Overview

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Since 2005, the New Voices grantees have traveled the arc of media innovation. They sought to report community news via blogs, podcasts, wikis, “citizen” journalism and social media, in addition to websites, community radio and cable access television.

They have won accolades and awards, filled gaps in news coverage, informed voters and increased voter turnout, spun into new projects, trained citizens to be journalists, mentored other local news startups, produced awardwinning faculty research, upended journalism school curricula - and garnered begrudging respect from local officials, putting them on notice that media-empowered citizens were starting to pay attention.

In every case they sought to cover news and information that was not being covered in their communities by other news media. Rarely did they replace coverage that had vanished from legacy news outlets - or even aspire to. Instead, they very much added news and information where there was none before.

Not even in the heyday of American journalism did the New Voices communities receive the kinds of hyperlocal news and information and opportunities for community connection that their New Voices projects supplied.

As important, they built new connections within their communities as they defined news in new and important ways.

“It certainly built a community inside Hartsville,” said Doug Fisher, founder of Hartsville Today in South Carolina.

“We definitely raised awareness about community events. And we also provided a much needed reflection of the communities we covered,” said Courtney Lowery, cofounder of Montana’s Rural News Network, which created both the Dutton Country Courier and CrowNews.net.

The 46 grantees launched 48 projects. Of these 48, 42 are still online. Of those 42 sites, 32 - or 76 percent - are still being actively updated. Two others have made occasional updates in recent months.

Three of the active projects launched, stalled, and then rose from the dead after solving either web development or staffing problems - a testament to their ongoing desire to cover their communities. But they also typified the struggles that several youth media, community radio and university-led New Voices projects faced as they tried to do community news.

The most robust projects operate year-round and regularly post new content, even if the founders do most of it themselves. Many, like GreatLakesEcho.org, also found clever ways to engage their audiences. In every case, they are driven by people - be they individual citizens, former “traditional journalists” or university faculty members - who have a passion for the enterprise and made a significant personal investment.

The less robust projects were plagued by frequent turnover of key people or technological problems that delayed their launch. They update less frequently and struggle to generate content. Sometimes, they over-relied on training citizen journalists.

Projects funded from 2005 through 2008 received $12,000 to launch in the first year; they were awarded $5,000 in the second year - if they matched it with other funds. All but one of the 46 projects received their Year Two matching grants. Projects funded in 2009 and 2010 received $17,000 the first year and were eligible for $8,000 in matching funds the second year.

The findings in this report were assembled from a variety of sources, including grantee progress reports, email correspondence, J-Lab monitoring and interviews, selfevaluations, a survey, and presentations at New Voices grantee meetings and journalism gatherings.

To be sure, our findings are based on a small universe - the work of our grantees. However, we know from our work in this field that other community news sites have experienced the same learning curves as the New Voices projects. We’ll elaborate on our findings later in this report.

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