A look at a 'community journalism' project in a poor part of Philadelphia.
Citizen journalism has become the faddish name for the effort to encourage regular folk to use the Internet to report the news directly, but Mr. Wolfson (Todd, 35, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the organizers of the Media Mobilizing Project) had a point: many of the people whom his organization and an immigrant rights group, Juntos, are teaching to make video reports for streaming on the Internet are not citizens. Many are not even legal residents.
The hope, however, is that they can be journalists.
The classes are supported by a $150,000 news challenge grant from the Knight Foundation in Miami, which is donating a total of $25 million over five years “for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.”
Gary Kebbel, the administrator of the Knight Foundation news challenge grants, said the promise of wider access to the Internet means there “should be good content for communities, by the communities.”
“We live in, work in, pay taxes in, and democracy is organized around where we live; we don’t vote for virtual presidents or pay virtual taxes,” he said. “Democracy, the way we practice it, is geographically based.”
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At a recent class at the Songhai City Cultural Center in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Brewerytown, all the challenges and opportunities of a still-unfolding experiment were evident.
The Brewerytown neighborhood is experiencing an intense struggle with gentrification and street violence — something I could have learned by searching Brewerytown at a news site like Philly.com (recent headlines: “Brewerytown Man Charged With Two Stabbings,” “Firearms, Explosive Devices Found in Brewerytown Home”).
But, in fact, I (Noam Cohen) learned it by hearing the collective news judgment of Mr. Wolfson’s group. After a free-flowing discussion about the kind of news they see and read in mainstream outlets, the group of about 15 was encouraged by the class’s three teachers to suggest their own story ideas, a few of which they will turn into five-minute video segments by the end of the eight-week class. A pattern quickly emerged: proposed topics included gun control, violence in schools, as well as crime against cab drivers.