As Montana’s Rural News Network plans to launch, the project directors have been reaching out to rural communities to learn more about them and recruit citizen journalists. And students at the University of Montana School of Journalism in Missoula have been taking an active role in developing and designing the RNN website.
This summer, Associate Professor Keith Graham and Courtney Lowery, managing editor of NewWest.net, a UM alum and the creator of the project, made a summer scouting trip to Dutton, one of at least three towns that will participate in the RNN. Local residents will report and write the news for their community’s page, while UM students in Graham’s RNN class will contribute stories on rural issues to another section of the site and help train resident reporters.
Graham and Lowery also visited the nearby town of Brady, which recently consolidated its schools with those in Dutton, a major issue for area residents. Their road trip included a tour of the ranches and farms in this region of northwestern Montana.
In conversations in Dutton with the mayor and her assistant, the town librarian, the high school principal and his secretary, the English/yearbook high school teacher and several citizens, Graham got a very positive response. The mayor and the librarian were interested in training to be citizen journalists, and Graham and Lowery felt the high school secretary would participate as well, since she helped publish a monthly newsletter in Dutton after the local paper folded. One woman outside a church in town told Graham, who now has visited Dutton three times, that residents miss their newspaper and RNN would be a welcome addition.
Throughout the summer, Lowery tackled the technical side, choosing software for the RNN site and starting to design it. In the fall, Graham’s RNN class of seven students from various journalism disciplines started to produce content for the site, brainstorm on ideas for how the project will work, and instruct a Dutton high school class in the basics of reporting.
In November at a town meeting, Dutton residents will give their input about the design of the Dutton page on the RNN site. By the end of the semester, the site should be ready to launch, and in the meantime, Graham has asked the students to start thinking about the second town the project should approach.
Part of the challenge has been to figure out ways to teach basic reporting to citizens who are novices in journalism but experts on Dutton. Graham’s class has suggested putting a “community reporter’s notebook” section on the site with how-tos on covering city council meetings and high school football games. “It’s really kind of a messy project. It’s a project with so many moving parts,” he says. “But it’s also involving the citizens in as many ways as we can.”
The UM students’ final project will be to coauthor a piece with a town resident. It’s a great way to make this a “hyperlocal” citizen journalism project, Graham says, plus get students involved in covering rural issues.
