The Idea Following the model of law enforcement citizen academies that offer residents a better understanding of policing, senior news managers at the World Company and leaders at the University of Kansas journalism school decided in August 2006 to design a series of seminars that would offer interested citizens a first-hand taste of the news business. Cody Howard, news director for 6News, the video arm of the World’s converged newsroom in Lawrence, said the goal was not necessarily to Read more [...]

Reader-supplied information and documents help nail down stories “Crowdsourcing” is a great-sounding phrase that actually means what it says: Ask the crowds for information. To Skip Hidlay, executive editor of Gannett Company’s Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, the term means “calling on citizens to help the reporter fully report the story.” To Matt Reed, an assistant managing editor at a sister newspaper, Florida Today, it means “asking your readers, or your audience, to help you solve a problem.” To Read more [...]

Don’t go it alone: Consider alliances with other media Some citizen media editors think a good way to get off the ground (and cover the ground) is to partner with other media or community resources. If you like the idea of forming alliances, look no further than Twin Cities Daily Planet, a self-described “community newswire and syndication service,” which lists nearly 50 media partners. The Daily Planet, which targets Minnesota’s Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, is published by the Twin Read more [...]

Fame, pay and training help Ever wonder how the most successful citizen media sites find people to actually write the articles? The best sites rely on a combination of passion (as documented by J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer in a report earlier this year), pay, politics and parties, backed up with training and workshops. The passion part is easiest to grasp. Many CitJ sites are created because some folks in the community say they find the mainstream media coverage absent or lacking when it comes to Read more [...]

Big stories lurk online and in computer files When the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed in August 2007, the programmers and journalists at msnbc.com flew into action. Less than 48 hours after the bridge tumbled into the Mississippi River, they had turned a national database on the condition of bridges into a clickable state-by-state map, giving viewers the chance to see whether their bridges might be dangerous. It was a dramatic demonstration of the power that data or “structured information” Read more [...]

Best strategy: Answer the simple questions Sometimes it’s hard to know where to get started when a story seems to have so many elements. Here’s the trick: Break things down to their simplest form. That means, answer the basic questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Let’s take a look at how this might have worked in the case of a proposed rezoning in the Buckingham Village and Arlington Oaks neighborhoods in Arlington, Va. (Full disclosure: Wendell Cochran lives in Arlington Oaks.) The point Read more [...]

Tips for finding compelling community stories Good ideas lead to the kinds of stories readers remember, the kinds of stories that can galvanize a community, and more important, keep audiences coming back for more. Weak ideas produce lifeless stories that don’t inspire either the writer or the reader. Ask: “Why are all those bulldozers there?” The first element in a good story idea is a compelling question. And that doesn’t mean complicated. In fact, the simpler, the better. Often great stories Read more [...]

And the campaign goes on! If you’ve produced an important story that you think the world needs to know, don’t just rely on traditional and new-media avenues of distribution. To truly bring the story home you need to tap into high schools and universities. Educational outreach expands your reach. Equally important, longer term, it helps inspire an appetite for quality reporting. Back to School Our Global Gateway program brings our journalists into schools to present the topics covered and to Read more [...]

Distributing your story effectively is a lot more than getting it published or broadcast in the mainstream media. Today’s media landscape offers a multitude of ways to keep your story alive and have it reach a broader audience. Truly successful distribution requires a real investment of time and energy – but if you’re committed to drawing attention to teh issue you’ve reported on, it’s a critical part of the process. Multi-purpose, re-purpose, re-mix Having multi-media elements to start with Read more [...]

Always start with the question: What’s the best way to tell this story? Multi-media tools allow us to develop incredibly deep yet simple ways to navigate spaces and provide far more options for getting your story out during distribution. A creative presentation of the issues is a must if you want to draw people in after the news cycle has passed. And it may not always look like “news.” Our best example of this is HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, a reporting project that uses poetry, Read more [...]