Aldermen seek to sort out who’s a journalist—with no easy answers

Earlier this week, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen rolled out its first-ever media credentialing process. Too many random people have been on the actual floor of the aldermanic hearing room, Aldermanic President Megan Green has said. She wants to limit the floor to actual journalists.

The problem for Green is that the media is increasingly itself a random group. At a time when anyone with a few followers on social media and a smartphone can call themselves a journalist, it’s hard to see who the credentialing process could possibly cut.

Indeed, the people breaking news in St. Louis these days are just as likely to be former TV journalists live-streaming on Facebook or engineers posting on X as newspaper reporters. Some of the citizen journalists seem to be harkening back to an age-old tradition and writing under a nom de plume; almost all are far more opinionated (or at least, more openly opinionated) than the mainstream media outlets aiming for objectivity. The most recent addition to the melange is the St. Louis Globe Democrat resurrected as a Substack. The person behind the project is Willard Gene Harris, a 26-year-old who is open about not having a background in journalism. His motivation: “I’m tired of corporate media.” Why the Globe? “I like the name.” 

It’s been a long time since it was only traditional media outlets who want media access. But in some ways, it’s never been more of a free-for-all. 

That became clear last month, when former KTVI (Fox-2) journalist Elliott Davis claimed on his Facebook page, which has 184,000 followers, that Green was trying to bar him from covering the city’s legislative body. His sources, he said, were two people affiliated with the Board of Aldermen. “I have it verified,” he told SLM at the time. He repeated the claim on the radio.

No one else has ever been able to verify the claim (and KSDK’s Mark Maxwell pushed back pretty aggressively, tweeting out, “A whole lot of time spent trying to get to the bottom of erroneous claims made by a retired journalist who said credentials rules would’ve barred him from the floor”). But Davis’ allegation has persisted in the public consciousness. 

“It has grown a lot since I left television,” Davis says of his following on Facebook. “You would think that without the advantage of being on television, it would decrease. But the opposite has been true, because—I love my time at Fox-2, but now, of course, I can speak more frankly.”

Davis’ 45 years on broadcast television make him an outlier among the citizen journalists covering local news. Harris, the young man who’s claimed the Globe-Democrat name for his Substack, not only has no formal journalism training, but is also a relative newcomer. An Arkansas native who grew up in Branson, he’s finishing a master’s degree at Missouri State and estimates he spends 80 percent of his time in St. Louis. During his time here, the failures of the local media have gotten his goat.

“Things will happen in the city, and corporate media, when it negatively affects them, will hide those stories and suppress them,” he says. “Then people don’t know those things happened. Like it could be anything from a simple break-in at a business to corruption in City Hall.” He says he wants his Substack Globe Democrat to include coverage of crime, but not in the way of local TV outlets: “I don’t think the crime is a race issue or a class issue. I think it’s a corporate-driven issue. That is, people are poor, they have to do these things, and then the police don’t do their jobs.”

Another example is Denis Beganovic, who has declared himself the “mayor of Downtown” and is often the first to report to his 7,000 followers on development news and business openings and closings in that neighborhood. Any established outlet claiming to never have taken a tweet from him and reported it into a story is almost certainly lying. Beganovic sees himself as an important counter-programmer to those painting the city (and downtown specifically) as a crime-ridden and doom-looped. 

“The negativity lane about St Louis is just a big traffic jam. So why sit in that when you can go in a different direction?” he tells SLM. “If nobody comes downtown, why was there more money spent downtown last year than in Chesterfield? And, like, who goes to Chesterfield if more money was spent down here?” 

In just the past few days Beganovic has posted about a new fast casual salad and burrito place now open downtown, the quality of the coffee to be found downtown, and the city’s declining homicide rate. 

“What I try to do is find reliable, defendable data,” he says. “It counters that narrative that you see from some of these other ones, like the guy who goes by Jason Rivera—obviously it’s not his real name.”

Beganovic is referring to someone else who falls under the umbrella of citizen journalist and who also reports on the city. But if you only knew about St. Louis from Rivera’s coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking the city is a gang-warfare-ridden, no-go zone. “At least 233 kids have been shot in St. Louis since 2020. That’s over 10 full classrooms. This week, Missouri stripped St. Louis of control over its police department—a major blow to @saintlouismayor. Will this end the high crime rates and corrupt political games in policing?” is a fairly indicative post. 

There’s an active debate about who is actually tweeting as Rivera. Theories abound. But Beganovic, for one, is convinced it is not a young man named Jason. (The person behind Rivera’s account went silent when we asked directly last week.) 

Painting the city as a haven for crime is nothing new in local news coverage, and to Rivera’s credit, he does it with a level of detail that few can compete with. Last December, he even managed to get under then-Mayor Tishaura Jones’ skin. She responded to one of his posts on Twitter, which led many to wonder why the mayor was engaging with people she herself was calling trolls. (“That troll is a voter, too,” someone closely involved in the election observed at the time. Except, was he really?)

The tête-à-tête shows that in these scrapes between citizen journalists and the institutions they cover, the institution is almost always going to be at a disadvantage.

“If I have to come with facts, it’s frustrating that you don’t have those same constraints,” says Conner Kerrigan, a former mayoral spokesman currently writing on Substack. About Davis specifically, he says that he had a good relationship with him near the end of the reporter’s tenure at Fox-2. But after Davis went independent, he got hard to work with. 

Kerrigan recalls one incident when Davis used his platform to take the mayor to task for not providing a warming bus for the homeless. Davis essentially conceded he was an activist, Kerrigan says. “An activist can never be appeased by a spokesperson,” Kerrigan says, noting that activists by nature will always try to push the establishment further than they can go. (Davis, for his part, says that one of his main motivations is helping and advocating for the homeless.)

Last week, the Post-Dispatch reported that RealSTLNews, an independent, Black-owned, social media-based outlet, had its credentials suspended by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. (The police routinely provide incident summaries, booking photos and occasionally video used by the media.) That would make it harder for the outlet to cover crime, which is its main focus.

RealSTLNews was founded amid the 2014 Ferguson protests and has grown to have hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms. Founder Amir Brandy sued the police after being pepper-sprayed during the 2017 protests against the not guilty verdict of former police officer Jason Stockley. 

RealSTLNews drew police ire last month over what the police said were numerous instances of false information amplified on the outlet’s pages. These included reports, later proven incorrect, about a supposed murder hit list found in a vacant house on the southside and bodies buried in the yard of a Dutchtown home—the latter of which, the outlet wrote on Instagram, “forces us to confront the grim reality of…missing persons cases.” 

Police spokesman Mitch McCoy says that the department’s public information arm has to strike a delicate balance of informing the community without causing undue fear. “Their platform has been used to spread fake news,” he says of RealSTLNews. “[They’ve reported] things that have not even been verified. It truly spreads fear.” He says that the department has a much better working relationship with other large influencers, mentioning specifically Derk Brown and Voice of the People. “We will treat them like any other journalist.” 

McCoy says RealSTLNews has since been reinstated. He says the department has extended an invitation to meet with them. 

They haven’t heard back. 

Following news of their suspension, RealSTLNews released a statement saying, “We’re not going anywhere.” They added, “We stand on truth, and while we are open to professionalism, we will never compromise our commitment to the community.”