By Ireland Davies

“Everyone has a story to tell,” said Velvet McNeil, Executive Director of the South Jersey Emerging Journalists Project. McNeil feels that this sentiment guides her work in encouraging up-and-coming journalists and newsrooms across South Jersey to engage with their communities.

The South Jersey Emerging Journalists Project began five years ago. Formerly known as the South Jersey Information Equity Project, it was launched through a partnership between Montclair University’s Center for Cooperative Media and the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. McNeil explained that South Jersey is considered a “news desert,” making both receiving and providing news a challenge. Enter the South Jersey Emerging Journalists Project.

“The goal is to report on stories here in South Jersey, and in the Black and Brown community, for people of South Jersey,” highlighted McNeil. Focusing on elevating community voices can fill information gaps while producing a new generation of South Jersey journalists through what McNeil calls a “journalism pipeline.”

The project’s collaboration with the Center for Community Engaged Media was born out of a specific need McNeil recognized: “One of the things I noticed in the way that the project is going is that the community needs to have more buy-in to the stories, and I thought that the Center [for Community Engaged Media] would be the best place to support that.”

McNeil reached out to Letrell Crittenden, Director of the Center for Community Engaged Media, after becoming her own project’s Executive Director. She became familiar with Crittenden through his community engagement work for the American Press Institute. “I looked at him as a great resource,” McNeil explained.

McNeil felt that CCEM could provide guidance to her project’s young reporters in building relationships with the communities they are covering. “[SJEJP] currently trains emerging journalists, so they get to hear from the journalists in Philadelphia to try to figure out how they worked to create stories,” said McNeil. She hopes that she and her team can instill confidence in South Jersey residents that “they are also being rewarded with having their stories told in the best way possible.”

Working with CCEM will also give South Jersey journalists access to resources from the larger Philadelphia media market. This collaborative journalism model gives smaller newsrooms more agency in telling the stories that reflect the people they serve. “I think that it is a grand connection,” said McNeil of the partnership.

McNeil knows firsthand the effort it takes to gain a community’s trust. “I’ve been a member of the communications community for over 25 years, but as a storyteller myself, I see it as: if you don’t know, you’re afraid of it,” she explained, “How can we get out there and inform you and educate you and support you? We go and we ask that we share your stories.”

Ultimately, McNeil hopes that CCEM will help support South Jersey journalists in giving back to their communities, through resources and high quality reporting, of course, but also through simple, daily interactions. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with the center. I am really excited about the knowledge that South Jersey will gain from this experience and exposure,” McNeil concluded.