Starting with an idea

30Mar09

At last night’s CollegeJourn chat, Suzanne Yada asked what our ideal start-up publication would look like.

My immediate reaction was this:

community based reporting, ties experienced reporter with “citizen journalist” to create in-depth web content
funded by the community

I know, I know, shame on me for lapsing on proper grammar and capitalization. Double boos warranted for not even using complete sentences. But the idea itself… I think that has real-life potential.

After thinking about it a little more after the chat, my plan morphed to encompass not only my love for journalism but also my goal of teaching as well as acknowleging what it would take to get the communities of Sanilac County to rally around an online publication.

My new plan? To try to convince the ISD to allow a journalism program.

The program would partner one or two students with active members of their home community’s organizations–PTA moms, school board members, city hall representatives, school sport boosters. That person would become essentially the inside source on the information going on within those institutions (Obviously, this person can’t be particularly high up in the organization, nor can they be quoted sources as that would be a huge conflict of interest. Their role is essentially to steer the students in the right direction and perhaps legitimize their work to the institution).

The students would report on their “beats”–developing stories, art, and multimedia, for the publication, which would be updated as stories come in. I’d serve as editor for the first few years at least, while I established a base in the program, and then potentially open up positions for student editors (second-year students who proved themselves capable).

Local advertising and perhaps a $5 subscription fee would help fund the project.

I’ll be the first to say that this isn’t an easy thing to do. Money is tight and everyone knows that the newspaper industry is collapsing, so why would they invest in a vocational program to teach students how to do it?

The trick is going to be showing the validity of teaching community based reporting and the skills necessary to present that on the Web.

I have a couple things working in my favor:

• To my knowledge, none of the schools in the county offer journalism classes; the closest we get is yearbook. So the program would be unique, not duplicating what is already offered in the home school districts.
• The program, by virtue of being a publication, could generate some revenue towards its existence.
• In the process of teaching the students how to report, we would be producing a quality source of hometown news that would be widely available to the community.
• I’d be teaching how to present the news reliably online–something that currently is not really being done in Sanilac County. Sure, the local papers have Web sites, but they just reiterate the content from their print versions online in badly formatted pages. This could be the first publication in the county to do it right.

I think this has the potential to be a really strong program that would give students an outlet that they currently don’t have. What do you think? Is it viable?

Filed under: Journalism, School   |  3 Comments
Tags: local coverage, online journalism, start-ups, teaching