There is nothing like getting out into the community to be reminded of all the good things happening out there. At the Douglass Community Association on Monday, April 14, a group of leaders gathered to update others on the work being done for youth, veterans, mothers and so many more. There were bankers and builders, alongside community advocates. Literacy, mental health, and music all had a place at the table.

This is the kind of gathering that Second Wave was made for. Stories of folks, like Stacey Ledbetter of the Douglass, doing the work that moves the community forward are the ones we love to tell. And we have spent the past 15 years telling them.

When I sat down to write this retrospective, it was slow going at first. Having pondered this difficulty, I came to the conclusion it might, in part, be because as you are in the middle of growing something you don’t necessarily have time to take note of what’s changing.

The founders of the company that built Second Wave came out of the tech world. They found that when their company and those of their friends were doing impressive things — creating jobs and innovations — they couldn’t get any coverage in their local newspapers. At a time when journalism was focused on layoffs and crime, there seemed to be no reporters to cover business successes and people making positive changes in their neighborhoods. So they started a company to do that reporting.

In the early days, we didn’t have a name for the kind of reporting that Second Wave does, this blend of stories on entrepreneurs and changemakers, but we came to embrace the description of feature stories told through a solutions journalism lens.

If you are not familiar with solutions journalism, it explores a problem and then presents ways in which that problem is being solved. It is designed to give readers a sense of hope and agency in a world that can sometimes feel like there are no solutions. 

Courtesy Douglass AssociationParticipants at a recent meeting of Douglass Association Tenants and Partners discuss upcoming opportunities for the community. Our stories are about the people creating the change they want to see in their communities. We have stories that show off what is unique about the communities we cover — the types of places and events that help people feel connected to their town. 

In the beginning, I wrote nearly all of the stories and grew the publication to a freelance staff of seven regular writing contributors and three photographers. 

Having come from a newsroom background — 25 years at the Kalamazoo Gazette and six years at a paper in the Detroit suburbs — this style of reporting was and is refreshing. We don’t sit in a newsroom and wait for the stories to come to us. Instead, we have regular sessions where we talk to residents and leaders from the neighborhoods who tell us what is happening and what stories need to be told.

The On the Ground program was introduced in 2017, which focused on lifting the voices of those often left out of other media reporting. It included training neighborhood reporters. There also was the expansion of coverage in Battle Creek in 2018 with its own On the Ground program and the introduction of the Voices of Youth program, dedicated to teaching a new generation of young people the signifcance of journalism as they learn to report and write stories that are important to them. 

In late 2019, Second Wave and a group of local journalists that has grown to 12 members formed the Southwest Michigan Journalism collaborative to support one another and local news as journalism continues to collapse nationwide. (Reportedly, an average of 2.5 newspapers were closing per week in 2023.)

As people are increasingly telling the stories of their time during the pandemic lockdown, I have come to realize how different my experience was. There was work as usual only lots more of it. We went from a weekly to an almost daily publication during that time because there was such a demand for local news regarding the pandemic. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Jane Parikh Simons and Al Jones especially delivered all they had during the height of COVID. 

We went on to offer “A Way Home: Housing Solutions,” our series on affordable housing and the unhoused, with stories of programs that are working to keep people housed, advocates for those who need housing, and the stories of those who have moved from homelessness into a place of their own.

And then, in 2023, Theresa Coty O’Neil became managing editor. She has brought her own touch to the magazine, hiring new writers and assigning stories that reflect her deep knowledge of the region. I moved into the position of Executive Editor for Issue Media Group, the parent company of Second Wave.

Looking through the highlights of our work over the past 15 years, I was hoping to see some patterns, discover some important insights about our readers. They really, really love Mark Wedel’s story on Japanese knotweed. Perhaps the greatest takeaway is our readers appreciate the deeper dives, stories with context, stories about ideas, and the people who think them up and then act on them. 

Readers have found their own way to describe us. We have been called the website with the pictures. At a gathering dedicated to exploring hope a reader recently told Theresa: “You give us hope.” 

Which brings us back to the Douglass Association. I was there to ask about story ideas, leads on what we should be covering. I left with two pages full of them, and we are hoping they will have more to share. There’s always a story to tell.

Courtesy Douglass AssociationParticipants at a recent meeting of Douglass Association Tenants and Partners discuss upcoming opportunities for the community.