Locally Grown

Brendon Etter met with me in a Carleton College conference room on Tuesday morning just above the school’s bookstore, where he works. Etter, also a playwright, said he would accept the position of mayor if elected, but calls his satire-infused campaign “political theater.” I attempted to keep a neutral tone during the interview, as did Joshua Rowan who accompanied me as a camera operator. I fear a giggle or two escaped. Still, in all seriousness, Northfield’s city government could improve, according to Etter, if citizens and officials were willing to laugh more.

Brendon Etter Platform from Bonnie Obremski on Vimeo.

Since Representative Journalism (RepJ) is a pilot project, there is an ongoing evaluation component. Professor Rachel Davis Mersey (moving from the U of MN to Northwestern U this summer) will be conducting a variety of polls and surveys to assess the project’s impact.

Here’s her intro to the first RepJ survey:

We want your feedback on Locally Grown! Understanding how and why you use Web sites like this one is important to journalism researchers.  Locally Grown represents a strong community conversation. We are interested in how and why you participate. The questions are simple, and the survey is designed to take you about 5 minutes to complete. You may leave any questions blank, and your participation is completely voluntary. Your name will never be attached to your responses, which will only be used in summary. This is about understanding your community and its resources. Our goal is simple: to determine the best practices to improve the work of other community Web sites across the country. We hope you choose to participate.

Our guest today: Representative Journalist Bonnie Obremski (that links to her bio page here on LG), the reporter for the Northfield Representative Journalist project (new page here on LG for RepJ).

We talked with her about her background, including why she dissed Northfield and its colleges in favor of attending some rinky-dink school out east that Ross seems to favor for some reason.

Yes, we spent a few minutes on the RepJ project, too.

Click play to listen. 30 minutes. You can also subscribe to the podcast feed, or subscribe directly with iTunes. Our radio show/podcast, Locally Grown, usually airs Wednesdays at 5:30 PM on KYMN 1080 AM.

Our Representative Journalism colleagues have hired the first journalist for the project, Bonnie Obremski. She’s packing up her stuff in North Adams, Massachusetts where’s she been a news reporter for the The North Adams Transcript the past two years. After a cross-country drive, she’ll arrive in Northfield sometime early next week. We hope to have her on next week’s podcast.

See all our RepJ-related blog posts for more.

 
Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalis (PIJ) project hosted a moderated discussion last Friday night in their UBS Forum. A group of about 20 citizens selected from their PIJ database were invited to discuss the topic: The Press and the Public: What’s the new relationship?

A group of about 10 attendees from the Journalism That Matters conference, New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs, observed the discussion for 45 minutes and then joined in… me among them.

In the PIJ handout that was used to help focus the discussion, Locally Grown was cited as an example of Approach 4: the public is the press.

Here’s the text (partial transcription) but click the photos of the doc to see it all:

There is no starker example of the divide between the press and the public than these statistics from a recent survey by Zogby International: Most Americans - 70 percent - say journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities, but almost as many (67 percent) say traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news.

Established news organizations can’t help but notice as newspaper circulation numbers fall and broadcast outlets see fewer people tuning in. The notion of the public as passive consumer of news is passe. What is emerging is a new model of journalism built on partnership.

The question on the table is: What should it look like? Here are four broad approaches that can help get a conversation started.

• Approach 1: the public as critic
  With this approach, the public engages in critiquing news reporting. This can include the creation of the Minnesota News Council - a group of journalists and citizens who rule on complaints with the press, or NewsTrust.net, a website where news stories are rated for quality by the public. It also means that established press organizations become more transparent. Methods include open comments on stories and providing the public with greater understanding of the news-gathering operation (through, for example, chats with reporters online to discuss stories).
• Approach 2: the public as collaborator
  This approach calls for the public to participate in becoming sources for stories. Initiatives like MPR’s Public Insight Journalism reach out to the audience en masse for knowledge, which can then shape coverage.  Other initiatives ask the public to help with investigatory work. This method, called crowdsourcing, sometimes uses the public as a way to compile information on a subject or enlists them to comb through voluminous records (as the Fort Myers News-Press did on a sewer project).
• Approach 3: the public as correspondent
  With this approach, news organizations turn over segments of their space to the public and let them produce content with little interference. It could happen on news pages or on the air, but most times occurs online.
• Approach 4: the public is the press
  This approach avoids established news organizations entirely. The public starts a grassroots journalism effort to provide coverage of issues ignored by the press. It’s typically done online and while there are examples of national Web sites such as Talking Points Memo, most of them work on a local level.  A small scale example is “Locally Grown” - a website dedicated to the news of the Northfield, Minnesota area. This effort is also part of a larger initiative called Representative Journalism that seeks to marry local producers with funding to support them.

Since we and our colleagues are very close to launching the Representative Journalism project here in Northfield, these issues are now, um, more relevant than ever. So let’s discuss them.

In Sunday’s Strib: Citizens Kane & Jane: Grass-roots “citizen journalism” is taking off in Minnesota’s online communities as moonlighters report on issues they say the mass media are missing. (See also the sidebar on Citizen Journalism resources.)

Okay, I admit it. If Locally Grown had been mentioned in this piece, I probably would’ve blogged it on Saturday night when Curt Benson first alerted me to it. But it’s irritating that the journalist, Randy Salas, completely missed:

• Northfield.org’s role as an aggregator of dozens of area blogs and repository for thousands of citizen-submitted photos, saying only that it “… features news about public events of interest to the Northfield community.”
• Our thriving civic blogosphere
• The only citizen-produced, civic issues podcast in the state (ahem!), now approaching its 100th episode
• A 13-year history of civil, citizen-moderated online discussions
• The Representative Journalism grant

Sigh.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has a new white paper out titled Citizen Journalism and Newspaper Sites: The Revolution will be Uploaded.

Locally Grown and the Representative Journalism (RepJ) project are featured on page 11. 

And the Ft. Meyer’s Florida Team Watchdog project (being launched by the Northfield News) is featured on pages 9-10.

(I’ve turned off comments on this post. Continue the discussion in the Team Watchdog comment thread.)

Leonard Witt posted the RepJ advisory board to his Public Journalism Network blog last week:

• Bill Buzenberg, Executive Director, Center for Public Integrity
• David Cohn, Editor at Off the Bus, BeatBloggers, NewAssignment.net
• Oscar Corral, Reporter, Miami Herald
• Ken Doctor, Digital Media Consultant, Content Bridges
• David Eckoff, Media Consultant, formerly Turner Broadcasting VP
• Amy Gahan, Content Strategist, Poytner & J-Lab
• Mark Glaser, Host & Editor, MediaShift
• Joel Kramer, Publisher, MinnPost.com, former editor/publisher Minneapolis Star Tribune
• Dori J. Maynard, President and CEO, Maynard Institute
• Ken Sands, Innovation Editor, Congressional Quarterly
• Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab
• Venise Wagner, Chair and Associate Professor, San Francisco State University Journalism Department
• Lisa Williams, Founder, Placebloggers

Impressive list, but I’m guessing these folks have no idea how easily their reputations will become triumvirate-tarnished.

The Representative Journalism (RepJ) team paid a visit to Minnesota yesterday. (See the initial RepJ blog post for details on the project.)

Left: At the offices of the Bush Foundation, L to R: Bill Densmore (RepJ collaborator, Director of the Media Giraffe Project, U of Mass, Amherst), Peter Hutchinson (President of the Bush Foundation), and Leonard Witt (RepJ founder, Communication Chair and Associate Professor, KSU, Atlanta, Georgia)
Left center: Len mugs for a MinnPost.com billboard in a downtown St. Paul skyway
Center: Afternoon coffee break: Len and Bill with Andrew Haeg, director of Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism Network.
Right center/right: Me, Bill and Len, relaxing in MPR’s listening pods

Left: Recording a Locally Grown radio show/podcast at KYMN studios: Bill and Len with (center) Chris Peck, RepJ collaborator and editor of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, TN. (Earlier in the afternoon, Len and Bill also paid a visit to John Schott, Chair of Cinema and Media Studies at Carleton.)
Left center: Present in spirit throughout the day: Ruth Ann Harnisch, President of the Harnisch Family Foundation, which has funded RepJ.
Center: Relaxing at the Contented Cow: Bill, Len, and Chris with Tracy Davis, LG co-host and head honcho of GuildCraft Carpets and Northfield Carpets International. We then dined at Chapati.
Right center/right: Late night RepJ strategy session in the lower level Archer House conference room: Ross Currier, LG co-host and Executive Director of the Northfield Downtown Development Corporation (NDDC) with Bill, Chris, Tracy and Len.

We recorded next week’s episode of our radio show/podcast, Locally Grown, focused entirely on the RepJ concept, of course.

Click play to listen (30 minutes). The show will air next Wednesday, March 19 at 5:30 PM on KYMN 1080 AM. You can also subscribe to the podcast feed (or one click subscribe with iTunes). We seek your comments and suggestions. 

Update 3/15: The RepJ team had a few more collegial visits in the Twin Cities yesterday.

Left: Len Witt with Joel Kramer, CEO/Editor of MinnPost.com
Center and Right: Len, Bill Densmore and me with Bernadine Joselyn, Director, Public Policy and Engagement, Blandin Foundation.

Here’s the job description for the RepJ reporter position. Please pass this around to those you think might be interested, either by copy/pasting the text or better yet, using the permalink/URL of this blog post.

Northfield, Minnesota has been chosen to try a new concept called Representative Journalism.

We are looking for an entrepreneurial journalist with experience both as a reporter (daily, weekly, or monthly publication) and with the online world (e.g., blogging, message boards, discussion lists, etc.). A willingness to engage with citizens (online and F2F) before, during and after publication of a story is mandatory. Knowledge of Northfield is helpful but not required.

The journalist’s stories will appear on Locally Grown, a two-year old blog and podcast about Northfield civic issues, with a large participatory following of area citizens and community leaders. The journalist will report directly to one of the nation’s most respected editors with a long distinguished career in journalism. See this Locally Grown blog post for more information.

This trial project will last approximately four months, but if successful could develop into a long-term job. For now this is a half-time, temporary position.

Email a letter of interest, resume, clips and references to Leonard Witt, lwitt@kennesaw.edu. Our team will be in Northfield and the Twin Cities on March 14-16 to talk with potential job candidates, so a prompt reply will be appreciated.

Locally Grown has been chosen to test an innovative project called Representative Journalism, led by Communication Chair and Associate Professor Leonard Witt and colleagues at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. See Len’s blog post for details, as well as this press release (PDF).

Over half of the $51,000 grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation will flow to Northfield. Ross, Tracy and I will be paid for our time on the project. The Representative Journalism (RepJ) project will contract with a professional journalist who will be based locally. And money’s allocated to experiment with different ways to make the project financially sustainable.

Project staff will be visiting Northfield in the next few weeks to conduct interviews and help us get launched.

There’s lots to discuss about how all this is going to work so fire away with comments. As you’ll soon see, we have some stuff figured out but we expect to making a LOT of it up as we go, primarily based on input from you, our readers, listeners, and fellow citizens.

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