Happy 15th birthday, COMJIG

Today marks a special day for COMJIG.

it was 15 years ago that about 25 of us, led by the indefatigable Jock Lauterer, gathered in a poorly lit coferece room at Toronto's Sheraton Centre to form the Communty Journalism Interest group of AEJMC.

Fittingly, we are back at the Sheraton Toronto this year.

With recent develoments in journalism, the need for COMJIG has never been greater.

I hope you'll try to attend today's (Friday's) research session (4:45 p.m. in the Cedar Room - mezzanine). If you can't make that, come by the business meeting at 6:30 in the same room to wish COMJIG a hapy birthday and many more. - Doug Fisher

COMJIG honors its founder with "Roots Journalism Award"

COMJIG Founder, Jock Lauterer, right, receives the Roots Journalism Award from outgoing head of COMJIG, John Hatcher. 

In August of 2004, Jock Lauterer (now director of the Carolina Community Media Project), gathered a group of community journalism educators in a room at the AEJMC conference in Toronto, Canada, and announced that he and colleague Peggy Kuhr had convinced AEJMC leaders to approve the creation of an interest group dedicated to community journalism.

At AEJMC's annual conference this year, COMJIG's current officers wanted to find a way to recognize and thank Lauterer for launching this group and for his commitment to the study and practice of community journalism. We needed look no farther than the words of Lauterer himself when searching for a name for the award to honor him. This is what Lauterer wrote in the Forward to the 2012 book, "Foundations of Community Journalism," 

Lately I have begun to think of community journalism under a slightly different concept—that of “roots journalism.” Like roots music, roots journalism reflects the indigenous culture through storytelling.

When the great bassist Christian McBride was asked what guided his music, he replied that he tried to keep his repertoire “rooted in the groove.” It is that commitment to “rootedness” that has been community journalism’s credo from the start, and which has propelled community newspapers and many other community journalism efforts through “the Great Recession” and beyond.

The officers of the Community Journalism Interest Group hope this award is at least one small way of thanking Lauterer for his unending passion and support for all things community.  

Community journalism in China

One of the founders of this group, UNC's Jock Lauterer, is in China where he reports: "Pretty amazing stuff. Newspapers are everywhere and hugely popular. CJ is all but unknown but at its fledgling state. I honestly believe the state-controlled media system doesn't know what to make of the phenom."

You can find his posts at http://blogs.web.jomc.unc.edu/bluehighways/

Stories on Community Journalism

I always enjoy hearing what people have to say about working in community journalism. Here are a few samples:

• Lil Mirando - Honored to Practice Community Journalism (Hammond Star) - "My first day on the job I learned that the police reporter before me had screwed up his notes about a crime report and erroneously listed a store manager as a shoplifter. As a result, we had a huge trust issue with the police. It was eventually resolved over time as we got to know each other." This is the thing about community journalism - a lot of the ethical issues are self enforcing when you have to live and work with the people you are covering.
• David Knopf - Returning to Community Journalism After Working in the City (Sun Tribune) - "It was a fast start, indeed, for 2010. For me, it began on Dec. 14, 2009, the day I returned to doing what I like best — working for a community newspaper. If happiness could be backdated or made retroactive, I might say it was the best Thanksgiving I’ve had, with so much to be thankful for." We know the metro papers are facing serious economic problems these days, but it seems as though there is still life at the community papers.
• Jock Lauterer's students at UNC launched the Durham Voice, a community newspaper looking at the Northeast Central Durham community. Here's a video about what the students got out of working on the project. This video was posted by Lisa Marie Albert.

Durham Voice begins

COMJIG founder Jock Lauterer sends word from North Carolina that Durham Voice has launched in that city as a cooperative venture between UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central Univeristy.

The site can be found at durhamvoice.org.

It serves the Northeast Central Durham community. The area is known as the "bull's eye" to police because of the crime rate.

Content for Durham Voice is being provided by UNC and UNCC journalism students and from teenagers in the community who are being mentored by those students.

The Voice will be published bi-weekly online through November and will add a monthly 24-page tabloid print edition in February 2010. The Daily Tar Heel, UNC's student newspaper, is covering the costs of printing 2,000 copies monthly for the first year of publication. The Voice will be distributed at neighborhood schools, churches and businesses.

North Dakota journalism students come to aid of rural newspaper and town devastated by tornado

While Jock Lauterer's students at North Carolina are helping a newspaper stay afloat while its editor-publisher recovers from major surgery, those in a community journalism class at the University of North Dakota have come to the aid of a rural newspaper and town devastated by a tornado. I asked their instructor, Dr. Jacqui Lowman, one of the newest academic partners of our Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, to share the experience, which is now posted as a feature on our www.RuralJournalism.org home page and excerpted as an item in The Rural Blog.

By Dr. Jacquelyn Lowman, University of North Dakota

On the night of August 26, 2007, a killer tornado ripped through the little town of Northwood, N.D. There was great damage and the town was reeling.

Help poured in, but amid the confusion, folks there needed something to cling to, an affirmation of existence, a promise that they would prevail. In short, they needed The Gleaner, the weekly paper. But all the newspaper staff members were personally affected by the tornado and the paper’s advertising base was severely diminished. The Gleaner was in trouble. Newspapers stepped up, taking out ads to keep the income flowing. The publisher of a neighboring weekly and his staff pitched in to help get out the first post-tornado issue.

Northwood is about 40 miles from the University of North Dakota (and about 10 miles from where I live), and my students have adopted The Gleaner. That first week, I went with three of them to get people’s stories of survival and triumph. Since then, my students, by ones and twos, are going to Northwood, getting stories, contributing articles of hope to The Gleaner, making a record for posterity. The students will be continuing this at least through the semester.

This is tough on them. They are seeing and experiencing emotional pain and suffering. There are times when they need some hand-holding and the stories have to be pulled out of them. But they are growing enormously and giving a priceless gift. I am so proud of them and of the wonderful profession of community journalism.

I asked Jacqui to send me some student stories and images for posting on our Web site. Wes Fahrenbruck write about a woman who found refuge from the storm in a bathtub: "We all spend some time in the bathtub, but rarely without a roof over our heads. Mary Weber, an employee at the Northwood Deaconess Health Center and six-year resident of Northwood, has spent time in the tub looking up at the sky." (Read more)

Nick Johnson wrote a more personal account, about helping his girlfriend's grandmother: "She thought of every excuse in the book to stay in her home, telling her daughter Anne, “I just washed these sheets today, and I’m going to sleep right here in my bed.” As her hand came down onto the mattress to reiterate her point, a number of leaves bounced off her freshly washed sheets. At that moment, Grandma Haga started to realize what had actually taken place." (Read more)

Mark Thueson, a former meteorology major, wrote a story describing the path of the storm. "It reads like a thriller to me, despite the fact that I know what happens," his professor wrote. He also put together some images to help people follow along," one of which appears below, with Northwood at the center and the tornado path in red. For his story, click here.

Jock is on the road again

For the 7th summer, our intrepid COMJIG founder Jock Lauterer is on the road, offering free training at North Carolina's community papers. Now, he has a blog. Here's the start of today's entry:

"Let’s get this straight: Newspapers are not vanishing. At least not my kind of newspapers.

"Yes, many major metros are in a circulation free-fall. But not my guys. The small, local or what we call “community newspapers” – papers with circulations below 50k, many of them found off the interstates on the so-called “blue highways” of this nation – are doing very well, thank you.

"In fact, these “relentlessly local” papers are so quietly successful that big-city papers have finally noticed and are copying them! Ex: pick up today’s N&O and count the number of local stories on the front page."

More from the Blue Highways Journal.