William Celis
Los Angeles, California 
Homepage: http://annenberg.usc.edu/Home/Faculty/Journalism/CelisB.aspx
I am an associate professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles. I teach media history, education reporting and urban affairs courses. My work has appeared in a number of general-interest and academic venues, including the Boston Globe, Columbia's Teachers College Record, Education Week and USA Today. I am a former education correspondent for The New York Times and a former reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.
April 29, 2009
A century ago,
The New York Times routinely ran short items on its inside pages about church socials, fund-raising efforts by community groups, programs at public schools. These news nuggets defined the robust neighborhoods of Manhattan and the city's four other boroughs. Though eventually lost as the daily emphasized foreign and national news, these news blurbs from neighborhood are in vogue again a century later, this time on hyperlocal news websites.
These intensely local news sites, now firmly established on the emerging journalism landscape, offer readers more than news about chicken dinners and church functions, of course. Many of them devote energy and money to produce meaningful journalism from and about under covered urban neighborhoods and isolated rural communities. These places are not the easiest communities to write about; distrust of the media runs high, especially in urban communities of color. But enhanced coverage of urban, working-class neighborhoods of color -- long ignored by mainstream media -- is one of the emerging trends of hyper local news sites, including the new USC Annenberg School for Communication news site, Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project, recent winners of a $25,000 grant from the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism through its New Voices program, a community news initiative funded by the Knight Foundation. http://www.j-newvoices.org/
Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project, www.intersectionssouthla.org, is a multimedia news site with multiple layers of community engagement, classroom instruction and different forms of news delivery. Willa Seidenberg, a colleague and director of the award-winning Annenberg Radio News, and I have collaborated for the last year on this project, building community and school ties, constructing infrastructure, rethinking our classes and offering new courses designed to give students a deeper understanding of urban America and its institutions. It's all an effort to engage residents in telling their own stories and to train a new generation of journalists to see communities as a whole. More...
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