Methodology: Interviews and Informants
Interviews enable people to tell their own stories. Lindlof and Taylor (2011) state that an interview is well suited to understanding a person’s experience, knowledge and worldview, and enables the interviewee not only to share stories, accounts and explanations, but also to inquire about the past. Many people have produced content for the news service: editor-in-chief, interns, reporters, students, faculty, volunteers, etc. So how to select a representative group of participants who could best say how NNS imagines its work, what defines the work it has produced and what they have learned about community and journalism? This study employs purposive or judgmental sampling, a strategy in which a sample is deliberatively selected based on the knowledge of the population and the qualities the informant possesses (Babbie, 2001; Tongco, 2007). Tongco adds that “simply put, the researcher decides what needs to be known and sets out to find people who can and are willing to provide the information by virtue of knowledge or experience” (p. 147). Given (2008) would consider my method a form of stakeholder sampling inasmuch as the informants chosen for this research are people who helped to design or administer the initiative being evaluated and or are otherwise affected by it.
Furthermore, this research takes advantage of the informants’ reflexivity about their work as well as my own reactions to not only their feedback, but additional information resulting from a preliminary analysis of the sample. Finlay (2002) described reflexivity as a tool to evaluate the research process and outcomes given an explicit self-awareness of the meta-analysis. It is also acknowledges the impossibility – and perhaps upside – of remaining unattached to the subject matter and or the people producing the work being analyzed. So as this study pursued the meta-categories by which NNS understands and organizes its own work (for example, tagging, most popular, nominated for awards, staff versus interns, corrections) – mostly through the reading of the 229 stories sampled – my interpretation benefitted from extraordinary access to the main informants. Indeed, as my questions arose throughout the analysis, NNS’ editor-in-chief and staff, working down the hall from my faculty office inside the Diederich College, readily provided me with additional feedback or documentation to augment the results.
My five main informants were editor-in-chief Sharon McGowan, part-time reporters Edgar Mendez and Andrea Waxman, former intern Heather Ronaldson and faculty member Karen Slattery. They were there at NNS’ conception, have spent many hours developing its content and extending its reputation, and or witnessed how members of the community and student journalists have interacted with it. Standard interview queries were developed in order to determine, among other things, each informant’s level of journalism experience prior to NNS, what led him or her to join it, how NNS imagines its work, from what types of public sources the new service typically draws its content, how the community has responded to NNS’ coverage, how he or she understood the communities served, and what he or she has learned about them through their work with the news service. The initial interviews occurred in April and May 2013 and lasted between 33 minutes and 1 hour 22 minutes each, depending upon how elaborate the informants’ answers were. The Marquette University Institutional Review Board had earlier granted exempt status for this protocol and, accordingly, each informant signed a consent form granting permission for his or her name, information and views to be included in this study. The initial interviews were recorded, transcribed and interpreted.
INFORMANTS
Before turning to the analysis, brief profiles of the informants are in order to help provide some clues as to how and why they came to work at and or appreciate NNS, their level of journalism experience and their passions or stake in the operation.
Sharon McGowan
Sharon McGowan, 63, grew up and lives in Skokie, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. Her father held elected office in local, county and state government and served as chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party. McGowan remembers starting a newspaper – “it was a mimeograph thing and it had little stories and little poems in it” – in third grade; she went on to serve as an editor of her high school yearbook. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in English, she worked as a legal secretary at a law firm and then produced a newsletter for Cook County’s environmental control department. The University of Chicago and Northwestern University accepted her for graduate school, for social work and journalism, respectively. Her mother and sister were social workers but, against her family’s urgings, McGowan chose journalism; a friend helped persuade her that she was a good writer and curious about the world.
By then married, McGowan did well enough at Medill to have two offers upon earning a master’s degree: a $12,000-a-year job from the community newspaper in Skokie and a $3,000-a-year position with The Chicago Reporter, a new investigative newsletter covering race relations in the city. While she was deciding, The Reporter’s publisher and her Medill mentor invited her to join the staff for a ride on a sailboat. "I thought it was the coolest thing. I loved everybody on the boat. I took the job. And that was huge. I can’t even – there’s no words to describe how important that was to my career. Because I did investigative journalism as a 25 year old right out of graduate school and about important issues that got me into the city, that got me on television and radio, because I did some really good stories as a young reporter. It shaped my career. I became the first full-time reporter, covering education, with a grant, at The Chicago Reporter, then I was assistant managing editor, then I was managing editor – and I was there for a total of five years. Prior to me, the longest tenure had been a year and a half."
McGowan went on to work at other media in Chicago, first as assistant news director and then managing editor during five years at WBBM-AM; then assignment manager responsible for breaking news and the planning desk for a year at WBBM-TV. Starting in 1980, she taught journalism for most quarters during the next 20 years at Medill while starting a consulting company with her husband, Jim – they have two children – that specialized in writing, editing and graphic design. In 2009, the Zilber Family Foundation hired her to help two Milwaukee neighborhoods – Clarke Square and Lindsay Heights – finalize quality-of-life plans. Though still commuting from Skokie, McGowan attended meetings of the Zilber Neighborhood Initiative’s operating committee, listening as members bemoaned the mainstream media’s coverage of their mostly poor, black and Latino communities, and talked about what kind of journalistic enterprise could better serve their interests.
She said: "I had an intuition, and I knew from my work at The Chicago Reporter, that there are some amazing things going on in these neighborhoods, and some amazing people working in these neighborhoods – and no one who didn’t happen to live there, in the city of Milwaukee, knew anything about it. So I wanted to tell the stories of the quality of life plans, is how it started. So they set certain goals, certain objectives; I wanted to report on are they meeting them. Are they not meeting them?"
The foundation decided to fund an online news service. McGowan became the founding editor and spent months explaining to the operating committee’s members that her job was not to do public relations for their communities or nonprofit organizations. She also helped secure in-kind support from the Diederich College in terms of space, equipment and access to faculty and students. Arriving in Johnston Hall in March 2010, McGowan spent the next year training two part-time reporters, recruiting volunteers and spreading word about the news service before its launch in March 2011.
Edgar Mendez
Edgar Mendez grew up on Milwaukee’s South Side, near where he lives in Muskego Way, close to his longtime neighborhood, Clarke Square. He remembers that he always enjoyed writing as a child and that a teacher in high school would let him read the Milwaukee Sentinel when he finished his class work. But Mendez dropped out of high school and forgot about writing. However, after earning his GED diploma, he went on to earn, in 2009, at age 31, a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, majoring in journalism and sociology.
Before graduating, Mendez wrote several articles, sometimes for pay, for El Conquistador, a local newspaper serving southeastern Wisconsin, with his defining article for the publication featuring an interview with then-UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago; he also wrote for Front Page, the campus’ online newspaper. Unable to get into graduate school to pursue sociology, Mendez, single with no kids, found himself desperately looking for journalism jobs; he even moved temporarily to Minneapolis trying to do so. He was doing unsatisfying work for a small paper in Racine, and “doing phones” for Wisconsin’s QUEST Card program when his UWM mentor told him that a new neighborhood news service wanted a reporter for Clarke Square.
Sharon McGowan hired Mendez as one of NNS’ first two part-time reporters because, as she put it, “he knew everybody in Clarke Square.” He has produced 10 special reports for NNS, four of which a local radio station later invited him to speak about his reporting on its public affairs show. Fifteen hours a week is not enough to make ends meet, so for a time he also worked as a youth outreach and communications specialist at a nonprofit agency. In January 2013, after NNS and the Diederich College joined with the Public Policy Forum to create graduate fellowships, Mendez began pursuing a master’s degree from Marquette in addition to his news service work. He recently landed a journalism internship with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Heather Ronaldson
Heather Ronaldson, age 23, hails from Wheaton, Illinois. She chose to attend Marquette after a brother had done so before; she liked its urban environment, Jesuit values and potential for a good study abroad program related to journalism. She decided to major in journalism after thinking, in part, “I wanted to be the one they sent to foreign countries to report on different cultures and tell stories about different people.” Ronaldson was introduced to NNS and Sharon McGowan as a sophomore in my Digital Journalism II course; I also taught her as a junior in a class focusing on campaigns and elections. She spent time with student media – first as a writer and editor for the Marquette Journal, then as a features reporter for The Marquette Tribune – but said she tired of only reporting on campus events.
Ronaldson was interviewed for this study because, after having teamed with a classmate on two multimedia projects that the news service published, she served as an intern there during the spring 2012 semester. She also returned to NNS as a volunteer reporter before graduating in May 2013 – and credits that overall experience as crucial to landing two internships at the Journal Sentinel, one of which was extended several months until January 2014. She could also speak to being a young woman asked to do journalism in communities much different from the one in which she grew up, and being a novice journalist expected by a nascent news organization to do multimedia reporting using complicated equipment at unfamiliar locations. Ronaldson also contributes to the discussions of McGowan as an editor and role model, the news service and its impact on the neighborhoods it aims to serve, and what one can learn about the concept of community by doing the type of work done by an organization such as NNS.
Karen Slattery, Ph.D.
Karen Slattery is an associate professor and directs the journalism and media studies department at Marquette. A native of upper Michigan, she earned a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 1971 and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978 and 1983, respectively. Her professional journalism experience spans a total of about 10 years: in Green Bay as a reporter and producer at WBAY-TV and as a reporter at WFRV-TV, as well as a reporter in Milwaukee for Wisconsin Public Radio and the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.
Slattery taught journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., before joining the broadcasting and electronic communication faculty at Marquette in 1989. She has taught, among other things, courses in broadcast news writing and editing; ethics; television reporting and now digital journalism. She joined the journalism department in summer 2010, soon after the news service began operating in Johnston Hall. In addition to being a faculty colleague, Slattery also supervised my graduate-level independent study, which focused on digital branding.
Besides her professional and academic background, Slattery was interviewed for this case study because she was keenly aware of NNS on many levels. As the department’s leader, she wants journalism students to have the best out-of-classroom experiences as possible and has supported having my journalism classes do assignments ultimately published by NNS. She also sat in on staff meetings as a guest and volunteered to do assignments herself (along with her husband) for the news service in 2011, affording her the chance to witness and experience McGowan as an editor.
Andrea Waxman
Andrea Waxman, 64, was born and raised as an Army brat in Germany. Her family moved each year before she was 10, then lived mostly in Japan through her first year of college. She earned a B.A. in American studies from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and stopped short of earning a master’s degree at the UW-Madison after having a child 24 years ago. Her husband is a law professor at Marquette. They lived on Milwaukee’s East Side before moving to Whitefish Bay when their daughter was 2 years old. Waxman was teaching English in middle school and high school when, in 2004, “I wanted to find a way to write more.” Her background in English, grammar and writing; residency in the Milwaukee area since 1981 and deep familiarity with the Jewish community helped her land a reporting job with The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. She worked there for four years, becoming assistant editor after the first two. Her time there ended, though, when the community eliminated all but the editor-in-chief’s position.
Waxman and I began in Marquette’s graduate digital storytelling certificate program in fall 2010 and worked together on assignments in a class taught by Linda Menck. Waxman said she pursued the certificate because “otherwise I was never going to be able to do journalism again.” She first heard of NNS when Menck announced to the class that a new journalism project at the college was sponsoring a bus tour of city neighborhoods. That is when she met McGowan. Impressed and intrigued by the fledging operation, Waxman answered the editor-in-chief’s call for volunteers, figuring it would be a perfect way to practice the digital storytelling skills taught in Menck’s class. She started at NNS in January 2011 and was also an intern before McGowan hired her as a part-time reporter in December 2012. Waxman is essentially the No. 2 staffer, in charge of the operation when the editor-in-chief is away on vacation or because of an emergency.
In the next chapter, Results and Interpretation, we shall pursue answers to our research questions while examining NNS’ work and how it represents the life of the communities it serves.
Furthermore, this research takes advantage of the informants’ reflexivity about their work as well as my own reactions to not only their feedback, but additional information resulting from a preliminary analysis of the sample. Finlay (2002) described reflexivity as a tool to evaluate the research process and outcomes given an explicit self-awareness of the meta-analysis. It is also acknowledges the impossibility – and perhaps upside – of remaining unattached to the subject matter and or the people producing the work being analyzed. So as this study pursued the meta-categories by which NNS understands and organizes its own work (for example, tagging, most popular, nominated for awards, staff versus interns, corrections) – mostly through the reading of the 229 stories sampled – my interpretation benefitted from extraordinary access to the main informants. Indeed, as my questions arose throughout the analysis, NNS’ editor-in-chief and staff, working down the hall from my faculty office inside the Diederich College, readily provided me with additional feedback or documentation to augment the results.
My five main informants were editor-in-chief Sharon McGowan, part-time reporters Edgar Mendez and Andrea Waxman, former intern Heather Ronaldson and faculty member Karen Slattery. They were there at NNS’ conception, have spent many hours developing its content and extending its reputation, and or witnessed how members of the community and student journalists have interacted with it. Standard interview queries were developed in order to determine, among other things, each informant’s level of journalism experience prior to NNS, what led him or her to join it, how NNS imagines its work, from what types of public sources the new service typically draws its content, how the community has responded to NNS’ coverage, how he or she understood the communities served, and what he or she has learned about them through their work with the news service. The initial interviews occurred in April and May 2013 and lasted between 33 minutes and 1 hour 22 minutes each, depending upon how elaborate the informants’ answers were. The Marquette University Institutional Review Board had earlier granted exempt status for this protocol and, accordingly, each informant signed a consent form granting permission for his or her name, information and views to be included in this study. The initial interviews were recorded, transcribed and interpreted.
INFORMANTS
Before turning to the analysis, brief profiles of the informants are in order to help provide some clues as to how and why they came to work at and or appreciate NNS, their level of journalism experience and their passions or stake in the operation.
Sharon McGowan
Sharon McGowan, 63, grew up and lives in Skokie, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. Her father held elected office in local, county and state government and served as chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party. McGowan remembers starting a newspaper – “it was a mimeograph thing and it had little stories and little poems in it” – in third grade; she went on to serve as an editor of her high school yearbook. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in English, she worked as a legal secretary at a law firm and then produced a newsletter for Cook County’s environmental control department. The University of Chicago and Northwestern University accepted her for graduate school, for social work and journalism, respectively. Her mother and sister were social workers but, against her family’s urgings, McGowan chose journalism; a friend helped persuade her that she was a good writer and curious about the world.
By then married, McGowan did well enough at Medill to have two offers upon earning a master’s degree: a $12,000-a-year job from the community newspaper in Skokie and a $3,000-a-year position with The Chicago Reporter, a new investigative newsletter covering race relations in the city. While she was deciding, The Reporter’s publisher and her Medill mentor invited her to join the staff for a ride on a sailboat. "I thought it was the coolest thing. I loved everybody on the boat. I took the job. And that was huge. I can’t even – there’s no words to describe how important that was to my career. Because I did investigative journalism as a 25 year old right out of graduate school and about important issues that got me into the city, that got me on television and radio, because I did some really good stories as a young reporter. It shaped my career. I became the first full-time reporter, covering education, with a grant, at The Chicago Reporter, then I was assistant managing editor, then I was managing editor – and I was there for a total of five years. Prior to me, the longest tenure had been a year and a half."
McGowan went on to work at other media in Chicago, first as assistant news director and then managing editor during five years at WBBM-AM; then assignment manager responsible for breaking news and the planning desk for a year at WBBM-TV. Starting in 1980, she taught journalism for most quarters during the next 20 years at Medill while starting a consulting company with her husband, Jim – they have two children – that specialized in writing, editing and graphic design. In 2009, the Zilber Family Foundation hired her to help two Milwaukee neighborhoods – Clarke Square and Lindsay Heights – finalize quality-of-life plans. Though still commuting from Skokie, McGowan attended meetings of the Zilber Neighborhood Initiative’s operating committee, listening as members bemoaned the mainstream media’s coverage of their mostly poor, black and Latino communities, and talked about what kind of journalistic enterprise could better serve their interests.
She said: "I had an intuition, and I knew from my work at The Chicago Reporter, that there are some amazing things going on in these neighborhoods, and some amazing people working in these neighborhoods – and no one who didn’t happen to live there, in the city of Milwaukee, knew anything about it. So I wanted to tell the stories of the quality of life plans, is how it started. So they set certain goals, certain objectives; I wanted to report on are they meeting them. Are they not meeting them?"
The foundation decided to fund an online news service. McGowan became the founding editor and spent months explaining to the operating committee’s members that her job was not to do public relations for their communities or nonprofit organizations. She also helped secure in-kind support from the Diederich College in terms of space, equipment and access to faculty and students. Arriving in Johnston Hall in March 2010, McGowan spent the next year training two part-time reporters, recruiting volunteers and spreading word about the news service before its launch in March 2011.
Edgar Mendez
Edgar Mendez grew up on Milwaukee’s South Side, near where he lives in Muskego Way, close to his longtime neighborhood, Clarke Square. He remembers that he always enjoyed writing as a child and that a teacher in high school would let him read the Milwaukee Sentinel when he finished his class work. But Mendez dropped out of high school and forgot about writing. However, after earning his GED diploma, he went on to earn, in 2009, at age 31, a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, majoring in journalism and sociology.
Before graduating, Mendez wrote several articles, sometimes for pay, for El Conquistador, a local newspaper serving southeastern Wisconsin, with his defining article for the publication featuring an interview with then-UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago; he also wrote for Front Page, the campus’ online newspaper. Unable to get into graduate school to pursue sociology, Mendez, single with no kids, found himself desperately looking for journalism jobs; he even moved temporarily to Minneapolis trying to do so. He was doing unsatisfying work for a small paper in Racine, and “doing phones” for Wisconsin’s QUEST Card program when his UWM mentor told him that a new neighborhood news service wanted a reporter for Clarke Square.
Sharon McGowan hired Mendez as one of NNS’ first two part-time reporters because, as she put it, “he knew everybody in Clarke Square.” He has produced 10 special reports for NNS, four of which a local radio station later invited him to speak about his reporting on its public affairs show. Fifteen hours a week is not enough to make ends meet, so for a time he also worked as a youth outreach and communications specialist at a nonprofit agency. In January 2013, after NNS and the Diederich College joined with the Public Policy Forum to create graduate fellowships, Mendez began pursuing a master’s degree from Marquette in addition to his news service work. He recently landed a journalism internship with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Heather Ronaldson
Heather Ronaldson, age 23, hails from Wheaton, Illinois. She chose to attend Marquette after a brother had done so before; she liked its urban environment, Jesuit values and potential for a good study abroad program related to journalism. She decided to major in journalism after thinking, in part, “I wanted to be the one they sent to foreign countries to report on different cultures and tell stories about different people.” Ronaldson was introduced to NNS and Sharon McGowan as a sophomore in my Digital Journalism II course; I also taught her as a junior in a class focusing on campaigns and elections. She spent time with student media – first as a writer and editor for the Marquette Journal, then as a features reporter for The Marquette Tribune – but said she tired of only reporting on campus events.
Ronaldson was interviewed for this study because, after having teamed with a classmate on two multimedia projects that the news service published, she served as an intern there during the spring 2012 semester. She also returned to NNS as a volunteer reporter before graduating in May 2013 – and credits that overall experience as crucial to landing two internships at the Journal Sentinel, one of which was extended several months until January 2014. She could also speak to being a young woman asked to do journalism in communities much different from the one in which she grew up, and being a novice journalist expected by a nascent news organization to do multimedia reporting using complicated equipment at unfamiliar locations. Ronaldson also contributes to the discussions of McGowan as an editor and role model, the news service and its impact on the neighborhoods it aims to serve, and what one can learn about the concept of community by doing the type of work done by an organization such as NNS.
Karen Slattery, Ph.D.
Karen Slattery is an associate professor and directs the journalism and media studies department at Marquette. A native of upper Michigan, she earned a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 1971 and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978 and 1983, respectively. Her professional journalism experience spans a total of about 10 years: in Green Bay as a reporter and producer at WBAY-TV and as a reporter at WFRV-TV, as well as a reporter in Milwaukee for Wisconsin Public Radio and the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.
Slattery taught journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., before joining the broadcasting and electronic communication faculty at Marquette in 1989. She has taught, among other things, courses in broadcast news writing and editing; ethics; television reporting and now digital journalism. She joined the journalism department in summer 2010, soon after the news service began operating in Johnston Hall. In addition to being a faculty colleague, Slattery also supervised my graduate-level independent study, which focused on digital branding.
Besides her professional and academic background, Slattery was interviewed for this case study because she was keenly aware of NNS on many levels. As the department’s leader, she wants journalism students to have the best out-of-classroom experiences as possible and has supported having my journalism classes do assignments ultimately published by NNS. She also sat in on staff meetings as a guest and volunteered to do assignments herself (along with her husband) for the news service in 2011, affording her the chance to witness and experience McGowan as an editor.
Andrea Waxman
Andrea Waxman, 64, was born and raised as an Army brat in Germany. Her family moved each year before she was 10, then lived mostly in Japan through her first year of college. She earned a B.A. in American studies from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and stopped short of earning a master’s degree at the UW-Madison after having a child 24 years ago. Her husband is a law professor at Marquette. They lived on Milwaukee’s East Side before moving to Whitefish Bay when their daughter was 2 years old. Waxman was teaching English in middle school and high school when, in 2004, “I wanted to find a way to write more.” Her background in English, grammar and writing; residency in the Milwaukee area since 1981 and deep familiarity with the Jewish community helped her land a reporting job with The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. She worked there for four years, becoming assistant editor after the first two. Her time there ended, though, when the community eliminated all but the editor-in-chief’s position.
Waxman and I began in Marquette’s graduate digital storytelling certificate program in fall 2010 and worked together on assignments in a class taught by Linda Menck. Waxman said she pursued the certificate because “otherwise I was never going to be able to do journalism again.” She first heard of NNS when Menck announced to the class that a new journalism project at the college was sponsoring a bus tour of city neighborhoods. That is when she met McGowan. Impressed and intrigued by the fledging operation, Waxman answered the editor-in-chief’s call for volunteers, figuring it would be a perfect way to practice the digital storytelling skills taught in Menck’s class. She started at NNS in January 2011 and was also an intern before McGowan hired her as a part-time reporter in December 2012. Waxman is essentially the No. 2 staffer, in charge of the operation when the editor-in-chief is away on vacation or because of an emergency.
In the next chapter, Results and Interpretation, we shall pursue answers to our research questions while examining NNS’ work and how it represents the life of the communities it serves.
