Today we’d like to introduce you to Norine Dworkin.
Hi Norine, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
It was after the 2020 election, and I was reading a Washington Post feature about a woman named Robin Kemp in Clayton County, Georgia. She’d been downsized from her newspaper reporting job the way so many journalists have as newspapers cut staff or folded altogether. (Two thousand papers have folded since 2004, and another 55 closed during the pandemic, according to the Washington Post.) But Kemp fervently believed her corner of the world still needed the news, and so armed only with her unemployment checks and a WordPress site, she continued reporting the news of Clayton County. During Georgia’s epic ballot count, she was the only reporter on-site when the BBC called to get her take on what was happening in Clayton County. That interview and the Washington Post story put her on the map.
I thought I can do that.
I looked around at the news landscape in my neighborhood. The local paper was running stories about the fifth-grade play at a prep school and the opening of a new Dairy Queen.
I thought, there’s room for something different.
VoxPopuli launched in late January 2021 to focus on government, politics, and social justice issues. Pronounced vahx-pop-pew-lie — the title means “voice of the people.” We take our commitment to public service journalism seriously. We also take our commitment to media parity seriously too. Not only do we investigate injustice and hold the powerful to account, but we are committed to covering communities of color to ensure that the issues and concerns affecting our entire coverage area are brought to light. For instance, when Orange County Public Schools was floating plans to build a school bus depot in the heart of Winter Garden’s historic Black neighborhood, VoxPopuli published a feature about environmental racism, focusing on an advocacy group mobilizing to prevent the bus depot from being built in their community.
VoxPopuli has also broken stories about a candidate for Windermere town council who misrepresented his experience in law enforcement; an Ocoee pet store whose owners said they vetted their breeders carefully only to be exposed as purchasing puppies from breeders named to the Humane Society’s Horrible Hundred List. We’ve covered community activism in Winter Garden when a company wanted to build a helipad too close to residential neighborhoods. And we told the story behind two 1950s lynchings in Oakland that the town acknowledged 70 years after the fact.
The Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunlight is the best of disinfectants …” Our job as an independent, fact-based, public service news outlet is to report the news that makes a difference.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The road has most definitely not been smooth — mostly because I was self-funding this endeavor until we could get our nonprofit status secured and could start fundraising.
A writer/editor friend had joined me in the project because he said it sounded like fun, and the two of us were working insane hours putting together the website and developing content. It was just us, and a photographer I’d reconnected with from my son’s Montessori school days because we had no funds to hire anyone to help. (I’d made my living as a freelance writer for years, and asking writers to write for free just didn’t sit well with me.) I was doing the lion’s share of the reporting and writing; the managing editor was doing the editing and web design. And we’d fill in with stories we could reproduce from other sites like The 19th, Florida Phoenix and ProPublica.
About nine months after our launch, we secured a financial sponsor, which allowed us to accept tax-deductible donations, and in November 2021, we did our first fundraising campaign through NewsMatch, a national organization that bundles and matches donations for non-profit news organizations. For our first go-round with fundraising, we raised $14,000.
Having even a little money was an immediate game-changer. I began hiring freelancers so I didn’t have to write every story. We expanded our reporting into the cities we covered. And we began investing in advertising and marketing to help grow our audience and donor base. We just produced our first brand-building commercial and are planning our first fundraiser for the summer of 2022. We’re raising money to fund a reporting position for a journalist of color to cover the Black community full-time.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ve had a 30-year career in journalism, working and writing for newspapers, alternative/LGBTQ weeklies, websites, and national magazines. I’ve been an entertainment writer, covering theatre, dance, and film. I’ve been a women’s health writer, writing about nutrition, fitness, health conditions, sexual health, aging. I’ve been a parenting writing, covering pregnancy and early childhood issues.
But after the Black Lives Matter movement started, and Donald Trump was elected and the Big Lie about 2020 election fraud spread, I decided it was time to start a newspub that would focus on and examine local news and issues with the same rigor that the major papers were giving state and national news.
In the short time that we’ve been publishing, VoxPopuli has gained a reputation for its relentless pursuit of the truth, our fearless reporters, and for pushing to make change.
In my first city commission meeting in Winter Garden — at the height of the pandemic — I was stunned to see that two of the commissioners were unmasked. At the time, the city had a marketing campaign running in the downtown area, urging residents to mask up so that businesses wouldn’t have to close. Yet, here were two commissioners at a city meeting — one of whom represented the downtown business district — unmasked. I disrupted the proceedings to ask, loudly, why these two commissioners were unmasked. The mayor hushed me. I waited again till he called for public comment on some issue and again, I asked why the commissioners were unmasked when so many were dying during a global pandemic. The mayor told me to be quiet again. I found it interesting that the mayor was more concerned with meeting procedure than public health. But I wrote an editorial about the commissioners not wearing masks in city meetings, especially the representative of the business district. The next meeting, she had a mask on.
In another instance, I found that I’d been misrepresented in the minutes of a Winter Garden city commission meeting where I’d asked the mayor a question that he didn’t particularly like. The city clerk recorded it as a “personal question,” which I objected to since I’d asked the question during an election cycle, about the election, in my capacity as a journalist. When the clerk refused to change the minutes, I wrote another editorial and published audio of the meeting, calling for greater transparency. The city now publishes audio of all city commission meetings along with the minutes.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs, or other resources you think our readers should check out?
Well, I’m a news junkie and an ex-pate New Yorker. I couldn’t live without the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Politico, Slate, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and New York magazine.
I also like to check in with the political writings of Chris Cillizza of CNN, Bess Levin of Vanity Fair, as well as Erik Wemple and Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, Charles Blow, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni, and John McWhorter of the New York Times. NPR’s 1A, On the Media, Fresh Air, Snap Judgement, and Reveal are also favorites.
Pricing:
- FREE to Subscribe
Contact Info:
- Email: info@wintergardenvox.com
- Website: www.wintergardenvox.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wintergardenvox
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wintergardenvoxpop
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/gardenvox
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xQrwKo5EOul7YbwB3UIfQ
Image Credits
Norine Dworkin
Paul Morris
Mellissa Thomas
Kamia Brown
