Abstract
Two new books from the Bayou provide some exciting lessons for those working in journalism and mass communication education, while advancing service learning scholarship and the burgeoning area of research on coverage of disasters.
In Oil and Water: Media Lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, a trio of former journalists turned media scholars collaborated to go behind the scenes to characterize the most expensive hurricane in U.S. history and the greatest environment and maritime accident of all time from the point of view of the tenets of journalism.
Meanwhile, a professor in biological and agricultural engineering with Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities: Creating Safe and Happy Places for Children aimed to both instruct and inspire others to connect with the soul of a community by telling the “back story” of the Louisiana State University (LSU) Community Playground Project, a 15-year effort.
This book review essay shares a series of lessons that come from reading these projects, which were both written by professors at LSU. Thus, five Louisiana Lessons that can be applied to the journalism and mass communication or any classroom are the biggest takeaway offered here. But first, here is a word about the books’ structure.
In Oil and Water, the first of seven chapters focuses on a survey of 250 New Orleans residents about their media use before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Chapter 2 focused on the Gulf Coast journalists, who covered both Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and participated in in-depth interviews about the experience. Chapter 3 utilized content analysis as one way to show the difference between how the local media in Southern Louisiana covered these disasters and how CNN and Fox News Channel covered them. A framing analysis and an analysis of sources provided the foundation of the fourth and fifth chapters. The book ends with a chapter on visual images and a conclusion chapter with several calls to action.
Lima’s book, Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities, was organized into two parts. In the first part, the early chapters emphasize the collective stories of people and communities who were committed to ensuring every child in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System had access to a safe, fun playground. Lima took a more prescriptive approach in Chapter 3 offering a set of rules for community playgrounds such as “you can’t do it alone” or “watch for unintended consequence.” More advice for service learning instructors comes in Chapter 4 specifically on finding funding for playground projects and in Chapter 5, the importance of understanding the soul of a community. Lima’s own six principles for community engagement appear in Chapter 6. But then she ends her book with the voices of community leaders, who engaged in a ninety-minute discussion on “community.”
So what can we learn from these two titles? Here, five takeaways:
Lesson 1: Out of the greatest disasters comes an opportunity.
Thanks to their survey research of New Orleans residents, Miller, Roberts, and LaPoe make a compelling case for what happens in the event of a technology blackout. Internet journalism came alive in a new way during Katrina. As Lima explained, places like Renaissance Village, the largest trailer-park city ever established in the United States, located ten miles north of Baton Rouge, came alive as scores of people evacuated because of the storm. Even with 1,600 people, including 600 children, there was literally no place for them to play.
Lesson 2: Don’t just tell us what you’ve done, but explain how you did it.
Not only did the Oil and Water make arguments based on research, it also provided a thorough explanation of how the research was done. Likewise, Professor Lima wrote extensively about how she developed the relationships that led the successful community playground program.
Lesson 3: Local matters, whether talking about playgrounds or covering a disaster.
The main takeaway from Oil and Water was the importance of local news in driving preparation, endurance, resilience, and recovery. It provides a collective voice, one which Professor Lima attempted to capture in building partnerships for developing play spaces for kids in Baton Rouge.
Lesson 4: A picture is worth more than a 1,000 words.
Noting the symbiotic relationship between news agency–generated visuals that share cyberspace with user-generated visuals that go viral, the authors of Oil and Water chronicled the images of rooftop rescues and oil-soaked animals while showing how the public shares in the selection and transmission of images.
Lesson 5: Advocacy has its place—especially in Louisiana.
Not only does Professor Lima advocate for playgrounds for all children, but the authors of Oil and Water argue that in times of crisis, professional journalists must do their jobs as watchdogs of and conduits for the non-elite before, during, and after the crisis.
Just as the number seven is the Biblical number of completion, both of these books contained seven chapters, reflecting completeness in their handling of the topic at hand. In Oil and Water, Miller, Roberts, and LaPoe took a mixed-methods approach in developing a well-rounded examination of the media’s role in Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Oil Disaster.
Along with endnotes and references, a timeline of research projects conducted for Oil and Water and an annotated bibliography of studies contributing to the book appear in the back. Similarly, Lima does not stop at telling her story of community playgrounds but provides a type of tactical manual for service learning or community partnerships like those she built in the Baton Rouge area.
This essay really only scratches the surface when it comes to lessons one can glean from reading the two books described here. There are ample examples that can be immediately applied to teaching in journalism or mass communication along with applicable strategies for partnership development as service learning instructors build relationships that include and engage those in a larger local community.