Drawing lines: a new kind of journalism takes root in a struggling Detroit neighborhood.

"It's just not right," says Christine MacDonald, a Detroit News metro reporter in the paper's City Hall bureau. Going Home's blatant agenda-mongering, she says, no matter its good intentions, compromises the paper's overall credibility. Dave Josar, MacDonald's colleague in the City Hall bureau, shares her concern, and wonders, "What are the rules here?" It's a fair question, and one that newspapers around the country are struggling to answer as they incorporate reporters' blogs into their online strategy. (Going Home shares space on the News's Web site with forty-four reporter-written blogs on everything from politics to parenting to crafts.) Where to draw the line--between opinion and reporting, between advocacy and journalism--in such an uneven landscape is difficult to say with any consistency. The traditional take--that caring leads to compromise; that for journalists fighting isn't a right, but a luxury--seems simultaneously outdated and more important than ever. "You give that up to some extent when you become a reporter," MacDonald says of the former propositions. "All we have at the News is our reputation."

Happy and Morgan, though, see the work they do in the community--even the political activism--as bolstering, rather than threatening, that reputation. "There are two sides here," Happy says. "Either you help or you don't." To him, and to Morgan, journalism isn't just about telling stories; it is about using those stories to affect people and effect change. And credibility, they believe, lies less in objectivity--"I hate that word," Morgan says-and more in caring, actively, about sources and stories. "Michael doesn't cover the city," his editor, Nancy Hanus, the News's director of new media, points out. "That would be a different kind of an issue. But the fact that, as a native Detroiter, he got involved in something, and wanted to share the power of what he could do through this blog with others, and got other people involved-I don't think we do hardly anything that resonates so deeply with people anymore."

Going Home, Hanus believes, fights the reputation of wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am journalism (get in, get story, get out). Happy and Morgan are committed to the neighborhood. They're there before work, after work, on weekends. Observing, listening, learning. In other words, doing classic immersion reporting. "As we change as an industry," Hanus says, "people out in the community are coming to be a part of making the story, and I think that's a good thing.... We can only be doing a better job of covering our communities. And the fact that community is part of this report is, to me, where community journalism needs to go."

Happy and Morgan often describe themselves as "wearing different hats" when it comes to different aspects of their work in the neighborhood. When they're reporting and writing about the area, they're journalists; when they're making presentations to Detroit's City Council on behalf of the neighborhood or applying for grant money, they're private citizens. And yet the lines they draw for themselves, they're the first to admit, are as slack as the felled phone lines that sway on Dobel Street: when journalism meets activism, the divisions between narrator and player are necessarily muddled. There's no off switch for outrage.

Happy goes on to discuss the city's failure to maintain Fletcher Field--"despite the fact that it's the city's responsibility to maintain the park's grounds and equipment." Anger, he believes, invested with the agency of the communal, can lead to healing. Yet Happy and Morgan's ultimate goal is not to be activists themselves, but to help others to be. For the neighborhood residents who don't have Internet access, Happy and Morgan have tapped into on-the-ground networks--"Captain Edith" and others--to ensure that, to the extent they want to be, everyone is plugged into the project. Their current leadership of that project, Happy and Morgan say, is one they hope other members of the community will eventually fill.

Still, they defend their advocacy work. In an October post, Happy writes,

DETROIT'S STORY--from the national press perspective, at least-is often told within the inflated contours of caricature. The lusty-texted mayor. The Vegas-wannabe casinos. The foreclosed-on homes. The Most Dangerous City in America ... again. The city that forged its reputation through innovation is now suffering, not from disease, but from something perhaps more regrettable: atrophy. Politicians and pundits don't just talk about improving the city; they talk, these days, about saving it.

The 1967 riots still form a kind of psychic smog over Detroit and its suburbs. Racial tension is woven into the fabric of the city's political rhetoric. Just this March, in his State of the City speech, Kwame Kilpatrick blamed his scandal-plagued mayoral tenure--the most recent being perjury about the affair he'd been conducting with his chief of staff, sometimes on the city's dime--on white bigotry:

In the past thirty days I've been called a nigger more than anytime in my entire life. In the past three days I've received more death threats than I have in my entire administration.... This unethical, illegal lynch mob mentality has to stop.

Detroiters in general are quick to admit to a complex relationship with their city and its peak-and-valley history. There's a T-shirt popular among residents. "I Love Detroit," the shirt proclaims on its front. On the back? "I Hate Detroit."

One of Going Home's goals is to leverage the "Love" to work against the "Hate." The blog, of course, has its racial undertones: one of its key functions, after all, is to convene mostly white suburbanites to help a mostly black inner-city neighborhood. You could read a kind of misplaced colonialism into it. You could chalk its motivation up to white guilt. You could focus on the fact that Happy and Morgan, both white, live in Detroit's comfortable suburbs. And you could wonder how much difference a single playground actually makes in the scheme of things. Maybe you'd be right. But Going Home, its advocates will tell you, is as much symbolic as it is practical--a small-but-important step in moving on from the mutual pain of the past. The blog's potent combination of anger and understanding will, they hope, provide a bit of the heat necessary to help dissolve the racial tensions--city versus suburb, which is often used as a euphemism for "black" versus "white"--that have stymied the neighborhood's, and Detroit's, development over the years. "Unfortunately," Happy writes in a post,

Happy sometimes takes his young children to play at Fletcher Field; Lou, Shaun, and Amanda have become friendly with kids in the neighborhood. One day, Happy says, four-year-old Mandy, after an afternoon spent at Fletcher Field, announced to her mother, "I want braids like the girls at the park have."

"So Shannon sat there for almost an hour, trying to get her thin, blond hair into braids 'like the park girls," Happy says. He smiles at the memory. It's moments like this--small but powerful-that he's been working for. To him, they're the whole point.

MEGAN GARBER is an assistant editor at CJR.

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