Community Spotlight: Lede New Orleans

Lede New Orleans Spring 2023 Community Reporting Fellows and staff kickoff fellowship training in March 2023. Photo by Dariel Duarte

Community Spotlight by Sabrina Stone

Jennifer Larino, the Executive Director of Lede New Orleans, has spent over a decade of her adult life as a journalist, covering the news in our city. When the Times-Picayune was bought in 2019 and 100+ employees were let go, Jennifer took a hard look at the state of journalism in Louisiana and thought, maybe this was the time for her to do some equity work in the field.

Together with E’jaaz Mason, a local film producer, director, graphic designer, and film teacher, she created Lede, a multimedium journalism training organization that, “equips creative professionals from underrepresented communities, age 18-25, with skills, tools and resources to transform local media.” Several years in, the graduates of their fellowship programs have reported on all sorts of essential topics and moved on to exciting jobs all over the city. I sat down with Jennifer to discuss how Lede began, how they’re already having an impact on the face of local reporting, and where they’re growing from here.

Is Lede pronounced like “leed/ lead”?

Yes! Like the lede of a story. It’s the old journalism jargon for the top paragraph of a written story, the paragraph that encapsulates the whole story in one. Then we liked the double meaning of the people in our program being on the leading edge of what we hope media will look like in the future.

When did Lede begin?

We were officially incorporated in May of 2020. Our programming started in March. My cofounder and I started experimenting with what would become the organization in the Fall of 2019. We launched our core program, our paid 16-week journalism training program fellowship, the third week of March in 2020.

So, was the program a pandemic baby or did you just have spectacular timing?

We just have spectacular timing! I’ll always remember that week because that was when everything shut down. We were supposed to have our orientation that Friday. We put things on hold for a week and then we regrouped. In a weird twist of insight, we had already done much of our interviewing for the fellowship cohort through zoom, before people really knew what zoom was, so we had all the infrastructure in place and we decided we were just gonna go virtual. I’m glad that we did because the young people in our program had virtually nothing after that week. Our weekly meetings, for some of them, were their only contact with the outside world.

How many fellows have you had in the program since its creation?

Lede’s 2022 Fall fellows celebrating the conclusion of their fellowship in January.

Our fellowship runs twice a year: we have a Spring fellowship and a Fall fellowship. It’s 16 weeks, so it takes a good chunk of the year. Our cohorts are generally between four and six fellows. They are paid a stipend to train with us. Then they go out into the community and start reporting a story in multimedia formats. We do audio storytelling, we do video, we do photo essays, writing, the whole works, and they do reporting around a theme that we determine through community listening. So our work is really year-round, before the fellowship starts. The most recent cohort, the Fall of 2022, looked into mental healthcare access.

What other sorts of topics have your fellows covered in their projects?

When we first started, it was really about what they could cover without leaving their home, so it was a lot of “voices from the pandemic” kind of stories. Our Spring 2021 cohort covered virtual schooling. We have covered food justice and food access–that was something that we heard from the community, during the pandemic, that having access to fresh food was made more difficult by the fact that people were losing their jobs. Our fellows want to be involved in telling stories about the community and they’re coming from the community, which helps in being holistically representative.

One of our staff members is a former fellow, Alexis Reed. Alexis grew up in New Orleans, on the East Bank, then the West Bank. She wound up doing a profile of Big Cheif Victor Harris, Spirit of Fi-Yi-Yi, right before the 2021 Mardi Gras. She got to go visit him at his house and spend time with him. She got that opportunity, which could never have happened with an outsider, but even though she’d grown up here, she had never been to the Florida area of the city, where he lived, and got out of the Uber that day with a mix of fear and curiosity. She was learning something new about a place she’d lived her whole life.

What’s the makeup of the students in your cohorts?

It’s about a 50/50 split of people who are from here and people who came here for school. We have partnerships with Dillard and Xavier [Universites], a little bit of Tulane, Loyola, and young people who grew up here. About 80% of them are in school and the rest are in the workforce but usually not doing something that they want to be doing.

What have your graduates gone on to do?

We’ve had people who go out and teach, people who have gone into community organizing, people who do marketing and communications at local nonprofits, and people who went to ESPN to do sports reporting.

Does every student learn how to report in every medium?

We cycle through each medium and have them do storytelling in each: written, video, audio. We often hire people we train. It’s not just about us helping them out, we need to turn over the reigns of the program, for our equity model, and what better way to serve the community than to bring them in and have them design programming? I know so many people, the narrative they understand of New Orleans is that it is an impoverished, crime-filled place that you must escape and that’s destructive to our civic strength and to our cultural narrative. A big part of our work is ownership of that misrepresentation and a relearning and unlearning. I don’t think there’s any more powerful way of doing that than through journalism, listening to people and telling stories.