Community Journalism: Honing the Voices of Tomorrow

Originally posted on Neon Tommy.com

Yesterday, I stood in front of a class of seniors at Crenshaw High School and attempted to explain blogging. I showed them how to log in to Blogspot, how to write and submit their posts, and how to link to their stories from MySpace. But then a girl in a long purple dress, second row, asked: "What's the point?"

"What do you mean?" I replied, unsure I had understood her question. "What's the point of blogging?"

"Yeah."

For a moment, I was stumped.

What is the point of blogging? I wondered. And more importantly, what can it possibly mean to a noisy, over-crowded class of 17-year-olds, waiting for lunchtime to hurry the hell up?

I've been working with Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project since its inception in August 2008. Before the website was built, before the mentoring program had begun, before we changed the name from the ugly acronym "SLARP" to the user-friendly "Intersections," I sat with the two professors who had ignited the project -- Willa Seidenberg and Bill Celis -- and talked about the purpose, the point of it all, how to get the ball rolling, and where that ball could eventually go.

It would be a community forum and a hyper-local news website, focused on the areas of Los Angeles that usually fall short of media attention, unless the stories involve a body count: From Inglewood to Watts, Compton to the Crenshaw District, Intersections would serve the zipcodes that form the new incarnation of the old "South Central." Residents, community leaders and high school students would become a solid base for citizen reporting, while USC's own journalism students would be broaching their comfort zones and pounding the pavements, learning ethnically and culturally diverse reporting.

Eight months later, we're still officially pre-launch, but the Knight Foundation's J-Lab has honored Intersections with a $25,000 grant as part of its "New Voices" initiative. It's money that will certainly allow the project to continue and thrive, as well as expand into the many avenues it has the potential to traverse.

One of those avenues is the high school mentoring project, which has been running at Crenshaw High School throughout the 2008/2009 acadmic year and will be expanded to include other schools in South Los Angeles after the summer. It's this part of the project that lands me, and my fellow USC mentors, in cacophonic classrooms every week, from the senior seminar class to the ninth grade multimedia session. The senior class now have their own reporter's kits, with cameras and audio equipment, which they have used to produce projects on broad topics, from immigration to racial profiling to teenage pregnancy. The ninth-grade class are currently learning how to write, record and edit their own radio commentaries, the first of which they used to address the question: "Why don't youth take their education seriously?" The answer, in some cases, was again, what's the point?

It's much easier to explain to the students why they should enunciate their words when they're recording for radio, or how to use an editing program, than it is to explain why they should do any of it at all. In the end, what difference does it make whether they flunk or fly, post a blog entry or don't?

The answer, I tell them, is that it makes a lot of difference. "The stakes are high," I said last week to the ninth-grade class. "People are listening."

Things are changing in the media landscape. The power is shifting, and if they seize the moment and take their chance to wield it, it could make all the difference in the world. There are some, however, who find it hard to believe that the opinions and experiences of high school students, or even South L.A.'s residents at large, matter to anyone living beyond their own block. It's not surprising to feel that way about community journalism. I've even encountered professional journalists who believe it to be irrelevant, too far beneath them, to warrant attention.

However, it would seem that the opposite is, in fact, true. In the Internet Age, where niche markets are breeding, community journalism is finding a home like never before. Hyper-local news is gaining momentum and power. Unheard voices, ignored in the age of legacy media, are being given the microphone. South Los Angeles, especially, can benefit from this new media dynamic.

Consistent lack of coverage, combined with the arrogance of mainstream media outlets, has taken a harsh toll on the area. Last year, while I was reporting on a story remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, I ended up sitting at a chili dog stand at the intersection of Florence and Normandie, being told that I "could never make a difference" as a journalist. Henry Watson, a South L.A. resident and one of the "L.A. Four" responsible for beating a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, almost to death on April 29, 1992, told me that South Los Angeles would always be shunned until it eventually rotted away from apathy. It was partially due to this feeling of forced isolation that the riots were provoked, said Watson, and it's only a matter of time before they happen again.

Another resident and one of Watson's entourage, Tony Falley, then told me to take a look at the intersection where we were standing. This area, the scene of so much violence and social upheaval in the early '90s, still looked exactly the same as it did before. The rioting hadn't made a difference. It hadn't put South L.A. on the map. The lack of balanced media attention had, instead, left the area to physically stagnate. "Our environment needs to be built up," said Falley. "As far as Florence and Normandie, where the riots happened, we don't have anything but the same stuff: a gas station and a liquor store."

Journalism, at its best, is progressive. It seeks to bring new ideas, new stories, and new voices into the sphere of public consciousness. But if journalists aren't willing to broach the barriers of their own comfort zones and step out onto a different block, the process is simply stifling.

I only hope that, before next week, I can figure out a simple way to tell that to the rambunctious teenagers at Crenshaw High School, the next time they ask: "What's the point?"