Happy New Year to our community

Community journalism, as we understand and practice the form, always involves the consideration of community morale and wellbeing. Specifically in the black press, we report to and for a community that hears bad news about itself most places it turns. We consider it part of our responsibility to balance this, on average, negative coverage in the mainstream media with positive news about our community. That is why so many of our pages are full of routine good news that would fall beneath the notice of many media: scholarships, awards, promotions, donations, reunions, inspirational messages, celebrations, and so on.

We are feeling this responsibility even more keenly as we publish our first edition in this New Year. And while our community can expect, as always, a steady stream of routine good news in our pages in 2014, we also would like to offer some hope for our community (and region) by setting our sights more broadly at the big picture, in terms of the major stories our peers in mainstream media do tend to report.

Gov. Jay Nixon is meeting with the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus this month for the first time since he was elected governor. These are the elected representatives of the Democratic Party’s most dependable voting bloc. We hope this sets a new tone for Nixon, who too often has dismissed our community and its concerns, in his final term.

The African-American majority on the city’s chief fiscal body, aldermanic President Lewis Reed and Comptroller Darlene Green, shows fresh signs of working together for the betterment of this community. Reed and Green need to work together to address better the inequalities in this city.

Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones is setting a new, high standard for professionalism and transparency as a citywide elected official. While a new parking system is difficult to get excited about, we recognize genuine intelligence, dedication and leadership skill when we see it in action and expect great things from her.

Police Chief Sam Dotson is showing a willingness to advocate for fairness for the African-American community, even if it means challenging his own police officers when it is warranted, that we have not seen before from his predecessors. St. Louis could do far worse for its first police chief under local control than Chief Dotson.

The city is busy with new construction and economic development, and much of it will impact our community. Paul McKee Jr.’s Northside redevelopment is likely to finally get underway in 2014. The new $229 million bridge across the Mississippi River will open on February 9; the total value of the project along its three-mile link, including highway interchanges, is $700 million. CityArchRiver 2015 has started to move forward. 

The Central West End is on the rise. BJC HealthCare has undertaken a $1 billion expansion and renovation, CORTEX II has current projects with a combined value of $186 million, new residential high rises are going up, a new independent-living senior community has been formed, a Whole Foods has broken ground and IKEA is on the way. 

Two mainstays of our community, the United Way of Greater St. Louis and the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, have new, young African-American leaders in Orvin Kimbrough and Michael McMillan. We feel the interests of many of our neediest citizens are in strong, caring hands.

Mayor Francis G. Slay has not done enough to enhance our estimation of his overall leadership, and County Executive Charlie A. Dooley has taken a beating in the mainstream media after some poor decisions by his staff and appointees. But they have fostered a new era of collaboration by launching the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership, and Slay and Dooley are showing real courage in publicly discussing the possibility of even greater cooperation between the city and the county. However, our community must fight to have its say in how this new, much-needed cooperation evolves.

Slay and Dooley also have joined regional business leaders in launching a new initiative to spur economic growth in St. Louis by welcoming more immigrants to the region, an effort we heartily embrace.

Looking in our own shop, we expect to grow our Newspaper In Education program (the largest in the state, named No. 1 in the country by the National Newspaper Association in its first year) and upgrade our video production capacity (which won literally every single award in our class in this year’s Missouri Press competition) in 2014. We also have invested in a new newsroom in west downtown that offers the physical atmosphere of professionalism that our small, dedicated staff has always brought to the work we do.

We recognize that with the mainstream media’s frequently overwhelming emphasis on the negative and trivial, it can be difficult to recognize that many good and important things are happening around us. We will be here to remind you in 2014, every Thursday on the newsstands and in our e-edition, and every minute of the day on stlamerican.com. We wish you a very prosperous and Happy New Year!