Measures of Success Part 2: Community

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Small-J journalism stories mean a lot in covering community news.

“I tell two stories,” said Hartsville’s Doug Fisher. “Local churches started hanging out their Sunday school banners one morning. City inspectors came around and had a sudden zeal about enforcing the sign ordinance.  The outcry broke on Hartsville Today and by the end of the day the city had relented.”

In another instance, the U.S. Postal Service told residents that they would have to keep crossing a particularly busy road to get to their mailboxes. After a resident wrote it up for Hartsville Today, the post office agreed to work with neighbors to move the boxes, Fisher said.

Great Lakes Echo, which spun off from Great Lakes Wiki, is focusing on environmental hot spots and the invasive Asian carp, bringing new levels of engagement to people living in the Great Lakes region. Indeed, it produced a learning module on the Knight Citizen News Network to share its strategies with others.  (See Great Lakes Echo: Sustaining a Niche Site.)

Loudoun Forward sought to produce major issues papers for one of the fastest-growing counties outside Washington, D.C. While the site succumbed to the founders’ inability to edit the ambitious takeouts amid their other commitments, their first brief on the role of arts in the local economy gave prominence to the idea of a signature performing arts center in the county. Indeed in 2008, a year after the grant ended, the Franklin Park Arts Center opened its doors, a dream come true for local artists and patrons.

The New Voices sites have generously trained contributors and mentored the launch of other sites - even though they have not always directly benefited from the people they trained. However, all the projects that launched with ambitious multi-session training plans have scaled back. Instead, they are offering single-session or single-topic training to better serve prospective citizen contributors with severe time constraints.

Most of the 20 university-led New Voices projects have not only taught students how to cover local news, but also have run workshops for community members. All three of the youth media projects have provided media skills training for young people.

All of the community-radio and cable-access New Voices sites have trained citizens in blogging and audio or video production with notable successes at Radio Free Moscow, Cambridge Community Television’s NeighborMedia.org, and Appalshop’s Community Correspondents Corps.

Madison Commons alone trained 150 citizen journalists and posted an excellent curriculum online. Now, though, it is moving in a different direction. Oakland Local is also training people in community media skills.

Twin Cities Daily Planet, a project of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, revamped its training over the years and now offers citizen journalism classes and media skills workshops on discrete topics such as how to create free WordPress sites for small business and community organizations.

Importantly, community media training is showing early signs of offering a modest source of revenue for sites that can offer local nonprofits or businesses how-to skills in creating websites or using social media to advance their operations.

Several sites have fielded ongoing streams of calls from people asking how to replicate what they are doing.

Moreover, the sites have been the focus of academic research. Doug Fisher’s cookbook, “Hartsville Today: The first year of a small-town citizen-journalism site,” has been downloaded 3,000 times.

For two consecutive years (2008 and 2009), the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists recognized the Twin Cities Daily Planet with its Page One Award for Best Independent News Website. (See Twin Cities Daily Planet: Sustaining Citizen Journalists.)

Said the judges: “The breadth and depth of this site is terrific. It connects on multiple fronts: reader engagement, neighborhood coverage, local opinions, 24/7 updates and a strong commitment to a diversity of voices. TCDailyPlanet really taps the power of the medium to make the community part of the conversation - a lesson some of its competitors could benefit from.”

The Daily Planet has also turned the ideas of accolades around. It not only publishes the Minnesota Ethnic and Community Media Directory but also honors top ethnic and community sites with an awards program.

ChicagoTalks.org, a project of Columbia College-Chicago, has been honored for publishing award-winning student work with awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Chicago Headline Club. Among its winning efforts were a two-part series on Chicago aldermen hiring relatives to work city jobs; an investigation on the City Council breaking state laws by failing to keep adequate records and voting on ordinances without enough members present; an 11-story series on abuses in the Illinois General Assembly scholarship program; and a series on handicapped accessibility problems in the Chicago Transit Authority.

Also of note, the college recently won a $45,000 grant from the Chicago Community Foundation to launch a sibling site, AustinTalks.org, for a diverse and little-covered community of 100,000. The grant was part of Knight’s Community Information Challenge.

The Society for Professional Journalists recognized GreatLakesWiki.org in 2008 as one of the top three online, in-depth, news sites reported by university students.

GreaterFultonNews.org was named one of the 40 most successful university-community parnerships as part of Virginia Commonwealth University’s 40th anniversary in 2008.

With everyone in search of new revenue models for journalism, there is an assumption that sites must bring in money to be sustainable.  Again and again, we’ve seen volunteer New Voices efforts that are sustaining themselves with little income. And we do believe that community news, as a new form of civic volunteerism, is one important model.

The Forum’s Maureen Mann has even remarked rhetorically: “I don’t know what we would do if we made money. Who would we decide to pay?”

There is no question that volunteer sites run the risk of disrupting their organizational dynamic when money is introduced. That said, nearly all the sites would like to be able to pay their contributors at least something for their work. Many already are.

GrossePointeToday.com in Michigan is paying $150 for an assigned, bylined article and hopes to reimburse Wayne State students for fuel costs.

TC Daily Planet pays from $10 to $100 for a story specifically assigned by the editor. And it is now trying out Spot.Us to crowdfund some reporting, seeking, for instance, to raise $2,000 for a story on whether low-income high rises are urban ghettoes or urban villages.

Oakland Local is paying $200 to $250 for some stories. Several of the university sites, including 10 Valley, Intersections: South Los Angeles and Grand Avenue News, are paying student editors and reporters during summer and winter breaks to operate the sites year round.

In a March 2010 survey, more than three-quarters of the New Voices respondents said they had brought in other money from ads, events or other grants.

All but a handful of the New Voices sites feel pressure to raise money, but most are juggling multiple commitments and are short on fund-raising skills.

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