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Last fall, Pressroom Buzz broke the news of a new, nonprofit neighborhood news service coming to Milwaukee.
Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service has been up and running now since March 21, so it seemed like a good time to catch up with Sharon McGowan, editor and project director, for an update.
The Neighborhood News Service, sponsored by the United Neighborhood Centers of Milwaukee with support from the Zilber Family Foundation, was conceived to remedy Milwaukee mass media’s habit of ignoring the city’s neighborhoods except for stories about crime and decay. In the early innings, it’s clearly finding no shortage of material.
“We’re pleased so far,” says McGowan. “We’ve gotten a very positive reaction to the site, and our reporters are developing sources and turning out high-quality work. We already have demonstrated that there is no shortage of stories to report.”
“Fresh food restaurant proposed for Lindsay Heights,” one recent story was headlined. And in keeping with now-standard tactics in news on the web, the NNS has its share of video as well.
The NNS also takes part in the other big digital journalism trend: curation. On the site’s home page are links to selected stories in other publications — Milwaukee News Buzz as well as the Business Journal, the Journal Sentinel, WUWM and other outlets. “The links are chosen based on their relevance to the residents of the communities we cover and the issues we focus on, including education, health and wellness, housing, arts and recreation, and public safety,” McGowan says.
The operation has a total of five paid, part-time staff people and another five volunteers. It gets help from Marquette University’s Diederich College of Communication.
The service has begun to find an audience as well, with 13,972 page views in the first two months.
“We currently cover five neighborhoods: Lindsay Heights, Clarke Square, and the Layton Boulevard West neighborhoods of Silver City, Burnham Park, and Layton Park,” says McGowan. “We are seeking additional funding that would allow us to add more paid part-time staff and cover additional neighborhoods.”
The service still hopes to see local commercial news operations pick up its stories, but so far the primary focus has been “on attracting community residents to our site and working out the kinks that are typical of a new website,” McGowan says.
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Journalism and Social Change: Thanks to PBS’s “American Experience,” my 14-year-old and I sat down last week and absorbed a two-hour history of The Freedom Riders — the astonishingly courageous young people who 50 years ago challenged segregation in intercity bus travel. A couple of things came to mind as we watched. One was how critical TV news coverage was to changing American perceptions about southern segregation, from initial complacency to outrage, as images of protesters (and some journalists) being beaten by police streamed into our living rooms.
Another was how those images actually helped change how the media covered civil rights, from a detached stance to one that was increasingly — and, I would argue, appropriately — sympathetic with the aspirations of black Americans fighting for equality.
In light of that, recent comments by veteran journalist Bill Moyers to Tavis Smiley on PBS are pertinent. It has long been the contention of media observers — especially on the left — that coverage of stories about politics and policy tends to focus on a fairly narrow spectrum of perspectives. Moyers makes the point with special vigor in his interview:
Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties. They do their job; they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.
Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology – two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job – those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear. You got voices like those on your show. You got them on Amy Goodman “Democracy Now!” and a few other places like that, but not as a steady presence in the public discourse. American TV is saturated with conservative views of the “ruling ideology.”
Center of the Storm: Every once in a while some huge cataclysm catches a reporter directly in it, and then there’s nothing quite like the stories that result. This week it was the turn of a reporter from Joplin, Mo., who tells a harrowing tale of living through Sunday’s massive tornado there.
Buck Up: And finally, the Columbia Journalism School in New York asked Nate Silver – the statistician and blogger who probably had some of the most accurate and perceptive coverage of the 2008 presidential election, and won himself a berth at The New York Times website for his efforts — to address its graduates this year. At a time when the news business continues to be rocked by uncertainty, his remarks [PDF] offer some degree of hope and direction.
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