Rural News Network has launched a beta version of the Dutton Country Courier, its website covering Dutton, Montana: www.duttoncc.org.
Citizen interest in the University of Montana’s Rural News Network is high. Keith Graham, the project director, proudly reports that about 80 people in the town of Dutton attended a meeting about the RNN in the fall.
“We couldn’t believe it,” he writes in a progress report on the project. “We got some effective questions from the floor that evening. After that meeting we really had a sense of what people want to see on their site. Now we just have to get it developed and designed.”
Graham hopes to launch the site at the end of March 2007. In preparation, students have been writing stories and building contacts in the community. At that town meeting, residents were given surveys, and 36 people returned them. Graham had been concerned that citizens in rural areas wouldn’t have home Internet access, but 30 of the respondents said that they had home computers. Three or four people also expressed interest in volunteering to work on the site.
The fall RNN class was made up of seven students that represented many facets of journalism. There were two reporters, two photographers, one radio reporter, one videographer and a web designer. “This is the only class this semester where we have this kind of cross-discipline work,” Graham writes. Five of those students will continue to be in the class in the spring semester, and Graham is trying to recruit another participant.
The web designer took suggestions from the class and has been designing the site. RNN is using Typepad to make it easy for citizens to participate.
For the fall semester’s final assignment, students teamed up with Dutton citizens to create stories. The radio reporter, for instance, produced a project on family heritage with interviews recorded by students in a high school class that has received reporting instruction from the RNN students.
One reporter worked with a woman who sold a local cafe she had owned for years. The student wrote a background story on the history of the place, and the owner penned “a nice reflective piece,” Graham says, on how she felt about leaving the restaurant. That story, he says, will serve as a model for other reports. None of the stories will appear on the web until the RNN site debuts.
