For more than a decade, Detroit Is Different has gone where event listings, algorithms and quick-hit media rarely can: into the context behind the people shaping the city.
Khary Frazier has spent more than a decade asking Detroiters to explain how they got here.
Not what they are promoting. Not what event is happening this weekend. Not whatever happens to be moving through the algorithm that morning.
The story.
Since 2014, Detroit Is Different founder Khary Frazier has been building an increasingly deep record of the people, families, ideas and movements that make Detroit what it is. Frazier calls it storytelling. Increasingly, though, he has another word for what he’s building.
A library.
That distinction matters.
Because at a moment when media is getting faster, shorter and increasingly driven by whatever people happen to be talking about today, Frazier has spent 12 years doing almost the exact opposite.
He sits down. He asks questions. And he gives people time to answer.
“I’m more so trying to let you understand their story.”
— Khary Frazier
Before Detroit Is Different, There Was Music
Frazier didn’t come to podcasting through journalism.
He came through music.
Before Detroit Is Different existed, he already owned microphones, mixing boards and consoles. More importantly, he knew how to use them. He was producing music and, by the early 2010s, had also become an early podcast listener.
Between classes at Henry Ford Community College, he would listen to people like Marc Maron and Bill Burr. Eventually, the thought occurred to him that he already had most of what he needed to make something himself.
Initially, the podcast was connected to his music. He had an album coming and wanted another way to promote it.
But another idea was sitting underneath that.
Detroiters Needed a Way to Find One Another
Detroit, Frazier says, can be a cliquish town.
People can be doing extraordinary work a few miles apart and never cross paths. Different communities have their own circles, relationships, and histories. If you’re outside of one of those circles, you may never know what’s happening inside it.
Frazier wanted to change that.
Detroit Is Different became a way to introduce Detroiters to one another.
And over time, the interviews became less about what someone was doing and more about understanding how they became the person doing it.
“I’m not trying to explicitly, per se, sell what the person is selling,” Frazier told BLAC. “I’m more so trying to let you understand their story.”
That philosophy has become the foundation of Detroit Is Different.
Context Changes the Story
Frazier once worked as circulation manager for the Michigan Citizen, giving him an unusual vantage point into journalism. He could see what headlines connected with readers and watched how the newspaper approached Detroit from a grassroots perspective.
But Detroit Is Different allowed him to do something traditional media often doesn’t have the space to do.
Stay awhile.
Ask about someone’s parents.
Ask about the neighborhood.
Ask what happened before the business, campaign, organization, artwork or movement everyone suddenly wants to discuss.
Frazier wants context.
“If I can get context, even if I disagree, I can understand.”
Understanding isn’t agreement. It isn’t endorsement.
It is simply refusing to flatten people into whatever happened most recently.
That becomes increasingly important in a media environment that often rewards exactly the opposite.
When Everything Becomes Content
There is an enormous amount of content being produced right now.
Frazier isn’t convinced that means we’re becoming better informed.
The rise of influencers and personality-driven media has blurred the line between expertise, commentary, reporting, and entertainment. A topic trends, and suddenly people with little previous interest or expertise in it become commentators because the algorithm has identified an audience.
Traditional media isn’t immune either.
Reporting increasingly competes with opinion, personality and the relentless demand to publish something else.
Then there is the other treadmill familiar to almost every local publisher.
Twenty-five things to do this weekend.
The restaurant that just opened.
The event photos.
The quick story designed primarily to generate another click.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of it.
But a publication can produce an enormous amount of content without building much of a record.
What Gets Lost When We Only Publish for Today?
Frazier believes long-form storytelling offers something different.
A two-hour conversation makes it harder to hide behind a talking point. Eventually, the story has to go somewhere. The listener begins to understand not only what someone believes, but how they arrived there.
And strangely, Frazier argues, the short version may actually be harder.
You have to understand the entire arc before you know what can safely be removed.
Detroit Is Different has chosen to preserve the arc.
A publication can produce an enormous amount of content without building much of a record.
Find the People Who Hear the Music
That commitment doesn’t always fit neatly into the systems designed to fund media.
Detroit Is Different has historically been financed largely through Frazier’s own for-profit work. The organization now has a nonprofit structure and has received some grant support in recent years, but much of what exists was built because Frazier decided it needed to exist.
That reality became especially clear after Detroit Is Different applied for a grant centered around Detroit storytelling.
The organization didn’t make the second round.
After more than a decade of doing almost exactly that work, the rejection landed hard.
Not only for Frazier.
For his team.
He knew he needed to respond in a way that acknowledged the disappointment without allowing someone else’s decision to become a verdict on the value of their work.
That moment produced a phrase:
FIND THE PEOPLE WHO HEAR THE MUSIC.
Frazier has spent enough time building unconventional things to understand that not everyone will see them before they exist.
Sometimes, he believes, the better funding relationship isn’t about convincing someone to approve an idea shaped around their expectations.
It is finding someone willing to say: We know what you do. We trust your creativity. Go make it.
For Frazier, that’s bigger than getting a grant.
It’s about maintaining dignity in the work.
Twelve Years Later, It Looks Like History
After 12 years, Detroit Is Different has accumulated something that would have been difficult to recognize when Frazier turned on those microphones in 2014.
History.
Hundreds of conversations about Detroit.
People explaining their families, neighborhoods, politics, businesses, art, organizations and ideas in their own voices.
Some guests will become more important with time.
Some places will disappear.
Some organizations will close.
Some neighborhoods will change.
Some debates that seem enormous today will eventually become chapters in Detroit’s history.
But the conversations will remain.
A Podcast Becomes a Library
That’s why Frazier has begun thinking differently about what Detroit Is Different actually is.
Not simply a podcast.
A library.
That may also be the most important idea to emerge from his work.
A community still needs a record of itself.
The internet has given us the ability to publish more information than at any point in human history. It has not guaranteed that we’ll preserve the things worth remembering.
Platforms change.
Algorithms change.
Companies disappear.
Links break.
Trends move on.
A community still needs a record of itself.
And somebody has to sit down long enough to make one.
For more than a decade, Khary Frazier has been doing exactly that.
One Detroit story at a time.
Filed under