The Mountain Xpress recently launched a new website it calls “an experiment in citizen-powered community journalism” called Hendersonville Live. The WordPress site offers a list of stories, which right now consist of local press releases, links to stories by other local media outlets and links to other local stories gathered from the web.
The project is being coordinated by Xpresser Steve Shanafelt, the alt weekly’s former arts and entertainment. Shanafelt left the newspaper a couple of years ago to make a go of his own experiment in citizen-powered community journalism in Spartanburg, S.C., called the Spartanburg Spark. Shanafelt recently shut that site down. He said he was moving from Spartanburg and couldn’t keep the site running. In a recent goodbye note on the site, Shanafelt declared his project a success:
After two very awesome years, I decided in August to end the Spartanburg Spark project. What started out as a scrappy little online media project with dreams of maybe becoming an alt-weekly newspaper instead became something else entirely. It became part of the community conversation. It became a platform for new writers, an outlet for news and views that simply wasn’t available before, and a place for Spartanburgs not-so-small progressive community to share thoughts and ideas. As humble as the project was — laughable funding, mere thousands of weekly visitors — to a certain section of the population here, it meant something.
Shanafelt, who over the past couple of years kept a hand in at Xpress as a forum moderator and on a couple of other projects, now appears to have moved on to Hendersonville Live. Here’s more about that new project:
Hendersonville Live is an experiment in citizen-powered community journalism in Hendersonville, North Carolina. It emerges from discussions among a few Hendersonville residents and the staff at Mountain Xpress. The project aims to use software and platforms readily available on the Internet to give residents the opportunity to take part in media activities that in the past were reserved for newspapers, radio and TV stations.
We hope that Hendersonville-area residents will join in the experiment and post their own news and views on the site. Currently, this can be done via Twitter and/or by signing up on the site and asking to be added to the list of contributors. We expect in coming weeks to add more tools and opportunities for residents to self-publish on HvlLive.com.
For more information, email Steve Shanafelt at sshanafelt@mountainx.com.
I think Shanafelt is a smart journalist who understands the new media landscape and the Internet’s impact. I can’t wait to watch this new experiment grow and evolve, and hear what Shanafelt learns from it.
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For those of you who are interested in the haps in Spartanburg, most of the SpartanburgSpark.com staff have moved their efforts over to FlyingOskar.com.