Neighborhood News Bureau opens
By Kate Bradshaw
The James B. Sanderlin Neighborhood Family Center in Midtown was astir Saturday morning with about 120 people: academics, journalists both budding and seasoned (including a Pulitzer winner), church leaders, and a member of the Florida House of Representatives. They assembled in the midmorning cool with one common interest: community journalism.
The Neighborhood News Bureau is an off-campus newsroom that offers journalism students at USF-St. Pete a chance to cover Midtown St. Petersburg, a poverty-ridden part of town with a predominantly African-American population.
"This is an opportunity to get balanced stories," said Lounell C. Britt, Executive Director of the Sanderlin Center. She sees great value in having a news bureau in Midtown. "Lots of things happen that have nothing to do with drugs and violence," Britt said, noting that many churches and youth programs are housed within the limits of Midtown. "But you don't hear about programs like that," she said.
NNB is dedicated in honor of local news legend Peggy Mitchell Peterman (1936-2004). The daughter of a man who battled for civil rights, Peterman fought to desegregate the pages of the St. Petersburg Times in the days when the Times had a seperate section for African-Americans. "My mother was a kind and gentle person with a fiery side," said Peterman's son, Florida Representative Frank Peterman.
It was Killenberg, now in phased retirement, who got the idea for the bureau. Killenberg, who practically single-handedly started the USF St. Pete journalism program, confessed to the audience at the dedication that he and fellow journalism professor Dr. Robert Dardenne came up with the concept during a brainstorming session over pints of Guinness. "We were thinking about ways to create a distinctive identity for a program that would focus on community journalism," Killenberg said.
Other speakers at the dedication included Director for the USF-St. Pete Department of Journalism and Media Studies Tony Silvia, USF- St. Pete regional chancellor Karen A. White, Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg Goliath Davis, and USF- St. Pete journalism graduate student Casey Cora. Tony Silvia said he hopes that the bureau will host annual lectures on community journalism for years to come.
The keynote speaker at the dedication was Pulitzer Prize winnner Leon Dash. He told the audience that he hopes "a journalism that's long been absent" comes out of the Neighborhood News Bureau. "There's great potential here to really make an impact on public service journalism," said Dash. Public journalism, he said, is "getting out and talking to the people and finding out what the issues are."