INDIVIDUAL ACCESS TO POWER
There was significantly less time to explore the third Wichita neighborhood, College Hill, but based on newsroom and community interviews, this neighborhood seemed to work quite differently from the first two.
College Hill is an upper middle class area of large homes and manicured lawns with a preponderance of movers and shakers, young and old.
People interviewed described College Hill as a place where the local network of civic activity is weak, where people stay largely to themselves and often have direct individual access to local officials and Wichita's elite.
Journalists will need to be creative to tap into this kind of neighborhood, for there may be few, if any, civic spaces to explore.
Journalists should seek to identify key people in the neighborhood who tend to interact with others socially and who could pull people together or help a journalist gain access to where people do meet, for instance, at a social event or a country club.
Another strategy is to knock on peoples front doors to engage them in conversation, as Eagle reporter Jim Cross did at Country Place Estates (Page 6). One way to start that process is to interview an individual for a specific story and then build that relationship over time. The contact may lead the journalist to other civic places and sources to tap.
UNORGANIZED NEIGHBORHOODS
West Side, the fourth neighborhood, like College Hill, was not the primary focus of the Wichita experience. It is a neighborhood that The Eagle is now exploring on its own. Still, the newsroom conversations and community interviews offered insights into how this area of the community operates.
West Wichita is a large, rapid growing and economically diverse area of conservative whites, dominated by retirees and by families with young children filling up new subdivisions.
The unorganized neighborhood is perhaps more common in America than many people might think, and it often is the kind of place that remains invisible to journalists.
In this neighborhood there seem to be few known places for civic conversation and few links between the different layers of civic life. Many of the third place interactions revolve around people's immediate lives, such as youth sports events (Little League), bridge clubs, backyard socializing. Incidental interactions occur as people mow their lawns, meet at the supermarket, drop their kids off for school.
To tap into this kind of area, journalists will need to find the neighborhood catalysts. These people will help point journalists to public events, such as Little League games, and to more invisible places where people naturally convene, such as their homes and backyards.
Yet another challenge is for journalists to be aware of possible biases or preconceived ideas about residents of this type of neighborhood, who often come from different backgrounds, educational levels and perhaps political views than the journalists do. It is not uncommon to hear journalists talk about residents of this kind of neighborhood as "having their heads in the sand."