Community journalism alive and well, thanks to TCU's Schieffer School

Jerry Grotta, Andrew Chavez and Tommy Thomason, left to right, make up the leadership team at the Texas Center for Community Journalism

Fort Worth, TX

7/6/2010

The Texas Center for Community Journalism is less than two years old, but already it has established itself among the national leaders in the still-healthy field of community journalism.

Though metro newspapers are hurting, and some major metros have even shut down, community journalism is still healthy in Texas, according to Tommy Thomason, director of the center.  There are more than 500 newspapers in Texas, and of those, more than 90 percent are community papers, Thomason said.

TCCJ was founded in January 2009 by Thomason, who was returning to teaching after stepping down as the founding director of the Schieffer School of Journalism.  Provost Nowell Donovan gave him the go-ahead to establish the Center to house some of the work in community journalism that he had been doing since 1998.

Under Thomason's direction, the Schieffer School had been holding small-group community journalism workshops with funding from the Texas Newspaper Foundation.  More than 160 Texas newspapers have sent staff members to those workshops.

"I wanted to take what we were already doing and expand on it," Thomason said.  "We were holding some of the nation's best community journalism workshops, but I wanted to offer more services to these newspapers."

And the Center is doing just that.  One of only five community journalism centers in the United States, it already has the most varied offerings of services in the nation.  Those include:

•    An ask-an-expert program gives free advice on anything from legal issues to circulation problems to publishers who call or email TCCJ.
•    The Digital Initiative, a program that offers free website consultation and even a free download of a content management system for Texas newspapers’ websites.
•    An Around the Web section of the Center’s website that monitors around 200 publications for news and information about community journalism and passes along digests for busy editors.
•    A new online scholarly journal which will feature research on community journalism, set to debut in 2011.
•    A service called FeatureTex which offers free features and columns to community newspapers to enhance their websites.

But the heart of the Center’s mission, Thomason said, is the workshops TCCJ does for journalists.

“The most important investment any paper can make is in its own staff,” he said.  “We want to offer quality professional development oriented exclusively toward community newspapers, not training for metro professionals that community journalists can sit in on.”

Thomason said the Center has offered several workshops that have never before been offered anywhere with a content geared exclusively to community journalism – one on advertising design just for community papers and their websites, one on developing a social media philosophy,  one on advertising sales for the Web and one upcoming this fall on investigative reporting for community papers.

“We try to offer workshops for the whole staff, not just the reporters,” he said.  “We want to offer help for ad sales people, the circulation managers, the publishers and the design staff.”

The Center also has an outreach to other parts of the state.  Thomason and Andrew Chavez, the Center’s associate director, conduct workshops and speak to regional press associations throughout Texas.

“We do this because we believe it’s important,” Thomason said.  “In Texas communities, the newspaper is frequently the only forum for the exchange of ideas and information, and the paper itself is the only watchdog on local government.  In supporting these newspapers, we feel as if we’re making a contribution to the civic life of our state.”