The vital importance of a quality hangout spot

Hi readers, and welcome to your favorite newsletter! 👏🏼👏🏽👏🏿

We’re excited to catch you up on the News Ambassadors program and highlight the amazing work done by our partners. If you care about strengthening communities and better supporting democracy, help us by following us on Instagram, donating or forwarding this newsletter to a friend.

Do you frequent your neighborhood coffee shop, public park or library? Consider yourself lucky for having a “third space.” 

Public libraries and spaces like it are classified as “third places” by sociologists. Accessible third places – outside of work and home – are dwindling. Ideally, visiting these spaces would also be free, but not all are. Student journalist Abby Lee reports for KBIA on the importance of third spaces and what they mean for Mid-Missouri and similar areas. 

Lee interviewed community members such as seventh-grader Zeke Turner, who hangs out at the Boonslick Regional Library in Sedalia for his Dungeons and Dragons campaign. The library gives kids space to explore and learn together on their own. 

A study by the Journal of Rural Studies stressed that a lack of third places can lead to a decline in quality of life, social health and opportunities for socialization, making places like Boonslick Public Library, more important than ever. Read Lee’s story here.

Broader context: 

Third places are critical for strong communities because of how easily they facilitate connections among people who share a public space. Chatting with neighbors, friends, or even strangers is vital to weaving a strong social fabric and stemming polarization and overall better public health. A Surgeon General’s advisory last year called attention to the effects of loneliness and isolation. 

“In a world where we spend ever more of our time staring at screens, blocking out even our most intimate and proximate human contacts, public institutions with open-door policies compel us to pay close attention to people nearby,” writes NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, sociology professor at New York University, in his book “Palaces for the People: TK subtitle” 

In March, The Week reported on the dwindling number of third spaces and some of the root causes of their disappearance. Americans reported spending about 6.5 hours a week with friends but from 2014 to 2019, but third spaces were either not free, not inviting or expensive.

✨Story Spotlight✨ 

Student journalist Olivia Mizelle reported on Sedalia, Missouri’s Open Door Service Center for KBIA, which provides services for people such as food and clothing. Nearly 4,000 of Sedalia’s approximately 22,000 people live below the poverty line. Attendees tell Mizelle that they’ve made friends that they’ve known for years. 

“Many of the people eating at the kitchen have a clear camaraderie with each other, knowing each other's names and bonding over shared jokes,” writes Mizelle. Sounds similar to a third place. 👀

Click here to read more about the Open Door Service Center. 

🌱Knowing and Growing 🌱

This month, we spoke with one of our new professors joining the News Ambassador’s program, Dr. Carrie Brown, professor at Montclair State University and former Director of the Engagement Journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

What excites you about teaching this year and the News Ambassadors program? 

I'm excited to teach students about solutions journalism, how to tell better stories about complex and divisive issues, and how to assess what kinds of information communities need. Any time colleges and students can help fill gaps in local news coverage and reach underserved communities, it is really meaningful to me.

In your experience, how has teaching engagement progressed in classrooms? In newsrooms? 

Teaching engagement has progressed a lot in universities over the past 10 years. Resistance to listening to citizens and using their input to shape the news agenda has softened, although it still exists in some quarters. Newsrooms, too, are increasingly open to both audience and community engagement. Many new local nonprofit news organizations have launched in recent years with engagement as part of their core mission.

Any advice for teachers implementing engagement journalism methods for the first time? 

You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Also, all community engagement work is highly iterative and what works well in one classroom or one neighborhood can be different, so it's important to be flexible. The most important thing is to help students develop a mindset of collaborating with communities as they decide what is newsworthy and a knowledge of the assumptions each of us holds and the importance of always interrogating them in the search for truth. Building trust takes careful and sustained effort on the part of journalists and often we have to overcome people's skepticism rooted in their bad experiences with news media in the past.

🎧What we’re listening to🎧

Inheriting from NPR, is a show exploring how one major historical event in the Asian American Pacific Islander community can ripple through generations. Radio journalist Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations, exploring how their stories fit within the larger fabric of history and how to live with inherited histories throughout lifetimes. 

Listen to the trailer here. 

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

If you’ve read this far, tell us what you did for the long weekend. We’ll be resting up after a busy few weeks preparing for the upcoming semester.