By Carolyn Shapiro
Madison Karas knew little football when she decided to write about a high school homecoming game in fall 2021. Then a Temple University senior, Karas was on assignment for Philadelphia Neighborhoods, an online news outlet for underserved areas of the city, and she covered southwest Philly.
Karas entrenched herself in the community, though it was difficult to reach without public transportation, and spent time talking to its residents. She met the high school’s football coaches and players at a diner to go through her lengthy questions, according to Christopher Malo, Philadelphia Neighborhoods’ executive director and Temple University faculty member who teaches the journalism classes that feed the publication.
She worked on the piece all semester and took photos. The story, “A Day at John Bartram High School’s Football Homecoming,” retold the events of the day in narrative form, a feature known as a “tick tock.” Last year, it won an Editor and Publisher Eppy Award for best photojournalism on a college/university website.
“To have somebody come down and be so invested in telling their story — the story — even before winning awards, meant a lot to these people,” Malo said. “It means something to get it right.”
Philadelphia Neighborhoods describes its focus as hyperlocal community journalism produced by students in the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple. The student reporters take two courses, including a senior-year capstone, and spend the semester writing about communities often overlooked or sparsely covered in Philadelphia’s vast media landscape.
“We try to go into neighborhoods that a lot of the mainstream and legacy newsrooms don't,” Malo explained. “So our mission, both in the department and for Philadelphia Neighborhoods, is to report in underserved, under-resourced, underreported-on communities.”
Klein students are assigned a community beat in one of the city’s low-income neighborhoods. Some reporters cover themes such as housing, health or LGBTQ issues. Coverage changes depending on students’ interests and ability to travel.
In the junior year Philadelphia Neighborhoods course, students learn to cover general hard news, such as community meetings and education. They get ready to take on a community beat by interviewing and writing a profile of a community leader. By senior year, they go more in depth with longform and enterprise pieces, building on those relationships, Malo said.
The courses emphasize multimedia, and seniors choose to specialize in digital writing, photography, data, audio or video. The two sections of the junior level and four sections of capstone Philadelphia Neighborhoods courses per semester are capped at 20 students each. Between the junior and senior level Philadelphia Neighborhoods classes, the program averages 115 students over the academic year.
“They can really try to, as much as possible as students, build relationships and rapport and familiarity with these particular neighborhoods, because the texture and the flavors and the identities, especially in a city like Philadelphia, are different from neighborhood to neighborhood,” Malo said.
A Klein alumnus himself, Malo teaches a graduate solutions journalism class, as well as the Philadelphia Neighborhoods courses. The outlet used to have a full-time editor, as well as a faculty director, but those roles were combined under one Klein faculty member with Malo. A full-time paid staffer handles the website, multimedia support, and back-end operations.
The outlet’s website has a “Want to Use Our Stories?” link for other news organizations to run the work. Sharing the content is part of Malo’s mission.
“I don't need to be proprietary around the content,” he said. “I want this information to get out to the neighborhoods, so it's better if people steal our stories. And so I've tried to advocate for that and making our content available for newsrooms anywhere to use.”
Philadelphia Neighborhoods started in 2004 as the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, where Temple journalism students wrote stories and shot video for the web. Faculty members rotated through oversight of the lab every three or four years.
In 2018, the publication shifted from breaking daily news to focus on longer, evergreen content and more deeply reported stories, said Brian Creech, Klein’s associate dean for research and graduate studies and former faculty director of Philadelphia Neighborhoods. The school got a grant to do audience research and learned that’s what readers wanted.
“We also realized that focusing on that kind of reporting was a really good pedagogical model,” Creech said. “Sometimes the trappings of daily deadline journalism means that helping students hone their reporting, writing, video production, digital production skills falls by the wayside.”
The university shifted its Philadelphia Neighborhoods curriculum and did a major redesign to the website, which won an Eppy Award that year.
Philadelphia Neighborhoods loads new content Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the semester and sends a weekly newsletter to email subscribers.
For winter break, students usually have finished enough stories to keep the site fresh. Philadelphia Neighborhoods reruns some popular pieces and uses social media to direct readers to stories.
During the summer, the outlet runs for one session at the start and used to go dark for the remaining couple months. But recent grants have allowed the university to pay a small group of students to keep the site updated and do some special projects. One summer, they produced a magazine of evergreen content around accessing city services and community resources. Another year they wrote a long report on immigration.
Temple recently received a grant to develop community advisory groups to help bring innovation and best practices into Philadelphia Neighborhoods, Malo said. The program has spun off hyper-local “info hubs” in some communities, such as Germantown and Kensington, where locals take over publication to produce news for their neighbors.
Academic-news programs provide a unique environment to discuss creative approaches to the work of journalism, Malo said.
“We exist in this really neat place, because there’s not a lot of pressures and there's room for experimentation and innovation, just by the fact that we're a university,” Malo said. “It’s really exciting not to be constrained by things that a lot of newsrooms are.”
For more information:
Chris Malo at Temple, malo@temple.edu