New Voices: Essex County Community Media

Essex County Community Media

• Newark, NJ

CONTACT INFO

Jennifer Wager
Essex County College
Newark, NJ
(973) 877-1937
E-mail
Website

In the first New Voices project at a community college, Essex County College in Newark, NJ, operates a year-round news operation to report on issues in the state’s largest city. Journalism students develop and maintain their website, using mobile and social media tools, and the college will conduct, for a fee, training workshops to help community residents contribute. Local advertising and grants help support the project. Content is aired on local radio stations and the school’s educational access channel and offered to other local media.

• April 2011
• February 2011

Essex Voices has a new site!

Essex Voices Strives to Find its Voice

February 2011

Essex Voices, a multimedia news site covering Newark, N.J., from Essex County Community College, is up and running. The focus now turns to the challenge of developing a strategic plan for content that will reach the community, reports professor and project coordinator Jennifer Wager.

Her approach from the start, incorporated into her mission statement, is to cover “news, culture, and events from the greater Newark metropolitan area and beyond.” Defining that will take some work.

It means grappling with questions like, “Should we focus more on positive stories about the greater Newark metropolitan area or hard-hitting stories dealing with serious issues?” she explains.

In the search for answers, Wager’s partnership with the Urban Issues Institute has helped. Essex Voices contributors already cover events from the institute and these ties have allowed them “to cover serious issues like the HIV epidemic and its impact in Newark,” Wager said.
To add a softer edge to its news coverage, Essex Voices generates stories on Newark’s cultural presence and history. While the site’s coverage has no specific model, Wager said they are working with others to refine the approach.

“I think this is how we will maintain relevance to the greater Newark community,” Wager said.

“We feel pleased with the progress the project is making in terms of technical and content production,” she said. Early content has primarily come from one production class during the fall semester. More content is coming during the spring semester, which offers four production classes, three video and one audio.

Wager, in partnership with advisory board members and the Newark New Media Innovation Lab, is planning a series of community workshops over the next few months to train future contributors. They include:

Reporting In Front of the Camera workshop with Cheryl Washington, journalist and producer from CNN. Audience: students and community journalists who want to hone their skills in front of the camera to create a more professional presence and delivery. Two four-hour sessions.
Multimedia Journalism workshop with Ryan Joseph, renowned photojournalist and digital media instructor and United Nations Radio journalist Gail Walker. Audience: students, community journalists and community organizations who want to combine photojournalism with audio interviews to create embeddable audio slideshows. Workshop participants will do a collaborative project about a community issue in Newark that will be published on the EV site and as an art gallery installation. Two eight-hour sessions.
Blogging Newark: Writing for Digital Media workshop, facilitator TBD. Audience: students, community journalists and organizations. Find out what Newark bloggers are writing and how writing for digital media differs from traditional media. Suggested facilitator: Andreas Jackson, WBAI and Newark New Media Innovation Lab; Glocally staff writer. One three-hour session.
Ethnic Media is Social Media. This will be a panel discussion with various local ethnic media, including the Brazilian Voice, Lakou Haitian Radio, and Dominican TV, on the impact of social media on ethnic media. Ideally we will partner with New American Media for this. Audience: students, community organizations and journalists. One three-hour session.
Community Journalism Workshop with People’s Production House. This will be adapted from PPH’s curriculum, which has proved highly successful with community organizations in New York City, New Orleans and elsewhere. We’re working on getting them a proposal for the workshop, which would be in May/June. Audience: students, community journalists and organizations.

Essex Voices is also moving forward with new collaborators, such as the Africana Institute and the WISE Women’s Center.

—Briona Arradondo