Site construction continues at creatingcommunityconnections.org. Project directors signed a contract with Civicspaces to design the web pages, and in early January, a prototype was nearly complete. Barbara K. Iverson and Suzanne McBride at Chicago’s Columbia College say they began talks with the company after consulting with other New Voices grantees and various experts.
In the meantime, Iverson’s and McBride’s students are reporting and writing about communities in and around the city’s downtown – and learning that connections are important. “The more time students spent in their neighborhoods, the more connections they made with ‘mavens,’ as author Malcolm Gladwell terms influential people in his best seller, ‘The Tipping Point,’” Iverson and McBride write in their progress report. “We soon realized that getting students hooked up with the key elected official in each neighborhood — the alderman — was critical to finding other movers and shakers in the area.”
The directors have hit upon three main goals as the site develops: give readers local news they can’t get anywhere else; prompt them to become contributors; and use RSS feeds and links to other Chicago-focused sites to transform “readers” into “viewer/users” of a dynamic site.
Because students have been most successful in covering neighborhoods when they made contacts with politicians, the project’s coverage plan will be redefined in coming months to emphasize the city’s wards — although the content will still be divided by neighborhood to be user-friendly.
Plus, Iverson and McBride want to gain momentum at creatingcommunityconnections.org with stories about the February 27 local elections. “By February, our goal is to have journalists covering news in at least 10 of the city’s 50 wards,” they write. “We’ll identify the wards based on a number of factors, most notably whether our student journalist lives and/or works in that area and if there is a contested aldermanic race in the ward.”
The big challenge, as with many citizen-journalist efforts, is to get residents to add content to the site – and to do so consistently. The site will contain numerous content streams from the viewpoint of a block, a ward or the city to help encourage participation. Iverson and McBride are also wrestling with whether to provide compensation to citizen reporters. They’re not fond of the MSM’s practice of handing out little or no pay to freelancers. “We like what OhmyNews has done: Pay reporters based on the number of hits on their stories.”
