With continued support from the new Center for Sustainable Journalism at KSU in Georgia, there’s going to be a Northfield version of Spot.Us, a community-funded reporting project operating in the Bay Area of California under the guidance of founder David Cohn. Their software platform is open-source and, with a lot of help from Ruby on Rails guru, Jared Mehle, I got it up and running yesterday. (continued)

RepJ was based on the idea that a community could fund its own independent reporter. Here in Northfield, the position was funded initially by a grant for a year, with the expectation that funding for year 2 would come from the community.

Spot.Us is based on the idea that community-funded reporting could be used to fund individual stories or beats, that many people in a community, both professional journalists as well as citizen journalists, might have the interest and ability to produce local content if they could get paid for it. Under the Spot.Us model, these people make ‘pitches’ for their stories or beats, name their asking price, and then wait to see if there’s enough community financial support to warrant working on them. If so, the finished content can then be published in a variety of ways. There are more aspects to Spot.Us, so be sure to visit their site if you’re interested in knowing more, including David Cohn’s six-month Spot.Us progress report published last week.

Here in Northfield, we’ll have a separate web site for this project, with a new name, not RepJ.  It won’t be part of Locally Grown, though we’ll certainly promote it here. 

Part of the plan is that the content created could be published in a variety of places, depending on the medium and the interests of the authors and local media organizations.  Content could end up on LoGroNo, Northfield.org, Northfield News, KYMN radio, NTV, other websites, or some combination of all of them.

I’m being paid as a consultant (project manager) for this project to help get it off the ground.  That may end soon or it may continue. As you might have guessed, we’re making this up as we go. 

I’ll stop now and take questions.

Farewell, friends!

See the album of 40 photos, the large slideshow, or this small slideshow:

Josh, my fiance, and I added two to the population when we arrived. Now, we're taking a Northfield native back out with us, our cat "Sarah Palin." Minus three!

Northfield, we’ve reached the hand off. The Representative Journalism Project has come to another turning point after eight months. Now, instead of reading the work of a transplanted, temporary journalist (me) you could soon have the opportunity to support the area’s indigenous writers. Those writers, sponsored by the public, would produce news material that could appear across a range of local media, including LocallyGrownNorthfield.org. (More about that coming soon).

As the Representative Journalism Project collaborators have been hashing out the details of that new evolution, I came to the conclusion this month that perhaps one of the best things I could do to ensure the success of our latest ideas would be to step out of the way, instead of remaining until my work contract expired in July.

Now, the funds that would have paid my wage may be reinvested in jump-starting the project’s new efforts. Meanwhile, I am looking forward to immersing myself in a work environment that tethers me to computers less and fosters my desire to write about travel and adventure more.

The most difficult part of this transition is leaving our Northfield friends and neighbors. My fiance and I have hardly experienced a community that could equal Northfield in its warmth and kindness, as well as in its rambunctious spirit. Within hours of our arrival into this city, the people that were to become our good friends provided us with every essential. One person even scoured her neighborhood curbs to find us the perfect love seat to cram into our snug studio…

If I began to recount every kindness of every Northfield friend, this post would be exceptionally lengthy. I would love to thank everyone in person, however, and I invite everyone to come to the Contented Cow Pub tomorrow (Friday) beginning at 5:30 to enjoy a farewell gathering. I’ll be singing some songs with the New Moon Trio, dedicating each one to the people that we wish we didn’t have to leave behind.

Click play to listen. 30 minutes. You can also download the MP3 or subscribe to the podcast feed, or subscribe directly with iTunes.

Our radio show/podcast, Locally Grown, usually airs Wednesdays at 5:30 PM and Sundays at 10 AM on KYMN 1080 AM.

The Representative Journalism Project has a core goal of revealing the journalistic process as it happens, from beginning to end, and beyond. By creating “Bonnie Obremski, RepJ,” I am striving to meet that goal in a better way than I have been. LocallyGrownNorthfield.org will be a place for me to publish my finished work. (continued)

Meanwhile, readers who are interested in the day-to-day process should visit my blog-within-a-blog. I welcome the general public to visit the site and comment on my latest story idea!

Representative Journalism (RepJ) creator Leonard Witt (professor at KSU in Georgia, Public Journalism Network blogger) arrived in Northfield last night for a series of meetings (through Saturday) on the Northfield RepJ project at its six-month point. We tried to find him a set of long underwear last night before dinner at the Rueb ‘N’ Stein, but alas, the entire state is sold out on that item for some reason. Luckily, his room at the Archer House has a hot tub.

Len and RepJ reporter Bonnie Obremski were having breakfast at The Tavern this morning. We’re having boxed lunches from The HideAway today, meetings in John Schott’s Cinema & Media Studies department at Carleton this afternoon, and as Bonnie blogged earlier, there’s an open meeting that y’all are invited to at the Bittersweet Eatery Saturday morning at 10.

Update 1/17 at 11 am 3pm: new photos – yesterday’s RepJ/LoGroNo mtg at Carleton; RepJ feedback session this morning at Bittersweet Eatery; RepJ lunch at Chapati; Len Witt, paparazzi (continued…)

Discussions among LocallyGrownNorthfield.org visitors blossom and fade, to resurface another time or never again. Representative Journalism Project stories have had a similar cycle so far, but I’d like to insert a step when conversation about a topic begins to slow.

The goal of the step is to combine reader input and reported information into a single piece of writing. That way, a person can better see how the community and I worked together. I’m still figuring out what a final presentation of material would look like and how to make it as useful as possible, and I’m open to ideas from readers.

The latest online discussions surrounding a proposed new municipal liquor store subsided about three weeks ago (There are three discussion threads. “Gleason offers land…” has had the most activity, followed by “EDA talks about trust…” and “Two EDA members score…“).

The subject of whether and where to build a new liquor store is one that has surged intermittently among Northfielders since about 2005. In 2005, the City Council was considering renovating or moving the existing liquor store on the corner of Water and Fifth streets.

In August, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued two citations to the city after inspecting the store. Those citations indicated an electrical panel was too difficult for workers to access and that the stairway connecting the main floor to a storage room below was dangerous.

A lengthy delay

The existing City Council appears to favor building a new liquor store, but the council has struggled to decide where to build one. The decision was significantly delayed in 2007 when council members suspected Mayor J. Lee Lansing had pushed too hard in favor of putting the store in his son’s building at the south end of the downtown’s main drag. That building was one the family had operated as a hardware store for more than 30 years.

Lansing has denied any wrongdoing. Even so, the City Council voted in December 2007 to ask Lansing to resign, but Lansing refused to step down or relinquish the key to his office in city hall. The mayor and the council continued to work together, but the council had the lock changed on the mayor’s office door to prevent him from working there, and tension mounted.

In April, the Lansing family’s hardware store closed, partly as a result of a separate legal matter, according to an article published in the Northfield News. David Lansing, the mayor’s son, had to move the store as “part of a settlement of a 2006 lawsuit that centered around the hardware store building,” according to the article.

In October, the results of an investigation by Steve Betcher, the Goodhue County attorney, caused the mayor to face five charges of misconduct and two of maintaining a conflict of interest while in office.

In January, new City Council members Betsey Buckheit (Ward 2), Rhonda Pownell (At Large, two-year seat) and Erica Zweifel (Ward 3) will fill three of the council’s six seats, to replace, respectively, Scott Davis, Noah Cashman and Arnie Nelson. Mary Rossing will be the new mayor. The looming turnover has caused some people to believe that decisions about the liquor store should fall to the new council. Other people believe the existing council will be able to make a sound decision by year’s end Jan.4*. Others still are discontented that the council is no longer considering repairing the old store, or getting out of the liquor business altogether.

A new approach

In November, members of the city’s staff attempted to come up with a way to help the City Council decide where to build a new liquor store. They asked City Council to come up with basic criteria. The city staff added a few more requirements to the list and then asked property owners to submit proposals. In December, the council began to consider five proposals that fell into the boundaries of the requests, and stopped considering two proposals that fell beyond those boundaries.

The new owners of the former Lansing hardware store on 618 Division St., who do business as the New Division Development Company, submitted one of the proposals the council is currently considering. In addition, the council is considering a proposal submitted by Mendota Homes, which would build a new liquor store on the same property as The Crossing residential building, owned by Mendota. That proposed site is on the southeast corner of Second Street and State Highway 3. The Q-Block Partners is another corporation that submitted a proposal. The partners would build a store on a property across the street from The Crossing. The Northfield Development Company is proposing to develop a parcel on 500 Water St. into a new store. That property contains the Just Food cooperative grocery store. Daryl Knudsen proposed to build a store at 717 South Water St., where a multiple-family house stands now.

Despite the attempt to aid the council in its decision-making, the request for proposals process the spurred another wave of suspicion over whether someone in the city’s government was trying to be sneaky. Complications began when the city staff devised a score sheet in order to rate how closely each proposal met basic criteria.

Four different groups of people, which staff identified as important players in the proposed new liquor store development, filled out the score sheets. Those groups were: Victor Summa and Steve Engler of the Economic Development Authority’s Infill Committee; city staff, represented by Joel Walinski, interim city administrator, Brian O’Connell, community development director and Steve DeLong, liquor store manager; Northfield Enterprise Center representatives; and Donnelly Development representatives.

Northfielders debated the selection of people, the criteria on the score sheet and the ethics of rating the proposals before giving them to City Council. There was also debate over what parts of the proposals were private and what information could be revealed to the public.

The city staff released the score sheet, with the names of the each of the seven property owners who submitted proposals, in November. Walinski asked one of the city’s attorneys to look up state laws on confidential information regarding requests for proposals. He then publicly posted a memo containing information about the law.

Further complication

Perhaps the most significant debate occurred when Walinski said there were seven proposals and then Summa and Engler said that they had filled out score sheets for only five proposals when it had come time to rate the documents. On Nov. 20, Summa and Engler said city staff did not have score sheets for two of the proposals that had not met the minimum requirements in the request for proposals. Summa and Engler said they did not see the two eliminated proposals.

After Summa and Engler said they had scored only five proposals, Walinski said he could not comment on whether two more proposals had, in fact, been ruled out. That information, he said, was confidential. He added that he believed he had made it clear to Summa and Engler that any information about what they did during the scoring session was confidential.

Walinski’s remarks implied Summa and Engler had breached confidentiality. Still Summa, a retired documentary filmmaker and local political activist, and Engler, a former state senator, said they had not known the number of proposals was confidential, especially since city staff had released some information about the number of proposals and property owners previously.

The debate over the information Summa and Engler shared even seeped over to the Northfield News’ Web site. Jaci Smith, managing editor, responded to Summa’s written note of self-defense, which he posted on LocallyGrownNorthfield.org.

“It seemed to me he violated the intent if not the actual rules of the process,” Smith wrote.

Walinski has since twice refused to publicly clarify why Summa and Engler scored only five of the proposals and whether Summa and Engler breached confidentiality. Instead, Walinski said he would rather focus on the primary goal, which is to help the City Council make a decision about the liquor store.

A side discussion

While discussion about the matter unfolded online, James Gleason, one of the owners of the proposals that didn’t made the cut, came forward to reveal why he believed his family’s idea had been removed from consideration. The property was too far beyond the downtown area that City Council and city staff identified as the prime location for a new liquor store. Gleason argued that the council might not have been wise in eliminating his proposal because he offered the valuable commercial land across from the Target store for just $1. The information fueled a side debate between those who agreed with Gleason and those who suspected the motives behind his offer.

Have we learned?

I began reporting this story after attending an Economic Development Authority meeting during which the issue of the liquor store arose. I was shocked at how quickly suspicion seemed to grow among elected officials, members of city staff and Northfield residents.

I talked with people about what I observed. Some told me “Well, that’s just Northfield” or “Well, that’s just city government.” Some people pointed fingers at groups or individuals. Some blamed the infighting the City Council has experienced of late.

*Corrections indicated with a strike-through of the mistake and replacement text.

• What does this latest development in the plan to build a new liquor store say about Northfield as a community?
• Is there anything we can learn from these discussions?
• How could what we learn help us in the future?
• What is the most important question that has emerged from our discussions and have we answered it?

Here are the first three paragraphs of RepJ guru Len Witt’s blog post from last Thursday:

I am very pleased to announce that this morning the Harnisch Foundation provided a $250,000 gift to Kennesaw State University to help advance my Representative Journalism concept.

Bill and Ruth Ann Harnisch awarded the check in New York this morning. The university will be putting out a formal press release, but I don’t want to get scooped. So you will read it here first, unless you follow Ruth Ann on Twitter, she sent a Tweet as the check was granted.

The Harnisch Foundation has supported the Representative Journalism concept from the very beginning. In fact, without Ruth Ann Harnisch’s inspirational, intellectual and financial support, Representative Journalism would probably just be an idea rather than a concept that is now being tested at Locally Grown in Northfield, Minnesota.

Very cool.  Len will be visiting Northfield in mid-January to catch up on all-things Northfield RepJ related.

In the meantime, if you’ve got RepJ-related feedback for Len or Northfield RepJ reporter Bonnie Obremski, see her blog post from last week titled Half-year mark for RepJ Project.

The Representative Journalism Project is nearing its five-month anniversary and my collaborators and I could not thank the people of Northfield enough for all the support they have offered so far.

We’re hoping those supporters might chime in now and let us know what parts of the project seem to be working and what parts still need refinement.

The Representative Journalism Project is nearing its five-month anniversary and my collaborators and I could not thank the people of Northfield enough for all the support they have offered so far.

We’re hoping those supporters might chime in now and let us know what parts of the project seem to be working and what parts still need refinement.

One change I am determined to make this week is in how I introduce stories, document their development and finally present them to readers. I would like to gather more input from a wider spectrum of people, and do more to show them my reporting and writing process, before I produce a finished piece of work.

Now, when I put up a part of a story to introduce a topic, I would like to see readers help me put together the next part of that story for the following day, and so on until finally, I write a feature-length article that one might see in a magazine or newspaper.

In the evolution phase of story development, I want to be more informal about presenting the information I update day-to-day. I want people to know more about how and when I got the information, and what thoughts ran through my head as I received it.

I hope the increased transparency and opportunity for public participation will improve the quality of my stories and distinguish Representative Journalism as a truly different and valuable way for a community to learn about itself.

Please answer the questions below to help us know how we’re doing. If you prefer, email your responses to RepJNorthfield@gmail.com. Thank you!

• What parts of the Representative Journalism Project do you value? What parts don’t work?
• How can we further refine the project into something Northfield citizens value more?
• How could Representative Journalism support itself financially in a community?
  

Hi, my name’s Ben Haynor. I’m a math and physics major at Carleton College. I ended up in a journalism class this semester and began looking at Northfield’s opiate problem. I met Bonnie on Friday and we decided to collaborate on a story. We had already been gathering information, conducting interviews and looking at the history of Northfield’s opiate problem this month. When seven were arraigned on drug charges on Monday, we felt prepared to cover the news and we were glad to have a team of two to do so.

In the coming week we’ll be talking with the authorities to learn more about the arrests, get a better sense of what problems our community still faces, and learn how police intend to continue combating problems with heroin. We’ll be speaking with police in other towns that have had similar bouts with heroin dealing to gain perspective on how a community can fight the problem. If you know more about Northfield’s opiate scene, and are willing to speak, please contact Bonnie or me at RepJNorthfield@gmail.com or haynorb@carleton.edu.

Photo: Bonnie Obremski/RepJNorthfield.org

Northfield administrators are offering more money to Greenvale township in an annexation deal than originally offered in August, but still less than what Greenvale supervisors asked for.
Joel Walinski, interim city administrator, and Brian O’Connell, community development director, represented the city in a meeting on Tuesday night in Greenvale’s new township hall on Guam Avenue. O’Connell said the city originally offered to pay Greenvale an amount equivalent to the property tax revenue on the land in question for a period of two years, about $7,700* according to documents filed in city hall.
“We’re willing to go more time,” O’Connell told the three township supervisors. “State law says we can go from two to eight years.”

Photo: Bonnie Obremski/RepJNorthfield.org

Northfield’s City Council wants to annex 530 acres of the township’s farmland into Northfield and then market the land to industrial developers. State law requires cities to pay townships an amount of money for a period of time to make up for the property tax revenue a township loses when it hands over land to a city.

Despite the counter-offer, the Greenvale supervisors agreed that it was still not enough, but they did not say so until after Walinski and O’Connell left the meeting.
“I think we ought to get some kind of bonus once something is built there,” Supervisor Richard Moore, said in front of an audience of about a dozen people.

Greenvale earlier asked Northfield for $265,000 with payments to be made as land was developed.
At one point during negotiations, Moore told O’Connell he had heard Taylor Trucking company had shown interest in developing a piece of the property, owned by John Fink, that is furthest away from the city’s existing utility lines.
O’Connell said he had heard that as well but that Northfield residents would not consider extending services that far out for just one smaller-scale project.
Once city administrators left the room, a Greenvale resident sitting in the audience said he did not believe O’Connell’s response.
“If they had someone ready to build, they’d do that in a heartbeat. And, if they say they wouldn’t, they’re full of you-know-what,” he said.

*Note: Originally, I believed the amount would equal about $13,000. That’s because Richard Moore estimated the township collected $12.50 per acre. I multiplied that amount for 530 acres, then doubled that figure. However, Brian O’Connell said that calculation was off and gave me the correct one.

Three months ago, reporter Bonnie Obremski drove her Subaru from Massachusetts to Northfield to begin work as a Representative Journalist for Northfield’s Locally Grown web site. The “RepJ” project matched Bonnie with a civic-minded blog hoping a new kind of grassroots community journalism takes hold. For more about the project go to RepJNorthfield.org.

Now that Bonnie is living on Division Street, has found stages for impromptu guitar gigs and cast her skills for their competitive advantage at the Friends of the Library’s Adult Spelling Bee last month, we thought she was ready for the big time. So we opened this space in the Northfield Entertainment Guide for RepJ’s “Didja’ Know?” Let us know whatja’ think!

Photo: Bonnie Obremski/RepJ

Mayoral Candidate Mary Rossing checks the poll figures on a computer Tuesday night. She and Paul Hager won in the city’s primary election and will face off in the general elections on November 4. For audio coverage of Rossing’s primary election party, click below. Length: 1 minute 57 seconds.

Note: I attended Rossing’s party after she delivered an invitation to me on Monday. Mayoral Candidate David Hvistendahl invited me to his primary event at Froggy Bottoms via e-mail on Tuesday night, but I had already left to go to Rossing’s gathering. No other candidate extended an invitation and I did not contact any of them to ask if they were hosting a party. I decided to accept Rossing’s invitation because, given my observations and her success in Locally Grown’s straw poll, I believed she stood a solid chance of performing well in the primary and I wanted to cover a win, if possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.