Some evenings, Margaret Bailey has to scoot her grandchildren out of the kitchen so she can get a few minutes to herself, time to sit at the kitchen table with pen and notebook and think through her next story for the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News.

A pipe fitter for 20 years before an injury forced her to retire, a frequent sitter for her grandchildren, a friendly, modest woman who stays close to home, Bailey doesn’t fit the typical image of a hard-bitten, fast-moving newspaper reporter.

Yet she is everything a reporter should be. She knows her beat: Savannah’s Liberty City area where she’s lived for 15 years. She’s learning more all the time, working on her writing, meeting new sources in the community and looking for the stories that will interest people in her neighborhood, particularly African-Americans like her.

Bailey became a weekly contributor to the Savannah Morning News in summer 2000 after she completed the newspaper’s first Neighborhood Newsroom program — a monthlong series of workshops on journalism basics taught by news staffers for people in the community who wanted to write.

The idea, Closeup Editor Steve Corrigan said, was “teaching regular Joes how to become newspaper reporters and then sending them back into their communities.”

The Morning News recruited nine people — many of them African-American — to participate in the first Neighborhood Newsroom program in June 2000.

Staff members taught sessions on journalism basics four evenings a week for four weeks. Sessions included interviewing, how to write a lead, how to incorporate quotes in a story, and doing research on the Internet. Each weekend, the participants did a story that was revised and edited during the week. Participants earned $400 for completing the workshops, and several joined the ranks of paid free-lancers for the newspaper, according to Corrigan.

“The thing I saw right away was that these people were telling stories about their neighborhoods and their communities,” Corrigan said. “It was neat to be able to tell those community stories with a community voice.”

Bailey — whose stories may range from the installation of bike racks on buses to a 617-pound pumpkin to a traditional homecoming at a local African-American college to the trend of some women growing very long fingernails — said she’s trying to fill a gap in the Morning News.

“Story ideas come from my surroundings, whatever is happening in my neighborhood or something that we’re interested in my neighborhood,” Bailey said.

“I receive the paper, but a lot of things I skip over because I don’t think it pertains to me,” Bailey said. “That’s the part I’m trying to add, not only for the paper but for the black community as well.”