Representative Journalism Network Trial Project Team

Leonard Witt, Project Director — also the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, outside of Atlanta

Chris Peck, Editorial Director — also Editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal

Bill Densmore, Administrative Director — also Executive Director of the Media Giraffe Project, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Representative Journalism Network National Advisory Board
Updated: April 14, 2008

Bill Buzenberg, Executive Director, Center for Public Integrity
David Cohn, Editor at Off the Bus, BeatBloggers, NewAssignment.net
Oscar Corral, Reporter, Miami Herald
Ken Doctor, Digital Media Consultant, Content Bridges
David Eckoff, Media Consultant, formerly Turner Broadcasting VP
Amy Gahan, Content Strategist, Poytner & J-Lab
Mark Glaser, Host & Editor, MediaShift
Joel Kramer, Publisher, MinnPost.com, former editor/publisher Minneapolis Star Tribune
Dori J. Maynard, President and CEO, Maynard Institute
Ken Sands, Innovation Editor, Congressional Quarterly
Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab
Venise Wagner, Chair and Associate Professor, San Francisco State University Journalism Department
Lisa Williams, Founder, Placebloggers

Representative Journalism Network Financial Support

A generous grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation with the inspirational and intellectual support from its president Ruth Ann Harnisch has helped advance the Representative Journalism concept and made the Northfield, Minnesota trial project possible.

An Update 4-02-08:

Representative Journalism Network Researcher

Rachel Davis Mersey, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication  at the University of Minnesota, is overseeing the assessment and evaluation of our Locally Grown, Northfield project.

Locally Grown Trial Project

The Locally Grown blog and podcast in Northfield is overseen by its triumvirate: Griff Wigley, Ross Currier and Tracy Davis.

 Help chart the future of local news and community. Apply for a Representative Journalism Fellowship. Leonard Witt, holder of the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, is leading a one-year trial in the college town of Northfield, Minn., 35 miles south of Minneapolis.

The representative journalist will spend a year working with the LocallyGrownNorthfield.org citizen blogger site to report one in-depth story per week on a critical civic or social issue. The reporting will be an open, transparent process where citizens can offer facts, comments, and perspective as the story develops. The final form of the story will be published in digital and print formats. Often, citizens will convene to discuss the findings of the reporting and participate in public meet-ups to discuss the results and next actions. This is not an assignment for an order taker. You must be an enterprising, self starter. You must have a willingness to engage with citizens day in and day out. When needed, you will produce work in multiple formats, including print, web, radio, access-TV and other formats. This will increase civic dialog in a highly educated community of 17,000 people and inspire the community to support and sustain your work. Bringing to this job a magazine-writing sensibility with in-depth reporting experience would be helpful. In the end, we want to talk about Northfield’s strengths and weaknesses, its joys and tribulations, its people and its governmental, civic, educational and economic institutions. Part of our inspiration is the Public Journalism Network’s Charter Declaration, which says in part:

• We believe the diversity and fragmentation of society call for new techniques for storytelling and information-sharing to help individual communities define themselves singularly and as part of the whole set of communities;
• We believe in the value of studying the dynamics of communities and the complexity of public life;
• We believe the best journalism helps people see the world as a whole and helps them take responsibility for what they see.

http://pjnet.org/charter/

Your day-to-day guidance will come from the community and the principals of Locally Grown. As a journalist, however, you will report to one of the nation’s most respected daily newspaper editors. You will receive regular guidance from participants in the Journalism That Matters collaborative and when requested from our highly respected national advisory board. The goal will be to provide high quality, ethically sound news and information, which will enrich the daily and civic lives of the people of Northfield. Email a letter of interest, resume, clips and references to Leonard Witt, lwitt@kennesaw.edu. A personal interview will be required at a mutually convenient location. To start immediately.

“From the first time I heard about representative journalism and read Leonard Witt ideas in his blog, I was eager to help launch it. Len’s idea has the potential to revolutionize the practice of journalism, especially as American journalism struggles with the loss of its advertising support base.”

Also from the start, she began encouraging, no really pushing me, to stop talking about it and to take the lead in making it happen. Now thanks to her and the Harnisch Family Foundation support of $51,000 to Kennesaw State University it is a reality and we are doing the first Representative Journalism trial project with the folks at  “Locally Grown,”an online community website in Northfield, Minnesota.

I chose Northfield foremost because of Griff Wigley, who I have been watching do on and offline community building, since he helped develop the Cafe Utne for the Utne Reader in the mid 1990s. He has also been my online mentor, indeed, there would have been no PJNet.org blog if he had not convinced me to start it back in 2003.

Here is more about the site from the “Locally Grown” press release:

Ross Currier, Tracy Davis, and Griff Wigley are the three local citizen bloggers, podcasters, and community activists who manage “Locally Grown”. They fill the web site with bits of community news, hundreds of photos, strong opinions, and quirky humor, and then engage the community in vibrant online discussions, some of which have drawn as many as 300 posted comments. The partnership with Representative Journalism allows the site to add breaking and in-depth journalism.

They thought having a professional journalist providing the community with news and information would be a perfect addition to the site and for Northfield as a whole. That’s what our Representative Journalism team of Bill Densmore, who runs the Media Giraffe project, Chis Peck, editor of the Commercial Appeal in Memphis  and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Associated Press Managing Editors, and I will help get done.

Peck has agreed to share some of his time to be the editorial traffic cop to ensure that from the beginning this project produces high quality, ethically sound journalism. However, the journalist will be funded by the community with our editorial oversight and will be embedded more in the community than in a newsroom. Words like community-assisted journalism, collaborative journalism help to describe what we are launching.

Since it is a trial we are not sure exactly how it will be configured in the end. Wigley, Currier, Davis, Densmore and I have been busy sending messages back and forth, dozens of them, as we work out a formula that will work for “Locally Grown” and meet the high journalism standards that the three of us on the Representative Journalism side live by. Densmore, a former small town newspaper publisher,  will be helping us move through all the logsitical steps it takes to run this on a daily basis.

I must tell you, as someone who has spent more than 25 years in newsrooms, this collaborative effort is different. We can’t just drop in and say, “Hey this is how journalism is practiced, take it or leave it.” Even in these first days of discussions with Currier, Davis and Wigley, it is very clear that Representative Journalism will not be a one-size-fits-all operation. Each geographic or interest community will be different. Each will have its own demands, own platform and own hierarchy. Making this all work and having the journalist funded by the community will be challenge, but one that Harnisch, Peck, Densmore, Currier, Davis and Wigley and I think is worth taking.

Stay tune, this is going to get interesting.