When I started our News for All project, I found it useful to write Week Notes – informal, sometimes scrappy, reflections on the work, my feelings about it and mainly what I was learning. They also gave me a space to share some questions (rather than answers) for myself and the wider industry which led to interesting and valuable conversations with friends and colleagues.

News for All has now evolved into Newyddion i Bawb – a project that takes the work we did in Cardiff to a new and exciting context in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Thanks to an Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Innovation Practitioner Award, we’ll get the opportunity to explore both the difference and the sameness of these two contexts. The aim is to build a diverse body of evidence around how deep listening can help us truly understand what people and communities – especially those who often feel overlooked or ignored – actually want and need from journalism.

I’m particularly looking forward to that work also delivering public events that explore how collective storytelling experiences can build feelings of connection and care. Given the state of *waves hands vaguely at everything* we want Newyddion i Bawb to be a social cohesion project more than “just” one that’s about journalism. I hope these week notes will give an interesting insight into that process.

Thanks to our brilliant partners, CellB, Y Dref Werdd, PDR, Rhiannon White of Common Wealth, Inclusive Journalism Cymru, Creative Wales and S4C.

Photos courtesy Resonate Productions / Petra Nieuwburg

“I don’t want to lose trust in people, because then I can’t love them”

That sentence has brought tears to my eyes as I write this on a train to Sheffield, in the same way it brought tears to my eyes in a theatre in Amsterdam a few weeks ago.

Those powerful (because they’re universal) feelings were just the start of a dialogue inspired by, and part of, one of the most beautiful acts of art, journalism and life that I’ve ever seen.

With Nothing Bigger Than Humanity, Andrea Voets and her team have created a way for us to experience and process events (what we sometimes call “The News”) collectively, empathically, and thoughtfully. I’ve written elsewhere about why I think we have to create these opportunities, and it was beautiful to see how powerful they can be in real life.

To give you a (partial) sense of how the experience unfolds, it’s built around interviews with millennials from across the world, recounting their experience being at the centre of events which have made news, but crucially illuminate what it means to be human. These interviews are soundtracked by a live accompaniment (more on that later).

At the front of the room is a chair with three seats around it. At the end of each “act”, one of the musicians/performers/facilitators (they fulfil all those roles and more) steps forward to one of those chairs and invites responses from the “audience” (The inverted commas there are because I’m not a huge fan of the word audience, because it feels too passive. Never more so than in this setting, but anyway…)

The room is held so well that of course someone always steps forward and they are greeted by the simple but powerful question, “What brought you to the table?”.

You’ll remember that there are three chairs around the table and this is a critical element. At the performance we were part of, just one person stepped up to the table after the first “act”, but after subsequent recorded testimonies, a second person joined the conversation – creating a dialogue. These spontaneous moments of connection are really the heart of the work.

Of course these moments ensure that every performance is unique – which is part of the beauty – so I can only reflect on the one that we saw. For me one of the most important aspects was that these interactions didn’t rely on agreement, in fact the most profound insights came from disagreement.

The response to, “I don’t want to lose trust in people, because then I can’t love them” was, “If we don’t trust, then we avoid being disappointed”. As is often the case, two things can be true at the same time. 

I made some brief notes of some of the conversations, and these are the glimpses that stand out for me a few weeks on:

“Before being forgotten, we did not even get a chance to be known”

“I will have to live with the idea that I can’t protect my children”

“The idea of any human being being illegal is just unacceptable”

“Even in a democratic society we still have to hide”

“Systems should be a failsafe for our lack of trust”

That last one particularly stuck with me because our visit to The Netherlands began with us spending three hours in an immigration queue at Schiphol Airport. That was a result of a particular political atmosphere which many of us are seeing and feeling. As I reflect on the entirety of that weekend I wonder if the big political divide is no longer left v right, collective v individual, but in fact trust v suspicion. What that immigration queue represents is actually a breakdown of trust.

I’ve written about trust in these week notes several times before, noting that it’s really difficult to define what trust actually is, and how difficult it is to measure. In the journalism context I always refer people to Heather Bryant’s peerless essay, “I’m never going to trust your news organisation” but, as discussed, perhaps Newyddion i Bawb isn’t about news organisations or journalism at all, perhaps it’s simply about how we create the kinds of connections that “Nothing Bigger Than Humanity” does. That’s what we’ll be working on over the next year – we’d love it if you’d like to join us on the journey.