A VOICE for Durham’s youth

The man Carlton Koonce approached to interview for his first story in the VOICE slowly took measure of the college student standing in front of him. After looking Koonce up and down and back, he met the student’s eyes with obvious mistrust.

“What kind of con are you running?” he asked Koonce. “There’s no newspaper around here!”

That was in 2010, when the VOICE was poised to come out in print for the first time. Now the newspaper is a staple in northeast central Durham, the latest tabloid-size issue eagerly awaited by its readers at barbershops, diners and markets throughout the neighborhood. And Koonce has graduated from North Carolina Central University and mentors the teenage reporters and photographers helping to produce the VOICE in a tiny newsroom.

The walls of the 12-by-12-foot office are decorated with color printout photos of teens who have worked at the VOICE over the years. Tables pack the space so tightly that it’s hard to move around. But the VOICE pays no rent for the little newsroom in Building 4 of Durham’s Golden Belt Campus. Scientific Properties donated the space to what is officially named the Northeast Central Durham Community VOICE but is better known as the VOICE or the Durham VOICE.

“It’s a community paper for inner city Durham, staffed by college kids and teenagers from the neighborhood,” Koonce explained. “If you want to know who got shot, who got stabbed, then you can go to WTVD. But if you want to know about a camp for your kid or where there’s some service learning happening or read about the Little League team, you’ll read us.”

Four monthly print editions and five web editions of the VOICE come out each semester. Each issue combines the effort of teens in the neighborhood, journalism students and Campus Echo newspaper staffers at Central and the community journalism class taught at Carolina. Other universities have tried producing community newspapers, Koonce said, but the VOICE is the only one to use teenagers from the neighborhood.

This collaboration evolved gradually from the response journalism professor Jock Lauterer had to the tragic death of Student Body President Eve Carson in 2008. The young men arrested for, and eventually convicted of, her murder were both from inner city Durham – a foreign land only nine miles up the road.

“I took it personally that two young men from Durham would come to my town and do such a heinous crime – as if there was a wall between Durham and Chapel Hill,” Lauterer said. “It was the end of innocence. How naïve I was then.”

That year, Lauterer was in the first class of Faculty Engaged Scholars, a program in the Carolina Center for Public Service that provides $10,000 over two years for a faculty project that deeply involves the community.

Mai Nguyen, associate professor of city and regional planning, was also in the class and knew how upset Lauterer was about Carson’s murder. “Why don’t you go over there and start a newspaper for those guys?” she suggested. “Put cameras and notepads in their hands. Make them shooters of a gentler kind.”

Lauterer’s goal was to create a newspaper “dedicated to social change, youth empowerment and civic engagement,” but that was easier said than done. He began by buying cameras, laptops and other equipment a newspaper would need, but had no idea how to get his target audience – neighborhood teens – to work for him. Would neighborhood mothers entrust their children to this strange white guy, he wondered.

He took his equipment to places where neighborhood teens gathered to teach them how to shoot photos. He taught computer skills to teens at South Eastern Efforts Developing Sustainable Spaces (SEEDS), a nonprofit supporting community gardening projects. The teens put on a photo exhibit and participated in an oral history project. Still no newspaper, though.

So Lauterer reached out to Bruce dePyssler, associate professor of mass communication at Central and adviser to the student newspaper, the Campus Echo, and dePyssler’s Central colleague Lisa Paulin, associate professor of mass communication. Between the students at Central and Lauterer’s community journalism class, they would be able to staff a newspaper, and they would also work with Durham high school journalism classes and Partners for Youth Opportunity (PYO) to recruit local teens.

In fall 2009, the VOICE had a soft launch online at www.durhamvoice.org. The newspaper’s name was a natural. “Whenever we talked to people in the community, we kept hearing them say, ‘We want a voice in what’s happening,’” Lauterer said.

The road has sometimes been rocky. Funding fell through a few times, but also seemed to get picked up by another source. The Daily Tar Heel donated the first year’s worth of printing, followed by Capitol Broadcasting’s funding of the next three years. This year, the Carteret County News Times all the way in Morehead City is printing the paper for free. When Lauterer’s funding for Koonce’s position ran out, he was able to keep Koonce involved as part of his new job as PYO’s internship/mentor coordinator.

Each collaborator gets something different from the VOICE experience. For Central students, it’s “an opportunity to be real reporters” that looks good on their resume, Paulin said.

For the Carolina community journalism students, largely white, it’s a chance to cover a community that most are unfamiliar with and to learn cultural differences. For example, sometimes the Carolina students have trouble getting black residents to talk to them for stories, Paulin said. “And my students will tell them that’s because it’s a bad neighborhood and people don’t like to put their business out there.”

For Paulin, the VOICE helps fulfill service and research requirements she needs for tenure. She is at work on a readership survey to determine community impact, but “anecdotally, they’re happy to see us,” she said.

For the teenagers, it’s an opportunity to write about a wide variety of topics, much broader than at their high school newspaper. Brooklynn Cooper, the first VOICE teen editor-in-chief to attend Carolina, wrote in the VOICE last year about a fashion show, holiday outings and why people should be proud to live in Durham.

“People say, ‘You live in Durham? I’m sorry,’” Cooper said. “I actually like living in Durham. It’s a nice city. It just gets a bad rep all the time.”

For the community, the VOICE makes it clear that northeast central Durham is not all thugs and violence but the home of hard-working citizens trying to make a difference in their city. They run soul food diners, have children playing violins and soccer, provide temporary housing for those who need it and plant urban gardens.

And for Lauterer, the VOICE is a way to make peace with the people and the city he once thought of as his enemies.

“The Durham that I was angry at I now love,” Lauterer said. “I had this naïve monolithic view of the African American community in Durham, and, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. It is nuanced, layered, political, complex, proud and frustrating and rewarding. And I just love it.”