Poulson, who is also associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, initially used New Voices funding to launch GreatLakesWiki.org. Not happy with the community engagement on that site, he spun it into Great Lakes Echo.
“Engaging readers is why your online news community exists,” he declares. Otherwise, “you might as well publish a newspaper.” So if you build it and they don’t come, what do you do? Just wait?
Of all the New Voices grantees, TC Daily Planet has raised the most money ($760,000) and has shown the greatest resilience in adapting to community needs and building a corps of contributors.
The site aggregates news from more than 100 community partners; citizen journalists now make up about 40 percent of its content. The site is a model for recruiting, mentoring and sustaining a corps of contributors. One of the chief ways it does that is with a multiple entry points.
Oakland Local is a case study in a New Era for Community News Sites - namely how future sites will use social media to ramp up, spark buzz, and build an instant brand.
The grant was announced in May 2005 and The Forum [forumhome.org] went online in August with four contributors and eight articles. Now, five years later, the site is a model of sustainability for an all-volunteer operation.
GreaterFultonNews.org was birthed in 2007 by professors at Virginia Commonwealth University in partnership with Fulton’s Neighborhood Resource Center (NRC). Now, it has been entirely handed off to the community, and it’s a model for having the community sustain a site.
The site’s central purpose is to report on the town’s two main governing boards, the town board and the school board, each with five elected officials.
“We’ve built good working relationships with board members, although they remain the right amount of uncomfortable with us,” managing editor Yeres said. “It’s been interesting to watch them get used to us. It was really impossible, once we were up and running, to avoid dealing with us.”
.png){kind=small}
