Civic Journalism Is… True Stories from America’s Newsrooms
Civic Journalism Is…
About stories that set you apart.
Deb Halpern
Assistant News Director
WFLA-TV, Tampa, FL
We do our journalism from the bottom up, so to speak. That is, we listen to the people we’re trying to serve about what matters most to them and we are trying to penetrate the deepest layers of the community to find the stories.
I was a little skeptical about civic journalism and techniques like civic mapping when I first heard about them. But we are using these tools to explore one neighborhood in Tampa and it has opened our eyes. If you really get into your community, you realize there are just endless stories to tell.
Neighborhood residents we met through our mapping project told us about a corner where drugs are being sold just one block from an elementary school. We were able to get pictures of drug dealing and illegal gambling there. And we plan to go back in the fall and show how close the drug dealers are to children walking to school. We hope the story might lead to better enforcement in that area.
I am really impressed with this process as a way of generating true enterprise reporting, which is what gives your station personality. Everybody does spot news and cop news but the enterprise reporting we are generating with the tools of civic journalism is what sets us apart.