{"id":4616,"date":"2004-12-14T16:57:20","date_gmt":"2004-12-14T16:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4616"},"modified":"2004-12-14T16:57:20","modified_gmt":"2004-12-14T16:57:20","slug":"micro-local-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4616","title":{"rendered":"micro-local news"},"content":{"rendered":"

Free advice … Today I met with the Washington Center for Internships<\/a> to discuss possible ways to evaluate their program, and then went to Streetlaw, Inc.<\/a> for their winter Board meeting. (Streetlaw provides a textbook, training, institutes, and other support for teaching about law and politics in schools.) Finally, I joined my colleagues on the Advisory Board of the J-Lab New Voices Project <\/a>. Thanks to the Knight Foundation, New Voices will be able to fund “20 micro-local news projects” in which citizens generate information, commentary, and discussion for their communities. J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism<\/a>, will also collect or create software and other support that anyone will be able to use for interactive or community news.<\/p>\n

We discussed some existing projects and products that exemplify community news on the Web. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine<\/a> was the source for most of these references. (On his blog, he says <\/a>that he was in DC to meet with his CIA handlers, but they must have got to him later in the day.)<\/p>\n

  • In Bakersfield, CA, residents of the northwestern part of the city produce all the content for an online newspaper<\/a> that is also printed and distributed (with paid advertising). Essentially, everyone in the community can post blog entries with news, announcements, and opinions. However, thanks to clever use of iupload <\/a>software, individual posts are classified in appropriate ways, producing a site that looks more like a newspaper than a blog. Simple announcements appear on a calendar. Crime reports go on a map<\/a>. Sports news would be classified under “sports.” Anything that an individual writes is also saved under her or his name, thus producing a traditional blog for each contributor. And a chief blogger puts the best posts on the main page.<\/li>\n
  • Journalism students at Northwestern University quickly built an impressive community news site for Skokie, Il (GoSkokie<\/a>), for which they and citizens produce content.<\/li>\n
  • A “wiki” is a webpage that anyone can edit online. Wikipedia <\/a>has turned into an amazing repository of information, thanks to untold thousands of volunteer contributors. Apparently, the same folks are working on a “newswiki” that could be used to describe events in a community. Anyone could add (or delete) text.<\/li>\n
  • MIT hosts three community news sites <\/a>for and by retirees, known as “silver stringers.” The same format has been borrowed by groups abroad and by youth groups.<\/li>\n

    (See also Leslie Walker’s recent Washington Post story <\/a>on Bakersfield and GoSkokie.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Free advice … Today I met with the Washington Center for Internships to discuss possible ways to evaluate their program, and then went to Streetlaw, Inc. for their winter Board meeting. (Streetlaw provides a textbook, training, institutes, and other support for teaching about law and politics in schools.) Finally, I joined my colleagues on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-and-public-issues","category-press-criticism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}