Creating Community Connections is now in the process of re-branding itself as Chicago Talks. Both CreatingCommunityConnections.org and ChicagoTalks.net will now take you to their site.
As of November 2007, CreatingCommunityConnections published 358 original stories on a range of topics: From stories about residents upset with street musicians banging drums in the middle of the night, to a decades-old ice cream shop managing to stay afloat, to one neighborhood upset by the amount of dog poop left on sidewalks.
“Our goal has been to tell stories that otherwise would go uncovered,” says Barb Iverson, who co-founded the site with Columbia College Chicago colleague Suzanne McBride. “We’re pleased that we’ve been able to provide the residents of several Chicago neighborhoods with news they need and want, and until now, couldn’t get anywhere else.”
The pair is especially proud of an exclusive investigative series published in April about Chicago aldermen who employ relatives in their taxpayer-supported ward offices. The series included a searchable database of more than 40,000 city workers. To increase traffic, they jointly published the aldermen stories with The Beachwood Reporter, another more heavily viewed local site.
Three weeks later, CreatingCommunityConnections published a package of stories, photos and video on immigration. “It was just hours before more than 100,000 people marched in Chicago at what turned out to be the nation’s largest rally on the controversial issue,” says Iverson.
Page views and registered users continue to grow even in this soft launch period with no formal marketing or promotion yet. “We plan a hard launch in the fall. We are getting to know how the site works and tweaking features.” In response to community and user requests, they’ve added new beats and neighborhoods to the menus on the site. They also use a CiviCRM package to do an e-mail “blast” to share a general report about the site’s progress with registered contributors.
Iverson and McBride have asked Chicago Tech for programming assistance and help to further customize the site and make image uploading easier to use. “And because we are using open source software, some of the features we develop for our site will be available for other citizen journalism sites to adapt for their use at no charge,” says Iverson.
As of November, 2007, CreatingCommunityConnections had 181 registered users and has published 358 stories. The site meter has tracked 9,052 views for the main page. Since June, they have added 8,050 site visits from 5,722 unique visitors. About one-third of visitors are return readers; the rest are new to the site. And a group of bloggers is now contributing to a section called “Talk Around Town.”
“About half of our traffic comes from users who type in our URL,” says Iverson, “so for a ‘soft launch’ period when we didn’t see much attention we are doing well with word of mouth. Visitors look at an average of four pages for about four minutes, so we appear to be getting readers, not just lookers, which is a good sign.”
CreatingCommunityConnections continues to reach out to new neighborhoods and community organizations. One successful bridge was built to the Chicago-based Friends of the Park (FOTP), a group of 10,000 volunteers who serve to protect, improve and promote urban parks. The Chicago Park District consists of 7,300 acres of parkland, 552 parks, 33 beaches, two conservatories, 16 lagoons, and 10 bird and wildlife gardens. There are more than 100 park advisory councils in Chicago. FOTP has been able to use the CreatingCommunityConnections site to engage people interactively. For example, FOTP volunteers shared their stories and photos from activities like the Late Night Bike Ride and annual clean-up drives. The site will also begin a forum on bikes and bike trails, as FOTP works with the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and other organizations on creating and maintaining bike trails throughout Chicago and its parks.
“This is an exciting development because one of our early goals was to connect with community groups and help strengthen what they’re doing,” says Iverson.
“The challenge in coming months is to build sets of portfolios of residents who want to be involved in the site, whether it’s providing story tips, spreading the word in their neighborhood about the site or submitting content,” says Iverson. Columbia College journalists are actively contributing to the site and full-time paid interns covered the month of August, when there are no journalism classes the college, ensuring fresh content gets posted on the site at least five days a week. Future plans include hiring a Citizen-J editor, who will recruit Chicago residents to help with the site, and offer stipends to content contributors.
