Creating Community Connections launched in April 2007 after weeks of reporting by 13 undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia College Chicago on the city’s aldermanic elections. Some of the student coverage outpaced the city’s major media.
Now the site is populated by news from a growing group of city neighborhoods and on such topics as politics, art and entertainment, and planning and development.
A recent round of stories on immigration issues, including video of a May 1 immigration rally in the city, has animated the site.
Users can now vote on their favorite stories: A “thumbs-up” gives a story one point; “thumbs down” takes away a point. The voting results are shown under “What’s Hot.”
Project creators Suzanne McBride and Barbara Iverson, who teach at Columbia, collaborated with CivicSpaceLab.org to remodel and polish the website. Content is searchable via neighborhood categories (South Loop, Lincoln Park, Hyde Park) and by interest categories (parks, schools, entertainment).
Since last fall, Creating Community Connections has increased its coverage from just three wards to many more of the city’s neighborhoods. Still, Iverson, McBride and their student contributors want more continual local content. Iverson says a new goal is to have “one fresh story on the home page” every day.
It’s been an exciting time to cover Chicago neighborhoods. All 50 aldermen faced re-election in February. “The major Chicago newspapers have published some stories on a few of the races, giving our citizen journalists in training plenty of opportunities to report and write about issues and the candidates not being covered,” Iverson said.
The project leaders worked with other community groups to organize a candidates’ forum in the Second Ward. It drew more than 100 people and cultivated many new connections within the South Loop neighborhood. McBride, a self-described ‘traditional journalist,’ likes this new idea: “It is a very interesting change in my mind to partner with community groups instead of competing with them,” like many traditional media do.
In the future, McBride and Iverson say they “envision helping organize similar forums with the aldermen in other areas of the city after the elections to help citizens get connected and stay in touch with what’s happening in their neighborhoods.” Their ultimate goal, McBride says, is to be able to do town halls — covering them on the website and “getting the conversation going” in communities.
Another goal is to create web portfolios on local parks and local entertainment to increase content and make the site more relevant to all residents of Chicago.
Now that the site is up and running, McBride and Iverson are spreading the word about their operation. Their hard work creating personal connections at the college, in the libraries, in the local governments and in the communities themselves is helping them keep lines of communication open to generate story ideas and to promote the site to potential readers and a base of contributors.
According to their progress report: “Local news might have faded from Chicago mass media, but it is clear that interest in neighborhood news remains as strong as ever. We’re excited to be moving toward establishing our place in the media landscape and one day serving as a model for other citizen journalism projects.”
