community-centered journalism, as they call it in Philadelphia, where both of them are based. Their case involves two neighborhood projects with deep community involvement: Germantown Info Hub and Kensington Voice. They were interested in two particular wrinkles to this community-based approach: One, what does this look like in historically marginalized communities, one majority Black and another majority Latinx, where distrust in the news media runs deep after decades of stigma and distortion? And two, how do these projects function during a pandemic, when public information is crucial, misinformation is rampant, and communities can’t get together like usual?
Wenzel and Crittenden combined an ongoing ethnography of the two projects with online focus groups of 26 community residents and leaders conducted last April, during the early days of the pandemic. Among the community members, they found frustration with sensational news and a lack of actionable information in local med