August 4, 2006
San Francisco

Keith Graham
Associate Professor, University of Montana School of Journalism

I'm Keith Graham from the University of Montana. First of all I should tell you, how in the world did a Mississippi boy make it to Montana and why are we talking about the Rural News Network?

Well, I think I'm like Dave; I'm a recovering traditional journalist. I went to school at Mizzou, worked at the Miami Herald, and I learned there that it's a big paper and kind of at a distance from its community. We learned that a lot after the riots in trying to understand, quite frankly, an audience that we didn't know a whole lot about.

I went to the San Jose Mercury News where I was really a part of a great, tremendous, sophisticated journalistic team, and my mentor – who, by the way, worked at the Miami Herald and then San Jose Mercury News – Jerry Ceppos tought me really how to engage people.

I went to the Roanoke Times after that, and my managing editor, Rich Martin, who's in the back, taught me something there and that is that you really have to listen to the community. Rich now teaches at the University of Illinois.

And I'm from Mississippi, I had a farm, I grew up in a little place, I moved to the city. My dad loved the farm and we would always go back there.

So what are we talking about here? The Rural News Network. I'm here as just part of the multimedia committee. Denise Dowling, who is on the committee, is here. She is a broadcast professor. We have two print professors, Michael Downs and Sheri Venema. I'm the photojournalism and design side. We also have in that committee people who are involved in online multimedia journalism, and you'll hear about one other in just a minute.

That gives you a sense of kind of what this is.

Two things: What's this thing about? Well, it's brought to fruition because J-Lab decided it was worth investing in. Its purpose is twofold.

First of all, we're going to have a class starting this fall. We just got funding two weeks before school was out. We met right after school was done and so we are literally, as Jan [Schaffer] points out, in a "concept and vision" stage.

Two-fold purpose: 1) Class this fall where students will go to the first town that we've picked, Dutton.

And I must tell you that this whole project is the brainchild of Courtney Lowery, a former J-student who works at NewWest.net, and she always wanted to see the rural part of Montana brought to journalism, so that's what we're doing. We're going to be visiting this place.

First purpose: Students learning about rural issues. Second: Citizen journalism.

We're going to train residents, and we hope to leverage this grant to other grants and provide it to other towns in Montana – places that do not have a newspaper because the newspaper has died.

Remember traditional journalists, I love the newspaper world. People keep asking, "You became a professor, what do you miss?" I miss the rhythm of the newspaper. I miss the daily journalism. There's no other high – I've run most of my life and there's that runner's high – but there's nothing like the journalism high of going out and producing good work.

The other thing here is that we want to train journalists. We want to train the residents – the experts on their community – how to cover this place. You'll see in a minute why.

We're going to provide hardware and software, and we'll get into that.

Why Montana?

Hey, we're talking a rural state. Out of an estimated 935,000 people at the 2000 Census, two-thirds were rural, and it's a big place. It stretches a good distance – it's the fourth largest state.

And here's the other thing, if you're from Texas, I know you think Texas is big. It is, and Montana's second to Texas in the total number of acres devoted to agricultural products. You see 59.2 million, but I was reading on the plane that it's up to 61 million acres. And by the way, that's increasing. The agricultural census, some of you may know, is done every five years in the seven and the two years, and in 1997 it was 57-plus [million acres]. So that is going up.

The average sized farm, too – and this is USDA stats – is a little over 2,000 acres, and we still have a ton of farms and ranches that are family owned.
Another part of "Why Montana?" is that newspapers simply can't survive in small towns like Dutton and Lame Deer.

We're still debating on where else we'd want to place them and we've got towns that we've nominated, we've just got to figure out what to do. But first of all Dutton, because here's the good news: Courtney Lowery is from there. She nominated her own town because she knows it, and that's where we're starting.

Also an underserved piece of population is the Native Americans. Do you realize that in 1999 only one-third of Native Americans in Montana even had a phone? Do they have a voice?

The Census data says that in Montana they're 8 percent. Well if you talk to the Native Americans it's probably 11 or 12 percent, but that's another population that needs to have a voice.

Why Dutton? Well, you heard, it's Courtney's place. [Audience laughs]

It's also a beautiful place and you can see the Rocky Mountain range right there.

I told you about the agricultural products. Well, here in Dutton, we're talking wheat. Now soon you may see a little increase in barley simply because Budweiser down the road has opened up a processing plant, so for their hops they need barley.

Right now there are two co-ops in this small town. Yes, they have a bank – their own bank – but about 10 years ago they lost their grocery store. The mayor told me, "Well maybe somebody from New York could move in and start a new grocery store." [Audience laughs]

They're desperate for things, but they have a thriving community and you need to understand it's a small place with a huge heart and a desire to keep that town going.

Here's the thing: Where do we put this place? What do we do here? Why are we even here?

Well listen to Barb. Barb's husband grew up in Powers, which is seven miles south of Dutton. She now lives seven miles southeast of Dutton – it's cattle and wheat.

"We really miss our paper out here. We just don't get any news out in this part of the county. We'd love to see the newspaper return. We want everything the Dispatch had" (that was the name of the paper, the Dutton Dispatch).

We asked the mayor, and they had just had a little impromptu drug arrest and they were talking about where they were going to put the members of the family that were not involved in this drug arrest, and I'm thinking, "Wow, this is interesting. There's news."

We also have the town librarian interested and doing things. She's great. They have computers there, and here's the thing: We will be able to put the software there and they'll be able to access it there.

Nick, who's the guy who works for Teton Wireless, is giving us information about how many households in the area actually are online.

Now go back to Barb for a moment. She's got a computer, but she's not hooked up to the Internet.

So we as we go through this we have to figure out where to put the kiosk. Do you put it in the senior citizen center? Do you put it in Café Dutton, which is at the southern end of town, right there with the Keno machines? You know, get your croissant and your update right here.

When we lost our newspaper it was hard to get the information out. Betty – by the way, she will be one of the citizen journalists – started a newsletter from the school, which tried to pick up some of the things that the paper was doing.

For the students, as part of this class of learning rural issues, one of the big things is the Dutton-Brady consolidation of schools. So there are just so many things for them to learn about rural issues.

I was in Dutton once for a fun day they have every July 8, and this is what they do: Parade downtown with horses, kids, the little girls doing the batons, and it gets hot and they end up with the last guy coming through with the fire truck and spraying every body down. And they have trucks in the parade, so there's a car show at the Legion field, and you'll see what's there. So you begin to understand a little bit about this community as you see what they care about and how they do things

In the end, 10 years ago this guy decided to do this thing called the "mud run." There are divisions of this: Stock, truck division, open division. And some of them – including the gentleman who started this thing 10 years ago – get stuck, but they're mostly alright and they have a blast.

At the end of the day they go to the park nearby, which has a pool and stuff, and they do things.

So this is the community that you see, and it's a real lively place.

So what's our vision? A multimedia online project modeled after award-winning resnetnews.org, which – in a short, quick take – is a site for and by Native Americans.

Denny McAuliffe, who worked at the Washington Post for 16 years, came to the University of Montana as a Native American journalist and thankfully he got tenure and he's still with us. He's a fabulous voice for the Native American community. All I can tell you is that the copy room is two doors down from where Denny's office is and you hear him mentor Native American students all the time. And that's where this got its birth – the way he mentored people is now done nationally. Michael Downs, who teaches some classes with Denny in this, also goes to the Native Journalism Institute every summer.

This is where our model is, because it works.

How do we start this?

You know we're in the concept stage. I'm telling you what I hope will be. We'll start out with blog style posts – including photos – but we want to get to where we're doing podcasting and streaming video. We've got big goals.

Local citizens will publish – we hope – at least monthly, and likely more often. Students and faculty with expertise will also publish.

We've made the scouting trip. It's great. So the former editor is now the postmaster, the local high school English class's journalism teacher is also married to the editor of the paper. We've talked to the mayor, the principal, the secretary. We've talked to the town librarian and several citizens already.

We'll have a journalism class. We have a print reporter, we have a still photojournalist, we have a Web designer/developer and he's doing an internship this summer at the L.A. Times. So we're going to have a fun part, and we still need the broadcast reporter and the video journalist. We want to have a full team doing this. I'm also trying to persuade a graduate student to do his or her project on this, so we'll just see as that goes.

We're going to have guest speakers come in – people who are journalists who will be able to talk to the students.

By the way, one of the first things we wanted to make sure of was that we weren't stepping on the toes of other small papers in small towns because Choteau, which is 25 miles away, has a weekly.

Melodie Martinsen, editor of the Choteau Acantha, loved the idea, and the first thing she said was, "When the site's up can you link to us?"

So it's already a partnership and I said, "Of course. And will you come talk to our students about what it's like covering rural issues?"

We'll visit the town twice, teach the high school students the basics of reporting: train, train train, writing, writing, writing and reviewing reporting.

Dutton is three hours away from the school driving the speed limit; students may get there a little faster. [Audience laughs]

And we'll also do a community meeting to get them involved as journalists, but also one of the things we want to do when we develop the site – and I mean a rough development – is to get their feedback. How do they want to use it? How does it work for them? Because that's the deal; we want them to be the ones running it.

NewWest.net will host the site.

Let's hope these things are real by the end of the year. This is the fun part; we're just at the beginning of this and we hope that the students will write three stories each for the site by the end of the time.

So give the community it's newspaper again, establish an online media experience through civic and citizen – and I love the way Jan [Schaffer] put this – the civic part – I want to involve public life, as well as in the media. I want tomorrow's journalists to cover rural issues. You know what? They need to understand how the rural community works. That's one of our goals.

If we serve the state of Montana and two-thirds of our population live there [in rural areas], if there's $2.1 billion in agricultural products in Montana and that's the leading piece of the economy and $1 billion of that is the beef and dairy industry, and mostly beef, we need to know that and we need to be covering those issues. Tomorrow's journalists need to know that and then give the rural community a voice in traditional and new media by enabling them to be their own voice.

Thanks.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Has the rural Native American community changed enough technologically that they will be able to access your Web content?

KEITH GRAHAM: The Native American community hasn't changed enough, so the question is going to be for us is where do we place some computers, if we have to do that in order to get – at least – access?

I'm going to give you what we think is true, and this has not been verified. All I can tell you is we think probably two-thirds of the community have a computer. We don't know how many of them yet are connected to the Internet. Nick, who used to work for Teton Wireless, has now moved so we're trying to figure out how to go about getting all that information from the next people. And that's another place, too, for sponsorship.

But I don't think it's changed a lot.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Will you offer site support for the people of these small towns who may not be really tech savvy?

KEITH GRAHAM: Exactly. One of the key issues, as always, is going to be the support and the sustainability, and that's why NewWest.net has agreed to host it. There will be some server troubleshooting for that and – I'm looking down the road here – training people how to use the site once it's up.

I'm just looking from now through December and there are tons of other issues for December through May that are just now getting on paper. Excellent question.

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