Introduction
According to the DC Homeless Crisis Reporting Project, at least 5,111 people in D.C. are currently experiencing homelessness—a population that is frequently overlooked and underserved in city politics and local media. Every year, the DC Homeless Crisis Reporting Project attempts to draw attention to this issue in a “News Blitz,” in which a variety of news outlets publish stories relating to the issue. Each of the involved outlets release at least one story about the homelessness crisis to “investigate barriers and solutions to ending homelessness.”
The first News Blitz in 2016 was a collaboration between Street Sense Media, DCist, and ThinkProgress. The project has continued every year since and was inspired by a similar effort in San Francisco.
The Blitz in Numbers
Since the start of the Media Blitz project, there have been 140 total stories about homelessness in D.C. published through the project. Coverage during the Blitz peaked during 2019, with 28 stories and nine participating media outlets.
Stories per year increased consistently between 2017 and 2019, alongside the number of media outlets participating in Blitz coverage. Total stories fell below any other year in 2020, with only 20 published in total, though this could be attributable to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small media outlets. In 2021, the number of stories returned to pre-pandemic levels but the recovery is not aligned with the previous trend that began in 2017.
Since the start of the Blitz, the number of collaborators has increased by five times. In 2016, there were only the three original collaborators participating in coverage, whereas 15 separate outlets contributed at least one story to coverage in 2021. The trend is mostly linear, but did fall back slightly in 2020, which may also be attributable to the effects of COVID-19.
Street Sense Media, a street newspaper that elevates the voices of people experiencing homelessness and provides them with economic opportunities, contributes a significant portion of the total coverage, ranging from 19% to 41%—as shown in the graph below. While this was on a decreasing trajectory for the first three years of the project, it increased again during the peak year of 2019 and then returned to declining. As the organizers of the project, their high levels of contribution are logical, but decreasing rates of contribution could serve as another way to measure the diversity of participants.
The vast majority of all stories per year are traditional news articles or feature stories. Other forms of media, like radio and video, are less prevalent. In the first year of the project, there were no radio stories, but there were two a year in 2019 and 2020. In 2021, there were no radio or television pieces available in that form on the DC Homeless Crisis website.
Past Coverage Evaluation
The stories in the News Blitz frequently exemplify what is known as Solutions Journalism, meaning that they investigate what is being done to solve a particular problem and how successful these efforts are. This means that many of the stories strike an uplifting tone, but many are also critical of situations where solutions are not being accomplished. It also lends itself to many stories about specific organizations that each present their own solutions to the homelessness crisis.
One of the successes of the News Blitz project has been the analysis of homelessness from a variety of angles and perspectives. Frequently, stories focus on groups that are attempting to end homelessness and on individuals who are currently or formerly homeless, but there are also many stories about policy and systemic issues that contribute to the continuation of homelessness. The coverage overall highlights the intersectional nature of homelessness, including the way that it overlaps with gender, age, ability, race, and LGBTQ+ identity.
A potential downside to this wide variety of coverage is a lack of continuity, which can make it challenging to view each year’s coverage as interconnected.
Another area of weakness in the coverage is the lack of inclusion of the voices of people experiencing homelessness, particularly in pieces that focus on policy changes. While articles that feature on-the-ground organizations frequently include these, readers are occasionally left lacking understanding of the perspectives of individuals who are homeless on the policies that could deeply affect them.
In 2018, Street Sense Media hosted a forum for editors involved in the News Blitz to receive feedback from an audience of readers. One concern that audience members addressed was the lack of homeless voices included in the Blitz’s coverage, according to Chris Kain, The DC Line’s editor, who spoke with a member of our class for this analysis.
“It was a criticism about some media coverage not having enough voices of people who either have experienced homelessness or are experiencing homelessness, so it felt like there wasn’t enough of that first person or the accountability in that manner,” Kaine said in a phone interview. “I think having raised that at the forum is something that stuck with me.”
2021 Comparison
The 2021 Media Blitz Project was the most extensive to date with 15 partners. There were also more collaborations with student newspapers and, for the first time, an article from a Spanish-language newspaper—El Tiempo.
The number of articles, however, did not quite reflect the overall trend of increased participation. There were more articles than published in 2020, but with 23 articles, they did not match the peak in 2019 (28 articles). The number of articles from Street Sense Media, a founding member of the project, decreased substantially from 2020. Only five of the articles are attributed, in whole or in part, to Street Sense Media. Although there are fewer written by Street Sense, one piece from Washington City Paper followed the life of a Street Sense Photojournalist, which demonstrates the continued role of Street Sense Media in the project overall.
Another difference in this year’s coverage was the lack of radio, video and multimedia coverage. In the previous two years, there were two radio stories each year. This drop-off is noteworthy due to the prevalence of radio and television journalism in general.
Once again, however, we observed the trend that homeless voices are not consistently included in the articles.
An example of this is one of the stories from Washington City Paper is about a documentary of a Street Sense photojournalist; however, the person who is interviewed in the story is the director of the film and not any of the homeless people featured in it. Similarly, an article from Street Sense Media about two neighborhood commissioners that are described as “advocates” for the unhoused population does not include any interviews with members of the unhoused community.
Target Audiences
In 2021, one story published was clearly targeted toward homeless communities specifically. The article, entitled “FAQ: What you need to know if you’re single and experiencing homelessness in DC.” Most of the stories, however, are written for a broader audience and thus focus more on policy issues.
The intended audience of the media outlet changes based on the context. The Hatchet, George Washington University’s student paper, wrote their coverage with their university community in mind.
“A large part of our audience is students, faculty, alumni, administrators so I think for the purposes of our audience it was more trying to educate them on what is going on in their community,” Editor in Chief Lia De Groot said in an interview for this analysis.
De Groot also acknowledged that, while The Hatchet covers the local homeless community in Foggy Bottom, it is difficult to connect directly with them, particularly for journalists who are used to using their connections with pre-existing sources.
Riley Rogerson, Editor in Chief of The Hoya, also told us that the fast turn-around times for the articles made it particularly difficult for their paper to find and interview people experiencing homelessness.
“We tried reaching out to [Street Sense Media] to see if there was anyone we could talk to but given the time, we were unable to,” Rogerson said. “In a perfect world, we would have had voices from people experiencing homelessness, but unfortunately the stories did not have that.”
On the other hand, DCist Editor Ingalisa Schrobsdorff says that the coverage is intended for both housed and unhoused audiences around D.C. and that DCist aims to include the voices of people experiencing homelessness whenever possible.
“You don’t cover a group or an individual without including voices of those affected if at all possible,” said Schrobsdorff. “Of course, we speak to advocates and officials, but we always aim to include someone who is or has experienced homelessness, as our stories reflect.”
Schrobsdorff’s comments reflect our findings that DCist was the outlet that most effectively represented unhoused individuals in their 2021 coverage.
Although some publications like the DCist are considering the unhoused communities as they write, our reporting found that the News Blitz is not widely recognized in the Foggy Bottom encampment at 23rd and Virginia Ave. One member of the encampment that was interviewed specifically to gauge the effectiveness of the News Blitz did not recognize Street Sense Media at all, although the paper is distributed by members of the community.
Reactions to the Blitz
After the publication of their articles, most of the outlets involved posted them to their social media, primarily using Facebook and Twitter to connect with audiences.
The tweets that received the most engagement using #DCHomelessCrisis are all from the DCist, whose top story on social media was about a tax increase to provide greater revenue for new housing programs. The same article was also tweeted out by Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George using the Blitz hashtag.
Some readers also had strong reactions to Street Sense Media pieces, including Twitter user Rebecca Dzida, who called the coverage of housing vacancies “damning” to the D.C. government in a tweet the day after the Blitz.
On Facebook, coverage by the DCist sparked a conversation about preferred terminology, with a comment thread that began with one reader asking, “Is ‘unhoused’ the new preferred word for ‘homeless’? Been seeing that a lot lately in news stories such as this one.” Engagement like this shows that audience members are responding to the content within the stories and possibly having lasting impacts in their day-to-day lives.
Not all engagement was through social media, however. One article that gained attention amongst the local community of readers was “Homelessness and DC’s housing shortage are part of the same conversation,” which received 23 comments on the Greater Greater Washington website itself. The high engagement with this particular piece indicates that readers are possibly looking for explanations as to the causes of homelessness.
Comments on The Hoya’s piece about hostile architecture, however, reflect negative attitudes about people experiencing homelessness. The paper’s Editor in Chief, Riley Rogerson, told our team that several comments had to be removed under the paper’s policies on hate speech.
Looking at the stories that received the most attention overall, there does not seem to be any particular preference for solutions-oriented stories versus more typical news stories about community issues. Rather, solutions stories were just one piece of the overall effective coverage.
Conclusions and Recommendations
First and foremost, we recommend that more people experiencing homelessness are interviewed across the board. Especially when the articles are policy-centric, those who are most directly affected are oftentimes not actually interviewed for the pieces. This not only leaves a hole in the Blitz coverage, but also takes the focus away from those at the center of the issue who deserve the most attention and airtime.
In order to make the Blitz’s coverage stronger and more impactful, Street Sense Media could potentially use the connections that they have with the unhoused population to provide links to possible sources. Although this may be rejected by some media outlets who have policies about their sourcing, it would be one way to use the strengths of Street Sense Media to the advantage of the project as a whole.
Additionally, stories that were written in previous years deserve some kind of follow-up in the next year’s News Blitz, especially those that tackle more difficult and complex topics like political decisions and large-scale crises. Whether the issue has been resolved or still persists, these stories exist beyond a single story, and a brief mention in another article—or even a Blitz article dedicated solely to recapping the previous year’s stories—would help keep these stories centered even as they evolve and new ones arrive.
Next year’s News Blitz should also expand its coverage to include audio and video storytelling. We feel that especially given the rise in popularity of podcasts over the past few years, attempting to produce more stories in this format would improve the size of their audience. In this same vein, the News Blitz should seek to produce and promote stories written in languages other than English. This will allow the coverage to reach a wider audience than it does when all of the stories are only written in English.
The final recommendation for the News Blitz is to write more pieces that are specifically directed to and written for the homeless community. Stories about policies and encampment clearings, like we observed in 2021, are valuable and deserve ample coverage. Moving forward, though, we believe that coverage should reflect the needs of the community by including the voices of people experiencing homelessness and also by including a larger number of pieces directed to the unhoused community specifically.
Report created by: Meredith Miller, Jo Stephens, Eli Kales, Annemarie Cuccia, Marianna De Souza, Jem Dyson, Brian Ely, Jessica Filling, Maddie Gaeta, Clara Grudberg, Annabella Hoge, Ethan Johanson, Nate Kral, Kerry O’Donnell, Jack Pedigo, Kira Pomeranz, Nate Powers, Moira Ritter, Kelvin Santacruz, and Holden Tisch
