The Northfield City Council has published a draft of its 2010 strategic directions and goals. One of the sub-goals:
“1.2.4 Consider including social media as part of communications plans.”
A few days ago I got a tweet from colleague Len Witt and the crew at the Center for Sustainable Journalism about a new report from the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania called:
It’s been six weeks since RepJ reporter Bonnie Obremski departed Northfield. Lots has been happening behind the scenes since then to figure out how to best continue RepJ. Here’s the plan.
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)
I don’t know the Nieman Journalism Lab guys personally but Mathew Ingram’s blog post today, “Locally grown” news gets a boost acknowledged the good stuff happening here. The ‘boost’ to hyperlocal sites like ours that he’s referring to is the new funding that RepJ founder Len Witt just got from the Harnisch Foundation to create a new Center for Sustainable Journalism (CSJ) at KSU in Georgia. No, that doesn’t mean a cash infusion into LG or RepJ Northfield. It’s just that we’re going to be a part of something much bigger. Mathew had this to say about LG after a quick look around here. (continued)