Concerns at a Beechview town hall on Thursday ranged widely, from immigration enforcement to transportation to the slow erosion of neighborhood connection, but a shared view emerged: Local media tends to be more overwhelming than constructive.
Editor’s note
For our town hall series, Public Source is asking participants to speak from their own experience and listen to understand. To preserve that openness, this recap doesn’t include names or attributed quotes. To attend a future town hall, click here.
The town hall at the Pittsburgh Hispanic Development Corporation, facilitated by Pittsburgh’s Public Source, included about 25 people. Residents, community leaders and journalists from other outlets engaged in small and large group discussion.
Many at the meeting noted that living their lives and then consuming news can be overwhelming when media throws negative, salacious or ultimately unimportant information at them with little connective tissue or sense of what a path forward could look like.
One sticky note, responding to a prompt about what seems undercovered by local media, provided a pithy summation that speaks to the group’s experience of consuming current media coverage: “I don’t know. I’m overwhelmed.”
One participant, a Latino man, shared the fear within immigrant communities and said the media does not do enough to correct misinformation, point to resources and explore what can be done for vulnerable people.
Many expressed a desire for coverage of promising developments among businesses, young people and charitable organizations, particularly in neighborhoods like the South Hills that sometimes seem outside of Pittsburgh media’s main coverage areas. Some journalists in attendance questioned, given knowledge of online news traffic, whether there’s actually much of a market for positive stories, and the whole group grappled with the question of what “positive” news should actually look like.
Some suggested that connecting dots and clarifying how various issues and concerns relate to one another could be the secret sauce of constructive news coverage. “Constructive news is something more connective,” one person suggested.
As a way to visually organize the topics of conversation, Public Source provided prompts on dry erase boards and invited participants to respond through colorful sticky notes. The notes posted on the boards showed concern about issues ranging from gun safety to language classes to affordability. They also highlighted sources of joy, from vibrant neighborhood activism to the networks of neighborhood dog walkers to salsa dance classes.
Matt Petras is a visiting lecturer of English at the University of Pittsburgh and a freelance reporter and can be reached at matt456p@gmail.comand on Bluesky @mattapetras.bsky.social.
