Tandy Lau of New York Amsterdam News: Transcript March 3, 2025
Rachel Jones, National Press Foundation (00:01):
Session three of the first virtual Widening training of 2025 amplifies a central issue. What does public safety mean for people whose very presence in public could lead to arrest or deportation? To explore that topic, we’re joined by Tandy Lau. Tandy is a Jersey City based reporter who covers public safety for Harlem’s Amsterdam News. New York City’s oldest and largest historically black newspaper for the past three years. Tandy’s coverage has ranged from NYPD practices and jail conditions to the migrant bus arrivals. His stories were used in a United States Court of Appeals gun control case and helped lead to the release of a young woman held on Rikers Island. Tandy, thank you so much for joining us today.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (01:02):
Hey, thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:06):
So I know that you’ve prepared some slides to sort of walk us through some of the stories that you have produced focusing on this issue. But before we get to those, tell us a little bit about your background and how you chose journalism.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (01:24):
Yeah, sure, of course. Thank you for asking. So I am originally from Los Angeles, California. I currently live in Jersey City as described in my bio, but I work in New York City. So basically for my entire life, basically I’ve lived in a city where lived in a city of immigrants and I am the child of two Chinese American immigrants. I’m second generation Chinese Americans. So early on, immigration’s always been kind of part of my life, and I think neither of my parents were reporters. They were immigrants, they were not reporters and basically just kind of studied in an undergrad. And when I graduated, I kind of felt like there weren’t necessarily places that I necessarily felt like my background as somebody who really cared about Asian American issues race, I had a double major in Asian American studies. Really there was really a place, one of the biggest concerns that I had was most of these entry level journalism jobs were very much focused on places where you couldn’t really talk about race, but because you were probably the only person that looked like the way that you did your race would factor into how you would be able to do reporting and who you’d be able to have access to.
(02:45):
So basically for a while, speaking of whitening the pipeline for a very long time, I had basically freelanced and brought about Asian American issues for quite a significantly long time in my early mid twenties. And meanwhile was working, was managing a furniture store, was just trying to figure out next steps. Ultimately, that brought me to New York City and basically after grad school ended up going through Report for America and they basically expressed, Hey, I want to cover racism. I want to cover, I want to cover what identity means to identity’s impact to reporting. So that ultimately led me to being connected with Amsterdam News. Ended up really hitting it off and funny enough, I was living really nearby their offices. I didn’t know that they were all working from home at the time. So now fast forward three years later here, we are no longer nearby the office here in Jersey City.
(03:55):
As you may know that that is a trek that a lot of people take in this housing environment here in New York. But yeah, basically my background, I cover public safety. It ranges from everything. Public safety is a very, very, very, very broad beat. And I think especially for a smaller newspaper, it could really mean anything. Housing, public health. I’ve covered numerous stories about rats in the city. I’ve covered, I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with Flaco the Owl and what it meant for his public safety to be eating rats that had rodenticide. So basically at a small newspaper, public safety is such a broad beat that really able to cover everything. And that’s how really I got into covering immigration. It wasn’t something that really was something that I was interviewing for or really was part of the job description, but we had a significant mass arrivals and it happened to become part of my coverage.
Rachel Jones/NPF (05:06):
You are one of the first, if not the first Asian American reporter at Amsterdam News. Is that correct?
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (05:14):
That is correct.
Rachel Jones/NPF (05:16):
And so before we get to your presentation, talk about how that has sort of deepened or broadened your own perspective of covering various mean scores of different immigrant communities or how you are received and how you navigate that.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (05:39):
Yeah, a hundred percent. So I think one of the, I mean just to go back to when I was in grad school, we had obviously all these conversations about race in terms of who could tell whose story. And at that time I was very much focused on talking about, Hey, I feel like the people who are part of the community can talk. And I still firmly believe that. And then I got the interview with Amsterdam News and I started thinking, how do I tell stories of another community that was obviously that was a huge imposter syndrome moment at the time. The editor was very can hire me and all that, but it was something that I was trying to figure out and something I’m still trying to figure out. But I think through the last three years, one of the big ways, I think just broadly even outside of immigration that had been really kind of a sticking point in terms of my coverage of public safety is that, I mean, I’m really lucky to work in New York City where everyone has to engage with everyone and Asian Americans have to engage with Black Yorkers, brown, new Yorkers, everyone kind of has to deal with everyone and that because of that everyone’s story is kind of everyone’s right.
(06:52):
So through that, I think it’s really, my experience has always been to not try to do stories that another black reporter can do better, but to approach stories from how I as an Asian American reporter, Chinese American reporter, can potentially do that no one else can with the platform and background in the newspaper. So one of the big things that I obviously have done is we’ll have Asian American stories that intersect with issues that we are covering. One of the big things has been the borough based jails. If the people don’t know, they’re building a huge jail in Chinatown. And the conversation in Chinatown has only been about this big building, how it’s going to mess up the neighborhood and the conversation elsewhere has been what it means to close Rikers. So that’s really what I felt like identity has really helped me in terms of working at a historically black newspaper being up until a couple months ago, being the only Asian American reporter in my newsroom.
(07:54):
So I think it’s very important to be able to dip into who you are to think of stories, because one of the big things is obviously in Chinatown, it is just easier to be an Asian American reporter to walk in and ask some questions that you might not necessarily be the most comfortable talking about. And I think especially knowing the stigmas within my own community to talk about incarceration, talk about public safety, there was that bigger benefit of looking the way I do and being able to speak Mandarin and be able to understand a little, the Canton use to be able to operate. And I think the same went through our immigration coverage. Obviously, I think one of the big benefits of working with the newspaper, the New York Amsterdam news is because I think advocacy, journalism could be a bad word sometimes in journalism, but I think we’re known as advocacy journalists.
(08:53):
So because of that, there is trust I think some communities might have for us to get it right. And I think that trust still has to be built and still has to be developed. But it’s something that I think you have to lean in on to take advantage of sometimes because some of these stories that need to be told, our stories are kind of get kept because there is that concern with media and sometimes you might not necessarily have the relationship with the community, but because you have a relationship with an advocate or you have a relationship with people that have necessarily maybe early on had gotten coverage from the newspaper or really have a relationship with the newspaper, it’s a little bit easier of a time to reach out to these populations to really get them to trust you and for them to know that you’re not going to do any harm with their reporting. I think that’s been really my experience working at this newsroom. I think with stories in general across the board and not just immigration.
Rachel Jones/NPF (09:57):
Thank you for sharing that insight. Of course. I think that’s very important for the journalists to understand. So I’m going to turn it over to you now and walk us through some of your stories.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (10:08):
Yeah, of course. So I think it’s a good leading off point to talk about basically trust with advocates because one of the stories I sent you, Rachel, was basically a story that we got from an advocate that was not really keen on speaking to press. He was very much one of those guys that’s like, I don’t need to be in front of a camera to really do my work. I don’t need to. It was one of those kinds of advocates. And actually the way that we were able to get him to really work with us to get him to talk to us about this migrant soccer program that he was working on in East New York was because he was a long time advocate for other things. And basically long before he was going to the Port Authority to meet with new arrivals, one of the things that we had kind of spoken about was him being in music videos. He was this cameo guy in nineties hip hop, and basically we had learned later that he had basically, basically there was kind of little background, there was a lot of these music videos he would known as this guy with an Afro. He would just be in the music video. He wouldn’t rap, he would just mean mug the camera. And then people would point, it would be like, where in the world is Waldo in nineties?
Rachel Jones/NPF (11:33):
Before you go forward with that, let’s set it up a little bit better and tell them the story, what the story was about.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (11:41):
Yes.
Rachel Jones/NPF (11:42):
Then we can go on from there.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (11:45):
So I guess you guys didn’t get a chance to read it, but it was basically a story about a migrant soccer program in East New York, basically, it was basically organized. It was funded kind of just by small donations and it really didn’t have any press. They were just taking migrant youth that were living in the shelters, giving them a soccer field to play on indoors. So the story I think was around this time last year, it was freezing cold outside, so you couldn’t play in a New York City park, but it was indoors, it was safe environment. They had their snacks, they had their juice, they had their pizza. Of course it’s New York City. And basically it was a program that wasn’t necessarily, it was on the books, but it wasn’t necessarily something that these big advocacy orgs were really, really championing. There wasn’t any involvement with the city.
(12:42):
It was something that was just going on underneath the surface that I thought was interesting, and I came across my radar. So that’s kind of the background on that story, and I thought, why not make the trip out there to go see what this program looks like? And then I was like, Hey, do you guys have a photography? They had a photographer. I’m like, great. I don’t have to on my iPhone. But basically that relationship that we have with an advocate who didn’t necessarily love talking to the media, I mean, he had a quote or two and some legacy newspapers, but he didn’t really looking for people to profile his work. But unfortunately, that’s kind of where you get attention, especially with funding, with donations, with just getting people to join your program. So we had talked to him, we had reached out to him and he was interested just because we had worked with him on previous stories and he wasn’t very interested in press.
(13:49):
He wasn’t really interested in, he was interested in obviously talking about the struggles of raising money and stuff, but one of the big issues he had was just generally kind of the uses of the kids’ faces, what the photographer is, he’s a little bit worried about some of these people, their parents are going through their cases, didn’t really feel super, super comfortable having this publicly available knowledge and we respect that. Right. So I think one of the big things that we were able to pull off was to be able to have photos be taken with the kids’. Joy, still very abundant and shown, but being able to really make sure that none of this stuff would come back to harm them. Obviously one of the big things that we always come back to at this paper is not to do harm. I think what really that opened the door to was other programs reaching out to us and really talking about what their plans were and what they wanted to do.
(14:57):
But for this itself, I think it also allowed us to really talk about what was going on in these shelters. It wasn’t just a story about soccer. The soccer was, the soccer was obviously that was the sugar on top, obviously that was what we focused the story on in terms of content, but it was an opportunity to really talk about the issues that were going to shelters. One of the big things that we learned from just standing around and talking to parents and not the couple advocates that were there or that parents were having trouble getting groceries that they could actually cook. They were giving out credit cards. I’m sure many of you guys heard about these credit cards that the Adams administration were giving, and there was a lot of backlash from other talking heads about it, but in reality they couldn’t really take advantage of it.
(15:53):
You could only really use it at certain places, and they didn’t have kitchens in these shelters. And we learned about that and it was really an opportunity to really get some of these stories told that I think otherwise wouldn’t be told in a very kind of feel good way, I guess, without making it fluffy. So that’s kind of one of the stories that Myer likes pointing to. If we have time for another example, I think in a more kind of, I guess sad angle, there was a recent death a couple years ago of two young men, young boys, young boys. They weren’t men, they were young boys that were, I think they were middle school age where they were just approaching high school. And basically what ended up happening was we found out that one was black American. He was from Harlem, but went to school on the lower East Side.
(16:49):
And then the other was from, I believe he was either from the Bronx or he was not from Harlem, but he was going to school in Harlem and they were good friends, but they weren’t classmates. They weren’t grow up in the same neighborhood together. One was black American, one was from Guinea, west Africa, and basically both ended up falling into the Harlem River and unfortunately their bodies were recovered. And I think during then was really when there was a conversation of how we want to properly cover immigrant communities because there was a lot of reporting that was very much divisive of the two communities. Obviously both of them were very, very, very, very high achieving students. They were all both very young. It’s a very sad story, but I think there was also this conversation of what happened, and it was a public safety story that regard, but what ended up happening was a lot of that reporting fed into this narrative that split black American communities in Harlem with the African communities that lived on one 16th street and in Bronx.
(18:05):
And that conversation got kind of ugly at times. Obviously, I don’t think any of it made it into the media into anyone’s reporting, but we saw a lot of contention between the two communities over this one. The big kind of thing, one of the big rumors that I think was pushed by one of the outlets was that the black American child who was, I think he was like six four, he was a big kid, had accidentally pushed the other child into the river, and that brought a lot of contention. So that was really where we started thinking of how we could do, how could do less harm in reporting like that. And one thing we found out was the child that was from Guinea, west Africa, he actually had a dad that was out of the country that had actually gotten deported, and his dad obviously wanted to send off his son, see the body, have a proper funeral, they’re Muslim, so they didn’t want to wait, but he couldn’t get back into the country.
(19:11):
And that’s really where we really started thinking of really how you could do less harm because we realized that immigration is really, it’s such a multifaceted story. And we also figured that one of the things that we also realized during our reporting when we went to the funeral, the other child was the father was incarcerated and basically he could only see his child for a couple seconds. He was in prison greens while the corrections officers that were escorting them were in really dapper suits. And we thought that that was really important to point out about how despite the division that was kind of caused by the stories of this, that there was very common ground between what black Americans were going through in terms of not being able to really properly sent off a child the worst thing that can happen to a parent. And the same thing happening for an immigrant who basically had to go through deportation.
(20:12):
We kind of looked through kind avenues of how they could have, ultimately it never happened, but we thought that that would probably be the best way to approach this big Harlem story about black New Yorkers that’s going in our backyard without feeding into the narrative. So hope those two examples show a little bit of how we’ve kind of adjusted our reporting on immigration and just generally how we approach things at a smaller newspaper where people don’t necessarily read us for day-to-day coverage for daily news recovers. They really want to learn about the world that’s around them. And I feel like that are my two favorite examples of how we do that.
Rachel Jones/NPF (20:57):
Extremely powerful examples for me as an African American when I think about, first the connection to the continent and how we think about reporting on it, just very creative and powerful. So thank you for sharing those. I want to talk a little bit about the issue of sourcing when it comes to, for example, I think the top of mind way people think about this issue is are communities worried about deportation? Are they worried about someone coming in and into a school or into a church? What strategies or what conversations have you had at the paper about how to get people to talk about this issue or how do you navigate that?
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (21:49):
Yeah, it’s definitely a difficult thing to navigate. And I think especially now since this turning of this year, people having a higher alert, unfortunately we haven’t had, with what’s going on in New York state, we haven’t had the same ability to cover immigration the same way that we have during the migrant situation where that was the big story headline story for. So because we’re a local news outlet, one of the things that we definitely have to be very, very careful of is just how our reporting is being used. And this might not necessarily be an immigration example, but one of the things that we definitely have thought about when we talked to law enforcement is to make sure that people aren’t reading these stories to necessarily do harm in the communities, whether it’s about gun violence prevention. We don’t want somebody reading my story about the iron pipeline and ghost guns and learning where to find instruction to build a ghost gun.
(22:56):
That would be the exact opposite of why we our advocate doing advocacy reporting. So the same goes towards immigration. So one of the big things obviously is one of the biggest concerns I had when we redid our style guide. We for a very long time were very, very, it was kind of like scout’s honor with our style guide. Obviously we went through AP and obviously SPJ, but in reality we were a little bit more liberal with the use of anonymous sources and protecting people’s identities. If I needed it, I can just do it and tell my editor later. And that changed with this new style guy, and that became a big concern because it is much easier to be able to promise somebody when they are talking to you, ‘Hey, how do you want to be described? Rather than being like, let me talk to my editor first. Let me make sure that this is OK.’ But thankfully that hasn’t been an issue. We’ve been very still very, very, very, very delicate with people’s identities when they need to be protected to make sure that no harm falls upon them. I think one of the big things that we also, I think actually need to do, and I think it’s something that as reporters, it seems counterintuitive sometimes, is really having to protect our sources. Because I’ve had people just tell me about their plans and the things that they’ve heard and the things that they feel like they can do that might be technically breaking the law. And I think that for me has been one of the biggest challenges is when you do get a source that really trusts you and that really just likes talking to you. Sometimes I think there is that there is a concern of making sure that you’re not going to do harm to them because I mean, there are stories where I’ll describe somebody and if you dig hard enough, there is a possibility of finding out who that person is.
(25:14):
Just if somebody who works as a doorman in downtown Brooklyn, then you could kind of surmise where they’re exactly located, who they are. And obviously that is a big concern. So I think the biggest challenge I think I’ve had in terms of making sure that we properly report a story and making sure that our reporting is good and the story is good and it’s responsible, is also making sure that sometimes the information that is given to us that we don’t want to ever stop a source from talking to us and giving us everything we want to know, but we want to make sure that they know what our job is, who is rating our newspaper. We do have elected officials, we do have police officers, we do have, I can probably imagine some of the variation officials rating our stories. So protecting our sources I think has been the biggest challenge and the biggest, I think conversation that I, with other reporters that cover immigration, because it is just a horrible feeling to even think about you’re reporting backfiring on somebody that you wrote on and that not being your intention.
(26:34):
So for examples of how I’ve been able to do it is really trying to talk on background. Obviously, especially I work through a translator a lot of times it is very difficult to explain what on the record background and off the record is to somebody when it’s already really, really difficult to explain it in English to the average English speaker. So to have somebody have to now go through a translation, go through a filter and try to explain it to someone else, I think I’m terrifying sometimes. But I think that has been really, really, really, really important. And for them to understand really what our jobs are. And even as an advocacy news journalist, we still have to be factual. We still have to be fair to everyone, including agencies that we are trying to hold accountable. So because of that, making sure that they know they what our job is, knowing the kind of basics of it, because I mean, most people haven’t spoken to a reporter in their life. This is probably the first time, and even if it’s not, it might be it’s probably the first time talking about what they’ve gone through. So you want to make sure you pair up that friendly face with an actual reason for them to trust you, I think is the best way to put it.
Rachel Jones/NPF (28:06):
That’s a great way to put it. Actually, I want to pivot here before I open it up to questions,
(28:12):
To a discussion of that term advocacy journalism, or maybe just the word advocacy. Because 40 years ago when I was starting out, that word could have gotten fired literally by an editor who thought you’re too close to the issue. And as I’ve told these fellows and other fellows over the past couple of years, when I started, my first job was in Clearwater, Florida, and the black community of Clearwater, Florida never made it to the newspaper. It was invisible. And so when I raised my hand and said, I want to cover it, the response was so that they don’t read the newspaper and they don’t buy our ad, so we’re not going to worry with it. So anyway, long story short, often that word can be used as sort of a club against us because we’re told we’re too close to the community or we can’t be objective or whatever. So I want to ask you about your role at the Amsterdam News, your role in reporting stories, finding out what’s happening in communities, but the sense that some people have this weird feeling about advocacy journalism. Talk a little bit about that.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (29:37):
Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad that you asked about that because actually the time I ever did an alumni event, the moderator who was my media law professor back in the day, he was like that. The Amsterdam news was regarded as this anarchist, I forgot the way he described it, but he used the word anarchist and he said it in a very disparaging tone. It was not a nice way, he was not an anarchist and he was not. And we are, to be clear, not an anarchist newspaper. And that was the first time I think I had talked to somebody that was outside of the black and brown community about the newspaper that had knowledge of it. And this guy was, I think a reporter for some time, but he at this point was a lawyer. He was a media law lawyer. He was white, he was affluent.
(30:32):
I think he made, I think he’s a millionaire is my understanding. But I thought it was interesting the way that he kind of talked about it versus when I talk about the paper with somebody who grew up in Harlem who kind of sees the paper not as advocacy news, but just as a newspaper of record and a little bit of background with the newspaper has been around for 115 years. It changed hands a couple times, but even before the prior ownership, the story was very much one of the first places the last civil rights leaders, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were published. I believe it’s actually the first place that Malcolm X was published outside of his own kind of newspapers. So there’s a lot of history behind civil rights with the newspaper. And I think one of the biggest knocks on it was because it was very close to issue because we would be publishing these people that are now kind of objectively seen as historical figures that were on the right side of history even amongst these non advocacy outlets and legacy news media.
(31:45):
So I think it’s really important to point back to, I am sure for those who went to J School, I’m sure you did a case study on the Central Park five. And I think it’s always good to point back to this case because a lot of times we look at what the media did wrong back then because obviously there was a lot that the media did wrong. They published the names of alleged youthful offenders. Obviously they used words like savages, animals, wolf pack, that’s all stuff that we studied, we studied. But I think on the flip side, one of the things that the Amsterdam news did was push back on that. And that was one of the reasons why we have this kind of trust within the populations we cover. And that’s one of the big reasons why the exonerated five still speak to regularly and give us exclusives to this day because we advocated for them.
(32:45):
But at the end of the day, on an objective level, that was really looking back on it as from a journalism studies perspective, that was probably the actual thing to do, was to not publish names of youthful offenders or alleged youthful offenders was not to call young men wolfpack or savages or animals. And back then it was seen as advocacy. But the question was question was when you call a group of young, black and brown teenagers, those terms, isn’t that advocating for something else? You’re advocating for their incarceration, you’re advocating, of course, beyond the fact that they were innocent. If they’re guilty, that language is very much advocating for something of advocating for what people think about. So I think it is interesting, I tend to call it advocacy news and traditional journalism spaces, but I think at the end of the day, I mean we still have to report the facts.
(33:51):
We still have to be accurate. We still have to write corrections if we get something wrong. But at the end of the day, we see race as something that you can’t really avoid. We don’t think that there are two sides to racism. And as a public safety, public safety reporter, I see my colleagues that work outside of advocacy news, when they write about murders, they don’t write about both sides of the murders. They don’t write about how a murder could murderer and anti murderer, people just write about how murder is bad. People write about how rape is bad, and there is that difficult conversation of whether or not you could say the same about racism because a much less tangible thing. It’s much more, there is a different understanding of racism that I think academics have towards how the general public has. That definitely makes sense.
(34:45):
But I think for our newspaper, for a paper, that paper, we’re all reporters of color writing to communities of color. I think it’s not something that we can avoid in our reporting. So it’s a long way to kind of say that. Obviously this word advocacy journalism is a very weighted word, and there are going to be people who are just going to disagree with how we approach our reporting. But I think that in a way, and this goes back to very J school, that it’s very difficult not to advocate for anything. Just the language that we use, just who we imagine is reading our stories. All of that in a way is a level of advocacy. Even if we follow these traditional conventions in journalism and deny, I think one of the big things is just denying that traditional model towards serving our audience, serving our populations, and writing against these kind of conventions in journalism that we felt like were the same conventions that in Amsterdam, why an Amsterdam news needed to exist, right? Because of segregation. Black Americans need their own newspaper because of police brutality in the sixties, they needed somebody to actually cover these wrongful arrests and police roughing up suspects in Harlem because it wasn’t being covered by legacy news. And that’s obviously, like you said, it’s a choice, right? There are publications that just because they don’t think that our readers are going to be their readers, that they’re not covered as much or in a way that I think we believe would be necessary to properly depict and tell stories of the community. I have to,
Rachel Jones/NPF (36:29):
I just need to jump in here because I think you have offered me an extremely powerful take on this issue that even though I’ve been in the business now about 40 years, it’s a powerful way to frame it. And that is when you report on something that is the example you gave the people calling the central Park, five young men savages and whatever, what are you advocating for? Are you advocating for discrimination and hatred towards various groups? I mean, that’s how it could be interpreted. And so particularly in this moment that we find ourselves in now, anyone who wants to say reporting on immigration or threats or whatever is advocacy, flip the script, shift the prism on the lens on the BRI whatever, and realize that when we cover these incidents and when we cover the outrage or the upset that people have against immigrants, are we advocating for something? It’s a question. It’s a question that we need to ask. Are we advocating for something negative or whatever? I don’t see any hands. Are there any questions? OK, we’ve got a question from Chloe. Go ahead and introduce yourself please.
Chloe Li/Al Jazeera English (38:00):
Hi, I’m Chloe. I’m with Al Jazeera English. I’m an associate producer with them. My question is related to what you were talking about with protecting sources. And so a lot of the times when I do anything that is protecting the sources, either taking information on background or even sometimes offering anonymity in pretty extreme cases, I then balance that out with a ton of data just to, there’s no arguing here. Yes, this is a personal who’s not giving their name, but also there’s a lot of data to support it when covering specifically migrant communities and immigrant communities. A lot of the data sometimes is either inaccurate or really difficult to find. So I guess I was wondering kind of two questions. One is on the topic of how do you find some of this data or just I guess more official information like non-interview based information. And then second question is how do you balance that in your pieces? So how do you balance more quantitative and more human parts of your stories, if that makes sense?
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (39:09):
Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you for that question. I think data, I think this conversation about data with migrants is very interesting because a lot of this kind of debunking of a migrant crime wave, it’s something that we definitely have avoided in our newsroom, is there’s been this very significant focus on both sides to use data to prove whether there’s a migrant crime wave or whether there’s not. And we just don’t know. I think right now we’ve looked through the data we’ve looked for and because one New York City doesn’t take immigration status when they arrest somebody, and obviously their charge is not convictions, it could be very difficult to prove whether or not there is any difficult change. But obviously the way that we go back to it is find previous historical data. We have historical data in our own newspaper 115 years. There has to be something, but also there are other patterns.
(40:11):
We know that in previous patterns of immigration, we know that migrants are more likely, asylum seekers are more likely to be victims of employment crimes than they are to be perpetrators of violent crime, that there’s data to back that up. But I think it could be tough to be very confident about that because we’re not talking about the same populations. And I think it could be also sometimes reductive to be like, these are very different populations, not just about they’ve these populations on where they came from and who they are, but it’s also what they’re going through. Because if they aren’t getting services, if they’re being kicked out of shelters, some of them have been in New York City, their outcomes are going to be different. And I think that’s something to think about when you’re using historical data and you’re using previous stuff, is that what sort of different outcomes could happen because of how we’re approaching this wave of immigrants differently?
(41:15):
And it could be something that you’re not going to ever find numbers for until maybe decades later when there’s finally a study that happens that properly and comprehensively does this, or it’s something that you get an investigative team to do and properly lay out after months and months to look at. But I’m glad you asked that because one of the biggest challenges of covering this has been that there isn’t really that much reliable data, and you definitely don’t want to talk to the city all the time about this. The city is telling us that it is going great, is going amazing, and that’s just not the case. From what we’ve seen, there’s been a lot of things that have come up that lead us to believe that migrants are going through a lot that is not going going so well through the way that the city’s approaching it.
(42:08):
But my advice a lot of times, and I think this is where the anonymity can be a barrier, is to really focus on the individual. Because even that person you talk to that you might just have to use a first name and blur their photo out or use a different way to describe them, even that person’s experience, I think is really, really critical. Now, fact checking can be tough because the shelters, I don’t know if you are familiar with covering New York City, but New York City’s a black box with almost everything, a public records request. The things that I filed when I was just starting the job are barely getting to me now. And the NYPDs, the black box crime stats, the crime stats are very, very, very difficult to understand. They’re always telling us that crime is going down. They’re always telling crime is going down.
(43:07):
They’re always telling us that crime is better than it was in the nineties and the eighties. So sometimes I think it is really critical just to sometimes be able to fact check what you can in terms of the individual and really hone in on what the individual is going through. And maybe the best way to do it is to talk to multiple individuals. If multiple people from multiple different shelters or humanitarian emergency relief, that’s what we call a humanitarian emergency relief response relief shelter is like if multiple people are saying this and the city is sheepish on it, then there is some smoke. And if it’s something that you’re having difficult, fully being able to fact check, then go with what, there’s a story somewhere I think with what migrants are going through that doesn’t necessarily really need this broader data that might be misleading anyways, if that makes sense. And to be able to tell these stories through what an individual is going through and what that process is like. And I think that could be, I guess, I don’t want to say a shortcut, it’s a lot of work, but that could be a way to fairly do it while protecting this person, but at the same time, being careful with what the data that you’re given, because even data that might benefit their argument sometimes might be misrepresenting them, if that makes sense.
Chloe Li/Al Jazeera English (44:45):
That
Rachel Jones/NPF (44:45):
Makes sense. Any other hand? So I’m going to jump in here until we haven’t. Another question, and that is, I’m thinking we have such a broad range of fellows from different parts of the country, et cetera, different urban type areas, et cetera. But I wonder if there’s a need to keep a proper context on the impact of policies in immigrant communities in a city like New York versus Des Moines or versus Macon. One of our fellows is I believe, from Macon. So give me your thoughts about how this issue might differ from various regions if you can.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (45:34):
Yeah, so like I said, obviously one of the big things is I’ve lived in a city of memories my whole life, but I’m not under an illusion that that’s representative of most people in the country. So that’s something that I’ve always kind of thought about is if I ever leave New York City, how would I be able to cover not just immigration, but just anything the same way? And I don’t think, I don’t even think you can really cover the five boroughs the same way I live in Jersey City. I definitely don’t think you cover Jersey even though it’s literally a 20 minute train ride away. I don’t think I could cover Jersey City the same way that I cover New York City. So in my opinion, I think really being somebody that lives in that community, and I think that goes back to advocacy. Part of it is your identity not just as a person of color, not just your sexuality or your religion, but it’s also who you are.
(46:34):
You live in this city and that gives you, or town that gives you a strong understanding of how your audience receives your reporting, what reporting is needed and what sort of things are overweighted in terms of importance, right? Because one of the big conversations, I think a lot of reporters that do cover rural communities that told me is I don’t know why people care about what’s going on on the border when we’re on the other side of the country when we’re so far up north. There aren’t really any asylum seekers living here. Why are people concerned about this? And I think that’s something that only the reporter can really answer, but I think a lot of times that comes from your view as somebody living in that community, why is this important? And it could just be that it’s on TV all the time.
(47:32):
It could be that there’s an uptick in crime and there’s a lot of specious misinformation. As a Chinese American, one of the big things is that we have, there are Chinese American social media sites WeChat where a lot of misinformation is being spread, but that could be a story in itself. I believe that if anything is really interesting is why does my city that is not in a border state really care about immigration? I think that is sometimes a story in itself. And I think part of it is just putting yourself and putting yourself and your community into why the story matters. Because sometimes we just do stories to do stories.
And that was one thing that I think as I’ve gone on in the Amsterdam news, I’ve had a little bit more freedom to pitch my stories that we’ve really wanted to avoid is you don’t want to just do stories to do stories.
(48:31):
You want to do stories that are going to provide your readers with some sort of vitamins, with some sort of, you don’t want to just be junk food just because it’s something that’s on social media just because other national outlets are covering it. And I think that’s really here in New York City. Why is it important, obviously, obviously we have an influx of migrants, but even on the granular level, there are people in the community that have a general misunderstanding of what an asylum seeker is. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of what an asylum seeker is, and they need to have that understanding. And I think that has been really why we do these stories more so than anything else because I mean, our reporting is all in English. It’s not translated, so it’s focused specifically on a black American audience, even though we hope that other black immigrant populations, generally everyone in the city reads are reporting, we are under the illusion that it’s for, we’re going to be writing to another audience, like another significant audience. So really to make sure that they get what they need from our reporting, they understand what’s going on, they know what an asylum seeker is versus somebody who is undocumented, what DACA is, what all of that is. So
Rachel Jones/NPF (49:56):
Could be, actually, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but you highlighted such an important challenge for media today in general, which is communicating to communities why they should care about these issues as so much a part of the big challenges for journalists when it comes to covering immigration. As you say, some people are like, I don’t have that problem in my community, or There are no others where I live, and so why should I care? We’re winding down here, so I want to jump in. I see a hand, Alicia, introduce yourself and ask your question.
Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (50:36):
Hi, Tandy, I’m Elisha Brown. I cover reproductive rights at States newsroom. I’m based in North Carolina. I was thinking about this question when I saw your clip about how social media fosters divide within or between black and Asian communities. Of course that’s something that has been going on. I know you mentioned you’re from LA and I think about the horizontal hostility in the 1990s, early 1990s between those two communities. So given your position at New York Amsterdam News as the first Asian American reporter there, which is awesome, but I know you also talked about experiencing imposter syndrome, right? Have you ever dealt with apprehension from black communities as a reporter? And if so, how do you foster trust maybe in a way that maybe you may not experience when you talked about covering the new possible gel in Chinatown, but also don’t want to be presumptuous? Maybe you also deal with some distrust there just because folks are distrustful of the media. But yeah, hope that makes sense.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (51:40):
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I’m glad that you mentioned that story. I didn’t realize I actually shared it, but it was, if it’s OK, I’m going to go a little bit back on my last point, which was basically that story. Basically I kept seeing stuff about black on Asian crime, and then it was constantly being sent to me on social media. I had to delete some of my mom’s channels on her WeChat or whatever it’s called to make sure that she wasn’t getting all this misinformation. But that’s what happens, right? I was like, why is this constantly a thing and is it true? And that’s really where that story came from. So that’s one thing that you can think about. Why do people enroll communities care if they don’t live in a border state? But I think to answer your question, and I hope I’m answering it correctly, is basically being kind.
(52:36):
I think I have not necessarily from sources. I think the paper has been really helpful in that people grew up on the paper, it was passed around. People have memories of the paper in a way that I think I’m never actually going to be able to fully comprehend because I didn’t grow up with it. But it’s been really beneficial for me to be able to, and that’s why we really need these kind of older minority owned publications because they have that relationship with the community that maybe the other outlets. But I think maybe the question that I think I had, I had gone on a Chicago radio station, I think it was an iHeart radio station, and I was there to talk about, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Jordan Neely Daniel story, but basically it was a big national story about a white marine killing a black unhoused man on the train after he was having a mental health episode.
(53:34):
And obviously being in New York, we covered that. And I had gone on and we had a guest who came on and he was, I think his focus was on black fatherhood and stuff like that. And he was asking me, he thought I was Vietnamese, and I was like, no, I’m Chinese American. And he was like, what would you know about these issues? And I think I had to take a pause, right? I think obviously, I think one, he was coming at it just generally on this very anti Jordan knee thing. So I came on to talk about it from an element of how race was taken out from there and he wanted to talk about something else. So I think when I was asked about that, I think it was really the first time I had actual pushback on being an Asian American, working at a black newspaper because this was somebody in Chicago that didn’t really know anything about the newspaper.
(54:27):
And I think that conversation where that conversation really steered was the idea of New York City, because that story kind of shows you can’t really step out of New York City without seeing both a black and Asian person. If you take the train, you’re going to have to engage with every, so I think one of the things is going back to advocacy news, stories about black New Yorkers and about their issues are stories that are not only about New York, but it’s the biggest city in America. And the biggest, they are just American stories of national interest at times.
(55:08):
I hope I’m answering your question correctly, but it’s definitely still something that I am trying to figure out the perfect way to do it. And I don’t think there’s a perfect way to do it because I don’t think there’s any single way of covering a community properly. And I think especially if you’re covering a community outside of yours, I think it is obviously going to be something that you’re going to have to work 10 times harder. And not only that though, it’s also something that when you go back to your own communities, you’re going to hear stuff at you because you work in a different community and everyone you engage with is in a different community. You hear it and you’re just like, wait a minute.
(55:51):
You almost have to sometimes have to relearn how to interact with your own community. Because when I went to Chinatown, some of those things that were being said, I had to question, I had to be like, is this something that Chinese Americans believe? Or is this something that you believe about jails and stuff like that? There was one guy that told me that nobody from Chinatown was going to be incarcerated there. And I was like, I totally disagree with that. And I don’t think that that’s true, but I think that really, from my experience, I think really the importance of having these old 115 year old newspapers really help when you have that imposter syndrome. Because when you go to a community and you say, Hey, I’m from this newspaper, there is a little bit more trust that you would have otherwise. And I haven’t really gotten pushback, thankfully, because of the newspaper. I definitely think it’s because of the newspaper more than anything else. And I think that’s really why it’s important to have that relationship as a newspaper to know that you’re not going to do harm, right? Because if there are people who the Amsterdam news has pissed off and they might not push back on me being Asian American, but they’re going to push back on what the newspaper has done to them. So whether or not it was justified or not, if that makes sense.
Rachel Jones/NPF (57:18):
And you’ve given me so much to think about, no, here’s how I frame it. You have helped me to realize and probably better articulate the fact that immigration, covering immigration is an American story
(57:39):
In a fractured nation when people want to other, everybody other than themselves. I think what all three of these sessions, but certainly this session is helping me to remember that I need to be able to articulate that this is an American story, this is our America, whether you like it being this way or not, or what color you are or whatever, that this is the American story. And I want to thank you so much for your insights and for your story and for being now a new member of the NPF Widening family. So thank you Lau of the Amsterdam News for being with us. I greatly appreciate it.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (58:28):
Thank you for just sharing an hour with me. I hope this was enlightening. I definitely feel like I have learned a lot. Like I said, I think obviously this is just one way of how to cover immigration, and obviously I hope that this gives people to think about. And obviously if you want to keep in touch, please share my information. Love to connect. If you’re in the New York City area, let’s grab a coffee and let’s talk about how we could really tackle reporting from the things that we talked about.
Rachel Jones/NPF (58:58):
And you should all definitely click on, Jesse has added the story about the soccer team program. So please do all of you check that out, and we will be in touch. So never fear you will be bugged by me at various points over the year. Thank you, Tandy.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (59:17):
Absolutely. Thank you and have a great Monday. I know everyone’s starting their week now, so best of luck with all your stories this week.
Rachel Jones/NPF (59:22):
Take care.
Tandy Lau/New York Amsterdam News (59:23):
Take care. Bye-bye.
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