Students staff non-profit paper.

Last November, New York Governor David Paterson visited a community center in the South Bronx to announce a plan to curb the asthma epidemic that afflicts the neighborhood. The city's press corps was out in force, but all the reporters wanted to talk about was whom the governor was going to name to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate.

Only two news outlets produced more than a brief on the asthma initiative--the ABC affiliate and the local paper, The Hunts Point Express.

The Express covers the poorest neighborhood in the poorest Congressional district in the United States, a community where median household income is under $17,000 and one out of every four adults has no job. Because advertisers aren't interested in reaching those who have little or no disposable income, Hunts Point could never sustain a commercial newspaper. Instead, it is served by a nonprofit publication and Website (huntspointexpress.com) staffed by students in Hunter College's Department of Film & Media Studies.

As shrinking newspaper budgets shrink staffs and bureaus, attention has been devoted to nonprofit news. In New York City's poorest borough, the concept is old news. The Bronx's five nonprofit newspapers have gone largely unnoticed because they cover neighborhoods, not nations.

I edit two of those newspapers--the Express, which I founded four years ago, and the Mott Haven Herald (motthavenherald.com), staffed by my students at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. The schools host the Websites and pay for production, printing, and distribution. Funds I've raised privately have allowed me to hire a j-school graduate, based in the South Bronx, to serve as community editor of both papers.

The Express has helped rally opposition to a city plan to build a new jail in a community already burdened with more waste transfer stations, sewage treatment plants and truck traffic than any other in the city. It has also reported on efforts to reclaim the waterfront for recreation by building parks and greenways; on a neighborhood campaign to improve a sadly deficient bus system; and on efforts to curb the emissions from the waste facilities, trucks, and industrial plants that sometimes make the air barely breathable.

It does not sugar-coat conditions in an impoverished community, but, in contrast to other sources of news, it also portrays institutions and people worth celebrating, with stories, for example, on the children who worked all semester to perform a Shakespeare play at the local community center, or on the artists whose huge murals relieve the gloom of an industrial block.

On its masthead, the Express declares that its "aim is to air information, connect residents, and give them a voice? It reports from the street, the classroom, the community center, the public meeting, the protest march, emphasizing the ordinary men and women who take part. It also provides an opportunity to hear the unfiltered voice of residents.

In the issue after Paterson paid his visit, a community health associate aimed a punch at the city's press corps and jabbed the governor, as well, "for allowing the press to show total disregard to a community crisis and focus on a senate seat." The neighborhood itself has created "Neighborhood voices," claiming page 2 as its own.

In January, an op-ed piece in The New York Times headlined "News You Can Endow" brought a flood of letters and sparked a debate on the NCEW listserv. Critics warned that nonprofits can't publish political endorsements. But my experience tells me that that's much too short a yardstick to measure a newspaper's influence.

I'm proud of my students' work. It's won praise from the advocates who work so hard to improve life in Hunts Point, and from ordinary citizens. The day I delivered the first issue, a woman picked a copy up and tears came into her eyes. "I never thought I'd see the day when my community had its own newspaper," she said.

But my favorite reaction was an angry one, when a deputy commissioner called to scream at me. He didn't think his department had gotten a fair shake. "The reason I'm so angry," he said, "is that the people up there don't get their news from The New York Times; they get it from you!"

Many of the students who report for these papers will join us as professional journalists. Others will become lawyers, teachers, business people, but will have gained a keener interest in and appreciation of the value of journalism. All, I hope, will come to share my conviction that journalism is less about stringing facts together than about connecting people to one another.

I hope to see a time when every neighborhood in New York City (and, ultimately, every community in the nation) is served by its own source of local news, regardless of its ability to support a commercial paper. And I think news for the underserved can mold committed journalists, who care about communities, who want them to change for the better, and who believe that what they write can help readers to make a difference by strengthening their ability to participate in the decisions that affect their lives.

As editor and publisher of The Riverdale Press, Bernard L Stein won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. He is now a professor at Hunter College and the City University Graduate School of Journalism. Email bstein@riverdalepress.com

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