Conclusions: Implications
The Zilber Family Foundation, Greater Milwaukee Foundation, United Neighborhood Centers of Milwaukee (UNCOM), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Marquette University have joined to fund the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service as a means of constructing a new reality of the city’s inner city – perhaps in the eyes of people who are hesitant or unwilling to invest there, and certainly on behalf of those who are striving to improve the quality of life in the neighborhoods.
Scholarly literature and McGowan, whose career started at The Chicago Reporter, with its brand of hard-hitting, investigative journalism, remind us that news organizations have been covering low-income, urban communities for many decades. Berger and Luckmann and other scholars contend that reality is constructed rather than found. Journalism does not merely reflect a reality that sits out there, but we understand reality – our personal and shared experiences – through the work media create and disseminate. NNS’ mission may be to provide professional and objective reporting about low-income neighborhoods, but it also strives to change the perception of them. Thus, it is socially constructing the reality that is different from what’s constructed by mainstream media.
For example, McGowan disagrees that NNS is constructing reality, just as any journalist holds dear to the idea of reporting that is professional and objective. She adds: The reality is that the central city neighborhoods we cover are complex. There are amazing people who choose to live and work in these communities, and care about passionately about them. There are people living in poverty who struggle every day, but are not criminals. Much of the news coverage about the neighborhoods has been related to the many aspects of a criminal case, as we’ve discussed before. NNS is working to change the perception of both those who live in the neighborhoods, and the mostly white, more affluent neighborhoods that surround them, by painting a more balanced picture of “reality.”
Evidently, McGowan and the scholars holding to the concept of social construction of reality may need to agree to disagree. She would not describe her efforts as socially constructing reality. But in her passage above, McGowan recognizes that NNS aims to frame perceptions of the neighborhoods it covers that are very much contrary to those created by mainstream media.
Interestingly, McGowan also objects to the term community journalism being applied to NNS. “Again, it’s about perception,” she said, adding “community journalism does not connote consistently high-quality journalism. There is high-quality community journalism, but there is also terrible journalism – biased, inaccurate, poorly written, unprofessional.” She said “that’s the opposite” of how NNS should be perceived. This also calls attention to how culturally difficult it is to do the work to which McGowan and NNS aspires. Just as she resists the term community journalism, I as a journalist have long done so for terms such as projects instead of housing developments, clinic instead of doctor’s office, minorities instead of people of color, and activists instead of advocates. The media too often uses pejorative terms to create a reality of haves and have-nots.
Again, as someone who began his journalism career at a small weekly newspaper focusing exclusively on the black community in Milwaukee, and then went on to work at several mid-size and major daily newspapers along the East Coast, I sympathize with the tensions McGowan articulates. I have long wondered why many community newspapers, particularly those focusing on ethnic communities, do not seem to strive for excellence. (Let me point out here, and I am sure McGowan would agree, that there is an amazing legacy of outstanding community journalism dating back to the days of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, etc.) One wishes that every inner city could have a media outlet such as NNS, and led by an editor with the credentials and devotion to communities and neighborhoods that McGowan embodies.
What can be done, though, to ensure that McGowan and her staff’s hard work achieves greater visibility and awareness? Doing community journalism differently – with novice reporters, many of whom will come and go as graduate students and interns, and depending on organizations and institutions with limited resources as sources – is admirable. But it remains unclear who else is reading the work (and why and how) beyond NNS’ own means of analytics, including page views, Facebook “likes,” etc.
So this must also be asked: Who most needs to read the news service’s work and share its content with others in order for it to achieve its purposes? It is useful here to draw again on Gillis and Moore (2003), particularly as they relate the types of sources and places where journalists encounter or affect the citizenry. Ideally, federal, state and local officials – as well as recognized leaders of institutions in society – would use NNS’ reporting to help present the case to businesses and private developers that investing in Milwaukee’s inner city is worthwhile, if not an imperative. The quasi-official organizations about which NNS writes so much should make more of an effort to circulate the coverage within the communities they serve, as it helps them all stand that much taller to know a legitimate news operation values who they are and what they do.
But what about the people and groups the news service may know the least about, the ones that perhaps may be the most important – those from outside of the 17 targeted neighborhoods? Debunking stereotypes can only happen if those who hold dear to them are confronted with different realities. In NNS’ case, this means that its content must reach those – from Greater Milwaukee and elsewhere – who would otherwise not know about the quality-of-life and self-improvement efforts sprouting from churches, community events, schools, markets, coffee shops or private homes in the inner city.
Meanwhile, NNS could use some more personality. McGowan’s professional standards and ambitions could work just as well with more human-interest stories as with those about larger community concerns. One imagines that an abundance of profiles about interesting individuals would help to make the community more visible to itself and lend stature to the lives of everyday people. NNS and the community alike would be well served, for example, if it hired at least one outstanding reporter and writer capable of weighing in as a columnist or blogger on important issues – and otherwise providing slice-of-life nuggets – about people living and working in the neighborhoods. Imagine having the kind of work that Gregory Stanford and Eugene Kane did for many years at the Journal Sentinel – and which James Causey does for it now – appear regularly on milwaukeenns.org. Adding a personality capable of maintaining the standards McGowan demands would help generate more audience for the news service.
Of course, doing more profiles or adding a columnist will not solve the news service’s most glaring concern: surviving after its current grant funding expires soon. Both consultants hired last year to recommend strategies for NNS – John Barron, the former Chicago Sun-Times publisher, and Paula Ellis, formerly of the Knight Foundation – agreed that increasing its audience through more aggressive marketing and sales is vital. In their 2013 reports, Barron also called for maximizing NNS’ potential for serving as a “conduit for community,” while Ellis advocated for being of it rather than about it.
Interestingly, Barron wrote that he had not yet met anyone “not institutionally tied to the site” who knew of milwaukeenns.org. He also called for more neighborhood profiles and developing a columnist/blogger, and was right to recommend, among other things: 1) a website overhaul to make it look and feel newsier and to add gravitas, 2) doing more “how-to” stories aimed at providing “more utility” for readers, 3) soliciting op-ed pieces from neighborhood leaders, businesses and politicians and 4) “adopting a forum or soapbox for readers to air” their “opinions on just about anything.”
Ellis smartly urged NNS to undergo several “mindset shifts” to help “unlock the full potential of this pioneering news service and increase involvement.” One shift is that its work must be less about “reporting on static events” and more about “fostering a sense of place and developing among residents a shared sense that we are all in this together.” Additionally – and my own view (Lowe, 2011b) is that this is vital given that people of color have higher usage rates compared with white owners across a wide range of mobile applications – Ellis said NNS should “adopt a mobile-first mantra” and devise a “high-tech, low-tech dissemination and creation strategy” for each neighborhood. Another idea, given that “everyone is content and creates content”: enable residents and others to be the “eyes and ears” for journalists. In other words, Ellis said, crowdsourcing by means of posting pictures of potholes or blighted buildings that need attention. She also said NNS should employ available tools for “quickly processing and visualizing data” inasmuch as agreeing on what data to use and measure is “itself a community-building activity.”
All of Barron and Ellis’ suggestions should be enacted. I would add to them that the news service should increase its branding by hosting large community-focused events. Short of that, as a community leader noted at a recent retreat for some of NNS’ stakeholders, promoting its website on billboards along local streets and highways would be nice. My sense is that McGowan and my fellow members of the news service’s advisory board are seriously considering the advice. Indeed, the site is being redesigned.
Beyond all of that, this case study is not only important for the communities that NNS serves, but also for journalism education, particularly students at Marquette, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and elsewhere, more than a dozen of whom have gained valuable experience as interns under McGowan’s tutelage. Lori Bergen, dean of the Diederich College of Communication, called the editor-in-chief a “rock star” in a NNS promotional video (Darmek) and said students have told her after graduation that the news service was “the most important and critical experience” they had in preparing for a journalism career. Just as Heather Ronaldson and two other Marquette students who interned at NNS did before him, part-time reporter Edgar Mendez will have an internship at the Journal Sentinel this summer, thanks to his success with the news service.
As the literature pointed out, NNS is one of many efforts nationally to provide community-based training for college journalism students. Even as my students have produced content for the news service during each of four prior semesters, Marquette’s journalism and media studies faculty is working through how best to incorporate the news service into its undergraduate and graduate programs. Nonetheless, this spring, adjunct journalism instructor Daria Kempka’s online design class is working with McGowan, part-time NNS reporter Andrea Waxman and Lillian Thomas – an assistant managing editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and spending the year at Marquette as part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism – on a weeks-long project focusing on Type-II diabetes in the city, which the news service will publish.
And yet Bergen also said in the video that the collaboration between a university such as Marquette and “all these other entities” provides the chance to “preserve the kind of quality journalism we want to see in our communities” when mainstream media struggles to find the resources or will to meet that need. The dean added: So this kind of partnership is critical: Our students learn from the experience, we contribute back to our community, and I really do believe that we’re creating something new. It’s a model that can be replicated in other cities. So we’re pioneers – we’re forging new ground.
I am reminded of what two of my students, Quinlan (2012) and Ramella (2012), both then sophomores, wrote on their class blogs about reporting for NNS. Referring to their joint multimedia project, “Cluster II Grow and Play Lot Pulls at Heartstrings,” Ramella wrote: “This project was my biggest learning experience in my young journalism career. I stepped out of my comfort zone to find fantastic stories about great people.” And how about this from Quinlan: “If I learned one thing from this project, it is that a community is not created and nurtured by street signs or white picket fences. It is the dedication and love of people ... that create a community.” As an added bonus, the local FOX affiliate republished their project on its local website, which extended NNS’ mission of connecting journalism and the community beyond www.milwaukeenns.org.
Scholarly literature and McGowan, whose career started at The Chicago Reporter, with its brand of hard-hitting, investigative journalism, remind us that news organizations have been covering low-income, urban communities for many decades. Berger and Luckmann and other scholars contend that reality is constructed rather than found. Journalism does not merely reflect a reality that sits out there, but we understand reality – our personal and shared experiences – through the work media create and disseminate. NNS’ mission may be to provide professional and objective reporting about low-income neighborhoods, but it also strives to change the perception of them. Thus, it is socially constructing the reality that is different from what’s constructed by mainstream media.
For example, McGowan disagrees that NNS is constructing reality, just as any journalist holds dear to the idea of reporting that is professional and objective. She adds: The reality is that the central city neighborhoods we cover are complex. There are amazing people who choose to live and work in these communities, and care about passionately about them. There are people living in poverty who struggle every day, but are not criminals. Much of the news coverage about the neighborhoods has been related to the many aspects of a criminal case, as we’ve discussed before. NNS is working to change the perception of both those who live in the neighborhoods, and the mostly white, more affluent neighborhoods that surround them, by painting a more balanced picture of “reality.”
Evidently, McGowan and the scholars holding to the concept of social construction of reality may need to agree to disagree. She would not describe her efforts as socially constructing reality. But in her passage above, McGowan recognizes that NNS aims to frame perceptions of the neighborhoods it covers that are very much contrary to those created by mainstream media.
Interestingly, McGowan also objects to the term community journalism being applied to NNS. “Again, it’s about perception,” she said, adding “community journalism does not connote consistently high-quality journalism. There is high-quality community journalism, but there is also terrible journalism – biased, inaccurate, poorly written, unprofessional.” She said “that’s the opposite” of how NNS should be perceived. This also calls attention to how culturally difficult it is to do the work to which McGowan and NNS aspires. Just as she resists the term community journalism, I as a journalist have long done so for terms such as projects instead of housing developments, clinic instead of doctor’s office, minorities instead of people of color, and activists instead of advocates. The media too often uses pejorative terms to create a reality of haves and have-nots.
Again, as someone who began his journalism career at a small weekly newspaper focusing exclusively on the black community in Milwaukee, and then went on to work at several mid-size and major daily newspapers along the East Coast, I sympathize with the tensions McGowan articulates. I have long wondered why many community newspapers, particularly those focusing on ethnic communities, do not seem to strive for excellence. (Let me point out here, and I am sure McGowan would agree, that there is an amazing legacy of outstanding community journalism dating back to the days of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, etc.) One wishes that every inner city could have a media outlet such as NNS, and led by an editor with the credentials and devotion to communities and neighborhoods that McGowan embodies.
What can be done, though, to ensure that McGowan and her staff’s hard work achieves greater visibility and awareness? Doing community journalism differently – with novice reporters, many of whom will come and go as graduate students and interns, and depending on organizations and institutions with limited resources as sources – is admirable. But it remains unclear who else is reading the work (and why and how) beyond NNS’ own means of analytics, including page views, Facebook “likes,” etc.
So this must also be asked: Who most needs to read the news service’s work and share its content with others in order for it to achieve its purposes? It is useful here to draw again on Gillis and Moore (2003), particularly as they relate the types of sources and places where journalists encounter or affect the citizenry. Ideally, federal, state and local officials – as well as recognized leaders of institutions in society – would use NNS’ reporting to help present the case to businesses and private developers that investing in Milwaukee’s inner city is worthwhile, if not an imperative. The quasi-official organizations about which NNS writes so much should make more of an effort to circulate the coverage within the communities they serve, as it helps them all stand that much taller to know a legitimate news operation values who they are and what they do.
But what about the people and groups the news service may know the least about, the ones that perhaps may be the most important – those from outside of the 17 targeted neighborhoods? Debunking stereotypes can only happen if those who hold dear to them are confronted with different realities. In NNS’ case, this means that its content must reach those – from Greater Milwaukee and elsewhere – who would otherwise not know about the quality-of-life and self-improvement efforts sprouting from churches, community events, schools, markets, coffee shops or private homes in the inner city.
Meanwhile, NNS could use some more personality. McGowan’s professional standards and ambitions could work just as well with more human-interest stories as with those about larger community concerns. One imagines that an abundance of profiles about interesting individuals would help to make the community more visible to itself and lend stature to the lives of everyday people. NNS and the community alike would be well served, for example, if it hired at least one outstanding reporter and writer capable of weighing in as a columnist or blogger on important issues – and otherwise providing slice-of-life nuggets – about people living and working in the neighborhoods. Imagine having the kind of work that Gregory Stanford and Eugene Kane did for many years at the Journal Sentinel – and which James Causey does for it now – appear regularly on milwaukeenns.org. Adding a personality capable of maintaining the standards McGowan demands would help generate more audience for the news service.
Of course, doing more profiles or adding a columnist will not solve the news service’s most glaring concern: surviving after its current grant funding expires soon. Both consultants hired last year to recommend strategies for NNS – John Barron, the former Chicago Sun-Times publisher, and Paula Ellis, formerly of the Knight Foundation – agreed that increasing its audience through more aggressive marketing and sales is vital. In their 2013 reports, Barron also called for maximizing NNS’ potential for serving as a “conduit for community,” while Ellis advocated for being of it rather than about it.
Interestingly, Barron wrote that he had not yet met anyone “not institutionally tied to the site” who knew of milwaukeenns.org. He also called for more neighborhood profiles and developing a columnist/blogger, and was right to recommend, among other things: 1) a website overhaul to make it look and feel newsier and to add gravitas, 2) doing more “how-to” stories aimed at providing “more utility” for readers, 3) soliciting op-ed pieces from neighborhood leaders, businesses and politicians and 4) “adopting a forum or soapbox for readers to air” their “opinions on just about anything.”
Ellis smartly urged NNS to undergo several “mindset shifts” to help “unlock the full potential of this pioneering news service and increase involvement.” One shift is that its work must be less about “reporting on static events” and more about “fostering a sense of place and developing among residents a shared sense that we are all in this together.” Additionally – and my own view (Lowe, 2011b) is that this is vital given that people of color have higher usage rates compared with white owners across a wide range of mobile applications – Ellis said NNS should “adopt a mobile-first mantra” and devise a “high-tech, low-tech dissemination and creation strategy” for each neighborhood. Another idea, given that “everyone is content and creates content”: enable residents and others to be the “eyes and ears” for journalists. In other words, Ellis said, crowdsourcing by means of posting pictures of potholes or blighted buildings that need attention. She also said NNS should employ available tools for “quickly processing and visualizing data” inasmuch as agreeing on what data to use and measure is “itself a community-building activity.”
All of Barron and Ellis’ suggestions should be enacted. I would add to them that the news service should increase its branding by hosting large community-focused events. Short of that, as a community leader noted at a recent retreat for some of NNS’ stakeholders, promoting its website on billboards along local streets and highways would be nice. My sense is that McGowan and my fellow members of the news service’s advisory board are seriously considering the advice. Indeed, the site is being redesigned.
Beyond all of that, this case study is not only important for the communities that NNS serves, but also for journalism education, particularly students at Marquette, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and elsewhere, more than a dozen of whom have gained valuable experience as interns under McGowan’s tutelage. Lori Bergen, dean of the Diederich College of Communication, called the editor-in-chief a “rock star” in a NNS promotional video (Darmek) and said students have told her after graduation that the news service was “the most important and critical experience” they had in preparing for a journalism career. Just as Heather Ronaldson and two other Marquette students who interned at NNS did before him, part-time reporter Edgar Mendez will have an internship at the Journal Sentinel this summer, thanks to his success with the news service.
As the literature pointed out, NNS is one of many efforts nationally to provide community-based training for college journalism students. Even as my students have produced content for the news service during each of four prior semesters, Marquette’s journalism and media studies faculty is working through how best to incorporate the news service into its undergraduate and graduate programs. Nonetheless, this spring, adjunct journalism instructor Daria Kempka’s online design class is working with McGowan, part-time NNS reporter Andrea Waxman and Lillian Thomas – an assistant managing editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and spending the year at Marquette as part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism – on a weeks-long project focusing on Type-II diabetes in the city, which the news service will publish.
And yet Bergen also said in the video that the collaboration between a university such as Marquette and “all these other entities” provides the chance to “preserve the kind of quality journalism we want to see in our communities” when mainstream media struggles to find the resources or will to meet that need. The dean added: So this kind of partnership is critical: Our students learn from the experience, we contribute back to our community, and I really do believe that we’re creating something new. It’s a model that can be replicated in other cities. So we’re pioneers – we’re forging new ground.
I am reminded of what two of my students, Quinlan (2012) and Ramella (2012), both then sophomores, wrote on their class blogs about reporting for NNS. Referring to their joint multimedia project, “Cluster II Grow and Play Lot Pulls at Heartstrings,” Ramella wrote: “This project was my biggest learning experience in my young journalism career. I stepped out of my comfort zone to find fantastic stories about great people.” And how about this from Quinlan: “If I learned one thing from this project, it is that a community is not created and nurtured by street signs or white picket fences. It is the dedication and love of people ... that create a community.” As an added bonus, the local FOX affiliate republished their project on its local website, which extended NNS’ mission of connecting journalism and the community beyond www.milwaukeenns.org.
