While it’s not accepting conent just yet, Creating Community Connections’ website is already up and getting the word out on what the site will do, what citizen journalism is all about, and what tools residents can use to write, film and record their stories.
Run by Suzanne McBride and Barbara K. Iverson at Columbia College in Chicago, this project will train citizen journalists in central Chicago to cover local news, along with Columbia J-school students.
McBride and Iverson have looked at three city neighborhoods for the first year of the project, trying to get a sense of what “community” means to residents there. Eight people came to their first public meeting in June to discuss what the Creating Community Connections could be, and the directors have met with other local community and political leaders in these areas. At their booth at a late July street festival in the South Loop, they recorded interviews with people in the neighborhood to identify story ideas and other community groups they could target.
There has been more outreach: The project directors have talked with Columbia College students interested in writing for the site, community groups, local chamber of commerce members, and those behind Chicago’s WiFi initiatives in the 10th Ward, which has worked on computer access issues — a key problem that can affect a community connection project. What they’ve found is a range of needs and desires. “One person wants to see neighborhood-focused health news, though he’s not sure he wants to help gather that content,” McBride and Iverson write in their progress report. “Another is interested in writing about growth and development that she fears is getting out of control in her neighborhood. And someone else would like to do some blogging.”
What McBride and Iverson have to do is be flexible. They’ll work on creating training workshops in public centers, possibly consulting with The Madison Commons Project, which has taught citizen journalists. On the technical side, they’ve gathered advice from other sites, such as TwinCities Daily Planet and MyMissourian, and decided to use open source software Drupal or Django and MySQL. They also have a local, inexpensive hosting service.
In addition to using citizen and student hyperlocal content, McBride and Iverson envision Creating Community Connections as a gateway to under-covered stories. “We think our site can serve as a portal for ethnic media and other alternative media voices,” they add. “Chicago neighborhoods are rich with niche media, but without a ‘virtual town square’ the voices echo only within small enclaves.”
McBride and Iverson believe future challenges will be keeping contributions from students and residents fresh, and attracting readers to the site.
