His Locally Grown Northfield community affairs blog, which he operates with Tracy Davis and Ross Currier had its own online community. Every day the triumvirate blogs and every day Northfield citizens comment.

The triumvirate wanted a journalist, who would provide the time and energy to do the digging and reporting they could not. With funding from the Harnisch Foundation, we were able to provide them with Bonnie Obremksi, our first Representative Journalist.

Today a post by Griff Wigley demonstrates what a good decision it was to go with Locally Grown. Read Griff’s post, he perhaps understands the new news ecosystem better than 99 percent of the folks in the news business. It is a brilliant sketch of how things might be in the future.

Indeed, if he and the good folks of Northfield succeed, it will fulfill many of the promises of public journalism which got me involved in first developing the Representative Journalism concept. Watch the work of Wigley and friends, it might just change the face of journalism.

PS. Without Wigley there would be no PJNet.org. He convinced me that I had to start blogging back in early 2003, when most of us were totally ignorant of blogging’s possibilities.

Here is what host Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project writes:

What motivates people to launch a local online news community — a “placeblog” and what are their challenges, their successes, the opportunities, vision and passion which accompany this work? Twelve citizen-journalists — “placebloggers” — gathered on Friday, June 6, 2008, for a one-hour conversation at Minnesota Public Radio. Listen to the auto stream of their conversation here. Or download an MP3 podcast for offline listening. Moderated by Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Here are a few excerpts:

Steve Yelvington, strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, talking of citizen participation says:

The key to meshing the bubbling social media elements of the site with the print product…is ensuring that the newspaper staff keeps tabs on—and participates in—online conversations. “When it works, the newsroom staff is engaged and comes back with a lot of impressions and leads they didn’t have before,” he says. “To me, that’s the way it fits with journalism. Trying to get people to go out and cover stories like a cub reporter doesn’t work very well.”

Kate Marymont, executive editor of the Fort Myers’ News Press, is quote in this passage:

Both the paper’s crowdsourcing and teamsourcing experiments have one thing in common: “A level of civic engagement I haven’t seen for a while…which is just fabulous.” While that’s a goal shared by many in the citizen journalism movement, it’s one particularly important for newspapers’ long-term survival as well.

And talking about our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota, in which we will provide the online community a fulltime reporter, I say:

“It’s not just an online newspaper that’s thrown on the online doorstep and the reporter walks away. The reporter is one voice in the bigger community—an informed voice, but one voice. Everyone else can jump in and add a bit of information, providing a higher-quality conversation.”

As I said read the whole white paper, it is an excellent overview of what’s happening.

The podcast gives an excellent idea of what we will be doing there. There is just on issue that I am kicking myself about. I never mentioned Ruth Ann Harnisch’s name. This project would not be happening without her intellectual, inspirational and financial support.