A nine-part reporting series from the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism explores how ordinary people work to support democracy.
Democracy at Work launched Sept. 3 and will deliver weekly feature stories through the Nov. 5 election.
The center, which is a nonprofit newsroom within WHRO in Hampton Roads, Va., is profiling Virginians who contribute to the civic life of their communities. Each story is published on the center’s website and airs Tuesday mornings on WHRV, the dual licensee’s NPR news station.
So far, the coverage has featured five people, including the owner of a 147-year-old community newspaper and a registrar preparing for early voting in the Tidewater region’s York County.
Democracy at Work is one of 21 projects funded by the American Press Institute’s 2024 Election Coverage and Community Listening Fund. The grants support local news organizations’ election-related community engagement work.
The project aims to report on people’s motivations for supporting democracy, according to Lou Hansen, center co-founder and senior editor. From the reporting so far, he’s found people are inspired by tradition and ethics.
“It boils down to a strong moral core,” Hansen said. “People believe that what they’re doing is the way it’s supposed to be done.”
The series also sheds light on civic service and the different roles that individuals play in the democratic process, said Chris Tyree, center co-founder and senior director. The project responds to the loss of local news organizations in Virginia and the growth of conspiracy theories around elections. Both trends have changed the way democracy works, he said.
For Hansen, the series also harkens back to the role of community newsrooms, which have vanished in some areas of Virginia. “A lot of this Democracy at Work series is just good beat reporting and good storytelling,” he said. “And it’s the things that we used to get so regularly in our daily newspaper. We wanted to bring that into our election coverage this year.”
In the commonwealth, seven counties have no local newspaper and 94 counties have only one, according to research by Penelope Abernathy, the Knight chair in journalism and digital media economics at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Democracy at Work sheds light on civic service and the different roles that individuals play in the democratic process, Tyree said. That includes journalists.
Audiences “can take away that there are people who are vested in our communities, who care about a person’s individual right to freedom [and] free expression of themselves,” he said. “Democracy is only as strong as the people who put the effort into keeping it strong, right? I hope that that’s what people know.”
Tyree and Hansen, who both reported for the Virginian-Pilot before founding the center, worked with WHRO beat reporters to find profile subjects, Tyree said. WHRO reporters are contributing five profiles, and Hansen and Tyree have each reported two.
‘Responsibility to work towards our democracy’
For each profile, reporters ask their subject what democracy means to them and about the moment when they realized their job was bigger than them, according to Hansen. From their answers and subsequent reporting, the profiles aim to reveal the deeper meanings and missions people find in their lines of work.
Tyree hopes readers discover the everyday nature of the people, as well.
“These people who are working out there every day to strengthen or uphold the democracy are not that much different from the average person in some ways,” he said. “We all actually have a responsibility to work towards our democracy, because if we don’t, we lose it.”
Another goal is to show journalism in action, Hansen said.
“We want people to understand that there are still journalists out there looking at important issues, journalists who can report on their communities, who can listen to … their concerns and really try to start to rebuild the good journalism infrastructure that Virginia once had — that the country once had,” Hansen said.
Finding contemporary stories of democracy has sometimes involved revisiting recent history. The profile that launched the series, for example, features a Newport News poll worker who disputed the intent of a ballot in Virginia’s 2017 election. A Sept. 17 piece profiled a Navy veteran who testified before the U.S. House Veterans Affairs Committee in 2022 on how a VA policy restricting abortion care affected their partner.
Each profile, along with its accompanying feature photos, is posted on social media. Posts on Instagram and Reddit “have been doing really well,” Hansen said. “So it’s really engaged the community [and] younger audiences as well as the established public radio audiences.”
Exhibitions adapted from the coverage are scheduled to go on display this month in libraries, schools and other public institutions across the state, including the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia. Organizations can apply to host an exhibition on WHRO’s website.