OnPoverty.org Web site is launched

OnPoverty.org, the Web site of the American Poverty Journalism Center, was launched March 29 after three years in development.

The site is the brainchild of Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics Ed Wasserman. It began in the spring of 2005 as a project for Wasserman's Journalism of Poverty class. The site provides professional journalists covering poverty and economic justice with links to print, broadcast and online news coverage, and opportunities for discussion and for sharing resources.

“We want to create a place where professionals can talk with one another about covering poverty — the obstacles and opportunities,” Wasserman said.  “It’s a news-driven Web site that finds and links to …  coverage that journalists in the field need to know about.  But it’s meant to be more than that.

“OnPoverty.org is an attempt to use Internet technology to inform, prod, extol, deplore and, we hope, mobilize.”

Site editors Kat Greene '08 and Melissa Caron '09 hope to provide resources to improve the quality of the coverage of poverty.

“In developing OnPoverty.org we have come to realize not only how few journalists actually cover poverty, but the passion that those few bring to their work,” Caron said. “As journalists we have great power through our words to help foster change in our society. We see this Web site as opening up communication between journalists to encourage further work in this field.”

Greene agrees.

“[We hope] the site inspires journalists to move out of doing stories about their readers and start telling the compelling stories behind the voiceless who are so often ignored, not only by the media but also, often, by everyone else,” she said.

 Wasserman and his students hope the site will spawn conferences and workshops, a  professional organization of poverty journalists and instructional curricula as potential means to raise awareness of the issue.

One challenge is to assemble a good distribution list of journalists. This spring students in the poverty seminar will begin the arduous process of identifying up to 1,000 reporters who are currently covering poverty and economic justice issues.

Wasserman also recognizes that while the site has benefited from student volunteers, the absence of institutional memory is a drawback in producing a consistently good resource. So he will continue to oversee the site while he's on leave next year.

For Greene, there is a lot at stake.

“Covering poverty is a way to show readers a different perspective on the consequences of their actions, or the actions of elected officials.” she said. “It's a way to tell the full story of who we are as Americans and where we're going as a nation.”