Category: Cover Feature

Twenty-one-year-old Emery Bascom lived in Memphis all her life, until moving away to attend Louisiana State University. When meeting new friends and planning hometown visits, Bascom was eager to show her friends around her city. However, she was often met with a familiar response. 

“There’s really only one reaction I ever get when I say I’m from Memphis,” Bascom said. “It’s always like ‘Oh, will I be safe there?’ or ‘Are we going to get shot?’ and I think that’s probably because of the way the news is in Memphis, which is hard sometimes.” 

Bascom explained that while this preconceived notion of overwhelming violent crime, specifically gun violence, can be frustrating to Memphis natives, she understands why it exists. 

“I barely even watch the news anymore,” Bascom said. “Sometimes my parents have it on, but watching it makes it feel like everything in my hometown is worse than it is.” 

When observing a traditional Memphis news cycle, it appears many Memphians may echo this frustration. Of three TV news stations, FOX13 Memphis, Action News 5, and WREG Memphis; print news outlet The Commercial Appeal; and the online news source the Daily Memphian, local gun violence was a commonly recurring topic in a recent seven-day period.

Despite widespread frustration from residents of Memphis with overwhelming crime coverage in the news, specifically related to gun violence, crime rates actually fell from 2023 to 2024. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) reported that more than 110,000 major crimes were reported in Memphis last year, less than 2023’s record-breaking high of 124,000 reports. Within this, gun-related violent incidents also decreased 3.4 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to the Memphis-Shelby Crime Commission. 

Traditional media coverage of gun violence in Memphis dominates the news cycle and perpetuates a narrative that is overwhelmingly negative. This is leading Memphis journalists to reconsider how they report on these shootings and how it affects Memphians. 

If It Bleeds, It Leads

“You also have to think about how crime can be down 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, even 10 percent compared to a prior year, but people won’t really see that until they stop hearing the sirens in their neighborhood,” The Commercial Appeal criminal justice reporter Lucas Finton said. “They won’t hear that until you can turn on the 6 o’clock news and the first four stories aren’t shootings or some sort of crime. Media is part of doing that.” 

Finton graduated from the University of Memphis in 2022 with a degree in journalism and strategic media. He has worked at The Commercial Appeal for the past four years.

“When you throw out crime story after crime story, it feels as though crime is at an all-time high and getting worse,” Finton said. “That tends to warp someone’s perception into something that it’s not. It makes the reality of crime, and especially gun violence, feel wrong to readers, so they get confused. It’s hard to put two things in context at the same time, of crime still being high but also going down.” 

Daily Memphian courts and public safety reporter Aarron Fleming has seen how their coverage of crime impacts the public’s view of gun violence in Memphis. 

“Our homicides are down, property crime is down, all these things have been going down for a little bit now, but when you highlight every single shooting and when people see that shootings are constantly in the news, they are not going to feel like crime is down,” Fleming said. “It is a perception issue. They aren’t going to believe the numbers and the data when they see it in the news constantly. People don’t feel safe despite what the numbers say.”

The phrase “If it bleeds, it leads” was popularized towards the end of the 19th century by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. When covering the Spanish-American War, Hearst relied on sensationalizing the war’s drama and violence to compete with other newspapers at the time. 

The timeworn adage still applies to national news coverage today. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, Americans are more likely to seek out news and information about crime than about any other topic except the weather. 

“We, as journalists, have to step away from the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ philosophy and step into the emotional aftermath of how someone processes this. Put yourself and the reader in that person’s shoes,” Finton said.

Both Finton and Fleming have emphasized the importance of highlighting every victim in a story, providing appropriate and thorough context, and gathering as many perspectives as possible in their reporting. 

“When we say something like, ‘A person was shot, and here’s where it happened,’ you can get a little numb to it and just feel like it happens all the time,” Fleming said. “Highlighting who the victims were, as hard as it may be, can really kind of break through that and show the impact that these things are really having on people.” 

Both reporters agreed that part of fighting against the overwhelmingly negative media narrative surrounding gun violence in Memphis is that not every shooting can or should be covered. Finton explained that there were 398 homicides in the city of Memphis in 2023, and their newsroom cannot cover them all. So there must be certain thresholds or discretion used when deciding which cases to put into the media landscape. 

“It’s a terrible example, but we aren’t going to cover the guy shot in the kneecap,” Fleming said. “We really try to focus on the ones that are going to impact the community and not just ones that aren’t putting public safety at risk.” 

Reality vs. Reporting

Angie Golding, communications specialist at Regional One Health, says over half of her daily calls are from various news sources asking about shooting victims at the hospital. 

“The reality is that [shootings] are not as common as you would think they are by watching the news,” Golding said. “That is something that is reported on a lot, or lots of stories are told about, but they’re not telling the stories about someone that was in a car accident or other sorts of trauma.” 

Indeed, gunshots are only the third leading type of injury in the Elvis Presley Trauma Center within Regional One Health, accounting for only 19 percent of cases brought in.

“I do think that the media contributes a little bit to sensationalizing shootings, but I don’t blame the media for that at all because the media is taught ‘if it bleeds, it leads,’” Golding said. “They are looking for that kind of story, so there’s more interest in it for that reason.” 

This is a common struggle in local Memphis newsrooms. Although the oversaturation of gun violence stories in the media can fatigue the local audience and drive a narrative of crime in the city, it still tends to get the most engagement and interest from viewers. 

“[The news] is very crime-heavy because, for some reason, that does really sell more, and it is why crime coverage is important to news outlets. It drives a lot of traffic,” Finton said. “But, especially in Memphis, there’s a disproportionately high number of crime stories to the crimes that are happening. So there’s this larger narrative all the time and this feeling among residents that crime is constantly going up every year because it feels like every year it is covered more and more.” 

MLK50 is a nontraditional Memphis newsroom focused on accountability and serving the working class people of Memphis — the people that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been aligned with if he were alive today.

With that in mind, MLK50 public safety reporter Brittany Brown said, “I am not covering a shooting that happened at a gas station because our local news outlets are covering that, and it contributes, to a degree, to this existing narrative of fear in Memphis, where people live in fear of their own communities.”  

Brown believes one of the biggest issues in reporting on gun violence is that each instance is often treated like a one-off, focusing on the individual, which can contribute to a narrative that some communities are more susceptible to engaging in this behavior than others. 

“[MLK50] gets me out of that routine of just going from incident to incident and really being able to connect the dots and see the bigger picture, which I think is what journalism should really be, especially today because we are all flooded with so much information,” Brown said. 

However, Brown acknowledged that not every newsroom and reporter has the ability to flesh out every story with this much thoroughness due to deadlines and requirements for breaking news. 

“The newsroom that I’m in gives me the flexibility to approach reporting with that level of care, which I appreciate. And I think it’s really necessary to get us outside of what has almost become a formulaic approach to coverage of an incident when someone has been killed by the police, no matter the dynamics, because they have become so common in our popular media narrative,” Brown said. “Same with mass shootings, they become almost sensationalized in these very formulaic ways: the shock and the trauma, thoughts and prayers, a big attorney, maybe something incrementally changes, and then it dies down until the next horrific incident happens.” 

At the same time, Brown emphasizes the importance of being present in the community of Memphis, especially in times of tragedy, in order to fully understand the social context and foster trust within the local communities. 

“Building relationships is vital, especially in Memphis because there is a lot of fear, distrust, and standoffishness with the media, and I understand it now because there are a lot of reasons for that,” Brown said. “I was able to be present and use my own common sense as a human being first, not being an objective journalist, because objectivity does not exist. Fairness, truth, and accuracy exist, but this idea that I am supposed to be this unemotional, non-feeling, kind of like ‘God’s eye,’ objective-type of journalist is just not true. We are people. We have brains. We have life experiences, and we have things that brought us to this moment.” 

Brown graduated from the University of Mississippi with a B.A. in journalism in 2019 and worked at Mississippi Today and Mississippi Public Broadcasting before moving to Memphis to work at MLK50. She emphasized the importance of prioritizing mental health in this line of work, where you are often exposed to some of the most horrible parts of our society.

Covering Crime

Brown shared that she had to take a step back from working in news by the middle of 2023 following her initial reporting on the death of Tyré Nichols due to police brutality in Memphis. 

“I thought that I was doing a good job of being able to compartmentalize my own identity from the job, and I think those lines got blurred along the way,” Brown said. “A lot of times, as journalists, we’re doing this public-facing work because we care about it. We take that work home with us, and for me, it had kind of become my identity like ‘I’m a journalist,’ and I had to realize I am Brittany first. I am a Black biracial woman living in this country. I had to take a step back and have a come-to-Jesus moment with myself about doing this work.” 

Finton concurred that mental health is key, as crime reporters are so often faced with many cases in rapid succession, each one confronting them with tragedy and its human aftermath. 

“You really have to open yourself up, and that’s why I think it is important to do those stories but to also give yourself some time to acknowledge that you have to take care of yourself first,” Finton said. “Journalists are human beings; we do have feelings, even though we cover a lot of horrible stuff. It’s really important to take care of yourself after those moments. But you kind of have to figure that balance out yourself. No one can tell a reporter when to or not to open themselves up to a source.” 

This idea of trauma-informed journalism is now being addressed at the national level by organizations like the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting (PCGVR). The PCGVR trains journalists to advance more ethical, empathetic, and impactful news, which includes promoting evidence-based, solutions-oriented, community-informed, data-informed, and trauma-informed reporting. 

“Once you understand that everybody that you are reporting on has been through extensive trauma, it makes sense to begin from a position of empathy and try to connect with them as human beings rather than just jumping straight to the incident,” PCGVR founder and director Jim MacMillan said. “Start with who they are, how they’re feeling, and what they need.” 

An Empathetic Approach

MacMillan founded PCGVR a little over five years ago. He worked in Philadelphia newsrooms for 17 years, covering 2,000 shootings over that time — about 10 percent of the more than 20,000 Philadelphians involved in gun violence during this period.

“The idea is that accurate reporting informs people to take civic action, whether they vote, run for office, or support a candidate,” MacMillan said. “The action is up to them. We collaborate with journalists, researchers, and the survivor community to advance more empathetic, ethical, and impactful reporting. Impactful reporting is the part that could lead to policy change.” 

While still in its early stages, PCGVR has been successful in completing various research projects, webinars, and a guide to reporting gun violence responsibly, informing the public without sensationalizing or dehumanizing the victims. 

“We see a movement growing,” MacMillan said. “We see interest in the community. We see interest from journalists, and we see examples of new best-practice reporting. I just can’t say that we’ve done the work yet to demonstrate a trend. It’s anecdotal until we do.” 

One example of this movement is the nation’s only newsroom solely dedicated to reporting on gun violence, The Trace. 

“So often, the type of coverage and the type of media that people consume is local TV news, and a lot of that, just because of the nature of TV news, focuses on individual shootings, individual violent crime, and it is kind of a churn of what shootings happened, but there is no discussion of long-term trends, people trying to make a difference, and that kind of stuff,” The Trace reporter Chip Brownlee said. 

The Trace aims to combat this by focusing all of their stories on both gun violence and possible solutions, informing the public and challenging the narrative that this is an insurmountable problem. 

This includes covering not only the actual crime but also things like public safety partnerships and local community organizations doing work to address these issues. By providing this sort of balance in news coverage, people are able to better understand the broader picture and context of gun violence. 

The Trace recently started a Gun Violence Data Hub, which is an effort to collect data and context they can then provide to local newsrooms that might be understaffed, in order to help them have adequate resources to cover these issues. 

“I think all of that is really important because those local outlets, your small-town newspapers, your local TV news, those are the outlets that are most trusted by people,” Brownlee said. “They are the closest to them, and if those places are struggling to cover an issue that has an impact all the way up the chain, that’s really important to address.”

And staffing shortfalls are very real. According to the Pew Research Center, employment in newsrooms fell 26 percent from 2008 to 2021. Even if reporters want to do more holistic and thorough reporting on every case, staffing restraints can often make this a difficult goal. 

“We [The Commercial Appeal] are the oldest paper in Memphis, but we are also a very small newsroom right now,” Finton said. “Currently, our metro news team has two reporters. So we just can’t cover everything.” 

However, with an uptick in resources for reporters that are covering gun violence, Brown is hopeful that current and future reporters can set a new standard for how gun violence should be portrayed in the media, specifically in Memphis. Brown even explained that she keeps a packet from The Trace in her bag at all times, and she often receives emails or check-ins from the PCGVR about stories that are happening. 

“While there are less people doing the work, the people who are currently doing the work are doing it with a really important set of values,” Brown said. “That, I think, will actually kind of set a new pace for how gun violence needs to be told.” 

Grace Landry, from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, is a senior at the University of Mississippi pursuing a dual degree in journalism and political science.

Crime and Public Safety

by Toby Sells

So how do we here at the Memphis Flyer cover crime?

It’s a good question and one to which I should know the answer. I am mostly responsible for our news coverage, but it’s always been collaborative. Years working with my colleagues in the Flyer newsroom have given me a certain set of norms, a loose structure, and a few lines we decided never to cross again. But I wanted a more formal answer to this question, so I asked for help.

A little context here. We are our city’s alternative newsweekly. That means a lot of things. But it certainly means we’re not Memphis’ “paper of record.” That means we’re not the final authority on everything that happens in Memphis. We’re boutique, hyper-local, and specialized — Sugar Ghost, not Baskin-Robbins.

We don’t have the resources nor responsibility to cover every crime, every arrest, and every verdict. We leave all of that in the capable hands of our two daily news outlets and four local television stations.

We do have a responsibility to our readers to cover crime responsibly. That is simply a bottom-line agreement we as a community voice have with folks who trust us to be good stewards of the power of the press.

As an unabashedly progressive newsroom, we leaned into change early. Our former editor Bruce VanWyngarden decided we’d quit running mug shots at a time when those mug shot magazines were all over every gas station in town. We also decided to remove old stories of arrests from our website on request, if the person had been found not guilty. If the person’s name had been cleared by the courts, we wanted to clear it with Google, too. Our current editor Shara Clark has left those guidelines in place, added more, and supports our efforts to change and improve.

We’ve also kept a watchful eye on how the rest of the Memphis media have reported on crime. Back in 1996, our reporters watched local TV news to gauge the prevalence of “bleeds it leads” stuff. We did it again in 2017, when we found that local, evening TV news shows devoted about half of their running time to stories about violence, criminal activity, and disaster. Half.

Historically, our crime reporting has been spotty. If there was a crime story that felt important, unique, or down-right weird (like the trucker who “inadvertently” traded a trailer full of lunch meat to two men for crack cocaine), we’d run it. On the flip side of that, we’d also publish stats from the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission. Pure data and correct context still means a lot to us in this post-truth world we live in.

In the wake of the beating death of Tyré Nichols, Chris McCoy gave readers an honest look at the Memphis Police Department (MPD) with two powerful cover stories — “What’s Wrong With the MPD?” and “How Do We Fix the MPD?” Last December, McCoy, Kailynn Johnson, and myself scoured the Department of Justice report on MPD’s excessive force to take you “Inside the MPD.” Many of those details were brutal, gut-wrenching, terrifying, and dark. But our inherent guidelines on covering crime meant that we owed our readers reporting that refused to look away.

So we had a collage of guidelines, best practices, themes, and a general tenor of how we covered crime. But I wanted to make sure our way was, indeed, the correct way. Thanks to the financial support of our company’s leadership, the Flyer’s small newsroom enrolled in the Poynter Institute’s program called “Transforming Local Crime Reporting Into Public Safety Journalism.”

One of the first things we learned was that we should rethink “crime,” as the name of the course implies. “Public safety” is police, courts, jail, and all the rest. But we learned it’s also schools, the environment, healthcare, and anything else that requires our governments and their officials to keep our community safe.

In our courses, we decided that we have basically been on the right track, especially with our MPD stories. Some of that, though, is just from our freedom to cover whatever we want. We’re not trying to scoop the other guys on every crime, arrest, and outrage. When we cover crime, we try to approach it from the side of the community, in order to hold government accountable — not the other way around.

The Poynter folks asked those in the program to come up with a mission statement, a sort of formal agreement with those we serve. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

“At the Memphis Flyer, we promise to find and report the crime trends that shape our community on a regular basis. We will present our findings unfiltered and put them into context so you can understand the trends.

“We will attempt to compare Memphis crime trends to other areas. We hope these comparisons will give you a real-world context to see if Memphis public safety agencies are effectively carrying out their duties, or if there are things we can learn from other law enforcement agencies.

“We will bring you independent, expert analysis to help our readers understand the public safety situation in our city and how it impacts their lives.”