It's been a foundational year for the Center for Community-Engaged Media, and there's a lot to celebrate. September marked a full year of the center’s management of the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative. Over the past year, our newsroom partners have worked diligently on a project focused on economic mobility. You can read more about this effort, which was a nationwide project led by the Local Media Association, in this month’s report from our director, Gene Sonn. 

Within the community, the center's partnership with the South Jersey Emerging Journalists Project brought journalism training and sustained community engagement directly to Camden residents. You can read more about this below. 

On the research front, the Delaware County project has been the centerpiece. A sweeping, mixed-methods effort that has now generated surveys of 565 local residents, more than 30 in-depth interviews, a community asset map charting organizations and influencers across the county, and two academic papers presented at this year's AEJMC conference. A white paper on Delaware County's news and information ecosystem is coming next month.

CCEM also landed $50,000 from the People’s Media Fund to launch the "Connecting Civic Information Actors" project, exploring how communities share information outside traditional news networks, which is especially timely given the current climate around immigration, LGBTQ rights, and civic organizing. You can find out how you may be able to support this effort in this month’s edition. 

Our center was also proud to co-sponsor several events over the past few months. These include the 10th anniversary conference of the Collaborative Journalism Summit, a training focused on journalism safety specifically geared toward Spanish-speaking reporters, and the annual Engaged Journalism Exchange, which brings together scholars and practitioners to deal with challenges facing news creators. You can learn more about the exchange in this edition.