Representative Journalism

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University takes a look at our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota and likes what it sees. Here is a snippet of what Mathew Ingram writes:

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 2:51 am and is filed under Journalism, Journalism Business Models, Journalism jobs, Locally Grown, Representative Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.