Civic blogospheres
I had a chance to chat with Griff Wigley, of Wigley and Associates, yesterday. Griff is involved in all kinds of blogging — leadership blogging, blogging for small businesses — and citizen journalism. He’s a project leader/volunteer for Northfield.org, a community weblog in Northfield, Minnesota.
Northfield has done a lot of things right in setting up a community space for citizen and civic leader involvement. A group of about six volunteers maintain a primary Northfield blog and calendar. They use RSS to automatically pull the subject lines of posts from a number of blogs written by civic leaders and citizens into a sidebar on the homepage, giving budding and established bloggers a built-in audience with traffic that consistently attracts more than 10,000 visitors a month. They maintain a separate email discussion list for those who sign up to discuss specific community issues, which is automatically archived on the Web site, and another email announcement list for about 1,000 local citizens.
Griff stresses the beauty of blogging — that it allows writers to capture small moments that have significance but are often lost. An opportunity to respond to a citizen suggestion; to highlight the important work of a school or a community effort; to share a funny picture or warn of a timely community danger — these storytelling moments allow us to both create and share community. Permalinks allow the messages to resonate over time in ever widening circles of contacts.
My question is whether local newspapers or television stations could/should help facilitate these civic blogospheres in their own communities. Griff wasn’t familiar with the blogs at the Spokesman-Review in Washington or the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, but he cautioned that successful bloggers feel a direct connection and responsibility to their readers that might be difficult to recreate if the blog were part of a news organization site.
Do news organization have a role in sponsoring community weblogs such as this one, completely separate from a main news site? Encouraging community leaders to blog? Sponsoring server space or providing training? If news organizations claim a role in democracy, then couldn’t facilitating citizen discourse, fact gathering and reporting, such as found on Northfield.org, be a natural expression of journalism?
June 10th, 2005 at 12:25 am
Donica… delighted to meet you, Cole Campbell and Crosbey Mwanza in Reno this week:
http://wigleyandassociates.com/2005_06_01_archive.html#111816621598419573
Thanks for the mentions/links.
As for local media sponsoring something like Northfield.org’s civic blogosphere, I agree with you… it should be part of their public mission, and now with the rebound of advertising on the internet, I think there are ways to at least have the project break even financially. But alas, that might not be enough for most.