Reporting on Independent Grocery Stores in a Food Desert: Anna Conkling in Conversation with Stephanie Parker
By Anna Conkling
Photo of Stephanie Parker from her website
In the article “What it Takes to Keep Independent Grocery Stores Open in Rural Communities,” journalist Stephanie Parker takes readers inside stores in North Dakota and highlights why these stores are so important to their communities. Parker highlights some of the solutions small towns have come up with to keep their grocery stores alive. Some of these solutions include buying shares in their local grocery store, fundraising to keep stores alive, and participating with the North Dakota Rural Grocery Initiative, which seeks to “ensure residents in the state have a consistent supply of healthy foods,” according to the organization’s website. The article, which appeared on the Civil Eats website, addresses the hardships some stores throughout the state have faced and what solutions they have come up with to survive in the wake of grocery delivery services, like Instacart and Amazon cart, and a decline in rural communities' population. I spoke with Parker to learn more about why she decided to write a story about food deserts, how she turned the story into a solutions piece, and what she learned through her reporting.
What drove you to write a story about food deserts?
I wrote for Civil Eats a while back about food co-op and as part of that story, I had spoken to somebody named Laurie Capouch; she's in this grocery store article as well. She's the head of the North Dakota Rural Grocery Initiative.
She was interesting because she had told me all about the Rural Grocery Initiative in North Dakota, and I always kept her in the back of my mind as an interesting person to maybe come back to and do a story more on the Rural Grocery Initiative. That’s where I got the idea from, because there's been a fair amount of stories online about Dollar Generals coming into a food desert or generally both in cities and in rural areas. I just decided to focus on the North Dakota Rural Grocery Initiative specifically and look at some of the stores in that. They were all stores that were working with or getting help from the North Dakota Rural Grocery Initiative. I think Lori had put me in touch with all of them.
What did you learn through your research that helped you when you were reporting?
I hadn't lived in North Dakota before or been there, but I had lived in Montana. So I had sort of a sense of what it felt like, what the distances were like, a little bit of what these small towns were like. Being from New York, that's not a great way to understand these things.
Then, getting a sense of where all these stores were, getting some background on the towns they were in. Laurie has a bunch of data. She had these surveys from the different grocery stores. Rural Grocery Initiative is based off of a Rural Grocery Initiative from Kansas State University, which also has a bunch of surveys about rural grocery and a bunch of data on that.
I had spoken to an economist to get a better idea of the background of what I was looking at; what the rural grocery situation was on the whole in the United States, and then to get a better sense of where I was going specifically in North Dakota, what these towns were like, and what kind of issues were taking place there.
What were some obstacles that you faced writing this and reporting? Was it hard to get people to trust you?
Definitely, I was lucky because Laurie had introduced me to people and they trusted her. That made it easier because I was coming in and being like, “Tell me all about your grocery store and you don't know me." It was helpful having that introduction.
I think they appreciated the attention because these small towns aren't always getting as much attention. They're losing grocery stores and they're worried. I think they appreciated being able to get the story out there because they weren't necessarily getting it to a national audience. I think going there really got the trust.. That was a big gift that I was able to do that. Simple Eats paid enough that I felt like I could go and I got the grant from the Solutions Journalism Network. It also brings the idea of having journalists who are local do this kind of reporting, which I'm not. That’s something else, whether I was the right person to do it in the first place.
How did you know when you had enough of a picture of a story and enough voices to move on to writing the article?
Part of it was just that my trip was over. You are able to do as much as you can do. I had to leave. I think that's always hard. You always end up having talked to more people than you use, usually for a bigger story.. I wanted to feel like I talked to people at different kinds of stores who had done different kinds of solutions or had done different kinds of things. And, [I wanted[ to hear from some customers, even though I only featured one or two customers, to get a sense of why these stores were important. I also wanted to really get a sense of the place, what these communities were like and what the places were like.
You can get back in touch with people, which I did for follow up information, especially as it went through the editing process.
What did you personally learn writing the piece?
I learned how important a grocery store is to a community beyond food. They're important because they can be community spaces. If you don't have a grocery store, then people aren't into town as much because maybe they go to the next biggest town or the next biggest city and go to Walmart. And then they're just not physically in the town as much. There's not as much of a sense of community. I think a broader issue is the outflux of people in rural America in general. People are leaving these places and they're not being replaced by other people. What I took away from it [is] that people also really want to have their grocery stores. Towns want grocery stores. People in towns really want to keep their grocery stores and work really hard to do it.