An episode for your weekend: Damaso Reyes, executive editor & investigative editor, New York Amsterdam News

New York City's Black Newspaper Is Making Its Mark In Investigative Work

Damaso Reyes is both the executive and investigative editor at New York Amsterdam News, one of the oldest Black weeklies in the United States.

Damaso has nearly 30 years of experience in journalism. Last year, he won the National Association of Black Journalists Ida B Wells Award. That's given to someone providing distinguished leadership in increasing access and opportunities for Black journalists and improving the coverage of communities of color in American media.

I talked to Damaso about what it’s like to do investigative work, what it’s like to be an editor and got his perspective on a variety of journalism issues and challenges. You can read excerpts of the interview below. Hope you’ll listen too!

You hadn't been an editor for a large part of your career. What kind of editor are you.

I like to believe that I'm a reporter's editor. What informs me as an editor most, I think, is my experiences as a freelancer with bad editors. So I try not to be a bad editor. My goal as an editor is to really uplift the voice of the reporter.

Their work should not sound like me, but sound as much like them as possible, while at the same time doing the important work we need to do of informing our community. I probably lean a little bit too much towards deference to my reporters and I have to sort of check that and make sure that I'm actually doing what I need to do, which is supporting them and making sure that they have the tools they need, but also making sure that I'm pushing them in the right direction and making sure that I'm there and I'm getting the best out of them I can.

There's some tension there, but my default is always trying to remember what it was like to be a reporter and say how can I make this reporter's life easier as an editor.

By the way, before I became investigative editor, I had never been an editor before. Nobody would hire me as an editor. So I had to create the job I wanted.

 One of the most prominent things that The New York Amsterdam News has done on the investigative front is a series that started in 2022 called Beyond the Barrel of the Gun, trying to raise awareness of gun violence as a public health issue. The project included an award-winning documentary and a community convening. The most recent piece is on the financial cost of gun violence and how it impacts victim families.

How did that series go from initial idea to developed project?

This is a great example of my approach to being an editor. One of our reporters, Helena Selemon, came to a meeting where we start talking about what we wanted to work on.

And she had this idea to do a story on victims' compensation funds. These are state funds that are available to victims of crimes and their families and survivors, and basically sort of looking at the inadequacy of these funds and how they don't really do a good job of serving the people they're designed to serve.

Then we discovered that there had been some other reporting on this. So I really pushed her and our other reporter, Shannon Chaffers, who's our Report for America corps member, to think more broadly to think about the sort of larger ecosystem of how we do or do not support victims of gun violence.

We talk a lot about public safety and how we need to punish criminals, but I think in our society, we often leave the victims to fend for themselves. And so this began a little bit of thinking on our part as a team, as a collective, as reporters and an editor, thinking about how can we expand this idea?

How can we look at what happens after somebody gets shot? How do they navigate going back to work? How do they navigate the social security system? How did they heal? What are the facilities that provide them support? We did a story on trauma recovery centers and even did some reporting out in California for that.

It was a really organic process. The idea came from one of our reporters. We workshopped it as a team and then worked on it as a team over the course of the better part of a year, and got to tell some stories that don't usually get told.

 Is the desire on your end to just inform or is it ideally to get to show solutions and to affect change?

Well, the hope is always to affect change. I think it's often very hard to measure that and to draw a straight line. But our job is to inform people.

So, when politicians are calling for the end of bail reform, or to revoke bail reform, for example, having an informed population that says, no, no, no, this is something that's actually benefiting people of color. It's actually reducing crime, not increasing crime.

You have to have people who are dedicated to the facts and to telling the truth and, say what you will about our politicians on any end of the spectrum. their allegiance is not necessarily to the truth. Their allegiance is to what will keep them in power, what will help them get elected.

You've had in New York state, Democratic politicians attacking bail reform because they've seen it as a way in which they can strengthen their own credentials on public safety, but I would say they are lying. I would say they are deliberately telling untruths around this public policy, which disproportionately benefits people of color and disproportionately benefits economically-disadvantaged people in order to score points with some middle class voter in some neighborhood or some part of the city or some part of the state.

As a journalist, I talked to the experts. I talked to people who with lived experience. I look at the data. And I come to a conclusion that is supported by facts, and that conclusion may be unpopular, but it's still the truth as far as I can tell it, and it's my obligation as a journalist to tell the truth.

 What are some voids in the industry that younger journalists could look to fill?

Finding ways to reach your peers. If you're a young person listening to this, what do you and your friends want to know? How do they want to know it? How can we convince your friends that news is interesting and worthy of their attention and maybe even some of their dollars? That's the thing that none of us old folks have figured out yet.

The people who control the levers of power do not get their information on TikTok. They do not get their information on Instagram. They do not check out Threads to find out what's happening. They still read. If the people who are rich and powerful and control our society get their information a certain way, young people should be thinking about, well, do they just want me to get all my information on social media and TikTok and maybe that's not good for me.

Maybe that's bad for me. It's not that these things are in and of themselves bad. They're absolutely not. It's just that It's not the best way to convey information in a 30-second or two-minute clip. There's a lot that gets lost.

We need, as a society, to help bring the next generation into a culture of information that is not primarily focused on entertainment or solely focused on entertainment. Entertainment has its place.

If you want to, you can avoid the news altogether for the rest of your life. I don't think that that's necessarily a healthy thing if you want to be an active participant in our society, in our democracy. If you're willing to have other people make decisions for you and other people control and manipulate you into making decisions, every once in a while when you go into a voting booth, if you go into a voting booth, then don't be surprised when you have outcomes that you're not a big fan of.

 I've seen you reference reparative journalism. What does reparative journalism mean? How is it put into practice? And why is it important?

I think of reparative journalism is just kind of journalism, right?

Journalism should be about holding powerful institutions to account. Journalism should be critical and analytical of our society. But within the context that we're speaking, I think, reparative journalism is really looking at history. It's looking at the past. So if we talk about bail reform, it's looking at how we got to where we are and whether or not that's fair or just and how we should be understanding the past in order to inform our present and future and to fix the problems in our society.

A lot of what we do as journalists is to uncover problems. And these problems don't just appear overnight. They're the product of historical forces. So, first, we need to understand those historical forces. We need to understand concepts like redlining and how that can directly and indirectly lead to harms that we are still experiencing and then get exacerbated by something like climate change.

So, we've done a series by a great freelance reporter named Roxanne Scott, looking at how climate change is impacting black homeowners in Southeast Queens. Well, redlining and institutional racism has directly led to circumstances, which are now being exacerbated by climate change. We can't tell the story of climate change in America, or certainly in American cities, without talking about structural racism, not in the distant past, but how that structural racism is manifesting itself today.

So I think reparative journalism is looking at how we can solve the problems that we have today in a holistic way, but also really helping us to reckon with our past because if we don't understand our past we are doomed to repeat it and so it's important for us to understand the mistakes that were made and calling them mistakes and being able to acknowledge those mistakes and say, hey, we don't want to do that again. So let's understand that. And let's try to apply solutions moving forward that can help heal the wrongs of the past.