Framework 2: Making Sense of Different Areas

The Wichita Context

In Wichita, two different neighborhoods, Riverside and Northeast, were explored; there were also occasional discussions about two additional Wichita neighborhoods, College Hill and West Side. The more conversations were held among Eagle reporters and The Harwood Group, the clearer the differences became in what made the civic life of each of those areas tick.

Naming Areas

As the Wichita initiative ensued, a search began for a word or phrase to capture the essence of how each of the areas worked. This step was important because it helped everyone involved get a clearer sense of the four neighborhoods. Arriving at authentic names was not easy and took a number of tries.

The Harwood Groups experience suggests that naming a body of information is critical to understanding it. Usually it is in the naming process that peoples underlying sense of how they understand the information emerges. Naming also creates a useful tension between becoming emersed in the richness and complexity of insights and the need to produce a sharp, coherent sense of what has been learned.

On the following pages are brief descriptions of the four Wichita areas. 

For each neighborhood, there is a review of its name, how the area works, and challenges journalists will face in tapping into these kinds of areas. Next is a chart that contrasts the four neighborhoods.

Please keep in mind that these Wichita neighborhoods are provided for the purpose of example. Each newsroom will explore its own targeted areas in the community, and each will come up with its own names for those areas.

 Moving Ahead

DON’T FALL INTO THE TRAP

Journalists should be cautious in “naming” areas. It should not turn into a process of “stereotyping” an area, which certainly would be out of sync with this work.

Instead, tapping into civic life is about gaining a deeper understanding of the community to strengthen journalism.

Naming community areas should serve to pull insights together and provide greater clarity about what those insights mean.

One last note: The area names are not intended for publication. They are to help journalists in thinking about the community and their reporting.

PROFESSIONALIZED NEIGHBORHOODS 

In Wichita, the Riverside area had the feel of what The Harwood Group has come to call a “professionalized” neighborhood. Riverside was familiar to many reporters; some even lived there. It is known as a well-educated, clearly defined neighborhood made up mostly of career professional couples and families. It is mostly white. Its civic groups and public discussions tend to be highly structured, have a formal air to them, and are largely centralized around the Riverside Citizens’ Association (RCA). 

To address a neighborhood concern, one local resident told us: “People will call the RCA hotline about an issue and it will get on the agenda for the next RCA meeting. At the meeting, we’ll discuss the issue and maybe devise a strategy for dealing with it. Then we cover it in the Booster (the RCA newsletter) to let people know how it’s being followed up.” 

The dilemma in this kind of neighborhood is that only a relatively small fraction of people participate in the neighborhood’s formal interactions. Most residents talk at the incidental level, that fourth layer of civic life where they bump into one another at the market or on the street, while many of the area’s third spaces have been in a state of decline for years.

 Journalists’ Challenge

When working in this kind of neighborhood, journalists need to tap into a variety of civic spaces beyond quasi-official ones. Only tapping into quasi-official areas will give journalists a false sense of security about how well they understand the neighborhood.

Why? Because often the agenda and conversations in quasi-official spaces do not cover the range or depth of peoples concerns in a neighborhood. The people that attend public meetings sometimes could be considered professional citizens. And in many communities, neighborhood residents are increasingly feeling that quasi-official groups together with official institutions are disconnected from the community.

GRAPEVINE NEIGHBORHOODS

This second type of neighborhood, Northeast, is called a “grapevine” because people’s concerns and information work their way through an informal network of personal interactions and conversations in a wide variety of settings. There is no single place to gain a true sense of what is happening in this neighborhood. 

Northeast was a place far fewer reporters had explored or even visited. It is a sprawling, mostly poor-to-working class neighborhood. Most residents are African-American.

The source of this name was a Northeast resident who said that the neighborhood worked like a “grapevine.” 

The typical quote we heard from people living in Northeast was: “If I hear something at church — like a drug problem on a certain block — I can call or will run into certain people I know to talk about what we can do, and maybe one of them can talk to someone else who knows a program or a group that can help.”

 Journalists’ Challenge

Organizations and leadership in this kind of neighborhood tend to be fragmented. The challenge is that there are so many places and people to tap that the neighborhood becomes unmanageable.

To understand this neighborhood, journalists should initially tap into as many places and people as possible. The goal should be to pinpoint a set of places and leaders that, together, can provide an authentic picture of the neighborhood. These places and sources can then become the go to places for journalists.

Just remember that in a grapevine neighborhood no one civic space or leader is likely to give journalists the whole story. Also, these go to places and leaders will change over time.

INDIVIDUAL ACCESS TO POWER 

There was significantly less time to explore the third Wichita neighborhood, College Hill, but based on newsroom and community interviews, this neighborhood seemed to work quite differently from the first two.

College Hill is an upper middle class area of large homes and manicured lawns with a preponderance of movers and shakers, young and old.

People interviewed described College Hill as a place where the local network of civic activity is weak, where people stay largely to themselves and often have direct individual access to local officials and Wichita’s elite. 

 Journalists’ Challenge

Journalists will need to be creative to tap into this kind of neighborhood, for there may be few, if any, civic spaces to explore.

Journalists should seek to identify key people in the neighborhood who tend to interact with others socially and who could pull people together or help a journalist gain access to where people do meet, for instance, at a social event or a country club.

Another strategy is to knock on peoples front doors to engage them in conversation, as Eagle reporter Jim Cross did at Country Place Estates (Page 6). One way to start that process is to interview an individual for a specific story and then build that relationship over time. The contact may lead the journalist to other civic places and sources to tap.

UNORGANIZED NEIGHBORHOODS

West Side, the fourth neighborhood, like College Hill, was not the primary focus of the Wichita experience. It is a neighborhood that The Eagle is now exploring on its own. Still, the newsroom conversations and community interviews offered insights into how this area of the community operates. 

West Wichita is a large, rapid growing and economically diverse area of conservative whites, dominated by retirees and by families with young children filling up new subdivisions.

The unorganized neighborhood is perhaps more common in America than many people might think, and it often is the kind of place that remains invisible to journalists. 

In this neighborhood there seem to be few known places for civic conversation and few links between the different layers of civic life. Many of the third place interactions revolve around people’s immediate lives, such as youth sports events (Little League), bridge clubs, backyard socializing. Incidental interactions occur as people mow their lawns, meet at the supermarket, drop their kids off for school. 

 Journalists’ Challenge

To tap into this kind of area, journalists will need to find the neighborhood catalysts. These people will help point journalists to public events, such as Little League games, and to more invisible places where people naturally convene, such as their homes and backyards.

Yet another challenge is for journalists to be aware of possible biases or preconceived ideas about residents of this type of neighborhood, who often come from different backgrounds, educational levels and perhaps political views than the journalists do. It is not uncommon to hear journalists talk about residents of this kind of neighborhood as “having their heads in the sand.”