Community Media Workshop is, of course, helping to level the playing field. But not everyone knows about their work or has the time to even think about press outreach. Many of them are too busy doing the work that makes them relevant to the city and to media discourse. The organizations and people we want to report on are the same ones that haven't gotten coverage in the Trib, WBEZ, the Sun-Times or the Reader. How do we report on the invaluable work of these community organizations and individuals?

Ideally, neighborhood reporters that we work with know about these people and their work and will seek them out for stories. As we develop our regional story meetings, hopefully some of this will come out.

I think we have to think about some fundamentals about class, race, age and privilege in our coverage though. We've been conscientious about recruiting neighborhood reporters, striving to develop a group that accurately represents the complicated social geography of Chicago. I think we need to have those same lenses in place when we look at which organizations and individuals are pitching us community news.

Media responsibility means asking seriously whose interest is served by publishing certain kinds of stories, and why different organizations seek coverage. Particularly here, I'm thinking about the connections between crime coverage and gentrification.

Now it is true that providing the public with details about crime rates and incidents of violent crime can be a public service. It can also be true that organizations seeking to advocate for increased police presence or cameras in neighborhoods can have a particular set of interests. I don't think anyone would argue that an increased police presence in most Chicago neighborhoods would expedite gentrification and serve as a message to communities of color in those neighborhoods.

I'm not saying that this is binary, rather that in thinking about representing a 'community' we need to think about how many different communities there are within each geographic community, and whose voices are the loudest both on our pages and on the pages of other publications. Generally it will be that with the most sophisticated communications infrastructure. And generally that will be the group with the most money and clout. Often that group will be largely white, new to the neighborhood, and middle class. The underdogs get left out.

I think part of doing bottom up journalism is rethinking the way that PR works in the newsroom. We're beginning to build direct connections with community organizations and would love to hear from anyone doing interesting community based work. Journalists love to complain about PR 'flaks' but honestly, I'm not sure that many of them would know what to do without them at this point. Reworking this relationship will take some work.