HartsvilleToday.com went live on Thursday, Oct. 27, and the next night it delivered a first for the community: Same-night coverage of the local high school football game. The big news was that the local Red Foxes had defeated their archrival Sumter.
In the past, this South Carolina community of 10,000 had to get that news from the Item, a daily newspaper that is 35 miles away and doesn’t circulate much in Hartsville.
“The site was in its infancy, and so we can’t say that word spread like wildfire through the community,” said project leader Doug Fisher, professor at the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications. But it was a start.
By experimenting with HartsvilleToday.com, Fisher and local paper The Hartsville Messenger, which publishes on Wednesdays and Sundays every week, are trying to build a template for a community newspaper to deliver more breaking news and more content contributed by the community.
WHAT WE USE:
- Drupal content management system
Someone, however, dropped the ball on a web report for the following Friday-night game, and the partners are working to be sure that doesn’t happen again.
The partners have been recruiting a pool of contributors, which “continues to be a challenge,” Fisher said. Of the 45 people who indicated an initial interest, about 20 came to the launch party. Some Coker College students are also becoming contributors.
Many contributors expressed concerns that the site’s content would not be edited. Others asked about how much “journalism” a person would need to know to write for the site. “In our recruitment, we have studiously avoided ‘citizen journalism’ in favor of ‘community storytelling,’” Fisher said. “You don’t need [journalism training] to write a good letter to your friends or have a good conversation with your family, do you? So don’t worry about it. Just write.”
The site is using Drupal as its content management system because it allows for categorizing forum submissions by topic, such as arts, entertainment and reviews; business; education; faith; hobbies and clubs; and sports.
“We felt this structure would work best … possibly attracting more postings if people were able to clearly see how their writing might apply to a particular topic,” Fisher said.
Still to come, as the site continues to build out, are blogs and a photo module. Discussions are underway with a local cellular phone provider about the possibility of donating picture phones.
Prospective contributors were still grappling with how blogs would differ from other writing on the site. “Keeping it simple allowed for us to focus on the message of contributing rather than on explaining the differences,” Fisher said.
Site developers are also looking for Wiki software for an “Our Hartsville” encyclopedia that would allow users to build a compendium of significant people, places events and organizations in town.
Plans are also afoot to tap students at USC’s experimental Newsplex newsroom to help publicize the website and encourage community involvement.
Wrote one contributor on the day the site launched: “A site that allows ‘regular’ people to post does not have the safeguards of an editor gatekeeper but at the same time does not have the obstacle of inverted pyramid or newsworthiness as defined by the editor. This will be an interesting site as we discover what each of us individuals thinks of as news.”
