By Ireland Davies
Temple News is collaborating with the Center for Community-Engaged Media to create a plan for expanding The Temple News’ coverage of North Central Philadelphia.
“If we’re reporting on Temple, its students and alumni, that includes the community (surrounding us). Everything we do impacts them,” said Sidney Rochnik, Editor-in-Chief of The Temple News.
While TTN has been venturing beyond the confines of Temple’s campus for its reporting, finding sources representative of North Philadelphia neighborhoods has proven difficult for some up-and-coming reporters. “If we’re only going to one woman when we need the community voice, that’s not really journalism,” Rochnik acknowledged.
That’s where CCEM enters. On a bi-monthly basis, CCEM’s director, Letrell Crittenden, has been meeting with Temple News staff to train them on asset mapping. Crittenden has long utilized asset maps, and brought the concept to the American Press Institute during his time as the organization’s Community Engagement director.
“If you don’t have a deep understanding of the communities you cover, you can’t fully serve a community’s information needs. Asset mapping is an important tool in developing a deeper understanding,” Crittenden said.
The project of growing community engagement has been a work-in-progress for TTN. Last year, the staff hosted their first community listening session. For Rochnik, the feedback was eye-opening. “We had conversations about how the media treats North Central residents versus Temple students,” she explained, “One of the people asked ‘What are you going to do with this? Can you promise me that you are going to do something?’”
With a newsroom of student journalists, maintaining relationships with the off-campus community is a challenge: reporters graduate and connections are lost. As a result, it can be difficult to maintain consistency. “I think it was unsatisfying for a few of [the listening session attendees] to hear ‘We don’t know,’ or ‘We can’t promise anything,’” said Rochnik.
With these obstacles in mind, the goal of the TTN and CCEM collaboration is to lay a foundation that future TTN reporters could build upon in the form of an asset map. Much like a newsroom, assets can shift and change, but they provide valuable reference points for canvassing and reporting.
Asset mapping is a tool that more newsrooms, especially those in Philadelphia, have been adopting in recent years. “We got a lot of great advice from people who are already doing this. Philadelphia has a lot of great, super local journalism, which is a great map for what we need to do,” Rochnik explained.
By highlighting businesses, parks, civic centers and individuals as sources of information and community news, TTN can create an evolving illustration of the community that envelops Temple. In turn, North Philadelphia residents will have a more prominent voice in TTN’s coverage. This representation has the power to dispel harmful stereotypes about the community, while strengthening the relationship between Temple students and lifelong North Philadelphians.
“Goals are the longevity [of community engagement] itself, but hopefully we will have achieved enough in this year, physically and also on the back-end, that will inspire people, or let people know that this is something that is possible that will not only make our content better, but aid in the relationship that we have with the community,” Rochnik said.
The Temple News will publish its second Community Issue, featuring stories about North Central Philadelphia, in Spring 2026. Read the first edition from 2024 here.
