Madison Commons Project Director Lew Friedland talks about the basics of neighborhood news reporting during the East Side Community Journalism Workshop.
Twenty-two people from two diverse Madison neighborhoods have completed reporter “boot camp” training, a three-session curriculum devised as part of the Madison Commons project to teach them how to identify, report and write the news.
Plans are now underway to launch by mid-December a website where they can turn their training into community reports. They will also be contributing to weekly community reports to be published in the local dailies, The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal.
The project partnered with two Neighborhood Planning Councils to recruit the contributors. Fourteen signed up from the city’s south side — mostly African-Americans, Latinos and Hmong participants. They included neighborhood association presidents, single mothers, high school students, and at least one former addict working on her GED.
“About half the group had at least some college education, but all needed major coaching in reporting and writing,” said project leader Lew Friedland, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The students were promising. The former addict approached her task of reporting with gusto and by the end of the session had interviewed the mayor’s chief aide and convinced him to do a walking interview with her through the neighborhood.
Another woman uncovered a major development that would displace many of the cheap hotels on Madison’s beltline highway but would also displace the transient people who now live there.
“They showed us that with some basic tools, citizens really can report on their own communities and break news,” Friedland said.
Rose Johnson-Brown, a student in the South Side Community Journalism Workshop, listens as project Managing Editor Chris Long offers advice about the neighborhood news story she is working on.
The eight participants from the city’s East side included many neighborhood activists and some mid-level state workers. They ranged from a cook to a software programmer. Since most of the group had some college education, “the starting level for reporting and writing was much higher,” Friedland said.
Still, each person “takes a fair amount of care and attention,” he said. Even those who have written for neighborhood newsletters or community papers “aren’t necessarily trained to report from a framework outside of positive neighborhood news.”
Now the planning council on the north side of town has asked for training, and the city of Madison has asked the project to run workshops for the city’s neighborhood newsletter writers. Meanwhile, students at the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication have taken an advanced community reporting course and may also contribute to the effort.
Various local foundations are being approached for future support and discussions are underway with the journalism school to fund a research assistant/editor for the site.
Meanwhile, the lessons of the three workshops are being used to draft a training curriculum. The participants recommended that a fourth session be added and that each session be shortened.
Conducting the workshops where people lived was important, Friedland said, because many people could come from work.
Brian O’Donnell, a student in the East Side Community Journalism Workshop, works on his neighborhood news story in the computer lab.
While training such diverse participants is a big challenge, a competing challenge is trying to keep the citizens voices alive. “Our goal is not to make everyone sound like a straight news reporter,” he said. “… Rather it is to develop a broad palette of community voices, while still developing a stream of news that otherwise wouldn’t be reported.”
Though money to launch this project was provided by J-Lab, the Madison Commons Project will approach a number of foundations, including the Madison Community Foundation, to continue funding the effort.
