roughly forty million people live in poverty in the usa can you imagine living under twenty four thousand a year for a family of four if you conned why can't you surely media should help this week why our mainstream media is so poor at covering poverty and what one project is doing to tell those important stories still are reporters and some of the reporting this week on the laura flanders show it's the place where the people is like can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it hard work not enough money coming in precarious housing food that scarce poverty is a persistent factor of american life but reporting on it is surprisingly tricky especially in a media culture that has a lot of time for celebrities and click bait but not a whole lot of interest in or even connection to the reality that millions of americans live in two thousand and twelve barbara ehrenreich author of the bestselling book nickel and dimed on not getting by in america founded something called the economic hardship reporting project the mission to tell real stories in creative affecting sometimes jarring ways another to help journalists who face economic hardship themselves through this work what's a producing and is anything shifting about the class character of journalism and journalists in the us here to tell us and show us managing director david wallace board member and filmmaker richen and contributing editor and photo journalist joseph rodriguez thank you all three so st congratulations adieu i think david to you i was at an early meeting i don't know what you hear that from which emerged this project that was many years back you're here doing great we're growing and we're proud of what we do which is fun journalism about inequality in the barriers to the american dream as we see it and what do you do exactly how do you do that it well it's challenging what we do is twofold on one hand we work with low income reporters or emerging reporters filmmakers and photographers for tog refers to fund journalism and sometimes we'll do multiple drafts sometimes we'll buy them a computer i have  one contributor who is unbanked and i had to send him target gift cards to pay him through fed ex that's how we did it so we do whatever's necessary to get stories about you know about poverty by people who have experience poverty into mainstream publications will do will place the stories and then on the other hand we'll work with very established folks including these two geniuses  who are over here on my right and we will provide them with funding to to do stories and documentaries and photo essays in places like the new york times will partner with them will will partner with showtime  emmy award last year for a project that we helped produce and so we are we're busy putting out about one hundred and fifty dollars stories and placements in a year well congratulations again i mean you but you are now very  savvy and a genius after we've got it now and take talk a bit about how you came out how this help though didn't help why you decided to be on the board and just how needed this is i mean why is it significant that you have low income people reporting on low income people well it's really interesting to see hearing the introduction and being reminded again how rare that is in our coverage and we're seeing a lot of that with you know all the political coverage how the big deficit in the media around economic issues and around the intersectionality of economic issues to me that was one of the things that's most exciting about the economic hardship project reporting project is that it's not just pulling out class as its own thing because as we know issues of gender sexuality race all intersect and you can and cannot talk about those issues that's the problem with all the audi's and i lived live exactly and it's not identity politics as they you know as they want to call it this is our live lives so all you know what i have the work that i've worked on with the organization and that i've seen it's all intersectionality they feel like that's a base of the organization another thing that's really important especially as a filmmaker is that the grants that are given you know in my case speaking very you know from my own experience the two grants that i've received from the organization we're very early grants so that's a key and that's very hard to get especially in documentary when often people want to see something before funding you but this project that we're working on now american reckoning the early grant led to us being able to do one more shoot at it a trailer and then get fully funded for for a short that we're doing and partnering with russia report so it's a real key part of the of the organization and very important in terms of helping us make so still going back to the landscape into which this project was born what's the problem the project is trying to address from our group of folks that i work with a form of journalism group the season especially the season for drones i have seen the greatest photographers just get a little often kicked to the curb over the past twenty years and some cases slower some cases faster and we worked for thirty years to learn how to really tell a very intimate and important story like enron criminal justice or around race  migrations from mexico you know if it was not for economic hardship reporting project i would not be able to do these stories so so they're helping me get the work done and then i'm pretty good at making the media people the big boys and big girls feel guilty so so that they're not doing enough for a night showing these stories enough and so you know i go knocking on the doors in new york times and the washington post i'm working with them now you prominent out or at a seemingly progressive publication and she said to me just flippantly she said anyone in this economy who want to job can get a job and my jaw dropped because it was  just such a myth and so about one rd of americans according to pew believe that poor people are in their current state because of lack of effort rather than systemic issues and so we try to look at that under reported those under reported issues that's just that systemic problems i mean talking about the systemic nature of the situation that we're in and the question of intersectionality i'm reminded that our media culture is itself a place of incredible segregation along all the lines that we've mentioned so far and i remember in two thousand and eleven i think when we were thinking about how were we going to cover what some in the media were calling the recovery it felt to me as if really no journalists had a human personal connection to the reality most people were living where they were not feeling recovered at all that culture problem i think it's what seventy two percent of journalists live in east coast cities or coastlines learn jersey is that part of the problem just don't know anybody don't feel it yeah i think it is you know in some ways i was just thinking where we're having the reckoning of in terms of race and gender and in terms of who tells what story and there's an acknowledgment at least the beginnings that people of color need to tell their own stories women to tell their own stories got along with evolution st but we haven't had that conversation around class and around and around working people i mean that hasn't that hasn't had in the work that the organization is doing is exactly that and i think that that's you know again that that's the problem of how we cover how things are covered in the video from texas police and it's gripping because it shows you the moments where they pull over people for relatively minor traffic violations and then turn them over to ice just take a quick  texas actually has a really good open records law and so when i heard these stories i thought to myself i should just take down people's names and other information they give me and i should ask for the dash cam we don't have to depend on the mere word of people anymore we now have this documentary audio visual evidence when the dash cam started coming on realizing wow this is really a record of a deportation machine of state troopers fishing for people on the highways and then turning them into federal immigration officials superpowerful it makes all the difference in the world to actually hear those voices another piece i wanted you to play is the piece about sleeping in your car yeah it's safe parking by jennifer dworkin iran on the  nation and it's a very intimate portrait of three families who are living in their cars and it's it's it's very moving these personal stories really we think cut through the noise and hopefully my colleagues listen court she says empathy is our metric and we hope that this creates a lot of empathy and take a look at last because my ex and my son got into the last fiscal fight i left the house with my kids and went to the hotel for a while friend's house from another friend's house for another three months and then another friend's house for another three months there's a santa barbara organ and saying that it's illegal to sleep in your vehicle over night i make the money i just don't have good credit my older son he helps me by watching them i work at night and there's been times that you know be sleeping in the car while i'm at my job at the cars coming up in the window they've me wants to say why does it need a nonprofit organization to raise the funds to tell these stories that are the stories of our time and without which we're not going to make smart decisions as a nation you know what i mean this is the power of alternative journalism right like that that's what we do because we know that the mainstream i mean i worked in at a b c news you know and we know the problems there that it's you know who runs these corporations the narrative that they latch and hold on to and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and it's really you know thank goodness for these organizations shows like this you know to get this other narrative out there i mean it's you know if we can answer that question i mean you have a whole different country lad and suppose sort of man i jokingly say i have jokingly i say my job in the last fifteen years i believe and mostly because their owners wanted to make a thirty percent return on their investment and that local part of it is not because there's no market i just want to say just the other day the vindicator which is an age old newspaper in youngstown ohio announced that they're closing there that's a city with sixty three thousand dollars people ok and patch i'm sorry is not going to be able to cover the mayor's office online local no service no pay you know you're not going to have  there's a there's a value in an experienced reporter being holding people to account and the other thing to just know looking at local television right we're also seeing a conglomeration  of these big corporations buying up local television stations like sinclair broadcasting which has a conservative bent which is a political outwardly political bet telling reporters what to report on opinion pieces that meet you know their political goals actually we need more billionaires to snap up newspapers before it's too late i would argue the progressive ones i think we need more media public interest in the public domain and we need more fights about public oh and media but that's another subject yeah having made our points and expressed our fury and i could keep doing that i also want to really talk about what you two especially as journalists are bringing to these stories that wouldn't be there otherwise and i want to use your example joseph some of the pieces that you've brought mostly to the new york times photo journalism again critical topics that you tell a story that you tell very differently introduce the gangs of l a piece where you put those folks back in their communities right well thank you for that question but i have to step back here because i grew up in new york city and i grew up at a time when we had that west side story atmosphere of italians here puerto rican series so race was something i grew up with i heard about all the banter about how i should go back so as a youngster i always felt reading the daily news the new york post growing up here seeing every weekend every sunday i think it was sunday you'd see the crime pages who got thrown off the roof and spanish wrong with this and i and i took it upon myself when i was a student  who i am and what i do because i i want to national geographic and i said to them hey would you be interested in looking at us now they have a tendency to slant their stories in a very cloning all style so i went along with it we did the story for them it became a big story they fired the editor because they gross and felt they should not this is a fact should not be doing stories about families poor families and use tom however we can go to africa and she can do this we can do that so i did the story i went to the smithsonian museum national as american art and said hey i don't see as being recognized here because in one thousand nine hundred and eighty seven i was telling editors in new york and around the country that the growth of spanish america is here it's growing we are here so again i'm pretty good at sort of the guild card so we got this st book published growing up in spanish harlem and then that sort of was the platform for me to understand it's five years of work and spending in a community where we've got to get to know families the families every week because as a next addict i know what it's like to dean oneself i know what it's like to go to rikers island where i spent to two little nice little vacation times in there i like to call it that because it wasn't a vacation but and that also set the tone for me to go to los jones foundation who gave us another grant and then i spent four weeks there decided to move there in ninety two stayed there to full for two more years in and so this brings us up to the present where i mean i meet the folks who cannot make hardship and i say hey it would be interesting to let's take a look and see what these guys look like in the families look like today so two thousand and twenty something years later we go back we find steve want the families you know and you find out they're not gangsters anymore than are drug addicts anymore their grandfathers now this is what it's it's all about what we've been talking about from the very beginning about owning our own story telling it from an insider's point of view and spending time and time with families you know putting the pictures up on instagram so the kids and grandkids can learn about their history so just to put a fine point on it for people that it might have missed it your point is to tell a story that didn't stop with the worst moment of those people's lives so because that's the american story or we all all all of us can start at the bottom and you know all these people that say yes you can make it you can make it i grew up with affirmative action that's why i'm standing here you know so i mean things really really did change my life because at that time right radio in brooklyn in new york so i know what can change and then when it comes to journalism this is a very important point editors after editor after editor would ask me where is the blood where's the drugs where's the guns where's the aids where's this and i said i would say to them constantly ok i can give you that but we need to show the other side to give us a balance in america so we're not just one sided slanted you did a piece that also added a new take to a story a very familiar story around abortion rights where given the story of for and against and we usually in the media like to talk about the fights you did something very different for a piece that i think ended up being called reconstruction if you want to introduce that i'm sure and that's actually how i started got introduced to the project because alissa court co founder had written a piece about looking at reproductive it's looking at abortion as part of the spectrum of health care that women receive and she had written an article about it that i thought very moving and resonated with my own family a woman who says you know how to abortion given up kids for adoption and been pregnant and had children a hologram all the whole gamut and so many women have that experience so listen i connected around that and i thought it would be a great you know short video piece if we could demonstrate this show this and we found a center in indiana called all options that it was a resource options pregnancy resource center is the st of its kind we do peer counseling we were for abortion and so the full spectrum approach with the options approach is a powerful way of reconceptualizing access to services and safe and you know what would be the story the future would tell of america if your stories got told now as not a special project on now and then but the news which would assume that we had people to carry the news but just but they're struggling because of systemic issues that this country has set up to hold us back rather than give us a leg up i think for me it would be the fundamental broke in this of our democracy voices out of the the system and is the reason part of the reason why we have kept these structures which are not helping the majority of americans you get the last word as a human ist i care about telling stories about us that struggle and that may have a hard time but that there is a chance for us to tell it more now for honest way and not necessarily always put us in this negative spot that we will not change do you have words of encouragement for journalists or people who might think they want to be journalists or the kid on the block that's telling stories to his neighbors or hers i mean i just think about what your heart is telling you and think about what your mind is telling you and then maybe shop less read more about the profession in the world because you get to learn every day it's still something that even though  it's a struggle to survive it's the greatest the greatest thing you can do in my pinion and it's deeply deeply satisfying even you know the economic rewards may not always be there but that it's so satisfying i feel privileged to be able to tell these stories that people let me into their lives give me access and there's there's nothing like it if you feel like you want to say something and maybe change  something it is quite amazing when you see that because we just recently had a big exhibition at photo villa in los angeles and families that i photographed in the ninety's or came with their children and cried and just we've changed we've changed i'm dealing with people right now that i photographed back then that are still in their own twelve step environment and it is an exciting that is a beautiful thing for me to discuss that journey with their children with their families and thanks to economic hardship reporting project we can do stories like