The Twin Cities Community Newswire has launched their Web site, Twin Cities Daily Planet. You can find it at http://www.tcdailyplanet.info.
“Cover the planet . . . or your neighborhood. Become a Daily Planet citizen journalist” urges a new Minneapolis/St. Paul community Web site that its volunteers will launch soon under the name Twin Cities Daily Planet: The Twin Cities Community Newswire.
The citizen journalism venture is relying on a growing alliance of participating community, ethnic and youth groups as well as citizen journalists to be its eyes and ears. Since May, the organizers, the Twin Cities Media Alliance, have wrangled support from a diverse group of 20 community news partners, including neighborhood, Latino, Asian and Native American news outlets. It expects several more groups to sign on in coming weeks.
“The plan is to feature the best and most timely stories in the main column on the home page, regardless of whether they came from independent citizen journalists or community media partners,” said Alliance director Jeremy Iggers,
The group has hired a part-time managing editor, Craig Cox, former Utne Reader managing editor and current publisher and editor of the Minneapolis Observer, a free monthly, to work 10 hours a week recruiting and maintaining relationships with participating media and citizen journalists.
The group hopes to diversify its Board of Directors and Board of Advisors with leaders from the cities’ ethnic and minority communities.
The group not only hopes to recruit citizen journalists, but train them as well. Ann Alquist, news director of partnering KFAI Community Radio, will head the training initiative. Already, a young Somali-American journalist has agreed to contribute material and serve as a bridge to the region’s growing Somali community.
While most of the participating media partners have their own Web sites, they are not set up to provide RSS feeds. The Daily Planet aims to help them install RSS, which will not only make it easier for the Daily Planet to syndicate their content, it will also make it easier for users to access stories in the various community newspapers.
The Newswire is also planning to develop audio content, both as streaming audio and podcasts, from its partner at KFAI and from other radio stations and individual producers.
