As this J-Corps team of Amina and Hafsa Rahman continue to prepare their reports as community journalists for NPR Illinois, they find current world events are impacting the Muslim community in Springfield.
Priyanka Deo: Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the J-Corps Audio Journal with my citizen journalists, Hafsa and Amina. I'm Priyanka Deo. I'm acting as editor. How is progress going? I know you're getting a lot of cool interviews, a lot of cool soundbites. How are you picking the most compelling ones? Because it seems like you have plenty to choose from.
Amina Rahman: Yes, it's a wealth of interviews, wealth of soundbites, and now I have to pick through and choose. It is challenging. What I'm doing today is listening through and writing notes and picking out the bits that are key. You had come up with some really great edits of draft scripts based on our feedback about what we wanted to talk about, then I'll edit those soundbites so that they make sense.
Priyanka Deo: Tell me about your thought process because, it's different when a trained journalist does this day in, day out. Is it running through your mind to pinpoint certain things during the interview process?
Amina Rahman: I'm going in with certain questions in mind and certain examples that I want to have them talk about so we can extract that. By the end, I try to re-ask the question where they can connect different things together to put the different points into one shorter soundbite. Sometimes people will tell me about things that I didn't expect. My light bulbs go off, "Hey, this is going to fit in here. This is going to fit in there." So I keep asking more questions about those particular points that they bring up.
There are a lot of developments with regard to uncertainty and people looking to community and each other across communities to support the things that they feel are at riskAmina Rahman
Priyanka Deo: Journalism really does start at the local level. Part of the feedback that I remember I had in the fantastic drafts that you sent me was, why don't you tie it into national issues, national trends? Can we tie it into a bigger picture? What are your thoughts on that? Because I know that's a big thing to process as a citizen journalist.
Hafsa Rahman: I feel like a lot of the storylines that we're trying to showcase in the episodes, there's the space for all these really important current events that are important to our community. They fit in well with it. Sorting them out is a rough thing because the episodes are gonna be so short, it's gonna be hard to get through all that information and then even add on other things that aren't directly related,
Amina Rahman: This week, there's a lot in the ending of the ceasefire and that they're starting to bomb again. People are very concerned about that. I have somebody I know personally who had recently traveled there to help as a medic. There's also bombing in Syria. We have a few Syrian families here that are very concerned. Also the bombing in Yemen. We have quite a few Yemeni families here.
Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in the New York area. He was transported over to Louisiana. His family didn't know where he was. There's footage of him being arrested. It's scary because the government is not saying that he has broken any laws. If you don't know your rights, then it's really hard to look back in hindsight, "Oh, I should have done this. And I should have done that." Your loved one is gone and you don't even know where they are. Somebody from our ceasefire group spoke about it at the Springfield town hall meeting. This issue of Mahmoud Khalil is interesting because a lot of people are concerned in the Muslim community, but we see this coming together of people who are concerned about having their civil liberties, their right to free speech, regardless of what their opinion is.
When we look at the news now, There are a lot of developments with regard to uncertainty and people looking to community and each other across communities to support the things that they feel are at risk or that they're feeling uncertain about. I'm seeing that in Springfield too, and I'm seeing that in the Muslim community. That's going to be something that we can definitely talk about in the final segments.
Priyanka Deo: It's interesteing that as you go about doing interviews, putting together a script, the way it's naturally tying into what's happening around the state, around the country, around the globe.
Amina Rahman: It's definitely an example of what you said, "Journalism is local."
Priyanka Deo: It always starts local and local stories are incredibly powerful.
Thanks for listening to this week's J-Corps Audio Journal. This is Priyanka Deo signing off.
Edited for length and clarity.
Press Forward Springfield is awarding its first project grants. NPR Illinois along with the Illinois Times and Capitol News Illinois are each receiving funding to report on different untold stories in our community. The three reporting projects will be posted in May.
Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln in collaboration with the Field Foundation and the Illinois Department of Human Services are leading this project as part of their Healing Illinois program.
NPR Illinois is using the grant to test its vision for community reporting and journalism training — the Journalism Corps or "J-Corps."
