Baltimore Community FellowshipsGuidelines | Fellows | Fellows Profiles
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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
To most people, starting a newspaper would seem a daunting venture. But 28-year-old cabinet-maker Nicholas Petr is, at heart, a muckraker. Petr is using his fellowship to support The Indypendent Reader, which he and a group of community artists started a year and a half ago with members of the Baltimore Independent Media Center.
The Indypendent Reader is a free, quarterly, news-print tabloid currently distributed in barber shops, coffee shops, community organizations and other locales. The intent behind The Reader is to build a grassroots media outlet that provides visibility for marginalized communities in Baltimore. "Working people didn't have a strong media outlet on their side," says Petr, who has a master's degree in sculptural studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. "But visibility is needed to change policy. We didn't think we could become the Baltimore Sun. But we thought if we started a small media project that would help people become the media, it would give marginalized communities a voice."
It's the content, Petr says, that separates The Indypendent Reader from the rest of the news pack. "The mainstream media doesn't offer the information people need to make a well-informed analysis of what's going on in their communities," he says. The Reader tackles issues that get short shrift elsewhere, such as the Algebra Project, in which high school students and teachers have organized around a court decision ordering the state and city school boards to pay millions to the city school system. The Indypendent Reader also has chronicled Camden Yard workers' campaign for a living wage. The paper's contributors are wide-ranging: everyone from researchers from Johns Hopkins to Death Row inmates.
In addition to devoting himself full-time as an editor, writer, designer and organizer, Petr says his fellowship will allow him to raise funds to keep the paper going and perhaps double its current circulation of 5,000. He also wants to set up a computer literacy project and to help grassroots organizations develop media strategies to gain the attention of politicians and the public.
