If you don’t build it, they won’t come. They may or my not come when you do build it. But for Kim Grinfeder of the University of Miami’s School of Communication, the most important thing to get people to start coming to his New Voices’ grantee site, Grand Avenue News, was actually giving his community a Web site to visit.
“During the past months we have been busy setting up the Web site, gathering content, creating new relationships with the community, and establishing the publishing workflow,” says Grinfeder. “I am happy to say that [Sept. 28] was the official deadline for the soft launch and the site is officially live. The official launch will be in mid-November.”
“These are important stories that are not being covered by local news organizations and we feel we should.”
But before Grinfeder and his team could launch the site, a name change was in order. The original name was The Villager. But after several meetings with people in and around the community, the site became Grand Avenue News (GAN).
Village West is a small section of the leafy, picturesque Coral Gables neighborhood in Miami. Grand Avenue is the main throughway crossing Coconut Grove and is identifiable both from people inside and outside the area. The avenue is dotted with bus stops and mom and pop businesses that Grinfeder says need more attention. The rest of the tiny Village West neighborhood is residential.
“The people here, they feel the pressure of being a part of wealthy Coconut Grove. They feel like they are being left out,” says Grinfeder. “I think it’s just an issue of a lack of information.”
Grinfeder explained that there are services in the community for people to use, including a nonprofit home makeover company and a church homeless shelter, but they often don’t know about these groups.
While waiting for the official site to launch, the Grand Avenue News team was very active.
About 40 students from Miami’s undergraduate journalism program were busy writing articles about the community to seed the initial Web site. (Support from the journalism program will continue in the future, but to a lesser extent.) Grinfeder says the site needs to transition from articles written by the students to articles written by the community.
“We have received a couple of submissions, but without a live website, many people have been skeptical to write something” he says. “They told me that they need to see the site first, which is understandable.”
There are also several short documentaries under production for the videos section of the site, as well as a multimedia piece on the history of the community.
Grinfeder is looking to bring more of the community’s young people into the project. In October he will start training a group of middle and high school students in an after-school program to take pictures of their community. (Canon donated eight cameras to the program.) The project will allow students to carry the cameras with them at all times and photograph their community. If all goes well. Grand Avenue News hopes to have an exhibit online by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Grinfeder says the site will be working on a project with Ransom Everglades, a private high school in Coconut Grove, collecting oral histories of several of community elders. The school has asked the Grand Avenue team for training support.
The site has also hired an independent reporter to conduct an in-depth story on a large development firm that has been buying up many of the properties in the community. Meanwhile, several neighborhood groups have agreed to send the site monthly reports, including: Neighborhood Crime Watch, Homeowners and Tenants Association, the Coconut Grove Collaborative; updates from the county commissioners’ office and the Thelma Gibson Health Initiative.
When the project started to work in the community, members noticed there was no organization helping local businesses promote themselves.
” ‘Help our businesses promote themselves’ was one of the major requests we received,” says Grinfeder. “My Web design class designed a Web page for many of the businesses in the neighborhood and I started compiling a directory for the community.
“The community is deeply fragmented and has been neglected for a long time. We are just beginning to gather all the information about the community. Many residents are very proud of their history and this is something we will begin directing some of our efforts to.”
Grindfeder says he sees four main challenges ahead for Grand Avenue News.
The first is fundraising. While possible funding organizations have been approached, most wanted to see the actual site before making any donations. Site organizers are also looking at online donations and advertising options. Grinfeder says that a more concrete fundraising plan will be in place by the project’s second New Voices report in December.
The second challenge is one that more than a few New Voices grantees have had to face – overcoming the digital divide.
“One of the main concerns… is people’s access to computers,” says Grinfeder. “Digital divide issues are real challenges facing us every day; this seems to be the main hurdle facing our project in the long run.”
As a result, Grand Avenue News is taking several steps, including the creation of a monthly print version of the Web site. Initially the print version will be produced at the University, but the project has identified individuals in the community who are willing to take over this publishing idea provided GAN provides them with a design template.
Other options that Grinfeder and his colleagues are exploring include: Mobile access – users could register their mobile device on the website and receive SMS updates via phone; a SMS gateway to setup a system to deliver news on demand via phone; computer donations for the community. “We are looking to accept computer donations. The logistics of such a project are fairly large, but possible. We are also considering asking some funders to sponsor Internet access.”
The next challenge is also familiar to New Voices grantees – the transition from content created by students to content created by members of the community. While many members of the community promised to help, Grinfeder says, the general attitude was to wait and see.
“Everyone wants to see the site up before committing to anything. Nevertheless, getting the community, beyond the local organizations, involved in the site is a top priority. We hope to start conducting workshops soon.”
The last challenge is a technical one – project members have been having a hard time creating automated news feeds on a micro level. Everyblock is not as flexible as organizers had hoped, so they are experimenting with Yahoo! Pipes filters.
Although Grinfeder feels progress has been made, there is a lot more to come. He says Grand Avenue News has to continue to do community outreach and journalistic stories. “We can’t just do journalism. We have to do both.”
“These are important stories that are not being covered by local news organizations and we feel we should,” says Grinfeder.” The next months will be crucial to show the community what we built and showing them how they can help.”
