The Asheville Citizen-Times is one of five news organizations that will be working together on a project aimed at collaborating with community groups on cooperative approaches to gathering and presenting neighborhood news on the Web.
The Miami Herald, which is part of the project, has the story:
American University’s J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, based in Washington, is funding the one-year project with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The money will be used to support a liaison at each news organization and provide small stipends to local content partners.
“We think this network is an important new way of expanding community news coverage at a time when it’s hard to launch fresh initiatives,” said Miami Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal. “We very much look forward to being a part of this national experiment and trying to figure out new ways of providing community news.”
For its part of the project, The Miami Herald is reaching out to community organizations, existing community newspapers and journalists interested in creating local reporting groups to publish geographically distinct websites on the same platform.
The goal is to develop a network of channels on the Web that provide community news from across South Florida, where users can find news, information, conversation, commentary and advertising from bloggers, school groups and news organizations large and small.
In addition to The Miami Herald, the other news organizations taking part in the pilot project are: The Seattle Times, The Charlotte Observer, Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and Tucsoncitizen.com, a newspaper that became a Web-only news outlet in May.
“We hope this project will help traditional news organizations and new media makers begin to figure out how to amplify good content coming from their communities — sharing it, even monetizing it for all participants,” said Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab. J-Lab is a center at American University’s School of Communication.
Congratulations to the Citizen-Times. Can’t wait to see the work.
6 Comments
Ash: I wouldn’t hold my breath for any announcements from the paper. I work there and I first heard about this community news initiative on your site. For a business that’s supposed to be about communication, the C-T sure does a poor job of communicating with its employees. Mostly I think it’s because they don’t want inside company information leaking to blogs, such as this one.
Having full-time staff reporters on staff costs these media companies salaries and benefits. Recent history shows they don’t want to pay this kind of money.
Trouble is, good reporting and investigative journalism takes time, and skill and media companies have to realize this is the cost of doing business. If the intent is to "really" serve the community, then these companies should hire the staff to serve the community. If this project is just to give the impression that you’re serving the community, then good luck!. Sad to say, this is happening in newspaper, television and radio these days.
If I were a print journalist at the Asheville newspaper, I would worry about the reference to the defunct print Tucson newspaper, which was closed by Gannett.
Junkie, you raise and excellent point. I couldn’t glean the project from the press release. Hopefully the Citizen-Times will come out and explain at some point.
Not clear what the Citizen-Times will be doing. What’s the process or mechanism proposed? If it’s just opening up the paper to press releases from local organizations . . .well, the Citizen-Times is already mostly press releases from local organizations.
This sounds great! I only hope they correct print media’s mistake of choosing to publish heavily toward liberal or conservative viewpoints without presenting both sides of any topic.