Attempts at banning books are record-breaking nationwide

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We’re excited to catch you up on the News Ambassadors program and highlight the amazing work done by our partners.  News Ambassadors enlists college journalism students to help local newsrooms fill gaps in coverage of underreported communities with rigorously reported stories that uplift solutions and common ground.

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📻One big story 📻

Have you ever read George Orwell’s 1984? Or Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale? Both classics and modern titles have been a part of record-breaking attempts at banning books at public libraries and school libraries across the nation. 

Chloe Beaver, a student journalist in the News Ambassadors program, explores how Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia is responding to the current round of book censorship. Their strategy: stocking up on banned titles. In addition to making banned titles more widely available, Avid Bookstore has also raised awareness of school and library board meetings where these decisions are made. 

Beaver’s approach to the story includes multiple perspectives and uses depolarization reporting techniques, rooted in mediation and psychology, that unpack how different communities see one issue.

Listen to the full story from WUGA.

Broader context: 

While book bans have gotten some major spotlight in the news recently, the practice has existed for centuries. In the first half of the 19th century, anti-Slavery literature would be aggressively banned in states across the South. Abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe defied the ban by publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that exposed the unimaginable cruelty of slavery. 

For decades during the modernization of American society, school libraries were sites of contentious battles over what information should be made readily available to children. Books that challenged longstanding narratives or social norms were considered problematic for language, sexual or political content and were often at the center of censorship. 

National Geographic wrote a brief history of book bans in the U.S. since the very first one in 1650.

✨Story Spotlight✨ 

When you use batteries, do you think of…Nevada? Eighty lithium projects are proposed for the state’s public lands but the arid environment makes mining this elemental salt pretty tricky. Supporters of mining lithium say it's necessary to expand the clean energy economy and could create thousands of jobs. 

But the conventional methods for extracting lithium rely on groundwater and have the potential to threaten their already scarce supplies. A new study found a less water intensive solution that could possibly change the way lithium is mined in the country’s driest state, student journalist Sydney Peerman reports for KUNR.

🌱Knowing and Growing 🌱

This month, we spoke with Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval, a journalism student at the University of Missouri who was the engagement intern for the News Ambassadors program last year. Sandoval worked with KBIA staff and community partners to hold an event to connect with community members in Sedalia, Missouri on their information needs and what they feel has been missing from local media. 

What did you learn from practicing engagement journalism and solutions reporting? 

Like New York has its boroughs, Sedalia certainly has its own little communities too. And I wish that I was strategic about it, focusing on one community really hard, instead of trying to do them all at once.

Tell us about the engagement event. How did it come together? 

We wanted to make a series of posters to advertise to the community. The posters were calling all citizens to meet their journalists at the local newspaper Sedalia Press-Democrat and KBIA so they could tell us, you know, what we’ve been doing right, what we’ve been doing wrong, what they’d like to see in their community. We also made a radio ad in their actual FM radio, too. 

We didn't get many people that showed up. In all honesty, three to four people, which was really heartbreaking. And to be fair, I think we did schedule the event on a very rainy Saturday, so the weather did not work with us. The interactions that we got with those people were really meaningful, because they were really engaged in their community. One of them was an active member of the local Republican Party. And someone else was a Latino business owner. They were really tired of negative news. They were really tired of seeing only the bad things that people in authority did, and they were. Really tired of not being able to look forward to something good that was happening in the community, which they said, like, kind of pulled them apart from it.

Anything else you want to share? 

I mean, solutions journalism is not easy. [Some] people [might] say that solutions journalism is just like fairytale storytelling, that you're just telling happy stories. But it's really not. It has a very rigorous kind of criteria. You have to prove that the solution works. You have to do real journalism, oftentimes investigative, to really see what people are doing, how effective their solution is against the problem, the history of the problem, tension in the city to get the solution up and running. It's not easy, really. It's really hard to find these types of stories. It's harder to find solutions than it is to find problems. 

👓What we’re reading👓

We love this solutions journalism story about how Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels. Unlike rooftop photovoltaics, the technology needed doesn’t require users to own their homes and the hardware can be easily bought online or at the supermarket with little effort. Grist has the full story here. 

That’s all folks! See you next month. Support us by following us on Instagram, donating, or forwarding this newsletter to a friend.