For as long as I’ve worked in Rhode Island journalism, something has bothered me.
The city of Providence – where I grew up and still live – is diverse, interesting, fresh, and exciting. It’s filled with people from all over the world; of all ages, races, sexual orientations, and gender identities; with varied interests and occupations. The city has more than 190,000 people spread across 25 neighborhoods, from Wanskuck to Wayland to Washington Park. It’s a vibrant place.
And yet I find that published opinion essays about the city are often tired, stale, and dusty. Contributors tend to skew older, white, male, and conservative. It feels like the written conversation about Providence is out of sync with the city I know and love.
And this is when there even are opinion essays to read about Providence.
Many of the city’s biggest news outlets – including WPRI, WJAR, WLNE – don’t publish opinion content. The Public’s Radio discontinued its “This I Believe” series a long time ago. The Boston Globe’s commentaries, while often quite good, cover the entire state and sit behind a paywall. The Providence Journal’s columns and commentaries are also paywalled and have steadily shrunk in volume in recent years. In 2020, the paper stopped publishing editorials. The paper now only publishes op-eds on the weekend.
This leaves precious few places beyond social media sites or message boards where folks in Providence can talk to each other via the written word. And as someone who loves both Providence and opinion journalism – op-eds and personal essays – this makes me sad. At a moment when we ought to be talking more to each other, we’re doing it less. And the voices being heard seem to reflect only a conspicuously narrow sample of who lives here.
I’d love to fix that.
That is the aim of the opinion section we launched at the Providence Eye a few months ago. We’re calling it “Readers’ Voices.”
Now, if you’re reading this and wondering, “What is The Providence Eye?” I get it. As a nonprofit, online, community-driven news outlet that launched in 2023, we’re still putting out the word about our existence. This introductory post from two years ago is a great place to start. It reads, in part, “We want to harness the collective wisdom and lived experience of our city to help us understand ourselves.”
Every week since its launch, the Eye has pursued this mission via news articles written by community members. And Readers’ Voices is an extension of that. We published our first essay in April.
While the Eye’s journalism adheres to fairly traditional news standards, Readers’ Voices is a place where contributors are encouraged to draw from their own perspectives, experiences, and opinions. In the months since its launch, we’ve published arguments for rent stabilization, ranked-choice voting, a bolder tourism strategy, and better funding for libraries at the city’s public schools. We’ve published essays from bicycle-riding food-scrap collectors, climate-anxiety counselors, laboratory-school parents, and Providence ex-pats who still think about the city. We’ve published fiery statements from city councilors enraged about local ICE enforcement tactics and a dispatch from a bike trip to Pawtucket’s new soccer stadium.
And if you live in Providence, we want to hear from you, too.
My short pitch is that we’re looking for “arguments or essays about life in Providence.” My slightly-longer pitch, accessible on our Guidelines page, calls for ”first-person essays about Providence life…[in] a variety of styles and formats: an argument about a policy issue affecting the city, a personal story about life in the city, a message to share with your fellow Providence residents, an essay about some aspect of the city’s past.”
I’m cynical about a lot of things these days. And sometimes, given the darkness of our national politics, I can drift toward despondency. But my work editing this section is a way to push back against that. Despite the scary times we’re in, and despite the bruises I’ve sustained from more than 15 years in journalism, many of my core beliefs about journalism’s power remain intact.
I haven’t given up on my belief that talking to each other via thoughtful short essays is an act of community-building.
I haven’t given up on my belief that when we listen to each other – across demographic and neighborhood lines, across age and gender, across interests and social milieus – we make our city better.
I haven’t yet given up on my belief that a path out of this era’s rampant dehumanization is a commitment to re-humanizing those around us. And I know from personal experience that written words have an almost magical power to do that.
So that’s what we’re up to with the Eye’s new(ish) Readers’ Voices section. And whether you’ve lived here for five minutes, or – like me – most of your life, I’d love for you to join us.
I invite you to send me your ideas, pitches, rants, raves, arguments, essays, or fully-written drafts of op-eds. At a basic level, the only requirements are that these essays are true, written by you (and not by AI), and about Providence.
I am happy to work with you to get your essay into publication-ready shape. In fact, working with writers is one of the best parts of the (unpaid) job.
I can’t wait to read – and publish – your words about this wonderful, complex city we share.
Philip Eil is a freelance journalist and author who lives on the East Side of Providence. He is a member of the Providence Eye’s Board of Directors. And he is the Eye’s inaugural Readers’ Voices editor. You can contact him at [email protected].
Want to comment? Click!