June 20th, 2007, 6:10 pm

Street Brawl in DC:
A Case for Citizen Journalism

COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Washington, DC, June 20, 2007

Pandemonium.

Lights flashing, a spiral of screaming, hysterical phone calls, a flash fire - combustible Columbia Heights - ignited.

It was a war zone, ground zero - not a neighborhood, not even anything physical - hate.rage.fear.heat, low hanging, oppressive smoldering chemicals, waiting for the spark, flash point fire.

I got off the metro at the Columbia Heights stop at around 8:30pm June 19, 2007.

The explosion was before me: complete chaos, nearly 25 cop cars, blocking 14th St. NW, lights blazing, satanic disco, and everywhere people screaming: into cell phones, at cops, at each other.

Sirens, screams, and DC’s inescapable heat.

Near me, a woman screamed the story into a phone; she was shaking, near hysterical: Two teenage girls had been fighting, the cops had arrived to bust things up, and then [allegedly] taken the arm of a bystander - a teenage girl, a ‘chile’ - and busted her head against a car and started roughing her up.

From there it had exploded; everyone screaming at everyone.

I whipped out my camera, shaky from the 4 hours of sleep I’d managed to snag on my way back from Portland, through Phoenix, Vegas and finally DC.

Get that the fuck out of here! Get on with yourself! Don’t point that at me! screamed one woman - I’m not! I’m taking pictures of the cops! ((I’m on your side! - I didn’t say - I’m press! - I didn’t say!!)) - Keep walking! Keep walking! she screamed, and I did, because I was tired, and this was not my fight.

I could have circulated, taking notes, more pictures, trying to get the story, but I knew she was right. The story was what that woman was screaming into her phone - not my transcription of it. People talk about citizen journalism, and they talk mostly of the elites - white soccer moms contributing play by plays of their children, pictures and videos galore; lawyers posting nuanced descriptions of the latest city council development.

But this - sweat, fear, alleged police brutality, raw emotion, a neighborhood terrorized by gunshots and intermittent police presence that now was as frightening as the drive-bys murdering 13 year olds - this is the stuff that “citizen journalism” should be made of, not yuppies posting restaurant reviews.

A search of Google News turns up nothing about last night - a terrifying night in Columbia Heights - my community message board has nothing.

Background on the Columbia Heights violence:

• Columbia Heights Shootings Cause Alarm, WashingtonPost.com
• Three Shot, One Killed, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
• In Face of Losses, A Fight to Save Area, WashingtonPost.com
• ‘Ghetto sun’ burns bright, Columbia Heights, LauraFries.com
• Teen Charged in Youth’s Slaying in ‘Shooting Melee’, WashingtonPost.com

The Washington Post has written some amazing pieces about Columbia Heights violence recently, but it’s impossible for one reporter to capture everything - and never with the intensity of last night, with women screaming the story into their phones and the muggy night air.

This is the story of the summer.

If I was the editor of a local publication, with reporters at my disposal, this is what I’d do.

I’d send my people out into the community for the summer. It would be their job to make friends with trusted community leaders, in the churches, community services, and schools. It would be their job to comb every source: every community newsletter, bulletin board, barber shop, church social and blog where citizens were spreading the news themselves. It would be the reporter’s job to earn trust and build sources.

From there, I’d ask them to deputize community voices - precocious writing students, the empassioned families of shooting victims. Give people the means of telling their own stories. Give people hope - that when something truly horrible happens in their community, that they have the means to document it; that [alleged] police brutality doesn’t begin and end with a rough shove onto sizzling summer concrete.

I’d set up easy ways for citizens to contribute their stories - a voice mail box where they could tell the story as it happened, an easy way to email the pictures that nearly everyone was snapping on their cell phones last night.

I’d have my reporters perform a number of roles - soliciting content from their community, while creating it themselves. Reporters would weave together pictures from the fight, combined with user-contributed audio accounts of the brawl, into slideshows for the website. They would interview community members while encouraging them to contribute content themselves; in effect turning interview subjects into viral marketers for the publication.

And because the community I was trying to serve would have limited access to the web, I’d be sure to create a print-product that my reporters and trusted community members could circulate as they did their jobs of reporting and source-gathering. Even something as simple as a 8.5×11 newsletter that others could photocopy and distribute themselves would serve multiple purposes: 1) reporting the news in a medium that was accessible to the community it was serving, 2) soliciting user contributions, and 3) creating a feedback loop between community and publication.

In collaboration with the community, my reporters would eventually be able to create a number of media products:

• Traditional reporting in a newspaper
• A rapidly-updated website, with professional and citizen content
• A micro-distribution newsletter

It’s a lot of work - no denying it. But if you lived, like I do, in Columbia Heights, afraid to walk home at night, distrustful of the police you [allegedly] see brutalizing teenage girls, hearing the gunshots that are kids killing kids, you’d be happy to find even a 8.5×11 piece of paper on your doorstep, telling you that at least somebody was paying attention, and you had the means to fight back.

[Crossposted on Web.aan.org, the web publishing blog I write for AAN; a fair bit of discussion has happened there.]