Great experience for students

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

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By Kate Bradshaw
Neighborhood News Bureau reporter

More than 120 people attended Saturday's grand opening of the new Neighborhood News Bureau facility in Midtown St. Petersburg Saturday.

The bureau, located at the James B. Sanderlin Neighborhood Family Center, 2335 22nd Ave. S., is a program of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

The Neighborhood News Bureau offers journalism students at USF St.

USF St. Petersburg students Meghan Rulison, center, and Elise Bouchard, right, interview Pulitzer Prize winner Leon Dash. Photo courtesy of Beth Reynolds, USFSP adjunct professor.

Petersburg the opportunity to cover Midtown, a predominantly African-American neighborhood rich in history.

G. Michael Killenberg, founder of the bureau, said he and fellow journalism professor Robert Dardenne came up with the concept during a brainstorming session while sharing pints of Guinness.

"We were thinking about ways to create a distinctive identity for a program that would focus on community journalism," Killenberg said.

The Neighborhood News Bureau's newsroom was dedicated in honor of pioneering journalist Peggy M. Peterman.

Peterman was the daughter of a civil rights leader, and she fought to desegregate the pages of the St. Petersburg Times in the days when the newspaper had a separate section for African-American news.

"My mother was a kind and gentle person with a fiery side," said her son, state Rep. Frank Peterman (D-St. Petersburg). "She had to say it the way it needed to be said, and I was glad she did that. She didn't pull any punches."

Pulitzer Prize winner Leon Dash delivered the inaugural Peggy M.

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Peterman lecture. Dash won the 1995 prize for explanatory journalism for "Rosa Lee's Story," which he wrote for the Washington Post.

The in-depth series, which took Dash years to complete, focused on Rosa Lee Cunningham, a 53-year-old drug-addicted African-American woman living in a two-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., with six of her eight grown children and a number of grandchildren. Dash explored Cunningham's family history and helped readers put her drug abuse in context. In his speech he stressed that journalists should always strive to provide context in their stories.

Dash encouraged USF St. Petersburg students to practice a "journalism that's long been absent."

"When [journalists] look at issues, we don't look at interconnections, history," he said. "We write about one phenomenon without exploring how it was created."

Dash said he was "jealous" students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches, don't have the opportunity to interact with the community they cover in the same way that USF students do in Midtown.

Like Dash, Lounell Britt, executive director of the Sanderlin Center, was encouraged by the bureau's opening.

"This is an opportunity to get balanced stories,'' she said. "Lots of things happen [in Midtown] that have nothing to do with drugs and violence."

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