Introduction
My 22-year reporting career included a gamut of assignments ranging from the Miss America Pageant to political campaigns, from small-town festivals to senseless murders, from economic development to high-profile criminal trials. However, much of my work at seven newspapers involved chronicling the efforts of people and organizations to improve the quality of life in their mostly black and Latino communities.
As a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), I also have spent many years advocating for greater diversity not only among newsroom staff, but also in the types of stories the media tell about inner city neighborhoods. Count me among those striving for credible journalism that comprehensively portrays the voices and experiences of people of color for a society and world that values them.
Hence my interest in the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (NNS), a three-year-old, award-winning, online-only journalism source at www.milwaukeenns.org. The news service’s mission is to provide objective and professional reporting about 17 low-income communities centered in our nation’s 30th largest city. NNS aims to offset what it considers the media’s limited coverage of quality-of-life efforts by residents and organizations in these neighborhoods, to debunk stereotypes by informing Greater Milwaukee about revitalization initiatives in the central city, and to motivate more residents in these neighborhoods to become involved in civic affairs.
This is a case study of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. It examines the extent to which NNS has achieved its goals by analyzing many of the more than 750 reports published on its website. The case study focuses on the individual and shared experiences of the NNS staff as it uses journalism to help construct a sense of community. In addition to how media and institutions have reacted to its work, the study also examines how NNS is contributing to the ongoing discussion of journalism and community journalism – and how and why journalism matters to how a neighborhood is perceived – even as the news service’s supporters consider its sustainability.
CONNECTING JOURNALISM AND COMMUNITY
The Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service presents itself as a means of connecting journalism and community. It wants to give a greater voice to the voiceless, to better enable them to share their stories of hope and progress, in ways that let them stand a little taller and feel more respected – all the while learning from one another’s successes and failures, and conveying to the region that all is not lost in their neighborhoods. NNS argues that the mainstream media’s incomplete picture of people’s lives in these communities can weaken efforts to attract investment. It believes that spotlighting people who are making a difference both energizes them and can inspire others.
NNS is a small operation with limited resources. It originally focused on three communities – Lindsay Heights, Clarke Square and Layton Boulevard West – when it launched in March 2011, but added 14 more in mid-2012. Its paid part-time staff is led by editor-in-chief Sharon McGowan, a longtime news and communications professional from Illinois, whom Milwaukee Magazine media critic Erik Gunn praised as bringing “an impressive resume to the assignment.” McGowan, four reporters and two Web coordinators produce, publish and promote at least one new article each weekday on topics such as education, public safety, economic development, health and wellness, arts and recreation, employment, housing and the environment. Unpaid college interns and volunteer reporters, videographers and photographers assist. NNS operates from a classroom transformed into a newsroom in Johnston Hall, home of the J. William and Mary Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. The college’s dean, Lori Bergen, Ph.D., was an early NNS supporter – she offered the space as well as computers, software, audio and video equipment and training for multimedia reporting.
The news service has earned awards and acclaim. Editorially independent of its funders and in-kind contributors, NNS has received regional and statewide awards for reporting from journalism-related organizations, and gained acceptance as a credible news source by other local newsrooms. Indeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; the local NPR station, WUWM-FM; the local FOX affiliate, WITI-TV; and online sites such as urbanmilwaukee.com have all helped to broaden NNS' reach by republishing its work. Community-focused bloggers and neighborhood group leaders alike have also applauded NNS for its reporting. And NNS interns have used their experience to secure opportunities in legacy newsrooms elsewhere.
AN EXPERIMENT BECOMES VALIDATED
The Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service is in many ways an experiment. It not only exists within a relatively new realm of journalism – that is, one entirely distributed on the Internet – but also operates within forms that have long consumed news organizations, large and small, and particularly community journalism and public (or civic) journalism. NNS resembles similar efforts nationally that are focused on training future journalists to care more deeply about communities and the people living in them – and to do their work in a digital environment. But unlike community journalism initiatives that are curricular highlights at academic institutions elsewhere, NNS stems from a partnership between a university and community-building operations.
NNS traces its origins to the Zilber Neighborhood Initiative, a 10-year, $50 million effort started by Joseph Zilber, the late real estate tycoon, philanthropist and Marquette alumnus, to improve Milwaukee’s poor neighborhoods. NNS' publisher is Tony Shields, executive director of the United Neighborhood Centers of Milwaukee, which comprises eight nonprofit agencies and is an operating partner in the initiative. The Zilber Family Foundation awarded NNS a grant of $108,000 to begin functioning.
Significant validation came 16 months after NNS launched: The Greater Milwaukee Foundation and Zilber Family Foundation joined to match a $192,000, two-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a leading funder of journalism and media innovation. McGowan (2012) wrote that the Knight Foundation’s grant, provided through its Knight Community Information Challenge, “engages community and place-based foundations to support news and information projects.” In the same article, Knight, noting that entities such as itself are “uniquely positioned” to help, said “as traditional media organizations have struggled … close to 80 local foundations nationwide have launched projects that meet local information needs.”
In its Knight application, the Zilber Foundation noted that communication had been “an underdeveloped component” of its initiative (Community Information Challenge, 2012b). It described NNS as a “multimedia, interactive website created through a place-based foundation, university and nonprofit partnership” (Community Information Challenge, 2012a) and said the news service provides “an important vehicle” for telling stories of inner-city areas and engaging residents (2012b). Zilber’s application stressed wanting to inform residents of “underreported” central city neighborhoods and Greater Milwaukee about “successes and challenges in addressing urban issues,” and to create “more balanced perceptions” that would attract residents and investment and inspire community organizations to duplicate successful quality-of-life improvements (2012a).
NNS said it would use the grant to do more enterprise and in-depth reporting, expand beyond its three pilot neighborhoods to 10 additional surrounding communities and recruit part-time staff who live, work and volunteer in those areas – with the promise of training and mentoring them in reporting, writing, multimedia and Web skills. NNS also hoped to establish and grow relationships with local community groups and media, encouraging them to link to, republish and or broadcast NNS content; “step up” and “intensify” its social media and other promotion efforts; pursue digital innovation and nurture its strong relationship with the Diederich College (2012b).
Zilber also said because mainstream media could not fully cover local communities and online news entities such as Patch.com did not cover the inner city, NNS would fill an important need: “Offering a more complete picture of people’s lives, increasing their ability to improve conditions and attract investment” (2012b). The news service would help communities to learn from one another, and its coverage of residents who volunteer their time to improve their neighborhoods would “energize them and motivate others to join them” (2012b). When asked several months later about the recognition from the Knight Foundation, McGowan said the funds enabled her to hire two more part-time reporters. She also noted that it was “relatively unusual for an organization that has already been running for a year to get Knight funds, because they like to start things up and we were already started. It was a tremendous validation of our journalism” (2012b).
UNPACKING THE POTENTIAL OF NNS
The Knight grant will soon expire, however. So, too, will other smaller funding sources. Sustainability is the operative word and so in 2013 NNS enlisted two experienced media professionals to study its circumstances and propose means to keep the experiment alive: John Barron, a Marquette alumnus and former publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, and Paula Ellis, a former vice president for strategic initiatives at the Knight Foundation and a retired senior publishing executive and journalist.
Barron’s report offered good and bad news. NNS is a “stable editorial operation” that has “accomplished many of its initial goals and continues to fulfill its mission,” he wrote, with “the most obvious evidence” being its “hundreds of stories.” Without NNS, Barron continued, most of those stories would never have been told and its “good, focused journalism ... has helped change and expand the conversation about Milwaukee neighborhoods.” On the other hand, Barron said, “perhaps the greatest potential left largely untapped” was NNS’ ability to serve as a “conduit for community” or perhaps “a destination for information, connection, opinion and utility?” Barron said two things held NNS back: 1) a lack of funding and steady business focus leading it to spend nearly all of its budget on editorial concerns and 2) visibility and awareness. NNS must “dramatically improve its reach” to “more robustly appeal” to advertisers, foundations, etc., he said.
Ellis submitted her report three months afterward. She agreed with Barron that NNS must increase its audience through more aggressive marketing and sales. However, she cautioned against depending on “a pretty traditional local news financial model similar to those employed by decades by the now-imploding industry.” While most other “budding news outlets” are not “aimed at improving communities,” Ellis said NNS’ “social mission” is different because it focuses on “Milwaukee’s most-resource starved communities” and “wants to foster engagement that leads to community betterment.” However, she expressed concern that a traditional business model is “just not experimental enough” to meet NNS’ social and financial goals. Arguing that engagement must be “at the center, not as an afterthought,” Ellis said “this unique Milwaukee team can re-imagine ‘news’ in ways that benefit” local neighborhoods and inspire similar efforts nationally. She also called for “several mindset shifts,” including that NNS must “feel and act more like it is of the community rather than about the community” – and become more digital and use the Web to “make news social” and foster engagement.
WHAT IS TO BE EXAMINED
This case study will be mindful of the Barron and Ellis reports as it looks at how the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service views itself and its work in hopes of better understanding the organization’s overall purpose. Does NNS’ staff feel that its efforts more consistently and or more accurately represent what happens in the communities than those of mainstream media? Can the staff point to how its journalism has impacted the neighborhoods they cover? The study not only examines the news service’s activity, staffing and reception by the public at large, but also, as noted, how it is contributing to the ongoing discussion of journalism and community journalism. In doing so, it also combines an analysis of some of the founding documents as well as those already noted in this introduction, interviews with key NNS staff and a review of 229 of its more than 750 published reports – all in order to help draw informed conclusions.
Scholars have studied the nexus between journalism and community for decades. All of this literature is relevant to understanding how NNS thinks about the communities it serves and does its work. Chapter 2 of this study thus offers a review of the vast critical thinking concerning the concepts of community and sense of community as well as journalism, community journalism, public (or civic) journalism and online journalism.
Chapter 3 describes the theory that guides this thesis and the methodology employed to study the news service. The social construction of reality is used as a theoretical framework to create four guiding questions: 1) How does NNS imagine its work? 2) What defines its work – for example, what kinds of stories is it publishing, which individuals and organizations are the most common sources, what storytelling forms are used and which are the most popular stories based on analytics? 3) How have others in the community and elsewhere described or presented its work? 4) Who is doing the work and what have they learned about journalism and community? The process of determining relevant contexts and sources (for example, purposive sampling, interviews with key NNS staff, textual analysis, reflexivity) from which to draw answers to these questions – as well as how best to evaluate them – is also revealed.
Chapter 4 presents the results based on a textual analysis of interviews with NNS’ editor-in-chief, two of its part-time reporters, a former intern and a journalism faculty member, as well as its bread and butter work and what can be considered its best and most popular efforts. Information shared with the news service’s advisory board, and evidence that other media, significant organizations and individuals have taken stock of its work, are analyzed and interpreted related to NNS’ role in the community. Chapter 5 offers some conclusions about NNS and its limits based on the literature, results and interpretation. The implications that the news service has for journalism education and areas of interest for future research are also discussed.
A final personal disclosure: My journalism career began as a reporter covering residents and organizations in the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service’s targeted neighborhoods for the Milwaukee Community Journal. The weekly black newspaper hired me a few months after my graduation from Marquette University in 1984. McGowan, the editor-in-chief, opened the NNS newsroom in the Diederich College of Communication only months after my return to my alma mater as the journalism professional in residence. Our offices are near one another in Johnston Hall. I have a NNS byline myself (Lowe, 2011a) and serve on the aforementioned advisory board.
NNS is one of many efforts nationally that provide community-based training for college journalism students. During four semesters, it initiated and published community journalism assignments by students in my classes. I believe that more students should engage with NNS. Yet as a board member, and Marquette’s director of journalism for social change, I am concerned about the news service’s operational viability as well as seeing its audience and relevance increase. Hopefully, this study shall offer insight with respect to the opportunities and challenges associated with an initiative such as NNS.
As a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), I also have spent many years advocating for greater diversity not only among newsroom staff, but also in the types of stories the media tell about inner city neighborhoods. Count me among those striving for credible journalism that comprehensively portrays the voices and experiences of people of color for a society and world that values them.
Hence my interest in the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (NNS), a three-year-old, award-winning, online-only journalism source at www.milwaukeenns.org. The news service’s mission is to provide objective and professional reporting about 17 low-income communities centered in our nation’s 30th largest city. NNS aims to offset what it considers the media’s limited coverage of quality-of-life efforts by residents and organizations in these neighborhoods, to debunk stereotypes by informing Greater Milwaukee about revitalization initiatives in the central city, and to motivate more residents in these neighborhoods to become involved in civic affairs.
This is a case study of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. It examines the extent to which NNS has achieved its goals by analyzing many of the more than 750 reports published on its website. The case study focuses on the individual and shared experiences of the NNS staff as it uses journalism to help construct a sense of community. In addition to how media and institutions have reacted to its work, the study also examines how NNS is contributing to the ongoing discussion of journalism and community journalism – and how and why journalism matters to how a neighborhood is perceived – even as the news service’s supporters consider its sustainability.
CONNECTING JOURNALISM AND COMMUNITY
The Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service presents itself as a means of connecting journalism and community. It wants to give a greater voice to the voiceless, to better enable them to share their stories of hope and progress, in ways that let them stand a little taller and feel more respected – all the while learning from one another’s successes and failures, and conveying to the region that all is not lost in their neighborhoods. NNS argues that the mainstream media’s incomplete picture of people’s lives in these communities can weaken efforts to attract investment. It believes that spotlighting people who are making a difference both energizes them and can inspire others.
NNS is a small operation with limited resources. It originally focused on three communities – Lindsay Heights, Clarke Square and Layton Boulevard West – when it launched in March 2011, but added 14 more in mid-2012. Its paid part-time staff is led by editor-in-chief Sharon McGowan, a longtime news and communications professional from Illinois, whom Milwaukee Magazine media critic Erik Gunn praised as bringing “an impressive resume to the assignment.” McGowan, four reporters and two Web coordinators produce, publish and promote at least one new article each weekday on topics such as education, public safety, economic development, health and wellness, arts and recreation, employment, housing and the environment. Unpaid college interns and volunteer reporters, videographers and photographers assist. NNS operates from a classroom transformed into a newsroom in Johnston Hall, home of the J. William and Mary Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. The college’s dean, Lori Bergen, Ph.D., was an early NNS supporter – she offered the space as well as computers, software, audio and video equipment and training for multimedia reporting.
The news service has earned awards and acclaim. Editorially independent of its funders and in-kind contributors, NNS has received regional and statewide awards for reporting from journalism-related organizations, and gained acceptance as a credible news source by other local newsrooms. Indeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; the local NPR station, WUWM-FM; the local FOX affiliate, WITI-TV; and online sites such as urbanmilwaukee.com have all helped to broaden NNS' reach by republishing its work. Community-focused bloggers and neighborhood group leaders alike have also applauded NNS for its reporting. And NNS interns have used their experience to secure opportunities in legacy newsrooms elsewhere.
AN EXPERIMENT BECOMES VALIDATED
The Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service is in many ways an experiment. It not only exists within a relatively new realm of journalism – that is, one entirely distributed on the Internet – but also operates within forms that have long consumed news organizations, large and small, and particularly community journalism and public (or civic) journalism. NNS resembles similar efforts nationally that are focused on training future journalists to care more deeply about communities and the people living in them – and to do their work in a digital environment. But unlike community journalism initiatives that are curricular highlights at academic institutions elsewhere, NNS stems from a partnership between a university and community-building operations.
NNS traces its origins to the Zilber Neighborhood Initiative, a 10-year, $50 million effort started by Joseph Zilber, the late real estate tycoon, philanthropist and Marquette alumnus, to improve Milwaukee’s poor neighborhoods. NNS' publisher is Tony Shields, executive director of the United Neighborhood Centers of Milwaukee, which comprises eight nonprofit agencies and is an operating partner in the initiative. The Zilber Family Foundation awarded NNS a grant of $108,000 to begin functioning.
Significant validation came 16 months after NNS launched: The Greater Milwaukee Foundation and Zilber Family Foundation joined to match a $192,000, two-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a leading funder of journalism and media innovation. McGowan (2012) wrote that the Knight Foundation’s grant, provided through its Knight Community Information Challenge, “engages community and place-based foundations to support news and information projects.” In the same article, Knight, noting that entities such as itself are “uniquely positioned” to help, said “as traditional media organizations have struggled … close to 80 local foundations nationwide have launched projects that meet local information needs.”
In its Knight application, the Zilber Foundation noted that communication had been “an underdeveloped component” of its initiative (Community Information Challenge, 2012b). It described NNS as a “multimedia, interactive website created through a place-based foundation, university and nonprofit partnership” (Community Information Challenge, 2012a) and said the news service provides “an important vehicle” for telling stories of inner-city areas and engaging residents (2012b). Zilber’s application stressed wanting to inform residents of “underreported” central city neighborhoods and Greater Milwaukee about “successes and challenges in addressing urban issues,” and to create “more balanced perceptions” that would attract residents and investment and inspire community organizations to duplicate successful quality-of-life improvements (2012a).
NNS said it would use the grant to do more enterprise and in-depth reporting, expand beyond its three pilot neighborhoods to 10 additional surrounding communities and recruit part-time staff who live, work and volunteer in those areas – with the promise of training and mentoring them in reporting, writing, multimedia and Web skills. NNS also hoped to establish and grow relationships with local community groups and media, encouraging them to link to, republish and or broadcast NNS content; “step up” and “intensify” its social media and other promotion efforts; pursue digital innovation and nurture its strong relationship with the Diederich College (2012b).
Zilber also said because mainstream media could not fully cover local communities and online news entities such as Patch.com did not cover the inner city, NNS would fill an important need: “Offering a more complete picture of people’s lives, increasing their ability to improve conditions and attract investment” (2012b). The news service would help communities to learn from one another, and its coverage of residents who volunteer their time to improve their neighborhoods would “energize them and motivate others to join them” (2012b). When asked several months later about the recognition from the Knight Foundation, McGowan said the funds enabled her to hire two more part-time reporters. She also noted that it was “relatively unusual for an organization that has already been running for a year to get Knight funds, because they like to start things up and we were already started. It was a tremendous validation of our journalism” (2012b).
UNPACKING THE POTENTIAL OF NNS
The Knight grant will soon expire, however. So, too, will other smaller funding sources. Sustainability is the operative word and so in 2013 NNS enlisted two experienced media professionals to study its circumstances and propose means to keep the experiment alive: John Barron, a Marquette alumnus and former publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, and Paula Ellis, a former vice president for strategic initiatives at the Knight Foundation and a retired senior publishing executive and journalist.
Barron’s report offered good and bad news. NNS is a “stable editorial operation” that has “accomplished many of its initial goals and continues to fulfill its mission,” he wrote, with “the most obvious evidence” being its “hundreds of stories.” Without NNS, Barron continued, most of those stories would never have been told and its “good, focused journalism ... has helped change and expand the conversation about Milwaukee neighborhoods.” On the other hand, Barron said, “perhaps the greatest potential left largely untapped” was NNS’ ability to serve as a “conduit for community” or perhaps “a destination for information, connection, opinion and utility?” Barron said two things held NNS back: 1) a lack of funding and steady business focus leading it to spend nearly all of its budget on editorial concerns and 2) visibility and awareness. NNS must “dramatically improve its reach” to “more robustly appeal” to advertisers, foundations, etc., he said.
Ellis submitted her report three months afterward. She agreed with Barron that NNS must increase its audience through more aggressive marketing and sales. However, she cautioned against depending on “a pretty traditional local news financial model similar to those employed by decades by the now-imploding industry.” While most other “budding news outlets” are not “aimed at improving communities,” Ellis said NNS’ “social mission” is different because it focuses on “Milwaukee’s most-resource starved communities” and “wants to foster engagement that leads to community betterment.” However, she expressed concern that a traditional business model is “just not experimental enough” to meet NNS’ social and financial goals. Arguing that engagement must be “at the center, not as an afterthought,” Ellis said “this unique Milwaukee team can re-imagine ‘news’ in ways that benefit” local neighborhoods and inspire similar efforts nationally. She also called for “several mindset shifts,” including that NNS must “feel and act more like it is of the community rather than about the community” – and become more digital and use the Web to “make news social” and foster engagement.
WHAT IS TO BE EXAMINED
This case study will be mindful of the Barron and Ellis reports as it looks at how the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service views itself and its work in hopes of better understanding the organization’s overall purpose. Does NNS’ staff feel that its efforts more consistently and or more accurately represent what happens in the communities than those of mainstream media? Can the staff point to how its journalism has impacted the neighborhoods they cover? The study not only examines the news service’s activity, staffing and reception by the public at large, but also, as noted, how it is contributing to the ongoing discussion of journalism and community journalism. In doing so, it also combines an analysis of some of the founding documents as well as those already noted in this introduction, interviews with key NNS staff and a review of 229 of its more than 750 published reports – all in order to help draw informed conclusions.
Scholars have studied the nexus between journalism and community for decades. All of this literature is relevant to understanding how NNS thinks about the communities it serves and does its work. Chapter 2 of this study thus offers a review of the vast critical thinking concerning the concepts of community and sense of community as well as journalism, community journalism, public (or civic) journalism and online journalism.
Chapter 3 describes the theory that guides this thesis and the methodology employed to study the news service. The social construction of reality is used as a theoretical framework to create four guiding questions: 1) How does NNS imagine its work? 2) What defines its work – for example, what kinds of stories is it publishing, which individuals and organizations are the most common sources, what storytelling forms are used and which are the most popular stories based on analytics? 3) How have others in the community and elsewhere described or presented its work? 4) Who is doing the work and what have they learned about journalism and community? The process of determining relevant contexts and sources (for example, purposive sampling, interviews with key NNS staff, textual analysis, reflexivity) from which to draw answers to these questions – as well as how best to evaluate them – is also revealed.
Chapter 4 presents the results based on a textual analysis of interviews with NNS’ editor-in-chief, two of its part-time reporters, a former intern and a journalism faculty member, as well as its bread and butter work and what can be considered its best and most popular efforts. Information shared with the news service’s advisory board, and evidence that other media, significant organizations and individuals have taken stock of its work, are analyzed and interpreted related to NNS’ role in the community. Chapter 5 offers some conclusions about NNS and its limits based on the literature, results and interpretation. The implications that the news service has for journalism education and areas of interest for future research are also discussed.
A final personal disclosure: My journalism career began as a reporter covering residents and organizations in the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service’s targeted neighborhoods for the Milwaukee Community Journal. The weekly black newspaper hired me a few months after my graduation from Marquette University in 1984. McGowan, the editor-in-chief, opened the NNS newsroom in the Diederich College of Communication only months after my return to my alma mater as the journalism professional in residence. Our offices are near one another in Johnston Hall. I have a NNS byline myself (Lowe, 2011a) and serve on the aforementioned advisory board.
NNS is one of many efforts nationally that provide community-based training for college journalism students. During four semesters, it initiated and published community journalism assignments by students in my classes. I believe that more students should engage with NNS. Yet as a board member, and Marquette’s director of journalism for social change, I am concerned about the news service’s operational viability as well as seeing its audience and relevance increase. Hopefully, this study shall offer insight with respect to the opportunities and challenges associated with an initiative such as NNS.
