EJ Academy


Creating a Learning Community Through Community Journalism By BERNARDO H. MOTTA


Four tables were arranged in each corner of the main hall of the


Carter G. Woodson African American Museum in Midtown St. Pe- tersburg, Fla. A community member sat at each one, sharing a story with a student-reporter in a style similar to “Story Corps.” Nearby, a journalist from WUSF Radio operated a sound recorder. The event, a partnership between WUSF Public Media and the University of South Florida St. Petersburg’s Neighborhood News Bureau, or NNB, re- sulted in two special broadcasts for


WUSF Radio’s show


“Florida Matters.” What’s surprising is that the great majority of the stu- dents who work with NNB had never heard of Midtown before taking the class in their senior year. Even students who had lived in St. Petersburg for most of their lives had no or very lit- tle knowledge of this historic African-American community in the south side of town. The ones that did had a distorted im- pression of the area. Yet in a couple of months, these same students were pro-


Neighborhood News Bureau reporter Samantha Sotos (left) interviews Winnie Fos- ter (right) for a "Telling Tampa Bay Stories: Midtown" event last February. Photo by Bernardo H. Motta


ducing mini-documentaries, conducting long interviews, building relationships with sources, searching for public records and histor- ical artifacts in the libraries and community centers, covering busi- nesses and events, and teaching the next generation of journalists in the local schools. They were not just covering the community; they had become


part of it.


An embedded newsroom with environmental interests NNB is a newsroom and classroom embedded in the Midtown


community. The initiative was founded in 2006 by the late Bob Dardenne, who believed that having students embedded in the Mid- town community was the best learning experience the department of journalism and media studies at University of South Florida St. Petersburg, or USFSP, could provide to its students. NNB’s mission is to fill the information gap about the Mid- town communities, which have been historically underserved and underreported, to bring relevant and useful information to the local residents, and to provide a complete learning experience for our fu- ture journalists.


The students who work in this embedded community news- room learn a combination of specific content and hands-on appli- cation of skills. Students learn about history, culture, politics, social justice, economics, environmental science, public affairs law and many other topics that matter to the community.


On the skills side, they report for audio, video, print and mul- timedia, research public records, aggregate data, conduct opinion polls and work on long-form features and investigative projects. A few students also help with outreach and educational efforts in local K-12 schools. Local media outlets publish or broadcast the stories produced by the students. NNB also has its own website, NNBnews.com. When I joined USFSP in the fall of 2015, my task was to plan the expansion of NNB, add mul- timedia reporting, secure fund- ing, develop long-term partnerships and continue im- proving the service NNB pro- vides to both the Midtown community and to our students. I also wanted to make sure that this project had something to do with environmental journalism. In my first semester I invited fel- low SEJers Craig Pittman and Cynthia Barnett (I think I still owe them coffee or lunch) to talk about environmental issues in St. Petersburg and in Florida. At the same time, I identify students who want to work on an


environment-related story and help them produce it. In my two se- mesters here, NNB students produced stories about a local refer- endum question about sea grass in Tampa Bay; a longtime volunteer in the Boyd Hill Natural Preserve, located immediately south of Midtown; the giant brownfield that covers most of south St. Peters- burg; and many stories related to food and environmental justice. I am also planning to work with local schools to test tap water in Midtown; look for the effects of local sea-level rise and ocean acidification in Pinellas County; test air quality and compare envi- ronmental health markers in Midtown with the rest of the county, among other ideas.


Outsiders in the community


“One word defined St. Petersburg’s historic African American neighborhoods: connectivity,” Rosalie Peck and Jon Wilson wrote as the very first line of “St. Petersburg’s Historic African American Neighborhoods.” My students have to read it in the first two weeks of class.


I see my job as mostly facilitating this connectivity between my students and the people, culture, history and daily life of Midtown. As I try to connect students who are not from the area or simply oblivious to it, I use my own experiences to guide me. I am a stranger here myself. Besides being an actual foreigner from Brazil, I arrived in St. Petersburg only in July 2015, after living for years in a small town in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and, before then,


Continued on page 22 20 SEJournal Fall 2016


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