In the second half of 2011, AllPrinceton focused on developing media educational outreach, and cementing the collaboration with the local TV access station.
Over the summer, our high school internship program gave selected students from the high school newspaper some multimedia training, including video and Web production techniques. These students also created some original community news coverage, and continued to do so once the school year started. The benefit of involving this age group goes beyond journalism training. We found that sending them into the community opened their eyes to the workings of their own town, and stimulated their interest in community affairs. One student enthused, “I LOVE covering these town meetings, it’s so interesting to see how everything works!”
In the fall, AllPrinceton coordinated a Digital Media Bootcamp for Princeton University students. Many participants were already involved in print journalism, and wanted to acquire multimedia skills to be more competitive in today’s job market. The course incorporated video production and editing techniques, image and audio editing and basic web production. It was an intensive week, commissioned by the Humanities Council, and offered to students of journalism. This course also yielded, as a side benefit, some new contributors to the site. The plan is to use this multimedia course as a template for other workshops to be offered elsewhere in the community.
On the business side, AllPrinceton is collaborating with our fiscal sponsor and media partner, Princeton Community TV, to create a campaign for joint sponsorship of community media. With the recognition that standard rates for online advertising were not going to work for the modest local traffic on either of our sites, we are joining forces to solicit more general “underwriting” in the public media sense, for our combined community news output. The revenues will be shared between AllPrinceton and Princeton Community TV, and will serve to fund continuing reporting, as well as some basic costs for the television station.
Local elections in November 2011 offered a way to showcase our multimedia collaboration with Princeton Community TV. AllPrinceton once again cosponsored their debates among local candidates. It was a high-stakes year for Princeton voters, who were asked to decide whether to consolidate the Borough and Township into a single municipality. We orchestrated the town’s first ever live TV coverage of an election night, using iPhone4s as remote cameras, Skype for two-way connection, talk hosts in the studio and live streaming of the two-hour show on AllPrinceton.com. The success of this coverage has prompted us to consider staging a more regular political talk show, in part to fill a void in New Jersey coverage following the closing of the state’s only public TV station last year.
We have done no new development on the OpenPublish software platform upon which AllPrinceton was launched. Upgrades had been so buggy they seemed to introduce as many new problems as they solved old ones. OpenPublish did release a Drupal 7-compatible version, which I am reluctant to implement because of past experiences. I’m not sure I would recommend this platform to future users, especially if they do not have in-house Drupal support. The development costs can be prohibitive.
Instead, we will be devoting our resources to developing new opportunities with Princeton TV, including both coverage and sponsorship. That is our focus for 2012.
