Framework 4: Making Sense of Different Areas

As your newsroom explores more than one area or topic of the community you will want to figure out how they compare. This effort can help you get a better handle on how each area operates, what it takes to tap into different areas, and what it all means for reporting. Four neighborhoods researched for Harwood Institute work in Wichita are used to illustrate this framework.

Wichita Context

In Wichita, two different neighborhoods, Riverside and Northeast, were explored in civic mapping efforts; 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 Institute, the clearer the differences became in what made the civic life of each of those areas tick.

Examples

Below is a chart that contrasts the four neighborhoods. On the following pages are brief descriptions of the four Wichita areas.

For each neighborhood, there is a review of how the area works, its generic name (simply a way of organized thinking) and the challenges journalists face in tapping into these kinds of areas.

Keep in mind that these Wichita neighborhoods are just examples. Each newsroom will explore its own targeted areas or topics in the community.

TYPE A: Professionalized Neighborhoods

In Wichita, the Riverside area had the feel of what The Harwood Institute 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 white, career professional couples and families. 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 said: “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. And many of the area’s third spaces have been in a state of decline for years.

Challenge: Tapping into this kind of neighborhood

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 people’s concerns in a neighborhood. The people who 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.

TYPE B: 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 neighborhood of mostly poor-to-working-class people. 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 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.”

Challenge: Tapping into this kind of neighborhood

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.

TYPE C: 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.

Challenge: Tapping into this kind of neighborhood

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 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 people’s front doors to engage them in conversation. 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.

TYPE D: Unorganized Neighborhoods

West Side, the fourth neighborhood, like College Hill, was not the primary focus of the Wichita mapping effort. Still, the newsroom conversation and community interviews offered insights into how this area operates.

West Wichita is a large, rapidly 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 conversations 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 or drop their kids off for school.

Challenge: Tapping into this kind of neighborhood

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 soccer games, and to more invisible places where people naturally convene, such as their homes and yards.

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.”