Bringing Humanity to Headlines: Why Strong Towns Tells Stories Differently

Strong Towns is many things to many people. Some people enter our orbit through an online course. Others, through an in-person event at the local bookstore. Perhaps you’re just a casual reader and still think about that one article Chuck Marohn wrote in 2013. Maybe you’re an elected official who attended the Beyond Blame Press Conference back in October per the recommendation of one of your constituents. Maybe none of these are your story, but you still found yourself here.

Making all of these initiatives work in concert is a top priority internally. It’s a process that involves a lot of rigor, sensitivity and, at times, a dose of hard-to-swallow pills. I’ve been a staff writer at Strong Towns for almost two years now and, since we’re taking this week to celebrate how much our movement has grown, I figured I’d clue you into the things our content is trying to accomplish. After all, this movement needs you.

What Is Our Content Trying To Accomplish?

Content is how we amplify the stories you care about in your neighborhood, in your city and across your movement. It’s how we take a dry report and package it into something that is not only digestible but can move you to action. It’s how we take a small win and, through long-form journalism, illustrate why sweating the small stuff is a big deal.

It’s also an opportunity for us to challenge the norms in our media ecosystem that reinforce the status quo — the status quo being 40,000 deaths annually on our streets that we apparently can do next to nothing about. Hundreds of thousands of crashes across our communities that are, allegedly, just a consequence of car ownership and some bad driving.

At the most granular level, this can start with something as simple as word choice. At Strong Towns, we insist on using the word "crash" instead of "accident." This is not for the sake of drama but because calling a collision an "accident" suggests that there’s little or nothing you can do to prevent it. And we know that’s not true. You may have also seen Strong Towns pushback on the word "pedestrian." This is not to say that there’s no place for the term, but too often we see the humanity of victims reduced to this clinical form of mobility that frankly obscures the relatability of the incident and dulls the urgency.

That pedestrian was a rising junior crossing the street to pick up the food he'd ordered. It was a mom of two exiting the library after story time. It was a former council member biking home after a gala at which he received a lifetime achievement award. It was an eight-year-old excited to see his father across the street after a long day at school. It was a recent retiree headed to the corner store to check on her grandchildren.

Besides injecting some humanity into the tragedies that take place, this is part of a broader commitment to zooming out and getting the fuller picture.

In conventional crash reporting, the writer gets their intel from the police report and other law enforcement or first responders present at the scene. If they're lucky, they also get the perspectives of the parties involved in the collision and maybe witnesses or neighbors. This may seem like a fair assembly of people to put together a balanced story, and it is, but the resulting story more often than not posits the crash as if it were a singular event, a one-off tragedy that exists in a vacuum.

What we know is that the story of a crash is hardly ever the story of only one crash.

Even anecdotally we know this isn’t true — how many times has a reporter talked to a witness or neighbor who’s said something to the effect of, “Oh yeah, I avoid that intersection at all costs,” or “I was just there with my kid and the same thing almost happened to me,” or “that was bound to happen on that road.”

There’s a tacit understanding that the design of our roads and places contributes to the frequency and severity of crashes.

And yet, that understanding is largely absent from our national conversations. The 40,000 deaths that occur annually are seen as largely the fault of individual driver error. Driver error isn’t negligible, of course. It’s worth investigating. Yet, it is only one contributing factor. Does the United States possess some of the most errant drivers? Or have we enshrined a system of transportation that regularly endangers people, killing up to 110 a day?

Telling these stories isn’t easy. For one, they are burdened by trauma — after all, a life was lost and many others broken by proxy. Moreover, we have built a system that starts and stops with blame. That’s how insurance is structured. That’s how law enforcement officers map their findings. That’s how our judiciary system will immortalize the event. That’s the story the media will broadcast to the public at large.

That’s where you come in. You know there’s more to the story. You know that the current system doesn't need to exist forevermore. In fact, you’ve seen how optically narrowing streets through the planting of trees, painting of murals and installation of bollards has slowed down cars and saved lives. You’ve seen how quickly some cities are responding to crashes and you’re confident that, in the future, they can be proactive rather than reactive.

However you found yourself at Strong Towns, you know that 40,000 deaths a year is absurd. It doesn’t have to be this way, and content is one way that we share and reinforce this knowledge. My job is to write, and yours is to apply and amplify. This movement needs you. Join us by becoming a member today.

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Strong Towns is helping local leaders, technical professionals and involved residents across North America make their communities more prosperous and financially resilient.

This movement needs you. Become a member today.