 "Photo: Photo courtesy of Jock Lauterer")
When Lisa Paulin hand- delivers The Northeast Central Durham Voice in downtown Durham, she's often stopped along the way. "Is that a new issue of the Voice?" "Can I have a copy?" "Do you write for The Voice?"
"We sometimes think, ‘Who knows how many people are actually reading it?'" said Paulin, an assistant professor in the department of English and mass communication.
"But when it gets delivered and people pick it up, you really do see how meaningful it is to the people who live here."
Voice's publishers, Paulin, Jock Lauterer, a senior lecturer at UNC—Chapel Hill, and Bruce dePyssler, Campus Echo adviser, all say that they've been pleasantly surprised by the Central Durham community's desire for the publication.
"Before The Voice came along, the only news for this area, all of it was bad. Gang violence, robberies — nothing about the community's good side," said Lauterer.
"Every community is more than its problems," said Paulin. "Every person has a story. There are a lot of things going on that should be talked about – and not all are bad."
Lauterer recounts the inspiration for the Voice: "One day, I was talking with my colleague Mai Ngyun. She'd been working with the city of Durham's regional mapping and planning with a class. One of her students asked her, ‘Could a neighborhood community paper benefit this area'?"
The answer was a resounding "yes."
Lauterer said he contacted dePyssler about working with NCCU students to start up a community newspaper that would serve the high-crime area Durham police have tagged "the bull's eye."
With NCCU on board, Lauterer went to work. Soon Paulin incorporated the Voice into two of her journalism courses, Public Issues Reporting and Advanced Reporting; Lauterer did the same with his community journalism class at UNC.
"What I see in the future is having a great group of teens, and a pipeline for teens coming up through their school, or their church youth groups or other non-profits, but to really get a good group of teen reporters," said Paulin.
"Our NCCU and UNC students will probably step into more of a mentor role, to really teach them about reporting and writing."
Lauterer then landed a $25,000 Z. Reynolds Smith Foundation grant for cameras, computers, other equipment; he sweet- talked Scientific American Properties, Inc. in the Golden Belt building for free office space and free wireless internet from Time Warner Cable.
The first edition of the Voice appeared, exclusively online, in the fall of 2009. But Lauterer said it had little impact.
"I would ask people on the street corner who I met, ‘Have you seen The Voice?' And they'd say, ‘What's that?' And I'd tell them, ‘It's the new community newspaper, for your neighborhood!'" said Lauterer.
"They would invariably ask me, ‘Well, where can I get one?' And I would tell them it was all online, and their faces would just fall."
That response inspired Lauterer, Paulin and dePyssler to overcome the digital divide by getting the Voice into old-fashioned newsprint.
In February 2010, Lauterer charmed The Daily Tar Heel, UNC-Chapel Hill's student newspaper, to donate a year of free printing. Today the Voice prints 2,000 16-page, full-color copies each month, while maintaining its online presence.
With a second Z. Reynolds Smith Foundation grant, the Voice has now brought NCCU graduate and former Campus Echo editor Carlton Koonce on board as neighborhood youth recruiter and mentor.
According to Koonce, pretty much anyone from the neighborhood can write poems, stories or news for the community newspaper.
"We really want to reach out for them and help them fill themselves out," he said.
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