USF St. Petersburg’s Journalism and Media Studies program honored pioneering journalist Peggy M. Peterman Saturday at the grand opening of its Neighborhood News Bureau in Midtown.
Located at the Sanderlin Center, the newsroom was dedicated Saturday in honor of Peterman, a reporter, editor and columnist for the St. Petersburg Times for more 30 years. Peterman helped transform both the St. Petersburg Times and Midtown by fighting for fair coverage of the black community.
Peterman practiced “people first journalism,” said Dr. G. Michael Killenberg, the program’s first full time faculty member and founder of the bureau. That philosophy made Peterman a good role model for the newsroom, which Killenberg said should “focus on lives and good deeds of everyday people.”
The Neighborhood News Bureau is the compilation of planning by both the university and the city of St. Petersburg to bring journalism into the heart of an under covered community.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Leon Dash delivered the inaugural Peggy M. Peterman lecture. Dash, a former reporter for The Washington Post, encouraged students to report and write a type of journalism “that has long been absent.”
Dash urged USF students reporting and writing in the community must to stories “into context. Not just focusing on isolated stories but trying to put them together to see what is really ailing the community.”
Peterman was hired at the St. Petersburg Times in 1965 to work on the Negro news page. By 1967 she had persuaded her editors to discontinue the Negro news page, which she saw as a facilitation of Jim Crow laws, and to integrate stories and concerns of the black community throughout the newspaper.
Peterman’s legacy lives on in the young people she helped realize their dreams. Chris Warren, who participated in Peterman’s Black History Pageants, said Peterman influenced him to try and stay in the community to “fight the good fight” and influence others.
story edited by Brian C. Morris & Brant D. Karmen