As I See It

Atlanta’s Canopy project brings the community in

by Feven Merid

Photographs by Aboubacar Kante

When Kamille Whittaker began working on Canopy, a journalism project in Atlanta, she thought of something she’d studied during her undergraduate days, at Howard University: Mbongi, a Congolese learning practice. The idea of Mbongi was to “gather around and talk about ideas, but nobody was the teacher or the student; everybody was contributing,” Whittaker said. She thinks of it as a space with no walls. The ethos of Mbongi guided Whittaker, who is Canopy’s fellowship director, as she reached out to six community members—most of whom had no formal journalism experience— inviting them to take part in a paid fellowship program that would pair them with a mentor to help them report the stories they wanted to tell. “Canopy started to form around this idea that there are communities that needed local journalism,” Max Blau, a journalist and one of Canopy’s founders, said. Blau had observed how, in parts of Atlanta that lacked formally trained reporters, people were already disseminating information on an informal basis. “With a bit more training in terms of skill sets,” he figured, “we’d be able to help them advance the work they’re already doing that is journalistic in nature.” Starting in July, as the pandemic raged, Canopy had its fellows and mentors meet virtually, over six weeks of workshops on research, interviewing, and narrative writing. The West End—the neighborhood of Atlanta in which the contributors lived—was to be the focus of the inaugural issue. With guidance from local residents and contributions from professional journalists, Canopy’s West End Issue debuted in October. Stories covered everything from the community’s arts scene in the days of COVID-19 to its rich urban farming tradition and highway “water boys.” “It goes back to that idea of: Why don’t we stop trying to write around communities?” Gavin Godfrey, the issue’s editor and an Atlanta-based journalist, said. “Why don’t we just let the community tell these stories?”

NAYA CLARK, who is twenty-five, has lived in the West End for two years. “It’s so apparent how deeply rooted arts and culture is, especially within this very Black community,” she said. “There are the stores that you go into with the African textiles, the weave shops, the braid shops; there are those places that sell knockoff fashion brands.” On assignment for Canopy, Clark surveyed how members of the creative community were faring amid the pandemic. What she found provided her with a sense of herself as a journalist. “As a writer I’ve always felt like everything needs to be that kind of breaking-news, statistic-heavy, very serious format of a story,” she said. “But for a slow researcher like myself, or someone that’s interested in more cultural critique and cultural observation, there is a space for that and there is a way to go about it that makes it relevant to the now—and how it’s going to impact the future.” Jewel Wicker, a freelance entertainment journalist in Atlanta and Clark’s mentor, was similarly inspired: “Working in this community-journalism capacity was a real reminder of what the root of journalism should be,” she said.

BRENT BREWER, a forty-six-year-old civil engineer, has lived in the West End for seventeen years. He remembers that, when the housing bubble burst, as much as half of the West End’s housing stock was vacant; one of his neighbors started a local newsletter, to which Brewer contributed a series on foreclosure and mortgage fraud. He was interested, too, in showcasing who provided the community’s identity. “I saw Black people lose their voice through gentrification,” Brewer said. “So doing this type of journalism is important to me because I know what happens when you don’t do that—people forget that Black people ever lived here.” His columns for the newsletter ran about three hundred words; when he joined up with Canopy, he wanted to develop his prose. “I never thought I could write a long-form article,” he said. “I tried before and failed miserably.” With the help of Blau, his mentor, Brewer shared a byline on a twenty-five-hundred-word feature about the West End Mall, a Black commercial center whose redevelopment is now uncertain. “Having a deep and local expertise about the place where you live is something that is, unfortunately, undervalued in media,” Blau said. “You can’t teach that.”

AYANA CLARKE, a forty-two-year-old director of training with the Georgia Charter Schools Association, collaborated on the West End Mall feature with Brewer and a few others. “We all had a different voice in our work,” she said. “I was really people-centered, so I did a lot of interviews; another team member was very into data research.” Clarke had noticed the neighborhood around her changing—a lot of new people were coming in, and they tended to be vocal on social media. When she set out to report, she said, “we were being intentional about lifting voices of legacy residents.” As the story developed, she acquired an appreciation for editing and fact-checking: “It just pushed the bar for documenting your community and making sure that your work is credible.” Whittaker, her mentor, observed Clarke’s pleasure in the process. “I think she’s an editor at heart,” Whittaker said. “It was so good to be able to just hear how she thought about the story and how she thought the molding of the story would be.”

NZINGHA THOMPSON-HALL, a twenty-eightyear-old program manager at a reproductive-justice nonprofit, moved to the West End months before the pandemic hit. Canopy, she figured, “would be a really great way to learn about my neighborhood, about my neighbors, learn about the history, what issues the neighborhood was facing and its strengths.” Thompson-Hall worked on the feature about the community’s art scene. “Always looking up at the murals, I was like, ‘Okay, let’s see if I can see who are the artists who paint the public art here,’ ” she said. “There’s a Colin Kaepernick piece that’s not too far from my home. There’s a piece against a brick wall with African statues. There’s lots of Black Lives Matter art.” She interviewed two Black women who have contributed vital creative work to the West End. “Nzingha was such an advocate for her sources,” Whittaker, her mentor, said. Reporting brought her closer to the neighborhood. “It gave me an idea of what’s coming next,” Thompson-Hall said, “with issues like housing, small businesses, and how a neighborhood responds to unprecedented times.”

ABOUBACAR KANTE, a twenty-five-year-old photographer, grew up in the West End. He’d always been interested in reporting; Canopy offered him a chance. “I knew journalists do research, but really getting in depth and learning all the tools you can use stuck with me,” he said. Kante signed on for two assignments, working in different capacities: he conducted interviews, wrote, took photographs. For one piece, he focused on Atlanta’s “water boys”—Black teenagers who sell cold drinks along the highway. “I’ve always seen them selling water on the streets but never actually got a chance to interact with them, outside of giving them money,” Kante said. “The whole process of being out there with them for a couple of days, talking to them, and building a connection while photographing, I feel, made the photographs in the story more personable.” His mentor, Dustin Chambers, a freelance photojournalist in Atlanta, helped Kante work through tricky moments. (“It kind of got hairy a couple times when they were demanding that he delete photos,” Chambers recalled.) Kante also photographed demonstrations against police brutality. “I love the way he went out and approached the protests from his own style, from what he knew,” Chambers said. cjr

Chapter 2: Where

Journalism emerging through the cracks

In an ideal world, the news would be consumed not only within a certain bubble—“a self-created and self-referring class,” as Joan Didion once described it—but by everyone, everywhere. It would be accessible, in terms of language and form; intelligent and empathetic; interested in the places power comes from and where it slams down. Instead, we find that traditional models of journalism have struggled to reach people where they are. But unconventional means of delivery—installation art, Twitch stream, pirate radio—are flowering, carrying vital information where it needs to go. —The editors