This is a fascinating effort, I think. Since the idea is that these local news operations will be “crowdsourced” or community-financed, in many ways it reminds me of Spot.us, the “crowd-funded” journalism effort from David Cohn — and in fact, the two are sharing ideas and sit on each other’s advisory boards (Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project and Lisa Williams of Placeblogger are also on the Representative Journalism advisory board). It’s not clear whether RepJ or Spot.us are viable long-term models for journalism, but there’s no question they are both interesting experiments. The Locally Grown Northfield project in particular seems like a thriving model for a local, community-driven news operation — and one that is worth keeping an eye on.

Here is why I like our Locally Grown trial: almost everyday someone on the project tries something just a little different, adds another idea. It is not static and each idea seems to bring us a little closer to the goal of figuring out how to get the community more involved and to help fund journalism.

Today in The New York Times media critic David Carr wrote:

Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.

Here is what I wrote on January 12, 2007 exactly two years ago to the day:

Here is my biggest question. What will happen when only the journalism is left? It has grown out of a Christmas present I received. It is a small portable GPS. So I can walk about, tell it to find me the barbecue places or the department stores or the visitor center. In other words, what I might have needed a newspaper for in the past all pops up instantly in front of me when I need it and literally walks me to my destination step by step, street by street.

So who needs newspaper advertising if you have that, and, of course, soon everyone will have it in a more perfected form than we have now.

Today we have the iPhone and that is only a primitive example of what we will have in the future.

David Carr ended his piece today by saying:

Now all we need is a business model…

Well a week later in January 2007, I posted my manifesto of sorts called: The Need to Reinvent Journalism While We Can. In it I wrote about what we needed then and still need now. We need:

A model where everything goes back into paying for the journalism. High quality equipment, high quality reporters and editors paid an excellent wage, high quality connectivity with the communities served, and high quality journalism that helps the community members find their way, while always being ready to speak truth to power. We can do it.

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 reporter Douglas MacMillan wrote about Rep J and its Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota:

Rather than sponsoring a story, what if you allowed readers to sponsor a reporter? In July, the rural town of Northfield, Minn., “hired” Bonnie Obremski to cover local topics like crime, education, and events on an existing blog called Locally Grown. Obremski’s assignment is the pilot phase for a program being developed by Leonard Witt, a professor of communication at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta. Currently, Obremski’s salary and expenses are paid for entirely by a grant from The Harnisch Foundation, but in coming months, Witt plans to raise enough local support from Northfield residents to pass the entire cost on to them. A community of 1,000 potential contributors, he says, each paying between $1 and $2 per week, would be sufficient. People in the community understand that eventually they’ll be asked to ante up.

Two-Way Conversation

Obremski is confident the experiment will work, judging by the way she’s gotten her readers involved in her reporting. “I invite my readers to participate in all parts of the story-making process online,” she says. “Readers understand that I’m engaged with them in a two-way conversation. They see how I get my information and how I process it.”

Witt’s larger vision, a project he calls Representative Journalism, is to bring this model to a hundred or more different communities in the country, both geographic and topic-centric. For example, one group of people with an interest in endangered species in Florida might sponsor its own journalist to write stories specifically focused on that topic. “We have this assumption that news is free,” Witt says. Unless people become willing to pay, “We’re going to reach a critical point where we’re not going to have the kind of news we want anymore.”

The discussion is part of a conference hosted by Bill Densmore, who heads the Media Giraffe Project and who is currently a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.

You can livesteam into the conference to hear Obremski by going here; her talk begins at 1 p.m. EST. Full details are here.

He contends the White blogosphere — read HuffingtonPost – is less relevant than the ethnic blogosphere.  Finally Howard Witt says mainstream media job cuts might mean the Jena 6 and Shaquanda Cotton type stories, both of which he broke, might not be possible in the future.

It is a 10-minute interview worth watching.

By the way, Leonard and Howard Witt are not related — except that they both care deeply about the fate of great journalism.

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.

 If you could build the ideal newsroom from scratch, what would it look like? We’re trying to help The Chronicle, the Duke University student newspaper, find an answer. Our project is being funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation  as part of the News Challenge Grant program.

Before we can build the Next Newsroom, we’ve been trying to address many other questions about a student newspaper’s role in its community. How must the newspaper’s mission evolve as technology and media consumption change, and how must its facilities evolve with it? What sort of workspace best attracts and prepares the journalists of tomorrow? How might print, broadcast and online media be integrated? How can such a newsroom encourage the community to engage in citizen journalism? How can a media center shape campus life? How important is the newsroom’s size and location in the digital age?

You can follow along here and since they are using Cover It Live, you can join the discussion.

Of course, I will be touting our Representative Journalism project and the yearlong community reporting fellowship that goes with it.  

 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.