A Guide to Small-Town Citizen Journalism
Douglas J. Fisher, instructor at the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications, and Graham Osteen, editor and publisher of the The Hartsville Messenger, have put together this 75-page report entitled:
Hartsville Today
The first year of a small-town citizen-journalism site
A guide especially for small daily and non-daily newspapers
Fisher writes at his blog:
For almost a year, the Hartsville Today citizen journalism project has been running and growing, one of the few such experiments aimed specifically at smaller papers without many resources (in this case, a twice-weekly).
When we started it with funding from J-lab, we promised a “cook book” that would give other smaller papers considering such projects a road map of what to expect and how to handle some of the challenges…In addition to covering all the aspects, we think it is the first major extended study of such a site, the postings and their contributors. There is an extensive section that tracks five months of postings and proposes a codebook that may be of use to future researchers.
