About Philadelphia Neighborhoods

Temple University student journalists work in a newsroom setting where they participate in all aspects of news production: text, broadcast, web, and digital media. Our reporters experience news gathering, production, and dissemination of news in a converged media environment, where they can experiment with new ways of telling stories.

Mission

Philadelphia Neighborhoods’ mission is to better tell stories in the undercovered and underserved neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

Reporters tell the stories that represent the diverse voices of the multicultural and multinational Philadelphia neighborhoods. Each semester, student journalists each select a particular neighborhood or topic to cover as a beat for the semester. Through concentrating their news coverage in a targeted Philadelphia neighborhood, the reporting aims to provide topical information and news from the community. Philadelphia Neighborhoods provides a form of hyper-local coverage missing from our urban communities: journalism street by street.

Future journalists will have to be competent in writing, reporting, and producing news across media platforms, while maintaining the traditional journalism values of accuracy, balance and fairness. We believe Philadelphia Neighborhoods can better prepare students.

In order to fulfill our mission, we developed a set of ethics and principles to guide our decision making.

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Neighborhood coverage

Philadelphia is a city that consists of 142 square miles and 1.5 million people. Philadelphia Neighborhoods utilizes a teaching hospital model where the class functions as a newsroom of about 40 student reporters a semester. We rotate neighborhood coverage according to a number of factors, always while keeping our mission centered.

We also understand there are no official neighborhood boundaries. With that in mind, this is the map of Philadelphia neighborhoods we use to identify the various and vibrant communities.

Partnerships

Philadelphia Neighborhoods has provided news to a variety of organizations and publications, including AL DÍA, Technical.ly Philly, WHYY, and East Falls Local, as well as having our reporting distributed on Patch. 

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Organizations

Philadelphia Neighborhoods and/or its faculty and staff are a part of several professional and collegiate journalism organizations.

• Society of Professional Journalists
• College Media Association
• Associated College Press
• National Academy of Television Art & Sciences- Mid-Atlantic Chapter
• Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association
• Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists

Staff

Chris Malo
Director
[email protected] / 215-204-3781
Malo attained a degree in journalism with magna cum laude distinction from Temple University and currently serves as an adjunct faculty member and editor of the department’s capstone class, PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com. During his time at Philadelphia Neighborhoods, the website and his students have achieved local and national distinction including winning EPPY awards, Society of Professional Journalism awards and Keystone Press awards. In 2016, he was an editor for the school’s special topics course in which students served as a wire service covering the Democratic National Convention for nearly 20 news outlets throughout the country. Previously, Malo owned his own nationally-distributed print magazine and his freelance work has appeared in places such as Vice and Philadelphia Daily News. He was also the managing editor of JUMP magazine, which covered the music scene in Philadelphia.

Neil Ortiz
Content Curator and Community Liaison
[email protected] / 215-204-3781

With Thanks

Philadelphia Neighborhoods would like to thank Thomas Petner, the first director of the program, and Armando Morales, the longtime graduate assistant, for the work they did in providing the foundation for future journalists.

We would also like to thank previous directors Profs. Chris Harper, Linn Washington, George Miller, and Brian Creech for their strong leadership roles, while having earned the program more than 60 awards during their tenures.

A thank you to Prof. Tracy Agostarola for her work redesigning the Philadelphia Neighborhoods logo across the website, newsletter, and social media platforms.