New York as our first reporter hired with investigative reporting as her primary assignment.

McDaniel has approached two topics — rental housing and the corrections systems — with a sustained focus. She’s tracking the ways eviction courts are structured against renters, showing which property management companies are, in fact, busying those court dockets and tracking the numbers of evictions. Through McDaniel’s reporting, it’s clear that no matter how much effort is put into moving people into housing, the eviction rate keeps moving people into homelessness.

She’s also staying on top of the Oregon Department of Corrections, most recently scouring records to report ODOC did not disclose the cause of 63% of in-custody deaths. Like evictions, incarceration intersects with homelessness. Systemic racism drives both rates of homelessness and incarceration. And, upon release, carceral records make securing housing more difficult.

We operate in a different geography than what Ellison describes. Our local scale is the greater Portland region, and the news we produce sometimes travels across media. Oregon Public Broadcasting, for example, will amplify stories on its radio waves that Street Roots reporters investigate. Street Roots journalists appear every Wednesday on XRAY FM and KBOO community radio.

But our scale is also statewide. Street Roots' Indigenous affairs reporter Melanie Henshaw recently covered the possibility of removing four hydroelectric dams in the Klamath Basin. Sometimes this means hiring reporters from elsewhere in the state for stories, such as coverage of the camping bans in Medford or the Oregon Law Center work protecting the rights of unhoused people in Grants Pass.

And our scale is also national and international because of the International Network of Street Newspapers. This network hosts a wire service (based in Glasgow, Scotland) through which all 100 member newspapers share stories. There’s a team of translators because these newspapers are written in 25 languages. The North American bureau of the street paper network, managed by former Street Roots executive director Israel Bayer, runs a “housing for the people” column written by people who’ve experienced homelessness, which complements Street Roots’ MoJo program that provides Street Roots vendors education in journalism and communications, leading to some published writing in Street Roots.

While newspapers fold because they don’t price out, Street Roots approaches journalism as essential to our mission. The primary way we fund our journalism is through individual donations (one way to sustain this support is to sign up for a recurring monthly donation). Grants also help. In the past, Meyer Memorial Trust has supported reporting projects, and Spirit Mountain Foundation supported the first year of our Indigenous affairs position. It is, of course, always a hustle for funding, but a worthwhile one.

Journalism is necessary for a thriving democracy, but, importantly, that democracy needs to be an equitable one. Again and again, wealth buys access, whiteness defines the terms, and Street Roots summons intention and commitment in order to pursue a different vision.

Among the analysis of disparities is the sharp over-representation of Indigenous people in homelessness. The latest regional Point-in-Time Count showed Indigenous people were overrepresented by five times their populations. That’s been an enduring number in our region. It’s important, then, that our newspaper shines a light on Indigenous affairs, growing knowledge that disputes prejudices that are some combination of dangerously romanticized, cruel and wrong-headed.

So beginning in July of last year, Street Roots hired Henshaw as its first Indigenous affairs reporter. She’s covering issues with depth, showing challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act are challenges to tribal sovereignty, drawing attention to affordable housing projects by the Native American Youth and Family Center, or NAYA, and she’s also, importantly, lifting up the joy, success and resilience among Native people, running a series on Indigenous artists. Watch for and depend on her excellent reporting ahead.

Despite the demanding job of editor in chief, which includes working with freelance writers who make major contributions, such as Aurora Biggers' coverage of local union drives, Rambo also continues to pursue investigative projects. Kanani Cortez produces the newspaper and digital content, but she also brings coverage of arts and entertainment into the paper, such as her work last year on the comic storytelling collaboration with Portland State University. She also edits columns from writers who are incarcerated.

I urge you to support your vendor by buying the paper each week and catching up on coverage you’ve missed online. Watch for more investigations into evictions and the corrections systems. Turn to Street Roots for Indigenous affairs coverage. Find writing from people who are currently homeless or incarcerated. We are committed to our work and nimble enough to be responsive — so expect to be surprised from time to time too. December 2023 will mark a quarter-century since Street Roots launched its first issue, so we’ll mark that anniversary with the launch of a new design.

In a media landscape that’s too often dominated by an ownership model that closes newspapers that aren’t profitable, Street Roots takes a different approach, and that approach is possible because of all of you who support us — both through donations and reading.

Thank you — and here we come 2023!

Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.

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Director’s Desk, Journalism and Media