Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project
USC Annenberg School for Communication
• Los Angeles, CA
CONTACT INFO
Francesca DeMarco, Asst Dean for Development
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA
(213) 821-1660
E-mail
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Website
The Annenberg School at the University of Southern California will spearhead the creation of a community news website for a region that is home to African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and immigrants. The project will use multimedia reporting by journalism students, community residents and community leaders and will focus on education, economic development, housing and immigration. Project leaders will target print and broadcast outlets that might also use Intersection stories. They will also work with student-run Annenberg Radio and Television News and will partner with Mobile Voices, a USC Annenberg storytelling platform designed to help low-wage immigrants develop mobile media skills.
• June 2011
• January 2011
• May 2010
• March 2010
• November 2009 Addendum
• October 2009
Check out their new website for the top news in the Southern Los Angeles region!
New Mobile and Social Media Strategy
June 2011
In just the last six months, USC-Annenberg’s Intersections South LA, under site founder Will Seidenberg, has redesigned the website and logo and developed the use of social media and mobile news - two entirely new marketing advances for the site. And the future looks promising for the local news site.
Personnel Changes
With February’s resignation of Managing Editor Emily Henry, Katie Coultier, a scholarship student who has been working with Intersections since she entered USC in the fall 2009, took over daily maintenance of the site. A replacement managing editor is being sought; Annenberg Dean Ernest Wilson has funded a one-year, full-time position to replace Henry. Two graduate students have also been hired to work on the site until that position is filled.
In April, the site began working with Mary Hill-Wagner, a former reporter who recently received her Ph.D. in Communications. For the next year, she is working at Annenberg as a community editor and helping with organizational and training systems for USC students and mentors, and community writers, under a grant from the Ford Foundation, says Seidenberg.
In May, Intersections also hired Veronica Villanfane. A journalist who reports in both Spanish and English, Villanfane maintains two blogs and will help Intersections reach the growing Latino community in South LA,” reports Seidenberg.
Marketing Changes
In February, Intersections adopted a new logo designed by South LA resident Gerardo Hernandez. It will help “raise visibility” in the community.
Website: In April, the Annenberg’s web technology team helped Intersections launch a site redesign to incorporate both the new logo and a new color scheme. A blog roll, which allows the system to register the Zip codes of site visitors, was added to the site. Community contributors are also now able to submit stories for editor review.
Traffic on the site remains steady with about 17,000-18,000 visits a month.
“We notice a direct correlation between active posting and traffic: when we have a steady stream of rich content, and daily news coverage, our traffic goes up and the site ranks high in Google searches for ‘South Los Angeles,’” reports Seidenberg.
Social Media:To help promote the site through Twitter and Facebook, Intersections teamed up with Pekka Pekala, a hyper-local researcher. Twitter and Facebook are now part of Intersections’ daily work flow, says Seidenberg.
Mobile News: The site’s student staff members are working with mobile news experts, including Amy Gahran. “She lead the staff through issues important to developing a strategy for reaching and engaging communities that are best reached through the mobile web rather than a website designed for a computer,” reports Seidenberg. “[She had] suggestions on setting up a mobile website and ideas that would be of interest to a mobile audience.”
With so many changes over the last several months, Intersections South LA has several priorities as they move ahead, including training new employees to recruit more community contributors, developing more partnerships, and investigating new funding.
To see what Intersections’ community contributors have been up to, visit:
Monte ‘M-Bone’ Talbert killed in drive-by shooting by LaMonica Peters
OPINION: Parental involvement helps children prosper in school by Jennifer Quinonez
United Teachers Los Angeles protest proposed layoffs by David Lyell
To view content highlights visit:
South Los Angeles residents remember the riots
Fast food ban changes the food landscape in South LA:
Ramona Gardens offers non-traditional restaurant experience
City Council candidates discuss the issues in South LA
Wig shops overwhelm Crenshaw Boulevard
Zoning in on Community Engagement Drives Web Traffic Explosion for South LA Site
January 2011
Intersections South LA experienced a five-fold boom in traffic in late 2010, and founder Willa Seidenberg attributes the increase to a focus on engaging a smaller community.
“The project began as an open-ended endeavor,” she said, with USC-Annenberg students covering a vast area with an approximate population of 750,000. Now, the team will focus on the area formerly known as South Central, with a population of almost 50,000. The new focus will enable more targeted coverage for a more responsive area.
The boost in traffic, paired with the increase in user comments, is marking an important growth spurt for the site and comes as Seidenberg and her team paved the way for a major site overhaul that launched in early 2011.
“The goal is to scale back overall, but do deeper and more meaningful reporting and civic engagement in the areas we are targeting,” she says.
Local residents have been involved in successfully writing stories, Seidenberg says, including a project that teamed Intersections staff members with local residents to create audio slideshows of neighborhood hangouts:
Intersections also gained national attention when it published a controversial editorial by a local mother about illegal immigration. The woman was asked to appear Bill O’Reilly’s show as a result.
“These posts are a window into places that promote community, pride and vitality in the neighborhood,” Seidenberg says.
Other initiatives by Intersections include community reporting workshops, partnerships with other local news organizations and a high-school student mentoring program. Seidenberg says these programs will continue to serve a critical role as Intersections moves into its new phase.
“The team is encouraged by the success of the site,” she said, “and we are looking forward to this next phase of the project’s growth.”
—Ashley Bright
Intersections: No Stopping In Sight
May 2010
Intersections: The South Los Angeles Report was officially launched in May 2009, with a reception attended by university, community, educational and governmental leaders. A bare bones site went live just before the launch party.
“We felt we needed to have a working site up and running in order to gain interest and credibility in the community.” - Seidenberg
The project leader, Annenberg professor Willa Seidenberg, and her team jumped right into getting the site online and did minimal advance planning and outreach. “It may have been preferable to lay more groundwork before launching,” she said, “but we felt we needed to have a working site up and running in order to gain interest and credibility in the community.”
She explains: “The South Los Angeles area has experienced an onslaught of media attention at various times, such as after the riots or when there is a particularly bad wave of gang crime. But the attention is always negative and not sustained, leaving the community feeling exploited and abandoned. We wanted to assure the community our was a serious endeavor and that we intended for it to be long-term. Therefore, content and engagement started slowly, but has been building steadily ever since.”
From the start, submissions from Annenberg journalism students have been the site’s most prolific and strongest content. For many students, it has been a profound reporting experience. For example, in the spring 2010 semester, adjunct teacher Sara Catania had her undergraduate print reporting class of sophomores cover Inglewood, one of the communities Intersections covers. Intersections agreed to post any publishable stories, even though Sara was not sure any of the stories they wrote would be good enough. Not only did the site get some it got many. In fact, every student in the class had at least one story on the site and some had more than one. Several of their stories were picked up by LA Observed.
At the end of the class, Sara told Willenberg that it was the best class she has ever taught. She said the students were inspired by being published on a real working site, excited to see the comments their stories received, and some of them had the experience of going to cover stories and meeting people who had read their work on the site. As a reporting lab, these students got the very best experience in journalism. And, in return, the community got a lot of coverage it would not ordinarily receive.
The site also had a quite strong start with the mentoring program in the high schools, though that was not intentional. We had some chance meetings at the beginning of the project with some teachers at Crenshaw High School who aggressively pursued our help. Willenberg found that the high school students and the USC students gained so much from the interaction, and that it increased overall engagement in the community, that the partnership went full steam ahead.
Willenberg adds, “If we had it to do over again, we may have resisted the urge to give so many resources to the mentoring before we had established community ties.”
Metrics
- Through June 1, published 46 education stories, 71 community stories, 30 arts stories and 47 politics stories in 2010.
- South LA community members produced and contributed 20 stories.
- Average number of visitors to the site is 4,966, with a total of 11,348 page views per month in 2010. That number has risen from an average of 1,000 to 2,000 in 2009.
- 49% of our traffic comes through search engines. 32% comes from referring sites and 19% comes direct.
- Most popular content is the community section, followed by our community events calendar.
Willenberg reports she has not experienced any situations she would consider a setback: “Each step we have taken has pushed us forward. If there is any sense of disappointment it is that our number of visitors is not higher. However, given the huge digital divide in the communities we are covering, it is not unexpected. We are also cognizant of the fact that we are building community for the long haul, a process that will take painstaking work, patience and time.”
Scope of Project
The project still revolves around three major missions:
- To serve as a reporting lab for USC journalism students to report from under-served neighborhoods;
- To be a hyper-local website for the South Los Angeles area, including Inglewood, Compton and Watts;
- And to provide news and media literacy mentoring in South Los Angeles schools.
Since its last report the group has:
- Tweaked the website. (“We plan to do a full makeover in the coming year when the Annenberg School switches to a Drupal CMS. This interim redesign made some needed changes in the feature box, coverage categories, calendar, added an announcement box and a few other changes.”)
- Increased the number of community contributions.
- Created a partnership with CD Tech (http://www.cdtech.org) to conduct social and multimedia workshops.
- Recruited journalism interns from schools throughout Los Angeles as summer reporters.
- Applied for two more grants: UNO Neighborhood grant from USC, a second grant from the McCormick Foundation.
- Hired project manager Emily Henry as a three-quarter time employee.
- Been accepted as a client of USC’s Marshall School of Business Consulting Program.
The summer of 2010 will be a challenge in terms of maintaining the same level of fresh content on the site, reports Seidenberg. However plans remain in place to keep the site current and prepare for next year.
- Project Manager/Senior Editor Emily Henry is now working 30 hours a week.
- Second-year graduate Christine Trang will work 24 hours/week during the summer with money from a student worker account. She will be blogging, reporting and planning a recruiting and orientation program for new and returning USC students.
- Undergraduate student Ariel Edwards-Levy will work 10 hours/week on reporting
- Intersections has “hired” one student intern, and will recruit more, for summer reporting, blogging and other duties.
- The site will hold a high school summer workshop the week of July 19. Students will produce audio/slideshows that will be posted on the website.
Single Best Idea
If there is any sense of disappointment it is that our number of visitors is not higher. However, given the huge digital divide in the communities we are covering, it is not unexpected.
“Our single best idea has to be our community workshops,” explains Seidenberg. “They serve a dual purpose: We learn more about the issues and concerns of the community and get content to post from local residents and the workshops encourage and enable residents of an area that is typically under-covered by the mainstream media to take control of their own storytelling network, build an online community, and preserve and share the experiences of the citizenry.”
She continues: “The effect is one of empowerment: the community learns to amplify its voice through a variety of mediums, distribute information for free, and begin to re-define the stereotypes perpetuated by media outlets aimed at audiences outside of South LA. Community members contemplate the effects of negative media coverage, from the social segregation of the area to apathy at the political level, and begin to create a new, more accurate image of South LA in all its vibrancy.”
The Next Year
Seidenberg and her team anticipate the coming year will be one of tremendous growth. Following is a list of their priorities for the next year:
- Marketing plan: USC’s Marshall School of Business Consulting Program has agreed to accept Intersections as a client. Over the summer of 2010, the Consulting Program will develop a marketing plan for the organization/website. We anticipate this will help us refine our mission, outline priorities, and identify strategies for monetizing the website.
- Advisory Committee: We will form an advisory committee that will help guide the organization’s missions within the community, the University and the high schools. We will identify potential members from all of our constituents: USC/Annenberg, community leaders, education representatives.
- Website Redesign: Plan for a full-scale redesign of the website and switch to a Drupal CMS platform.
- Publicity: Design publicity campaign to increase traffic to the site and visibility within and outside the community.
- Fundraising: Identify and apply for more grants. Explore ideas to monetize the site.
- Outreach: Continue to focus on our connection to the Latino community in South Los Angeles.
- Mobile: Begin exploring mobile content as this represents a key tool in reaching our audience.
Increasing Traffic, Boosting Involvement, and Seeking Sustainability
March 2010
With its website live and any fancy financial footwork in its past (see November 2009 report), Intersections: The South L.A. Report is now alive and well. Quite well, in fact, reports Willa Seidenberg, the USC Annenberg professor heading up the initiative, as they have seen tremendous growth in the site’s content this quarter.
“We have fresh stories on the site daily, including a mix of stories reported by USC journalism students, high school students and community residents,” she said.
At the same time, Seidenberg remains focused on efforts to increase traffic and form partnerships with appropriate organizations in the community. The most difficult and time-consuming component, she says, is seeking community participation.
“We realize that fostering an audience and having vibrant community participation will be a long, slow process that will take patience and painstaking old-fashioned, on-the-ground recruiting and publicity. Much of the networking we are doing now has not yet resulted in a swell of activity.”
That said, through partnerships and cross-posting of stories, the site has seen a five-fold increase in visits in the last nine months.
Content Generation
A majority of the content continues to be produced by USC Annenberg students, even during university breaks, says Seidenberg. This comes from Annenberg Radio News (“which features mostly daily, deadline-driven stories), a radio reporting class, undergraduate print reporting classes covering Inglewood and Compton, an undergraduate online class that produced a series called “On Jefferson”, an urban affairs course covering the region and freelance reports by more than a half dozen students.
Highlights this quarter include:
Project manager Emily Henry supplements the site’s reporting. “She has made invaluable connections in the community an filled holes in our reporting, and brought consistent attention to the site by reporting on city government in Compton,” Seidenberg reports.
Community members have also created content, including:
Readers can also find posts written by high school students who have been mentored by USC students, in the High School Notebook section. A few recent examples:
Partnerships and Exposure
The stories that appear on Intersections may also start appearing on the website of KPCC.org, one of Los Angeles’ major public radio stations.
“We hope this will extend our visibility,” Seidenberg writes, “and give residents outside of South Los Angeles a different view of an area that is usually covered in relation to crime and poverty.”
Articles are also distributed on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, as well as on community forums. So far, stories have also been cross-posted on LA Observed, Just Schools (an education round-up), Leimert Park Beat, Neon Tommy, Witness LA and The Huffington Post.
In addition, Seidenberg has met with a number of community groups with the hope that they will be an ongoing source of content.
Of the five-fold increase in traffic to the site, about 40 percent come through search engines, 35 percent through social media and 20 percent come directly through the front door. The site’s calendar is the second most popular page, following the homepage. Comments have gone up, and users spend an average of two and a half minutes on the site, according to their analytics.
Community Involvement
Seidenberg is continuing to lay the groundwork for the future. Multi-media workshops with existing community organizations are among the ideas for involvement.
Her staff also will continue to visit churches, libraries, and other organizations in an effort to spread the word about the site and, at the same time, use those opportunities for market research, to find out what issues and features potential readers would like to see about their communities.
Efforts to develop mobile content and a periodic printed broadsheet will help them reach an audience that has limited online access.
Going Forward
Siedenberg writes that while Intersections is fortunate to have foundation support, she knows that sustainability is not possible on grants alone. “Therefore,” she writes, “we plan to eventually monetize the website.”
Her next step includes conducting market research to determine the best way to make the site self-sufficient. In the meantime, Seidenberg plans to gain visibility and community involvement with Intersections.
Addendum to first quarter J-Lab report
November 2009
Reported spending during our first quarter of J-Lab funding was lower than expected for two reasons. We were unaware until the summer that we were required to take a grants administrator exam for certification, as required by the grants office at the University of Southern California. We were also required to submit a much more detailed budget to the USC grants office than the budget we submitted to the J-Lab competition. Once these technical details were addressed, we were given access to the first round of J-Lab funding.
During this period of time, when we had expected to draw funds from our J-Lab account, we requested and received “bridge” financing of $11,000 in summer 2009 from Annenberg Dean Ernest Wilson to cover costs associated with expanding the website and improving our coverage. Intersections “soft-launched” as a beta site in February with a formal launch on May 5.
From the time of our application to the J-Lab in early February 2009, we were also supported by technical support from the Annenberg Office of Web Technologies and incremental sums from the Annenberg School of Journalism, in hopes of winning one of the J-Lab grants. These modest sums of money were later followed by the much larger “bridge” financing. By the time we had access to J-Lab funds, The South Los Angeles Report had completed many of the improvements we had originally designated as J-Lab funded-projects. We are now in the process of moving some of those expenses to the J-Lab grant so that our reporting to J-Lab more accurately reflects costs associated with the application we submitted last winter.
Moving forward, much of the balance of J-Lab’s first year award will support a website overhaul [$3,000 to $5,000], expand the hours of our now part time project coordinator to accommodate increased efforts in our South Los Angeles communities [another $4,000 to $5,000] and pay for two “citizen journalist” training sessions [$2,000 to $4,000] with two South Los Angeles-based organizations with deep ties to the community. The first workshop is scheduled Dec. 17; the second one, early next year. As part of our efforts to develop stronger community ties and generate more community-generated content, we also plan to purchase inexpensive video and audio equipment [$1,000 to $2,000] All told, these expenditures will run $10,000 at the low end to $16,000 at the high end during the first year of J-Lab funding. [Annenberg School support in the form of the aforementioned “bridge” financing will cover any overruns, though we do not expect any.]
We also include website traffic data in this addendum that shows The South Los Angeles Report enjoys increasing use by our readers and visibility in our community. Since May, traffic has increased steadily, as the attached document suggests. [The spike in traffic during May occurred on May 5, the day of our formal launch.] We are now visited by 100 visitors a day, or an average of 3,000 visitors a month since May, including a number of readers from India and Pakistan. [We are at loss as to why this is.] We will begin including an analytics report in future accountings to J-Lab.
Off to a good start
October 2009
Intersections: The South Los Angeles Report experienced a strong start-up year, with promise for future sustainability and growth, according to co-director Bill Celis, associate professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. So strong, team members decided to change its name from The South Los Angeles Report from The South Los Angeles Reporting Project, to reflect the site’s evolution and growing maturity.
“We are working to build more bridges into the community to generate more ... op-ed pieces that speak with candor to and about urban life in a new century.”
Community contributions continue to increase, the high school journalism program is expanding, and the critical summer months were staffed by nearly a half dozen USC graduate journalism students who produced roughly a dozen multimedia reports.
The site— http://www.intersectionssouthla.org —soft launched in February 2009, with a formal launch on May 5. After the launch, the site’s continuing efforts have led to “critical community connections” that have generated substantive neighborhood reporting in fall 2009 for the site.
Celis said the New Voices grant played a key role in this growth.
“The New Voices grant enabled us to hire a part-time coordinator whose chief responsibility is engaging the community through workshops, and other community outreach programs that includes canvassing downtown Compton businesses and residents next month,” said Celis. “Our coordinator also began an aggressive review of the website, comparing its features with those of more mature hyper local sites, and recommended aggregating, for example, daily headlines from other Los Angeles media outlets.”
Celis said the vibrant neighborhoods of South Los Angeles are increasingly represented on Intersections.
Community Coalition, for example, is among the South Los Angeles community groups now contributing to Intersections, both in terms of content and news leads. The coalition contributed a series of high school student blogs and video reports from a Labor Day trip to Northern California to visit campuses.
It also provided Intersections with several news tips, including one idea this past summer about a free health-care clinic it helped organize in The Forum, a former sports arena in the South Los Angeles city of Inglewood. Thousands of South Angelinos sought free health, dental and eye care during the eight-day clinic sponsored by a Tennessee nonprofit. Story: http://tinyurl.com/psuf5s
Individual contributions are fewer in number, but no less significant, said Celis. For instance, an Inglewood African-American resident wrote about the pathology of young African-American high school males. The column received several posts from community members, the themes resonating with them, establishing Intersections a unique clearing house in its early months for South Los Angeles voices http://tinyurl.com/muyhta
“Few of the five African-American and Latino newspapers serving the area carry such honest pieces,” says Celis. “We are working to build more bridges into the community to generate more of these op-ed pieces that speak with candor to and about urban life in a new century.”
All told, roughly 15 percent of the site’s content has been generated with community partners, organizations and individuals, he adds.
Future efforts to generate more community contributions include offering $50 stipends to community contributors, and canvassing Compton, an incorporated city deep in South Los Angeles. Intersections also plans to expand coverage of South Los Angeles’ vibrant faith-based community in 2010.
But Intersection’s earliest and most successful push into South Los Angeles has been in the area’s troubled high schools, according to Celis. Working initially last fall with the USC Rossier School of Education, Intersections began mentoring one class at Crenshaw High School, just south of the USC campus. During the spring 2009 semester, Intersections organized a workshop for South Los Angeles youth that culminated in multimedia work posted to Intersection’s under one of our new categories, “high school notebook.” http://tinyurl.com/yah4w2z
The program was so successful that Celis says it’s not only expanding to another local school, but a successful three-day workshop with the Crenshaw students in the spring had led to a request from local schools for Intersections to hold it on a regular basis for students interested in journalism.
“Either through semester-long mentoring projects or future one-day workshops for high school classes and/or newspaper staffs, students contribute community news to Intersections while also learning media literacy,” says Celis.
In the coming months, these workshops will also be expanded to reach the community at large.
USC Annenberg’s continuing and future role in South Los Angeles
As important as Intersections is to growing members of the South Los Angeles community, Celis says the site is just as important to students at the USC Annenberg School. During summer 2009, to help sustain the site, USC graduate journalism students produced nearly a dozen multimedia reports through directed research credits. One student, for example, produced a two-story multimedia package about South LA youth campaigning for improvement of their neighborhoods and schools before the Los Angeles City Council. This particular project was produced in conjunction with UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, an organization designed to improve educational opportunities for urban youth. We expect to do more joint projects with our UCLA colleagues.
Celis gives credit to USC Annenberg Dean, Ernest J. Wilson, III, and Journalism School Director, Geneva Overholser, now in her second year, for the early success of Intersections. In particular his says Overholser’s support and enthusiasm for Intersections made it possible to introduce the new South Los Angeles Reporting course, one of the seven classes contributing to the site from semester to semester. The South Los Angeles class is a multimedia journalism class that explores life in South LA and it continues to test mobile phone delivery of the news through a relationship with Mobile Voices. Sudents in the class will work closely with Jordan High School in Watts to help students there embrace mobile delivery.
The support from the J-Lab, and the strategic use of the grant money, will enable us to continue growing the project in all the ways we have described here, and will support our ultimate goal of monetizing the site.
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New Voices is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. 