The Asheville Citizen-Times has launched a blog that will follow the progress of a journalism project it is participating in. “The Citizen-Times is one of five news organizations across the country working to develop an information network among local news sites and blogs,” according to the blog. “The project is funded by a grant administered through American University’s J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.”
The newspaper is calling the blog, and the overall project, WNC LINC, which stands for Western North Carolina Local Information Cooperative. The project will be overseen by two former Citizen-Timers: former editor Lydia Carrington, and former reporter Angie Newsome.
Here’s some of what Newsome wrote as an introduction to the project:
In short, the newspaper is undertaking a year-long pilot project to partner with five sometimes scrappy, frequently inspired local blogs and news sites. The newspaper is one of five newspapers across the country funded by American University’s J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism to do similar projects in places ranging from Seattle to Miami. Essentially, this effort, known as a “networked journalism” project, aims to do, in part, what news organizations have always done: collect and share relevant and current news and information that the community cares about.
But the platform this information takes and how quickly we can now share it has obviously changed. So these efforts, the first of it’s kind, says Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, will link what’s known as “hyperlocal” microsites, or sites that have a narrow geographic or topical focus and sometimes a narrow audience, to broader news organizations that may no longer have resources to fully cover those narrow topics and geographies. The AC-T earned a $55,000 grant to help fund the project, the majority of which will be split among the five blog partners, which has a goal to share information and audiences among the partners in a way they haven’t been able to before.
Lydia and I will co-manage the project over the next year. But just how, exactly will this happen? Good question. There isn’t a template for us to follow or even another model quite like it.
But the point is to be collaborative, figure out what works, and maybe along the way create ways all the sites – not just the AC-T, but also its five partners – can earn revenue (beyond the grant money) from the project, too. We’re already talking with stakeholders at the newspaper and among area blog-celebrities and news sites to figure out what could work. We’re already developing lists of potential partners, ways we can provide technical support to those partners, and techniques to share content and information.
Here, we’ll try to share out thoughts throughout the process on what works and what doesn’t. We’ll discuss the philosophical and practical implications of starting and maintaining a networked journalism effort.
In the end, though, this is an experiment, a pilot project. And while we have lots of ideas and seeds of ideas about how this will work and who some of the partners will be, we’ll be listening, too.
We’ll be watching.
3 Comments
Jason,
Thanks for reposting part of our inaugural post about WNC LINC, the effort to build a networked journalism project in the region, spearheaded by the Asheville Citizen-Times.
I wanted to respond to FrequentNewspaperReader’s question about who the partners are going to be. The answer is that we’re still working on it. There are a lot of details to be hashed out on every side you can imagine, and while there are top contenders, no one has officially signed on as partners. Yet. We hope and anticipate that that will change fairly quickly and that we’ll be able to share who those folks are in the next couple of weeks.
This is extremely cool. Way to go AC-T.
Who are the five blog partners?