When Community Residents Commit ‘Random Acts of Journalism’

By Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director
Harvard University's Nieman Reports
Winter 2007

Published in the Winter 2007 issue of Harvard University’s Nieman Reports.

In rural Dutton, Montana, 80 people showed up last fall, wooed by a notion of starting a local news site for this newspaperless town of 375 people. Months later, the community celebrated the launch of the Dutton Country Courier, DuttonCC.org.

In Chappaqua, New York, three long-time community volunteers decided their community needed a weekly online newspaper. They took matters into their own hands and in early October launched NewCastleNOW: News & Opinion Weekly.

Meanwhile in Moscow, Idaho, low-power KRFP-FM radio, just two years after it began airing a citizen-produced nightly newscast on radiofreemoscow.org, is applying for a commercial radio license.

All three of these citizen media projects were fueled in small part by micro grants from the J-Lab/Knight Foundation New Voices program, but they are being sustained in much larger part by the passion, vision and hard work of their creators.

From girls podcasting in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to environmental journalists creating a wiki about the Great Lakes, to journalism students scooping Chicago news outlets, in two years some 30 New Voices start-ups have joined scores of other hyperlocal ventures in committing “random acts of journalism.”

It is here - on these hyperlocal sites - that the systemic conventions of inverted pyramids and “balanced” stories are out of sync with information conveyed amid a keen caring about community. “These are not multiple-source stories,” said veteran journalist Suzanne McBride of the items on CreatingCommunityConnections.org, which she cofounded in Chicago. “It took me a while to say that’s okay; it’s not libeling anyone. I had to change my thinking about that,” she told a Citizen Media Summit at The Associated Press Managing Editors’ conference in October.

Nonjournalists sharing photos and videos of breaking news events - from the London bombings to the South Asia tsunami - garners media attention, yet what’s happening on emerging hyperlocal news opens a window to observe what is happening in journalism today. In communities with little news coverage, people are using the Web to restore a sense of place. Behind these hyperlocal efforts is a desire to get local citizenry engaged in issues affecting their lives - in essence, to create a civic media that at the same time constructs a new architecture of participation in their towns.

Learning curves at many of these Web sites are still high, but those of us who observe and research these efforts already know a lot. Earlier this year, J-Lab released one of the first reports on the rise of local news sites based on user-generated content (UGC). The research, “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?” reported on survey responses from 191 citizen media participants and on in-depth interviews of the founders of 31 Web sites.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Citizen media is emerging as a form of “bridge media,” linking opportunities to share and create news and information media with opportunities to get involved in civic life.
• No one size fits all; there are many models. Sites have been started by former journalists seeking to be the I.F. Stones of their towns and by friends of the public library seeking to construct a local newscape.
• Instead of being comprehensive sources of news, sites are forming as fusions of news and schmooze. Stories unravel over a series of postings and people, contrary to traditional journalistic conventions, “cover” the topics they care most about and know something about.
• Half the respondents said their sites don’t need to make money to continue. Costs can be as low as $13 a month for server space, and volunteers provide most of the labor. But site founders concede it would be nice to be able to pay a little to contributors.
• Most citizen sites don’t use traditional metrics—unique visitors, page views or revenues—to measure their success. Yet 73 percent pronounced their efforts to be “successful.”
• Success is often defined as impact on the community. Site owners say their sites they have increased voter turnout in elections and upped attendance at town meetings. They have helped their communities solve problems and watchdogged local government.
• There is a high degree of optimism that citizen news sites are here to stay. But site founders say that attracting more contributors and some operating support continue to be major challenges.

With the rise of so many independent local news sites, traditional news outlets are now trying to enter this space with their own iterations of UGC sites, such as the Chicago Tribune’s TribLocal.com and The Washington Post’s LoudounExtra. For the most part, news organizations are starting from scratch in developing their hyperlocal news sites rather than partner with existing ones. It remains to be seen whether the sites affiliated with news outlets will achieve the passion and caring for community exhibited by the independent startups.

Some citizen media site operators think such competition is senseless. “We are plankton,” says iBrattleboro.com cofounder Christopher Grotke. He’d like to see news organizations feeding off his site - and others like it - rather than trying to replicate what it already does.

It remains to be seen whether sustainable business models will emerge from the numerous citizen media efforts now online. Perhaps they will become a venue for a new type of community volunteerism, something baby boomers do after they have finished coaching their kids’ soccer teams. But it’s increasingly clear that citizen media sites are helping to transform how local journalism is practiced and even what it is and what it can do.

From his perch at MyMissourian.com, Clyde Bentley believes that “traditional journalism plus citizen journalism equals 21st Century journalism.” I agree.

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