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.

…consider the list of the domestic issues that each filled less than a single percent of the newshole: education, race, religion, transportation, the legal system, housing, drug trafficking, gun control, welfare, Social Security, aging, labor, abortion and more. A related trait is a tendency to move on from stories quickly. On breaking news events — the Virginia Tech massacre or the Minneapolis bridge collapse were among the biggest — the media flooded the zone but then quickly dropped underlying story lines about school safety and infrastructure. And newer media seem to have an even narrower peripheral vision than older media. Cable news, talk radio (and also blogs) tend to seize on top stories (often polarizing ones) and amplify them. The Internet offers the promise of aggregating ever more sources, but its value still depends on what those originating sources are providing. Even as the media world has fragmented into more outlets and options, reporting resources have shrunk.

When you are ready for real news and information, let us know. We will provide it.

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.

Northfield, Minnesota has been chosen to try a new concept called Representative Journalism.

We are looking for an entrepreneurial journalist with experience both as a reporter (daily, weekly, or monthly publication) and with the online world (e.g., blogging, message boards, discussion lists, etc.). A willingness to engage with citizens (online and F2F) before, during and after publication of a story is mandatory. Knowledge of Northfield is helpful but not required.

The journalist’s stories will appear on Locally Grown, a two-year old blog and podcast about Northfield civic issues, with a large participatory following of area citizens and community leaders. The journalist will report directly to one of the nation’s most respected editors with a long distinguished career in journalism. See this Locally Grown blog post for more information.

This trial project will last approximately four months, but if successful could develop into a long-term job. For now this is a half-time, temporary position.

Email a letter of interest, resume, clips and references to Leonard Witt, lwitt@kennesaw.edu. Our team will be in Northfield and the Twin Cities on March 14-16 to talk with potential job candidates, so a prompt reply will be appreciated.

Hello Eric Von Hippel and thank you for convincing me that “free revealing” works.Several months ago, as regular readers of the PJNet.org know, I started freely revealing my idea of Representative Journalism to the world. Ruth Ann Harnisch, a former TV, print and radio journalist and now president of the Harnisch Family Foundation, came across the concept right here at the PJNet.org, now saying:

“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.

For a decade, however, Consumer Reports has charged Internet readers the same price as print subscribers, currently $26 a year (or $5.99 for a month’s online access or $45 a year to get the magazine both in print and on the Web). While the rest of the industry sees print readers as more valuable — because advertisers do — Consumer Reports actually makes more money from readers on its Web site, because it avoids printing, trucking and mailing costs.

“It’s not like we’re a stroke of brilliance,” said John Sateja, senior vice president for information products at Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports. “We had no choice. We have no advertising, so we had to survive on what readers pay.”

The organization does more than just survive. Consumers Union reports that its publications — Consumer Reports and a few much smaller ones — generated $208 million in revenue in the year ended May 31, with an operating margin of about $28 million.

A colleague in the Coles Business School at Kennesaw State University has a cartoon on his door. One panel of the cartoon says Information $1, the other says Information you need $500. I subscribe to Consumers Reports, but only use it a few times year. I am using it now for example as  I plan to buy a flat screen plasma TV.  I also am part of its information  sharing community in that most years I take the magazine’s annual auto and appliance reliability surveys.

This post also gives me a chance to remind readers that the Representative Journalism idea is alive and well, but the blog is being a bit neglected as I work on how to apply this concept. A backer is showing some interest. Maybe in the not too distant future I will be able to reveal more information.

 Journalism is becoming a high-tech profession.  And like other high-tech professions such as software and biotechnology, professionals experience instability – layoffs, job changes, changes in their organization’s mission.  The good news about this change is that it provides entrepreneurial opportunities for journalists – but few journalists are taking advantage of these opportunities. 

I am now trying to incorporate that thought into my own ideas as  I try to advance this Representative Journalism concept. Right now I am trying to come up with a full blown Representative Journalism plan so I am blogging on it less but thinking of Representative Journalism more than ever.

Thanks to computers there is really no need for the editor to be in the same building, county, state or country. The idea is to pair the best editors with the best journalists. That could change story by story, but my guess is that journalists will find editors who enhance their work and in time great relations will form. For a minute, I want to turn the clock back to when the New Journalism first made its appearance with the likes of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson producing fantastic literary nonfiction. Most of the local attempts bombed. Too often the reporters didn’t have the skills to be both great reporters and great writers. There were even fewer editors who understood what was needed to produce literary journalism.

Just think if those reporters who did have chops, would have been paired with the types of editors who were working with Didion, Wolfe and Thompson. The result would have been more greater writers. So for Representative Journalism it will probably be a good idea to build databanks filled with the names, resumes, writer recommendations and clips from the editors. Perhaps just like with Digg, their work would go through a filtering process and the reputation of the best of them would grow.  Every writer needs an editor; now we must develop mechanisms for the best of each to find each other.