Results and Interpretation: Part II – The Work So Far
This section reviews and interprets the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service’s work based on topic areas (idealistically and in reality); special reports; page views and efforts to increase audience and correct mistakes; and student assignments. It attempts to answer the research question concerning what kinds of work NNS has produced.
TOPIC AREAS: "STORIES THAT ARE IMPORTANT"
NNS states on its website’s About Us page that it covers “stories that are important to the people who live, work and serve in city neighborhoods.” The Web page also lists nine topic areas as examples of the kind of reports it focuses on: education, public safety, economic development, health and wellness, environment, recreation, employment, youth development and housing. However, the drop-down menu below the “news” tab in the site’s main navigation lists arts and recreation, community, economic development, education, environment, health, housing and special reports as content sections. A keyword analysis of this case study’s sample of 229 stories reveals that NNS focuses on some types more than others.
Given the importance of the concept of community – to the primary funding sources, the news service’s staff and the community leaders who cited the need for more coverage of their quality-of-life efforts – it is not surprising that 75 reports among the sample NNS had itself tagged as “community.” I keyworded 109, or nearly half, as having a story source speaking directly about his or her community or neighborhood.
Forty-four stories were tagged as arts and recreation, followed by health (31), special reports (27), education (25), housing (15), economic development (12), environment (8) and public safety (3). My keywording, though, peeled some layers. Fifty stories not marked education focused on matters related to the Milwaukee Public Schools system and its students. Thirty-nine stories not tagged as health-related dealt with concerns ranging from the federal Affordable Health Care Act to counseling for domestic or sexual abuse victims. Twenty-three reports not tagged as economic development nonetheless addressed matters related to the economy, employment and job training, while an equal number of stories not tagged public safety focused on crime and or the Milwaukee Public Department’s efforts to fight it, quantify crime statistics and improve its community relations. Many other stories not specifically tagged focused on matters ranging from families and children (39) to teens and youth (20) to parks, gardens and food markets (18) to government agencies (15) to housing and homelessness (13), immigration (10), the environment (8), exhibits and galleries (8), charities, ministries or shelters (8) and street or housing beautification (7).
NNS emphatically focuses on low-income and minority communities, but few of its articles refer specifically to race or ethnicity: 17 about African Americans per se, 15 about Latinos (including six about Mexican concerns) and four about Native Americans. Likewise, few stories related specifically to gender – seven each for men and women.
The sample included six stories tagged as “neighborhoods.” Peeling that back as well, more than 25 neighborhoods received coverage by name, with the two most frequently mentioned – Lindsay Heights (13) and Clarke Square (11) – being the two pilot communities that NNS targeted upon arriving at Marquette in March 2010. The third neighborhood included by the launch a year later – Layton Boulevard West and its linked communities of Burnham Park, Layton Park and Silver City – had eight stories. Other neighborhoods covered often: Sherman Park (9) and Metcalfe Park (8). Given that Milwaukee residents most readily identify themselves as living on the city’s North Side or South Side, it is not surprising that the former garnered 13 mentions, while the latter received 12. Surprisingly, though, 58 stories did not identify a neighborhood. In nearly all of these instances, a street address was given, as if to invite the reader to knock on the door. Mainstream media typically identifies neighborhoods or street intersections, but almost never an actual street address. McGowan told me that “we are making a concerted effort” to identify the neighborhood within stories going forward. In doing so, NNS would further its bid to create a greater sense of community in its coverage area; remember, as noted in the literature review, that Lowrey, Brozana and Mackay (2008) suggested that community is “fundamentally tied to physical location.”
I am loath to say NNS should cover more stories about a particular topic or another, preferring to trust its judgment on what’s news and what’s not. But the news service could benefit from more systematically tagging its stories topically. All of its stories by mission or definition are about community or neighborhoods, so tagging them as community seems redundant. Better tagging could afford NNS and its supporters, not to mention the public at large and potential funders, a truer sense of the breadth and emphasis of its work – and whether the organization is meeting its coverage goals.
SPECIAL REPORTS: "WE OUGHT TO LOOK INTO THIS"
Twenty-seven times between March 20, 2011, and Dec. 2, 2013, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service published an article under the heading of “Special Report” or with those words as part of the headline. Special reports reflect news coverage that NNS believes merits extra attention – and the best of its capacities and ambitions. McGowan said a special report “usually it takes longer to report” and “often relies on data or tries to rely on data.” While initial special reports often included a small photo or multiple photos beside text, they typically now have multiple elements that might include graphics or video or an audio slideshow in addition to a more in-depth text story. Beyond that, McGowan said, special reports are “enterprise stories” that “we think we ought to look into this.” Asked to elaborate, McGowan quickly spoke of one published on April 11, 2013 (and one of two by Ronaldson): “We ought to look at how black contractors are doing in light of a new law that went into effect a year ago that was intended to give more business to black contractors.” McGowan also said a special report could aim to hold public officials and community organizations accountable, or show that an issue affecting low-income communities may not just be “black and white – it has subtleties.”
The largest subset among the special reports – five – focused on matters of health and wellness, including the need for Spanish-speaking medical interpreters at area hospitals, support groups for black women battling breast cancer, and the Affordable Care Act’s impact on domestic violence screenings and counseling services. There were four special reports each related to education (declining enrollment in charter schools, the tension between extending tourism and standardized testing preparation, Latino English language learners outperforming native-speaking students, and the pitfalls associated with getting a GED) and public safety (incarcerated juveniles and at-risk youth, miscalculated city crime statistics, a new law allowing those with permits to carry concealed weapons, and the deportation of county residents who lack criminal records).
Twelve NNS reporters and interns have had their bylines atop special reports. Mendez had 10 such reports – including those focusing on a unique collaboration between a community organization and a public school, the positive effect streetscape improvements had upon on a South Side business district, and residents’ concerns about contamination in the Kinnickinnic River. Evans, Waxman and intern Matthew Bin Han Ong each had two special reports, while six others all had one each.
There is no question that much of NNS’ best or most important work is within its collection of special reports. The equal number of such reports about health and wellness, education and public safety does not amount to a discernible pattern, but it does suggest that maybe the topics chosen reflect opportunities as they arise rather than a larger plan. One wonders whether the amount of effort or time put into what ends up getting stamped as such matters as much as the content published. If so, that would not be unlike what happens in legacy newsrooms where high-profile reporters earn added rank because of their reputation and past success. In any case, NNS is right to challenge itself to tackle in-depth stories that stretch its use of words, images, video, audio and data visualization. Doing so from the community’s perspective is a bonus for the audience.
MEDIA EXTENSION: "WE WANTED IT TO BE ORGANIC"
As with any media organization, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service strives to have its work reach as wide an audience as possible. NNS particularly hoped that local mainstream media would republish its work on their websites, so long as it received proper credit. Hence its name includes the words news service. McGowan said the local FOX affiliate, WITI-TV, accepted NNS’ offer even before it launched in 2011. But she also understood that not every news company would quickly follow suit. “It’s come gradually,” she said, adding that “we wanted it to be organic” and not, “Hey! ... We’re doing great work. You should publish our stuff.”
NPR’s Milwaukee affiliate, WUWM-FM, has given great exposure to the news service’s work after McGowan and NNS publisher Tony Shields appeared on the station’s local public affairs show on April 18, 2011, to promote the launching. The show’s host, Mitch Teich, invited NNS reporters into the “Lake Effect” studio 11 times between September 2012 and December 2013 to discuss their stories for its audience, which is more than 25,000 radio listeners a week and many more via online (live streaming or podcasts). The first time was for Ong’s special report, “Family Day Care Providers Squeezed by Low Ratings, New Rules.” Other news service stories featured on “Lake Effect” ranged from a new program to keep incarcerated juveniles close to home to city nonprofit organizations shying away from the ongoing residency debate to motorcyclists calling for awareness about an increase in crashes.
Teich wrote to me in an email that having NNS reporters share their work on “Lake Effect” is “an ideal situation for us” because “as a daily newsmagazine, our aim is to open a window on things happening across the community to our listeners.” With WUWM also having a small staff, “relationships like this are really vital” for the station to feature “news happening at the neighborhood level.” He added: "It quickly became evident that NNS reporters were doing admirable work in bringing issues to the fore that may not have been on the radar screen for many of our listeners. Almost to a person, the reporters had authentic, interested voices that helped make the stories come alive in a 'reporter’s notebook' fashion. The stories we featured were typically pitched to us through NNS’ editorial staff – a situation that worked well." Teich said more NNS-related “Lake Effect” segments could occur on a “regular, predictable basis,” so long as “they’re timely and strong,” and not just to fill 10 minutes.
The Journal Sentinel, the state’s largest newsroom and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes since 2008, has republished NNS’ work more sporadically. McGowan said its top editors told her that “they don’t have time or staff to cover individual neighborhoods” and “they’re more concerned about the city, the county and the region.” She said the editors agreed to consider NNS’ offer, but had done so only once when Ron Smith, an assistant managing editor and a Marquette alumnus, sent an email in April 2013 to Managing Editor George Stanley suggesting that a collaboration would benefit both organizations: "It would allow the J-S to get things online and into print that we don’t have the resources to cover and it would give NNS great exposure. For example, we often have trouble filling the local section of the Monday paper as well as generating local copy to post online throughout the days on Sundays. ... NNS would greatly improve our connections to underserved communities and help us to live up to our motto as 'Wisconsin’s newsroom.' … Let’s not wait any longer for something that sounds like a slam dunk for both organizations’ readership."
On May 23, 2013, the Journal Sentinel republished NNS intern Amalia Oulahan’s article, “‘Community-Oriented Community’ Unites to Build a Garden.” Thirty-six more reports made their way onto www.jsonline.com after first on www.milwaukeenns.org between that month and January 2014. It happened infrequently enough that McGowan believes Smith was physically in his newsroom whenever it did happen. In any event, when it does wish to republish an NNS article on its site, the Journal Sentinel typically creates a new headline, offers one or two paragraphs introducing the story, and links to it on the new service’s website using words like “the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service is reporting.” McGowan told the NNS advisory board in early March that she had a meeting soon with Smith and other editors at the Journal Sentinel in hopes of getting her staff’s stories republished on www.jsonline.com more regularly. “It would exponentially increase the people who read our stories,” she said.
No argument here. It seems plausible that the NPR affiliate could be more accepting of regenerating work by NNS for its radio audience because the host can agree to do so on his own, is always looking for interesting content and what matters most is what a studio guest says on air (less worry about mistakes). It may be more difficult for a larger newsroom with more ambition and areas of routine coverage and oversight to incorporate work done by reporters who it otherwise would not hire because of inexperience.
AUDIENCE: "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE COMMUNITY"
My other informants also spoke about the extent to which NNS stories are read by people who do not see them first on www.milwaukeenns.org. Noting that the entire staff promote readership for the website, Waxman mentions it to “every single person I talk to,” particularly her friends and acquaintances in the suburbs. She also has “quite a few of my friends on Facebook following it.” Waxman said “they find it really interesting” because “these are not stories they’re reading, for the most part, anywhere else.” She also said “most of the people in the suburbs have no idea what’s going on in Milwaukee,” even people who work in various kinds of “community and social justice things.”
Mendez noted that “a lot of the work” is republished in El Conquistador, southeastern Wisconsin’s most-read Spanish-speaking newspaper. At first, Mendez said, the weekly community paper just took on his work because he had written for it before. But he met with the paper’s editor and urged him to republish more NNS content because “it’s all free and it’s all about the community.” Mendez said “everyone’s gotten stories in El Conquistador” – including those that are of citywide interest, not just focusing on the South Side, where much of Milwaukee’s Latino population lives.
Ronaldson has a different take on the matter. “If I don’t tell people about it, force my friends to read it, email it to my family, I don’t know if people would read it,” she said. Having the word neighborhood in its name connotes that NNS is “just like a neighborhood newsletter” that does not explore as “hard-hitting of stuff,” Ronaldson said, adding that there is too much “adorable” content – such as “Oh! This lady turned 100 today!” – that “feels and looks soft, and so when you are Edgar, pulling out these awesome public policy articles, I think they get slighted.”
McGowan would counter that NNS is taken seriously by the nonprofit and other organizations whose community-building efforts it covers. Many such groups link to its stories on their websites, refer to them in membership emails, reprint them in newsletters and speak of them at their meetings. McGowan provided me with several such examples: ArtWorks Milwaukee’s website links to a profile about its new executive director; a Layton Boulevard West Neighbors e-newsletter points to a story about a bus tour for homebuyers; an ancillary Milwaukee Police Department website invites people to read about “the great work by officers” in a NNS article; and LISC Milwaukee uses e-alerts to promote that the news service has videos about its annual awards competition.
McGowan believes that all of this promotion of NNS’ work proves that she and her staff are enabling community groups to better connect and learn from each other’s successes and misfires – “that says, ‘Hey look at this. We’re interested in this. Maybe it works.’” McGowan also said NNS continues to work to increase its audience. But while its Google analytics and Facebook “likes” are “steadily growing,” she said, “they represent a fraction of who is actually reading our stories because we are a news service,” that is, there may be newsrooms elsewhere republishing NNS’ work without it knowing.
MOST POPULAR: "SOMETHING THAT'S WORKING"
Recently, at a Milwaukee Press Club event focusing on saving journalism, McGowan told the featured speaker, Kevin Merida, managing editor of The Washington Post, that Dwayne Burtin, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service’s staff member most attentive to the analytics, keeps pressing her to give more coverage to those issues or organizations in which prior stories have gained a huge number of page views. While acknowledging McGowan’s desire to cover as many deserving concerns as possible, Merida sided with Burtin, saying “when you see something that’s working – try it again.”
In any case, a review of the Top 20 posts on www.milwaukeenns.org through March 5 revealed no clear-cut answers in terms of what draws it the biggest audience. McGowan and Burtin have told the NNS advisory committee that any number of things beyond their control – much like for any other news or information website – could help increase page views for a particular story. Burtin told me recently that having an NNS story on the first page of a related Google search definitely draws added page views.
Such is the case still for NNS’ most accessed story to date, Brendan O’Brien’s “La Luz del Mundo Opens Violence Prevention Center on South Side.” Published on Aug. 29, 2013, it had 2,303 page views after benefitting from the focus on a popular church engaged in a matter relevant to people nationwide. “It was definitely being shared pretty heavily,” Burtin told me. (It cannot be overlooked that the primary accompanying photo includes Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett as one of three people cutting a ribbon.)
Only two other stories earned more than 2,000 page views: A special report, “Family Day Care Providers Squeezed By Low Ratings, New Rules,” by Ong, on May 21, 2012; and “New Test Could Force Thousands to Start Over on GED Exams,” by Mendez, on June 18, 2013. Burtin said Ong’s story was a “popular topic” because of a Journal Sentinel investigation concerning child-care centers. “Our angle was the other side of it,” about the impact on providers, he said. Mendez’ story was also “shared heavily,” had a “direct impact on the daily lives of a lot of our readers” and was “very real, very relevant, very timely and very useful,” Burtin said.
These two reports also appeared on WUWM’s “Lake Effect” show, but there’s no indication that having significant mainstream media exposure necessarily increases page views; only one other story among the Top 20 became a segment on the radio station and just five of them were among the 37 articles republished in the Journal Sentinel. Meanwhile, only two others of NNS’ 27 special reports made into the Top 20 list: “New Program to Keep Incarcerated Juveniles Close to Home,” on Oct. 3, 2012; and “Growing Hispanic Population Triggers Need for Trained Medical Interpreters,” on Aug. 6, 2012. That is somewhat surprising – or disappointing – given that NNS considers these types of reports to be among its best work. Other patterns include having community or neighborhood as a key factor in 13 of the most popular reports; projects, programs, partnerships and collaboration in nine, and Lindsay Heights being the top neighborhood mentioned (four out of 20). Fourteen stories on the list were published in 2013, but only one, “TRUE Skool Prepares for Grand Opening at Grand Avenue Mall,” in 2014.
Finally, the post with the fourth most page views, with 1,573, is the only one among the Top 20 not produced by NNS’ staff. It is titled “2013 Earn & Learn Summer Youth Internship Program (SYIP),” dated Feb. 2, 2013, and has “by the City of Milwaukee” as a byline. The post – a news release offering details for teenagers seeking an eight-week internship in one of 11 city departments – emerged from the “community tools section” of NNS’ site. The section allows readers to “share and submit” calendar items about neighborhood events, and stories and posts about “things going on in the community,” according to an NNS Web page. Burtin said “people are still hitting” that Web link on Google because they want information about internships for this summer.
SURPRISE: "I DON'T DO TONS OF PROFILES"
The profile, an in-depth look at a person or organization in the news or community, has long been a staple of both journalism and community journalism. So it is interesting that only about 20 of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service stories included in this study’s sample – including nine produced by students in my third-level, digital-journalism class during spring 2013 – could be considered profiles. “I don’t do tons of profiles of organizations,” McGowan said. That surprised me because in every time we have teamed to give my digital journalism students an NNS assignment, it meant two students doing a joint profile about a person or organization. That’s 37 profiles during four consecutive semesters dating to fall 2011. The former longtime journalism educator at Northwestern University said it was “an appropriate thing to do for classes – for young journalists – and because it’s easier than some of the other kinds of stories we cover. It’s less likely to get me in trouble because they don’t know what the heck they’re doing.”
And my students call me harsh! The implications associated with NNS and journalism education will be revisited in the conclusions. For now, though, McGowan wrote in an earlier email that my students have impressed her as motivated to do their best work. (Disclosure: Their final grade was tied to being published.) She added that they “provided valuable content on some of the many organizations and people in Milwaukee’s central city who work every day to make a difference in their communities. ... I learned a lot.”
My students’ profiles featured two nonprofit executive directors; an entrepreneur and community developer; a director of youth activities and a football program; a development director for a community center; an elementary school principal, a kindergarten teacher who owns a bed and breakfast and presides over a neighborhood improvement group; the founder of a cultural research organization; and a motivational speaker, poet and facilitator of a program focused on keeping black boys out of trouble. NNS tagged five of the nine stories as community, with two others as arts and recreation and one each as economic development and education. Each pair of students was required to turn in a 650-word story and a two-minute audio slideshow that had the profile subject talking about his or her background and mission with accompanying photographs.
Other Marquette students created three of the other profiles, including Ronaldson’s “YouthBuild Program Offers Young Father a Second Chance.” Waxman did five, including two in which she teamed with NNS Web producer Adam Carr for special reports about a Borchert Field block club’s efforts to improve the area around 14th Street. The others focused on a former city official now raising chickens in Sherman Park, two brothers working to help children in Riverwest, and the “Young Moms Organize to Strengthen Their Community” profile about Lakima Moore and Jessica Wilson. Waxman said that story and its accompanying three-minute video, “these women are just speaking from their hearts and telling their own stories” about being “extremely poor and living in extremely stressful circumstances” and yet “doing community service and fundraising and all kinds of work to help their community despite their challenges.” She adds: "This is Sharon’s favorite story that any of us have ever done – and it’s because it’s not (about) an organization. It’s not that the stories about organizations aren’t great, because they are. But to hear the voices of the people who are really living in the communities, I think, is a high priority for us and it’s a little bit hard to find them sometimes."
Waxman told me that she “happened to stumble” upon the story after meeting Moore while working on another one about improving access to immunizations for poor children. One wonders if NNS’ newsgathering routines enable its reporters to find such human-interest stories more frequently. It is hard to imagine that the news service thinks of itself as more issue-oriented than people-oriented. It seems this is another instance in which NNS could manage or aim to do more profiles of individuals.
TRANSPARENCY: "EVERYONE MAKES MISTAKES"
As noted throughout this study, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service presents itself as doing professional and objective reporting, despite nearly all of its reporters having relatively little experience in other newsrooms or being college students. So it begs the question: How often does NNS have to correct or clarify its reporting? Before we get to that, it is fair to say that corrections and clarifications have long bedeviled even the world’s greatest news agencies. It is alarming that Maier (2009) found that although news sources identified 1,200 factually flawed stories in a cross-market audit of 10 U.S. newspapers, fewer than 2 percent resulted in published corrections.
“Of course, everyone makes mistakes,” McGowan wrote in an email replying to my inquiry about fixes to published NNS stories. The editor-in-chief also said that interns have had their challenges, including an article in February in which a woman’s last name was misspelled and her job title and company’s name misidentified. But readers will not see a correction on that NNS Web page, even as Maier also wrote that “a clear standard for handling online errors is lacking” (p. 48). McGowan insisted that “all online news outlets” should get to quickly correct small errors – typos, punctuation, forgot to put a photo credit, etc. – without noting the correction. “It’s different for print publications, which could lay around for indefinite periods of time with the error in them,” said.
All that said, only two stories within the study’s sample of 229 had a correction posted at the bottom of the page – both were special reports: “Supporters of North Side Pool Sing Moody Blues,” on Dec. 3, 2012, and “Fewer MPS Charters, Declining Enrollment Add Up to Lost Revenue,” on Oct. 28, 2013; they each “fit the protocol in that they were substantive errors,” McGowan said. For the former, the correction posted the next day states that “the original version of this article misstated the number of county swimming pools on the South Side of the city. There are five, not six.” The latter notes that “this article has been revised to reflect the following correction: State aid per pupil in MPS charter schools is $6,642, not $7775 as originally reported.”
Meanwhile, NNS disclosed on two stories that it knew of a potential conflict of interest, something all media claiming to be professional and objective aim to avoid in their reporting. Below the “Viewers Say Burnham Park Public Art ‘Looks Like Life” article on Nov. 11, 2013, an “editor’s note” reveals that Carr, the part-time NNS employee, is among the featured artists. Another editor’s note appears below the next day’s “Historic ‘Settlement House’ Model Serves City’s Immigrants and the Poor” article, stating that NNS is published by UNCOM – that is, United Neighborhood Centers of Milwaukee, which along with its executive director, Tony Shields, is mentioned prominently. (A photo of Shields answering a question during a workshop is on the Web page.) Capping off an interesting week for NNS, another editor’s note appeared the day after that, this time stating that “a previous version” of the “Local Fair Housing Council Grantees to Reinvest in Home Ownership, Rehab” story “failed to mention” an organization as a “key player” to the spotlighted neighborhood initiative. The note ends with “NNS regrets the error.” This is notable, to say the least, given the option of adding the name to the story afterward and not drawing attention to the omission forever.
McGowan confirmed my suspicion that government agencies, particularly a public school system, and larger nonprofits and institutions are more likely to complain – “if they don’t like something, whether it’s an error or not” – than community residents or smaller nonprofits excited to get even the slightest news coverage. But lest anyone think that she is soft on accuracy or even clarity, McGowan is emphatic with interns and reporters alike that there is “no such thing as a minor error” when it comes to doing journalism. She stresses to her staff and anyone who will listen that NNS’ credibility – in the eyes of the community, its funders and the profession at large – depends on fair and accurate reporting. In her eyes, NNS cannot afford to miss the mark.
TOPIC AREAS: "STORIES THAT ARE IMPORTANT"
NNS states on its website’s About Us page that it covers “stories that are important to the people who live, work and serve in city neighborhoods.” The Web page also lists nine topic areas as examples of the kind of reports it focuses on: education, public safety, economic development, health and wellness, environment, recreation, employment, youth development and housing. However, the drop-down menu below the “news” tab in the site’s main navigation lists arts and recreation, community, economic development, education, environment, health, housing and special reports as content sections. A keyword analysis of this case study’s sample of 229 stories reveals that NNS focuses on some types more than others.
Given the importance of the concept of community – to the primary funding sources, the news service’s staff and the community leaders who cited the need for more coverage of their quality-of-life efforts – it is not surprising that 75 reports among the sample NNS had itself tagged as “community.” I keyworded 109, or nearly half, as having a story source speaking directly about his or her community or neighborhood.
Forty-four stories were tagged as arts and recreation, followed by health (31), special reports (27), education (25), housing (15), economic development (12), environment (8) and public safety (3). My keywording, though, peeled some layers. Fifty stories not marked education focused on matters related to the Milwaukee Public Schools system and its students. Thirty-nine stories not tagged as health-related dealt with concerns ranging from the federal Affordable Health Care Act to counseling for domestic or sexual abuse victims. Twenty-three reports not tagged as economic development nonetheless addressed matters related to the economy, employment and job training, while an equal number of stories not tagged public safety focused on crime and or the Milwaukee Public Department’s efforts to fight it, quantify crime statistics and improve its community relations. Many other stories not specifically tagged focused on matters ranging from families and children (39) to teens and youth (20) to parks, gardens and food markets (18) to government agencies (15) to housing and homelessness (13), immigration (10), the environment (8), exhibits and galleries (8), charities, ministries or shelters (8) and street or housing beautification (7).
NNS emphatically focuses on low-income and minority communities, but few of its articles refer specifically to race or ethnicity: 17 about African Americans per se, 15 about Latinos (including six about Mexican concerns) and four about Native Americans. Likewise, few stories related specifically to gender – seven each for men and women.
The sample included six stories tagged as “neighborhoods.” Peeling that back as well, more than 25 neighborhoods received coverage by name, with the two most frequently mentioned – Lindsay Heights (13) and Clarke Square (11) – being the two pilot communities that NNS targeted upon arriving at Marquette in March 2010. The third neighborhood included by the launch a year later – Layton Boulevard West and its linked communities of Burnham Park, Layton Park and Silver City – had eight stories. Other neighborhoods covered often: Sherman Park (9) and Metcalfe Park (8). Given that Milwaukee residents most readily identify themselves as living on the city’s North Side or South Side, it is not surprising that the former garnered 13 mentions, while the latter received 12. Surprisingly, though, 58 stories did not identify a neighborhood. In nearly all of these instances, a street address was given, as if to invite the reader to knock on the door. Mainstream media typically identifies neighborhoods or street intersections, but almost never an actual street address. McGowan told me that “we are making a concerted effort” to identify the neighborhood within stories going forward. In doing so, NNS would further its bid to create a greater sense of community in its coverage area; remember, as noted in the literature review, that Lowrey, Brozana and Mackay (2008) suggested that community is “fundamentally tied to physical location.”
I am loath to say NNS should cover more stories about a particular topic or another, preferring to trust its judgment on what’s news and what’s not. But the news service could benefit from more systematically tagging its stories topically. All of its stories by mission or definition are about community or neighborhoods, so tagging them as community seems redundant. Better tagging could afford NNS and its supporters, not to mention the public at large and potential funders, a truer sense of the breadth and emphasis of its work – and whether the organization is meeting its coverage goals.
SPECIAL REPORTS: "WE OUGHT TO LOOK INTO THIS"
Twenty-seven times between March 20, 2011, and Dec. 2, 2013, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service published an article under the heading of “Special Report” or with those words as part of the headline. Special reports reflect news coverage that NNS believes merits extra attention – and the best of its capacities and ambitions. McGowan said a special report “usually it takes longer to report” and “often relies on data or tries to rely on data.” While initial special reports often included a small photo or multiple photos beside text, they typically now have multiple elements that might include graphics or video or an audio slideshow in addition to a more in-depth text story. Beyond that, McGowan said, special reports are “enterprise stories” that “we think we ought to look into this.” Asked to elaborate, McGowan quickly spoke of one published on April 11, 2013 (and one of two by Ronaldson): “We ought to look at how black contractors are doing in light of a new law that went into effect a year ago that was intended to give more business to black contractors.” McGowan also said a special report could aim to hold public officials and community organizations accountable, or show that an issue affecting low-income communities may not just be “black and white – it has subtleties.”
The largest subset among the special reports – five – focused on matters of health and wellness, including the need for Spanish-speaking medical interpreters at area hospitals, support groups for black women battling breast cancer, and the Affordable Care Act’s impact on domestic violence screenings and counseling services. There were four special reports each related to education (declining enrollment in charter schools, the tension between extending tourism and standardized testing preparation, Latino English language learners outperforming native-speaking students, and the pitfalls associated with getting a GED) and public safety (incarcerated juveniles and at-risk youth, miscalculated city crime statistics, a new law allowing those with permits to carry concealed weapons, and the deportation of county residents who lack criminal records).
Twelve NNS reporters and interns have had their bylines atop special reports. Mendez had 10 such reports – including those focusing on a unique collaboration between a community organization and a public school, the positive effect streetscape improvements had upon on a South Side business district, and residents’ concerns about contamination in the Kinnickinnic River. Evans, Waxman and intern Matthew Bin Han Ong each had two special reports, while six others all had one each.
There is no question that much of NNS’ best or most important work is within its collection of special reports. The equal number of such reports about health and wellness, education and public safety does not amount to a discernible pattern, but it does suggest that maybe the topics chosen reflect opportunities as they arise rather than a larger plan. One wonders whether the amount of effort or time put into what ends up getting stamped as such matters as much as the content published. If so, that would not be unlike what happens in legacy newsrooms where high-profile reporters earn added rank because of their reputation and past success. In any case, NNS is right to challenge itself to tackle in-depth stories that stretch its use of words, images, video, audio and data visualization. Doing so from the community’s perspective is a bonus for the audience.
MEDIA EXTENSION: "WE WANTED IT TO BE ORGANIC"
As with any media organization, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service strives to have its work reach as wide an audience as possible. NNS particularly hoped that local mainstream media would republish its work on their websites, so long as it received proper credit. Hence its name includes the words news service. McGowan said the local FOX affiliate, WITI-TV, accepted NNS’ offer even before it launched in 2011. But she also understood that not every news company would quickly follow suit. “It’s come gradually,” she said, adding that “we wanted it to be organic” and not, “Hey! ... We’re doing great work. You should publish our stuff.”
NPR’s Milwaukee affiliate, WUWM-FM, has given great exposure to the news service’s work after McGowan and NNS publisher Tony Shields appeared on the station’s local public affairs show on April 18, 2011, to promote the launching. The show’s host, Mitch Teich, invited NNS reporters into the “Lake Effect” studio 11 times between September 2012 and December 2013 to discuss their stories for its audience, which is more than 25,000 radio listeners a week and many more via online (live streaming or podcasts). The first time was for Ong’s special report, “Family Day Care Providers Squeezed by Low Ratings, New Rules.” Other news service stories featured on “Lake Effect” ranged from a new program to keep incarcerated juveniles close to home to city nonprofit organizations shying away from the ongoing residency debate to motorcyclists calling for awareness about an increase in crashes.
Teich wrote to me in an email that having NNS reporters share their work on “Lake Effect” is “an ideal situation for us” because “as a daily newsmagazine, our aim is to open a window on things happening across the community to our listeners.” With WUWM also having a small staff, “relationships like this are really vital” for the station to feature “news happening at the neighborhood level.” He added: "It quickly became evident that NNS reporters were doing admirable work in bringing issues to the fore that may not have been on the radar screen for many of our listeners. Almost to a person, the reporters had authentic, interested voices that helped make the stories come alive in a 'reporter’s notebook' fashion. The stories we featured were typically pitched to us through NNS’ editorial staff – a situation that worked well." Teich said more NNS-related “Lake Effect” segments could occur on a “regular, predictable basis,” so long as “they’re timely and strong,” and not just to fill 10 minutes.
The Journal Sentinel, the state’s largest newsroom and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes since 2008, has republished NNS’ work more sporadically. McGowan said its top editors told her that “they don’t have time or staff to cover individual neighborhoods” and “they’re more concerned about the city, the county and the region.” She said the editors agreed to consider NNS’ offer, but had done so only once when Ron Smith, an assistant managing editor and a Marquette alumnus, sent an email in April 2013 to Managing Editor George Stanley suggesting that a collaboration would benefit both organizations: "It would allow the J-S to get things online and into print that we don’t have the resources to cover and it would give NNS great exposure. For example, we often have trouble filling the local section of the Monday paper as well as generating local copy to post online throughout the days on Sundays. ... NNS would greatly improve our connections to underserved communities and help us to live up to our motto as 'Wisconsin’s newsroom.' … Let’s not wait any longer for something that sounds like a slam dunk for both organizations’ readership."
On May 23, 2013, the Journal Sentinel republished NNS intern Amalia Oulahan’s article, “‘Community-Oriented Community’ Unites to Build a Garden.” Thirty-six more reports made their way onto www.jsonline.com after first on www.milwaukeenns.org between that month and January 2014. It happened infrequently enough that McGowan believes Smith was physically in his newsroom whenever it did happen. In any event, when it does wish to republish an NNS article on its site, the Journal Sentinel typically creates a new headline, offers one or two paragraphs introducing the story, and links to it on the new service’s website using words like “the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service is reporting.” McGowan told the NNS advisory board in early March that she had a meeting soon with Smith and other editors at the Journal Sentinel in hopes of getting her staff’s stories republished on www.jsonline.com more regularly. “It would exponentially increase the people who read our stories,” she said.
No argument here. It seems plausible that the NPR affiliate could be more accepting of regenerating work by NNS for its radio audience because the host can agree to do so on his own, is always looking for interesting content and what matters most is what a studio guest says on air (less worry about mistakes). It may be more difficult for a larger newsroom with more ambition and areas of routine coverage and oversight to incorporate work done by reporters who it otherwise would not hire because of inexperience.
AUDIENCE: "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE COMMUNITY"
My other informants also spoke about the extent to which NNS stories are read by people who do not see them first on www.milwaukeenns.org. Noting that the entire staff promote readership for the website, Waxman mentions it to “every single person I talk to,” particularly her friends and acquaintances in the suburbs. She also has “quite a few of my friends on Facebook following it.” Waxman said “they find it really interesting” because “these are not stories they’re reading, for the most part, anywhere else.” She also said “most of the people in the suburbs have no idea what’s going on in Milwaukee,” even people who work in various kinds of “community and social justice things.”
Mendez noted that “a lot of the work” is republished in El Conquistador, southeastern Wisconsin’s most-read Spanish-speaking newspaper. At first, Mendez said, the weekly community paper just took on his work because he had written for it before. But he met with the paper’s editor and urged him to republish more NNS content because “it’s all free and it’s all about the community.” Mendez said “everyone’s gotten stories in El Conquistador” – including those that are of citywide interest, not just focusing on the South Side, where much of Milwaukee’s Latino population lives.
Ronaldson has a different take on the matter. “If I don’t tell people about it, force my friends to read it, email it to my family, I don’t know if people would read it,” she said. Having the word neighborhood in its name connotes that NNS is “just like a neighborhood newsletter” that does not explore as “hard-hitting of stuff,” Ronaldson said, adding that there is too much “adorable” content – such as “Oh! This lady turned 100 today!” – that “feels and looks soft, and so when you are Edgar, pulling out these awesome public policy articles, I think they get slighted.”
McGowan would counter that NNS is taken seriously by the nonprofit and other organizations whose community-building efforts it covers. Many such groups link to its stories on their websites, refer to them in membership emails, reprint them in newsletters and speak of them at their meetings. McGowan provided me with several such examples: ArtWorks Milwaukee’s website links to a profile about its new executive director; a Layton Boulevard West Neighbors e-newsletter points to a story about a bus tour for homebuyers; an ancillary Milwaukee Police Department website invites people to read about “the great work by officers” in a NNS article; and LISC Milwaukee uses e-alerts to promote that the news service has videos about its annual awards competition.
McGowan believes that all of this promotion of NNS’ work proves that she and her staff are enabling community groups to better connect and learn from each other’s successes and misfires – “that says, ‘Hey look at this. We’re interested in this. Maybe it works.’” McGowan also said NNS continues to work to increase its audience. But while its Google analytics and Facebook “likes” are “steadily growing,” she said, “they represent a fraction of who is actually reading our stories because we are a news service,” that is, there may be newsrooms elsewhere republishing NNS’ work without it knowing.
MOST POPULAR: "SOMETHING THAT'S WORKING"
Recently, at a Milwaukee Press Club event focusing on saving journalism, McGowan told the featured speaker, Kevin Merida, managing editor of The Washington Post, that Dwayne Burtin, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service’s staff member most attentive to the analytics, keeps pressing her to give more coverage to those issues or organizations in which prior stories have gained a huge number of page views. While acknowledging McGowan’s desire to cover as many deserving concerns as possible, Merida sided with Burtin, saying “when you see something that’s working – try it again.”
In any case, a review of the Top 20 posts on www.milwaukeenns.org through March 5 revealed no clear-cut answers in terms of what draws it the biggest audience. McGowan and Burtin have told the NNS advisory committee that any number of things beyond their control – much like for any other news or information website – could help increase page views for a particular story. Burtin told me recently that having an NNS story on the first page of a related Google search definitely draws added page views.
Such is the case still for NNS’ most accessed story to date, Brendan O’Brien’s “La Luz del Mundo Opens Violence Prevention Center on South Side.” Published on Aug. 29, 2013, it had 2,303 page views after benefitting from the focus on a popular church engaged in a matter relevant to people nationwide. “It was definitely being shared pretty heavily,” Burtin told me. (It cannot be overlooked that the primary accompanying photo includes Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett as one of three people cutting a ribbon.)
Only two other stories earned more than 2,000 page views: A special report, “Family Day Care Providers Squeezed By Low Ratings, New Rules,” by Ong, on May 21, 2012; and “New Test Could Force Thousands to Start Over on GED Exams,” by Mendez, on June 18, 2013. Burtin said Ong’s story was a “popular topic” because of a Journal Sentinel investigation concerning child-care centers. “Our angle was the other side of it,” about the impact on providers, he said. Mendez’ story was also “shared heavily,” had a “direct impact on the daily lives of a lot of our readers” and was “very real, very relevant, very timely and very useful,” Burtin said.
These two reports also appeared on WUWM’s “Lake Effect” show, but there’s no indication that having significant mainstream media exposure necessarily increases page views; only one other story among the Top 20 became a segment on the radio station and just five of them were among the 37 articles republished in the Journal Sentinel. Meanwhile, only two others of NNS’ 27 special reports made into the Top 20 list: “New Program to Keep Incarcerated Juveniles Close to Home,” on Oct. 3, 2012; and “Growing Hispanic Population Triggers Need for Trained Medical Interpreters,” on Aug. 6, 2012. That is somewhat surprising – or disappointing – given that NNS considers these types of reports to be among its best work. Other patterns include having community or neighborhood as a key factor in 13 of the most popular reports; projects, programs, partnerships and collaboration in nine, and Lindsay Heights being the top neighborhood mentioned (four out of 20). Fourteen stories on the list were published in 2013, but only one, “TRUE Skool Prepares for Grand Opening at Grand Avenue Mall,” in 2014.
Finally, the post with the fourth most page views, with 1,573, is the only one among the Top 20 not produced by NNS’ staff. It is titled “2013 Earn & Learn Summer Youth Internship Program (SYIP),” dated Feb. 2, 2013, and has “by the City of Milwaukee” as a byline. The post – a news release offering details for teenagers seeking an eight-week internship in one of 11 city departments – emerged from the “community tools section” of NNS’ site. The section allows readers to “share and submit” calendar items about neighborhood events, and stories and posts about “things going on in the community,” according to an NNS Web page. Burtin said “people are still hitting” that Web link on Google because they want information about internships for this summer.
SURPRISE: "I DON'T DO TONS OF PROFILES"
The profile, an in-depth look at a person or organization in the news or community, has long been a staple of both journalism and community journalism. So it is interesting that only about 20 of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service stories included in this study’s sample – including nine produced by students in my third-level, digital-journalism class during spring 2013 – could be considered profiles. “I don’t do tons of profiles of organizations,” McGowan said. That surprised me because in every time we have teamed to give my digital journalism students an NNS assignment, it meant two students doing a joint profile about a person or organization. That’s 37 profiles during four consecutive semesters dating to fall 2011. The former longtime journalism educator at Northwestern University said it was “an appropriate thing to do for classes – for young journalists – and because it’s easier than some of the other kinds of stories we cover. It’s less likely to get me in trouble because they don’t know what the heck they’re doing.”
And my students call me harsh! The implications associated with NNS and journalism education will be revisited in the conclusions. For now, though, McGowan wrote in an earlier email that my students have impressed her as motivated to do their best work. (Disclosure: Their final grade was tied to being published.) She added that they “provided valuable content on some of the many organizations and people in Milwaukee’s central city who work every day to make a difference in their communities. ... I learned a lot.”
My students’ profiles featured two nonprofit executive directors; an entrepreneur and community developer; a director of youth activities and a football program; a development director for a community center; an elementary school principal, a kindergarten teacher who owns a bed and breakfast and presides over a neighborhood improvement group; the founder of a cultural research organization; and a motivational speaker, poet and facilitator of a program focused on keeping black boys out of trouble. NNS tagged five of the nine stories as community, with two others as arts and recreation and one each as economic development and education. Each pair of students was required to turn in a 650-word story and a two-minute audio slideshow that had the profile subject talking about his or her background and mission with accompanying photographs.
Other Marquette students created three of the other profiles, including Ronaldson’s “YouthBuild Program Offers Young Father a Second Chance.” Waxman did five, including two in which she teamed with NNS Web producer Adam Carr for special reports about a Borchert Field block club’s efforts to improve the area around 14th Street. The others focused on a former city official now raising chickens in Sherman Park, two brothers working to help children in Riverwest, and the “Young Moms Organize to Strengthen Their Community” profile about Lakima Moore and Jessica Wilson. Waxman said that story and its accompanying three-minute video, “these women are just speaking from their hearts and telling their own stories” about being “extremely poor and living in extremely stressful circumstances” and yet “doing community service and fundraising and all kinds of work to help their community despite their challenges.” She adds: "This is Sharon’s favorite story that any of us have ever done – and it’s because it’s not (about) an organization. It’s not that the stories about organizations aren’t great, because they are. But to hear the voices of the people who are really living in the communities, I think, is a high priority for us and it’s a little bit hard to find them sometimes."
Waxman told me that she “happened to stumble” upon the story after meeting Moore while working on another one about improving access to immunizations for poor children. One wonders if NNS’ newsgathering routines enable its reporters to find such human-interest stories more frequently. It is hard to imagine that the news service thinks of itself as more issue-oriented than people-oriented. It seems this is another instance in which NNS could manage or aim to do more profiles of individuals.
TRANSPARENCY: "EVERYONE MAKES MISTAKES"
As noted throughout this study, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service presents itself as doing professional and objective reporting, despite nearly all of its reporters having relatively little experience in other newsrooms or being college students. So it begs the question: How often does NNS have to correct or clarify its reporting? Before we get to that, it is fair to say that corrections and clarifications have long bedeviled even the world’s greatest news agencies. It is alarming that Maier (2009) found that although news sources identified 1,200 factually flawed stories in a cross-market audit of 10 U.S. newspapers, fewer than 2 percent resulted in published corrections.
“Of course, everyone makes mistakes,” McGowan wrote in an email replying to my inquiry about fixes to published NNS stories. The editor-in-chief also said that interns have had their challenges, including an article in February in which a woman’s last name was misspelled and her job title and company’s name misidentified. But readers will not see a correction on that NNS Web page, even as Maier also wrote that “a clear standard for handling online errors is lacking” (p. 48). McGowan insisted that “all online news outlets” should get to quickly correct small errors – typos, punctuation, forgot to put a photo credit, etc. – without noting the correction. “It’s different for print publications, which could lay around for indefinite periods of time with the error in them,” said.
All that said, only two stories within the study’s sample of 229 had a correction posted at the bottom of the page – both were special reports: “Supporters of North Side Pool Sing Moody Blues,” on Dec. 3, 2012, and “Fewer MPS Charters, Declining Enrollment Add Up to Lost Revenue,” on Oct. 28, 2013; they each “fit the protocol in that they were substantive errors,” McGowan said. For the former, the correction posted the next day states that “the original version of this article misstated the number of county swimming pools on the South Side of the city. There are five, not six.” The latter notes that “this article has been revised to reflect the following correction: State aid per pupil in MPS charter schools is $6,642, not $7775 as originally reported.”
Meanwhile, NNS disclosed on two stories that it knew of a potential conflict of interest, something all media claiming to be professional and objective aim to avoid in their reporting. Below the “Viewers Say Burnham Park Public Art ‘Looks Like Life” article on Nov. 11, 2013, an “editor’s note” reveals that Carr, the part-time NNS employee, is among the featured artists. Another editor’s note appears below the next day’s “Historic ‘Settlement House’ Model Serves City’s Immigrants and the Poor” article, stating that NNS is published by UNCOM – that is, United Neighborhood Centers of Milwaukee, which along with its executive director, Tony Shields, is mentioned prominently. (A photo of Shields answering a question during a workshop is on the Web page.) Capping off an interesting week for NNS, another editor’s note appeared the day after that, this time stating that “a previous version” of the “Local Fair Housing Council Grantees to Reinvest in Home Ownership, Rehab” story “failed to mention” an organization as a “key player” to the spotlighted neighborhood initiative. The note ends with “NNS regrets the error.” This is notable, to say the least, given the option of adding the name to the story afterward and not drawing attention to the omission forever.
McGowan confirmed my suspicion that government agencies, particularly a public school system, and larger nonprofits and institutions are more likely to complain – “if they don’t like something, whether it’s an error or not” – than community residents or smaller nonprofits excited to get even the slightest news coverage. But lest anyone think that she is soft on accuracy or even clarity, McGowan is emphatic with interns and reporters alike that there is “no such thing as a minor error” when it comes to doing journalism. She stresses to her staff and anyone who will listen that NNS’ credibility – in the eyes of the community, its funders and the profession at large – depends on fair and accurate reporting. In her eyes, NNS cannot afford to miss the mark.
