When Gary Lee worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and Germany, he realized that the same efforts required for international reporting should be applied to local news. That was a critically important lesson he brought back to his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city whose history was in the global spotlight in 2021, the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

From that troubled past, mentioned only in whispers when he was growing up, Lee built a distinguished journalism career, including stints with The Washington Post and Time Magazine.  He told Widening the Pipeline fellows that his current role leading the Tulsa Local News Initiative is a solemn but welcome obligation at this point in his career. He’s also executive editor of Tulsa’s Black newspaper The Oklahoma Eagle, and of the city’s newest nonprofit newsroom, the Tulsa Flyer. The local news collaborative also includes the Hispanic paper La Semana, The Frontier, the Focus Black Oklahoma podcast, and KOSU, an NPR affiliate. 

“With the Tulsa Local News Initiative, its motivation and its mission is to write about real people’s lives across the city of Tulsa,” Lee told Widening the Pipeline fellows. “Our funding comes from foundations, donors, some of it from membership or readers who give money to it. But because we are not beholden to any particular owner or any set of advertisers in that way, it gives us the liberty and perhaps also a responsibility to say, ‘Okay, what do people want to hear about?’ So we are doing constant in- person meetings, also surveying across the city to see, okay, what do you readers want to know? What’s important to you?’ ”

Angelica Perez, a reporter for the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, shed light on how authentic reporting on the Latino community requires more than just checking in. Perez advised journalists to use transparency and time when writing these stories, spending a day with a source to capture the nuances and niches of their lives. 

“So I speak Spanish, but it’s also not assuming that everyone that I meet is going to speak Spanish. A lot of people, especially younger people, are very much into Spanglish or doing completely in English, and it’s letting them decide in what way we’ll be doing the interview or just a mixture. also just understanding how people here in the community do things was also very important to me.”

As the fate of local news is debated nationally, Lee told Widening fellows he’s hopeful that nonprofit news collaboratives are signaling a positive new direction.

“We are all in this room aware, people have closed the doors to national news media. A lot of people across the country have just turned that off altogether. And at the same time, I think they’ve opened the door to local news and so that we are providing an outlet, a hope or news stories that I think people feel that they can relate to. So I think that the tide has shifted away from people looking to national news outlets and to looking for publications like ours, Tulsa Flyer, La Semana, to keep them in touch with things that are important.”

Access the transcript here.