"While I reported on Durham for four months, I was still a parachute journalist because this class inevitably ends — even if I tried my hardest not to be."

Last fall, I begged Professor Carl Kenney to pull me off the waitlist for MEJO 459: Community Journalism — the Durham Voice’s classroom-newsroom. Its namesake was the kind of journalism I envisioned myself pursuing. Lucky for me, he said yes.

Since I began my coursework at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and became enmeshed in the fabric of The Daily Tar Heel last year, I have grown increasingly fulfilled by reporting on issues close to home and, when I did it well, watching its impact on the community. 

I saw MEJO 459 as another chance to do community journalism outside of the UNC bubble — to challenge myself to learn a place I didn’t know and hopefully serve another community in the process.

To me, community journalism once simply meant doing the hyperlocal coverage that often gets lost in the fray of larger outlets. In a sense, it is. But in this class, I learned it is much more. That’s why I’m not quite sure we are always hitting the mark.

The now-retired Hussman professor Jock Lauterer founded the Durham Voice in 2008 as a student-produced publication collaborative between UNC and N.C. Central University. It covered Northeast Central Durham, which, at the time, was the most resource-disparate area in the city. The publication aimed to tell the stories of residents rather than focus on disproportionately oversaturated coverage areas like crime.

In our MEJO 459 Bible, “Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local,” Lauterer writes that a community journalist’s responsibility is greater than that of a large metro reporter because they are “a part of the community [they] cover, not outside it.” That closeness, he argues, is what makes them more accurate than larger outlets; because when they get it wrong, someone tells them at the deli counter or the laundromat.

By that standard, we have a problem.

Lauterer also describes a common audience conception of “parachute” journalists: “reporters are like free agents: keeping their bags packed, selfishly advancing their own careers, always looking for that big move to the next big market. They have no roots, no links to the community, and no intention of making any.” 

While I don’t think that any Durham Voice writers are here to simply rack up bylines and move on, the inherent staff turnover of a classroom-newsroom, coupled with our detachment from Durham, runs the risk of us looking like parachutes to our audience. We don’t know this place like a local would, and, by the time we get our bearings, the semester is over.

After Lauterer’s retirement and the paper’s COVID-related hiatus in 2020, Professor Kenney took the helm. As a Durham native himself, he transformed the publication into one focused on student development through coverage of broader Durham issues like housing, education and politics. But the partnership with the Durham-based NCCU was no longer in the picture.

Today, the Durham Voice operates solely from a classroom in Chapel Hill. Those of us with cars, Uber money or a mastery of public transportation could make our way into Durham to conduct interviews and experience the sights and sounds of the city. But at the end of the day, we went back home and slept in our beds in Chapel Hill, like tourists, or transplant journalists. We were almost as distant and detached as a large metro paper, but our narrow coverage area matched that of a community paper.

But does that technical disconnect really matter if we spent this entire class making an effort to learn about Durham? I would argue the affirmative — and a teaching moment Kenney often referenced illustrates why.

Last semester, a fall Durham Voice writer published a column about what she found to be a lack of decorum in Durham politics. She referenced incidents of unprofessionalism involving local politicians, like an incident between DeDreana Freeman and Nida Allam that the fall class dubbed “Pokegate,” and the Durham mayor’s use of the shorthand version of a slur. The writer also mistakenly cited an unsubstantiated altercation, which allegedly involved current and former city council members.

The column was met with a wave of backlash from Durhamites that flooded the Durham Voice’s comment section and overtook Facebook. A columnist writing from Chapel Hill about Durham politicians exhibiting unprofessionalism was, understandably, not received well.

The writer’s column was set up to fall flat because she did not know Durham well, and she, therefore, did not have the community’s trust. She was not an insider; she was not from Durham, she was not a reporter most locals had read before and she was not a neighbor whom they knew. That’s true for most, if not all, Durham Voice writers.

The column also inadvertently alienated a large portion of our audience, as Durham residents left comments arguing the article furthered racist rhetoric against Black people, and peddled unsubstantiated allegations against Black politicians to do so.

“You rarely step foot in Durham, but you feel entitled enough to write a piece on Durham’s political scene as if you truly know the tea (the real story behind the scenes),” one commenter wrote.

As Kenney wrote in his response column, his censoring of the piece would have undermined the purpose of a teaching paper and silenced a worthwhile conversation. He argued the column emerged from months of genuine reporting and the writer’s observations, which I do not doubt at all.

But Lauterer’s framework helps explain why the column was, in some ways, doomed to receive backlash before it was published — an outside columnist weighing in on political leadership without community standing risked embodying the very detachment the Durham Voice was founded to combat.

While I think the paper’s weaknesses are helpful lessons, I’m not here to rank on the Durham Voice, nor its student contributors.

As a Daily Tar Heel purist, experiencing the free-form mode of this class under Kenney was refreshing; it let me juxtapose the fast-paced, regimented newsroom workflow I had become accustomed to as University Editor at The DTH, during which burnout could sometimes stifle creativity.

I watched my Durham Voice classmates pitch stories out of an intrinsic drive to cover the uncovered, and I reveled in hearing their reporting adventures each class — playing chess at a Durham bar, visiting a reptile shelter, or seeing films at the Hayti Heritage Center — which led to stories that highlighted unique subcultures in the area.

My favorite voyage entailed a rainy day trip to see the giant, quasi-abandoned Brontosaurus statue off Ellerbee Creek Trail. In the process, I got to write a story about how the Northgate Park community banded together to preserve old Durham.

We had complete and utter freedom, and Kenney had the phone numbers of just about everyone in Durham who could bring these stories to life. Just this semester, I can confidently say that the class reported important stories that larger outlets wouldn’t touch. 

The strong coverage that comes out of this publication is thanks to Kenney’s insightful lectures, mentorship, his robust lineup of guest speakers and the drive of his students. But UNC students’ willingness to do community journalism isn’t enough, and neither is their mere commitment to reporting on Durham. The Durham Voice’s best work doesn’t mean its reporters couldn’t get even closer to the community they cover, or that our disconnect doesn’t carry a risk of harm.

The Durham Voice should by no means stop what it’s doing. But it has an opportunity to achieve the standard of community journalism more intentionally — perhaps by getting out into Durham in a more consistent, immersive manner, by exploring a re-partnership with N.C. Central University and by having regular meetings with community leaders who can tell us what coverage gaps their city needs filled.

I know I have tried to learn the city through my interviews, research and endless nights scrolling on the r/bullcity Subreddit. But my family is still from Massachusetts, I still grew up in Cary and I still go to school in Chapel Hill. While I reported on Durham for four months, I was still a parachute journalist because this class inevitably ends — even if I tried my hardest not to be.