Here is background from Rosen:

Let’s find out what the printed newspaper on the local level has been able to deliver recently, so we know in rough, round terms what we have to replace.

Tip from Bloggasm.

I am the person behind the Representative Journalism project that is taking place in Northfield, Minnesota via the Locally Grown blog. As many of you know, Bonnie Obremski, thanks to Harnisch Foundation funding, is now Northfield’s very own Rep J reporter.

Today in Northfield we are asking her to put all of her energies toward helping the folks of Northfield understand how the economic crisis is affecting their town. Griff Wigley, who along with Tracy Davis and Ross Currier runs Locally Grown, first posted about the economic meltdown in mid-September. Since then almost 200 comments have been added to that post.

In that post Griff wrote in part:

Looks like a real meltdown. Let’s try to make sense of it… especially how it might impact things locally.

Here was my comment today at Locally Grown addressed to the good folks of Northfield:

So why not add some evidence-based reporting by Bonnie Obremski to this discussion? Who are key people with whom she should be speaking? What stories could she do to answer your questions on how this economic crisis might affect Northfield? What effects are already taking place that should be reported in greater detail?

I have asked her to concentrate on what we are calling Spotlight on the Economy — she needs your help, your ideas.

The idea is for her to provide evidence based reporting and for all of you at Locally Grown to put the stories into a greater context, build upon what she finds, provide story ideas, tell your personal stories and when appropriate suggest ways to act on those stories.

I do believe with that combination of her reporting and your contextualizing we will have a greater understanding of what all this means to your private lives and to the public life of Northfield.

Then in a later comment at Locally Grown I wrote about the biggest challenge for any local reporter:

There is no way that Bonnie is going to do the international banking aspects of this story. She will do the local story. How is the fiscal crisis affecting Main Street and your neighbors right in Northfield?

Of course, the international banking story affects the local economy in profound ways. The Rep J/Locally Grown community’s challenge is to make sense of something which is driven by forces far from home.

We’ll keep you posted on developments as this phase of our Representative Journalism experiment in Northfield moves forward.

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.

He healed our sick hospitals and anemic health care system and all but rose the lame, struck down by diabetes, from their wheelchairs  — and he did it with narratives, stories, examples and explanations that had just enough common sense logic to make them seem doable.

And for all of that, he deserved page three on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Metro page, with the headline that reads:

Former president skips Obama jabs in speeches 

Ah, if only he had taken even a tiny jab, certainly that would have pushed him to the front page of the Metro section and a nice round-house swing would have elevated him to 1A status. But no, he offered nothing more than a rousing speech for which hundreds of people, the Marietta Daily Journal said thousands, stood in line for more than an hour to hear. The wimp, the palooka. Thus not even a photo.

Okay, I get it, the hardcopy part of the newspaper only has so much room, the website will reflect the feeling of celebration. After all, this is Cobb County, Georgia, home of Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr, certainly one must ask: Where the hell did all these Democrats come from? I know that was a question people were asking in the line itself. 

The Marietta Daily Journal, the real hometown newspaper, did, in fact, run the story with big photos on Page 1A, and with a massive headline that reflected the mood of the crowd, and not the disappointment of the AJC reporter, with a line from Clinton’s speech:

Rebuild the Dream

The difference is that the AJC plays for a mass audience and apparently does not have a clue how to connect in new ways with small fragmented communities. Hence, they wait for the punch in the face or at least the hope of a head butt. A former President — for whom people waited not just an hour, but really for years to see in person — connecting with his tribe was a thing of beauty, which the AJC with its old ways of covering the news, basically ignored. But that ignoring, built out of ignorance of social media, is done at its own peril.  

Rather than wasting everyone’s time by burying a story on page three that no one will read, why not direct that energy to engage the hundreds of people who came to this event. Let them share photos, stories, which you play up for anyone who is interested. Do the same with the other candidates, with rock concerts, with demonstrations, but don’t just write about who is on the stage; instead be the indispensable catalyst for community building, bring your tribes back home just as Bill Clinton did last night at Kennesaw State University. Give yourself a punch in the face, wake up; find yourself the 100-mile-a-gallon news operation, raise up from your wheelchair, rebuilt your anemic ways…and tomorrow you will feel good about yourself just as Bill Clinton’s crowd feels good about themselves this fine Saturday. 

So rather having an immigrant lift your aging mother from a bed directly, you have a robotic arm controlled via computer by a someone in a far away land do it. Robots are not smart enough to do a lot tasks by themselves, but if they are remotely controlled by a human, they can do thousands of tasks, even delicate ones.

So now that brings us to our citizen journalists as robots controlled by professional journalists or better yet professional journalists controlled by citizens or the true panacea for higher quality journalism is to have it both ways.

Here is the experiment at work. Robert Scoble, whom the BBC calls the blogger and videoblogger extraordinaire, was at the World Economic Forum in Davos interviewing folks for his website, and BBC blogger Tim Weber watched as Scoble interviewed Marc Benioff, a Davos participant:

…not with a big video camera but a small Nokia mobile phone, that sent a live video stream of the interview to his website. So far, so ambitious. Now comes the stunner. While he was doing the interview, Robert saw live on his phone screen the comments and questions posted by his viewers.

Just to illustrate how it works: When Marc pulled me into the conversation, within half a minute Robert had live on his screen a reader’s query about the BBC’s video-on-demand policy. Robert asked me the question straight away, and as we continued talking about the mobile phone industry and video on the web, more BBC-related queries piled up.

Since a citizen journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the delicate task of doing a professional interview and since a professional journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the complicated task of getting citizens involved on the scene when he or she is out on a interview, we now can bring in help from afar via technology, just as we would if we were really talking about robots.

Now this is extremely big — a stunner really — because it can change the equation of how news is gathered and reported, especially for smaller scale equations like with my Representative Journalism idea where groups of a thousand or smaller can hire their own journalists.

Just as Scoble did, if I am a reporter, I would use Twitter to tell my audience that I am on my way to interview Mr. Big. In five minutes, I will be live streaming the interview back to my website or to your iPhone, please jump in with your questions.

Or if you are a citizen journalist reporting on Mr. Big, you Twitter whichever newsrooms might be interested in the interview. The professional editors log on to your livestream at your website or on their cell phones and can do two things: 1) quickly verify that you are in fact interviewing Mr. Big, and 2) can feed you questions.  The mainstream then has a verified, professionally enhanced interview that it can use in its stories. Even when things happen spontaneously.

The citizen journalist gets to do a fun, exciting or interesting interview, maybe with monetary compensation, without worrying about the more complicated stuff that is necessary to finish a full-blown story. The mainstream media expand their reporting resources.  

Of course, the real panacea is that pro and amateur journalists Twitter their editors and citizen bases at the same time. So during an interview  the reporter, the editors and the citizenery all are weighing into the interview. It is putting Jay Rosen’s Beatblogging into real time, any time. It is citizen, civic and public journalism Nirvana.

Update: Marietta Daily Journal reports that Trooper Grant Rowe didn’t stop in time and caused this six car rear end crash chain reaction. He was just on general patrol.

Here are highligths, starting with Maier writing about one of his own initiatives:

When I founded Readers Edition, the term “citizen journalist” was not yet as confusingly common and widespread as it is today. Too many media organizations had hastily recruited readers as cheap contributors, promoting these “citizen journalists” as a great innovation, when in fact their goal was cost savings. With Readers Edition we saw the readers’ role differently; we really wanted to give them a voice. I was curious to learn what readers were really interested in, as opposed to what journalists think is important for their readers to know, or as opposed to what topics the marketing department pushes (I sometimes think that if the marketers had their way, papers would consist solely of car, cosmetic, and watch sections.). I had two different editions of the same paper in mind: one produced by journalists, the other by readers. What would be alike, what would differ? What rules should be established? Would it work at all? What if none of the readers was willing to write?

Of course, this allows me to make one more pitch for Representative Journalism my concept to reinvent journalism.

He adds:

Sometimes, when a very long, self-loving text about some bizarre topic arrived, I considered renaming the paper Writer’s Edition. People write what they like. They write about “things they care about, in their own voice and in the formats they think are best fit for them,” as German media-scientist Stefan Büffel puts it. Readers who write hardly think about other readers. They are driven by self-realization.  

Paraphrasing Bill Kovach, founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, Maier writes:

Engagement through interactive databases; interactive engagement in conceiving stories, providing expert input and advising on sources of data; and engaging in direct conversation with the audience in blogs as part of the reporting on a series of stories.

Here is how the blogging landscape has changed:

While a fellow at Harvard, Maier conducted a small survey of political bloggers which he says:

A video at CyberJournalist.net entitled Citizen Journalism at War provides nice insights on how citizen journalism is changing war coverage, and perhaps helping us all find a more complete truth.  

I feel like I have learned — the hard way — some truths about grassroots content and online community.

One lesson:

building a business on a core of user-submitted content is tough….In hindsight, I think we tried to rely too heavily on user submitted content. Even though a lot of it was really great, the overall experience was weak when compared to, say, reading a climbing or a mountain biking magazine filled with quality professional content throughout…If I had any money left to throw at the business, I’d hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content — and I’d mix that in with the best user content…Quality matters…In my view — and based in part on my experience with the Enthusiast Group project — user content when it stands on its own is weak. But it’s powerful when appropriately combined with professional content, and properly targeted.

Here is more about the end of the company.