PROFESSIONALIZED NEIGHBORHOODS

In Wichita, the Riverside area had the feel of what The Harwood Group has come to call a "professionalized" neighborhood. Riverside was familiar to many reporters; some even lived there. It is known as a well-educated, clearly defined neighborhood made up mostly of career professional couples and families. It is mostly white. Its civic groups and public discussions tend to be highly structured, have a formal air to them, and are largely centralized around the Riverside Citizens' Association (RCA).

To address a neighborhood concern, one local resident told us: "People will call the RCA hotline about an issue and it will get on the agenda for the next RCA meeting. At the meeting, we'll discuss the issue and maybe devise a strategy for dealing with it. Then we cover it in the Booster (the RCA newsletter) to let people know how it's being followed up."

The dilemma in this kind of neighborhood is that only a relatively small fraction of people participate in the neighborhood's formal interactions. Most residents talk at the incidental level, that fourth layer of civic life where they bump into one another at the market or on the street, while many of the area's third spaces have been in a state of decline for years.

Journalists' Challenge

When working in this kind of neighborhood, journalists need to tap into a variety of civic spaces beyond quasi-official ones. Only tapping into quasi-official areas will give journalists a false sense of security about how well they understand the neighborhood.

Why? Because often the agenda and conversations in quasi-official spaces do not cover the range or depth of peoples concerns in a neighborhood. The people that attend public meetings sometimes could be considered professional citizens. And in many communities, neighborhood residents are increasingly feeling that quasi-official groups together with official institutions are disconnected from the community.

GRAPEVINE NEIGHBORHOODS

This second type of neighborhood, Northeast, is called a "grapevine" because people's concerns and information work their way through an informal network of personal interactions and conversations in a wide variety of settings. There is no single place to gain a true sense of what is happening in this neighborhood.

Northeast was a place far fewer reporters had explored or even visited. It is a sprawling, mostly poor-to-working class neighborhood. Most residents are African-American.

The source of this name was a Northeast resident who said that the neighborhood worked like a "grapevine."

The typical quote we heard from people living in Northeast was: "If I hear something at church -- like a drug problem on a certain block -- I can call or will run into certain people I know to talk about what we can do, and maybe one of them can talk to someone else who knows a program or a group that can help."

Journalists' Challenge

Organizations and leadership in this kind of neighborhood tend to be fragmented. The challenge is that there are so many places and people to tap that the neighborhood becomes unmanageable.

To understand this neighborhood, journalists should initially tap into as many places and people as possible. The goal should be to pinpoint a set of places and leaders that, together, can provide an authentic picture of the neighborhood. These places and sources can then become the go to places for journalists.

Just remember that in a grapevine neighborhood no one civic space or leader is likely to give journalists the whole story. Also, these go to places and leaders will change over time.