Publications

The partners were all on board, the research was well underway, and the reporting had begun by April 18, 1994, when executives from Knight-Ridder and the Pew Center came to Charlotte for a project meeting. The group from the Observer included Buckner, managing editor Frank Barrows, editorial page editor Ed Williams, Carpenter, Thames, photo chief Jeff Siner, and a half-dozen reporters and photographers. Kronley and Arrington represented WSOC-TV.

The session was well underway when a comment and question from Knight-Ridder executive Steve Smith led to a significant addition to the project. Smith talked about how unprepared the staff of the Akron Beacon Journal had been to handle the overwhelming reader response to its Pulitzer Prize-winning public service project on racism in 1993.

"Are you prepared to deal with it?" he asked.

"We tap danced around a little," recalled Carpenter. Then Pew's Ed Fouhy chimed in, "Perhaps we can help you with that." The result was funding for a community coordinator, who was hired as a consultant.

"The community coordinator really helped us in ways we hadn't thought of," Buckner said.

The coordinator organized the advisory panels during the reporting, worked with WSOC's Arrington to set up town meetings, and assembled the "needs list." Perhaps most important to some, the coordinator linked the Observer to the neighborhoods after the journalists moved on. The ideal community coordinator for this project needed to understand how the media worked, interact comfortably with people ranging from business executives to elderly residents afraid to open their doors, and have organizational skills.

Charlene Price-Patterson fit the bill. With a background in television as a community affairs manager, Price-Patterson already had experience planning public events and working with the community and the news media.

In addition to having her hands on the pulse of the community, Price-Patterson had one other attribute: She is an African-American woman who grew up in what she calls the "ghetto" of Buffalo, N.Y.

While Price-Patterson has a desk in the Observer newsroom, she has spent most of her time in the field, visiting neighborhoods, attending community meetings and other functions, or checking on the results of the volunteer efforts.

A New Offensive

Even as the planning meeting was underway, interviewers for KPC Research, the Knight-Ridder subsidiary conducting the poll, began to phone residents in neighborhoods with crime rates twice the city's average. Over the next week, 401 residents participated in the 1994 Observer/WSOC Neighborhood Crime Poll. Many agreed to be interviewed later by reporters about the poll and for future stories, providing a useful list of contacts.

Coupled with Mellnik's computer-assisted reporting of crime demographics, the poll offered a news hook for the project. On Sunday, June 5, the front page of the Observer carried articles about two different wars: the lead stories commemorated the 50th anniversary of D-Day while the bulk of the page launched a new offensive, "Taking Back our Neighborhoods."

Designed by Dwuan June, the front-page package set the tone for the series. Individual residents were featured in three pictures, each in a box containing a quote against a stylized backdrop of the downtown skyline that would later become the logo for the project.

Project reporters Liz Chandler, Ted Mellnik, and Gary L. Wright drew portraits of residents affected by violent crime to explain the startling crime data while Ames Alexander did the same with the poll results. At Thames' urging, Buckner became part of the package with a letter from the editor and her photo anchoring the page.