Intersections: The South Los Angeles Report experienced a strong start-up year, with promise for future sustainability and growth, according to co-director Bill Celis, associate professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. So strong, team members decided to change its name from The South Los Angeles Report from The South Los Angeles Reporting Project, to reflect the site’s evolution and growing maturity.
“We are working to build more bridges into the community to generate more … op-ed pieces that speak with candor to and about urban life in a new century.”
Community contributions continue to increase, the high school journalism program is expanding, and the critical summer months were staffed by nearly a half dozen USC graduate journalism students who produced roughly a dozen multimedia reports.
The site — http://www.intersectionssouthla.org — soft-launched in February 2009, with a formal launch on May 5. After the launch, the site’s continuing efforts have led to “critical community connections” that have generated substantive neighborhood reporting in fall 2009 for the site.
Celis said the New Voices grant played a key role in this growth.
“The New Voices grant enabled us to hire a part-time coordinator whose chief responsibility is engaging the community through workshops, and other community outreach programs that includes canvassing downtown Compton businesses and residents next month,” said Celis. “Our coordinator also began an aggressive review of the website, comparing its features with those of more mature hyper local sites, and recommended aggregating, for example, daily headlines from other Los Angeles media outlets.”
Celis said the vibrant neighborhoods of South Los Angeles are increasingly represented on Intersections.
Community Coalition, for example, is among the South Los Angeles community groups now contributing to Intersections, both in terms of content and news leads. The coalition contributed a series of high school student blogs and video reports from a Labor Day trip to Northern California to visit campuses.
It also provided Intersections with several news tips, including one idea this past summer about a free health-care clinic it helped organize in The Forum, a former sports arena in the South Los Angeles city of Inglewood. Thousands of South Angelinos sought free health, dental and eye care during the eight-day clinic sponsored by a Tennessee nonprofit. Story: http://tinyurl.com/psuf5s
Individual contributions are fewer in number, but no less significant, said Celis. For instance, an Inglewood African-American resident wrote about the pathology of young African-American high school males. The column received several posts from community members, the themes resonating with them, establishing Intersections a unique clearing house in its early months for South Los Angeles voices http://tinyurl.com/muyhta
“Few of the five African-American and Latino newspapers serving the area carry such honest pieces,” says Celis. “We are working to build more bridges into the community to generate more of these op-ed pieces that speak with candor to and about urban life in a new century.”
All told, roughly 15 percent of the site’s content has been generated with community partners, organizations and individuals, he adds.
Future efforts to generate more community contributions include offering $50 stipends to community contributors, and canvassing Compton, an incorporated city deep in South Los Angeles. Intersections also plans to expand coverage of South Los Angeles’ vibrant faith-based community in 2010.
But Intersection’s earliest and most successful push into South Los Angeles has been in the area’s troubled high schools, according to Celis. Working initially last fall with the USC Rossier School of Education, Intersections began mentoring one class at Crenshaw High School, just south of the USC campus. During the spring 2009 semester, Intersections organized a workshop for South Los Angeles youth that culminated in multimedia work posted to Intersection’s under one of our new categories, “high school notebook.”
The program was so successful that Celis says it’s not only expanding to another local school, but a successful three-day workshop with the Crenshaw students in the spring had led to a request from local schools for Intersections to hold it on a regular basis for students interested in journalism.
“Either through semester-long mentoring projects or future one-day workshops for high school classes and/or newspaper staffs, students contribute community news to Intersections while also learning media literacy,” says Celis.
In the coming months, these workshops will also be expanded to reach the community at large.
USC Annenberg’s continuing and future role in South Los Angeles
As important as Intersections is to growing members of the South Los Angeles community, Celis says the site is just as important to students at the USC Annenberg School. During summer 2009, to help sustain the site, USC graduate journalism students produced nearly a dozen multimedia reports through directed research credits. One student, for example, produced a two-story multimedia package about South LA youth campaigning for improvement of their neighborhoods and schools before the Los Angeles City Council. This particular project was produced in conjunction with UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, an organization designed to improve educational opportunities for urban youth. We expect to do more joint projects with our UCLA colleagues.
Celis gives credit to USC Annenberg Dean, Ernest J. Wilson, III, and Journalism School Director, Geneva Overholser, now in her second year, for the early success of Intersections. In particular his says Overholser’s support and enthusiasm for Intersections made it possible to introduce the new South Los Angeles Reporting course, one of the seven classes contributing to the site from semester to semester. The South Los Angeles class is a multimedia journalism class that explores life in South LA and it continues to test mobile phone delivery of the news through a relationship with Mobile Voices. Sudents in the class will work closely with Jordan High School in Watts to help students there embrace mobile delivery.
The support from the J-Lab, and the strategic use of the grant money, will enable us to continue growing the project in all the ways we have described here, and will support our ultimate goal of monetizing the site.
