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.

Bill and Ruth Ann Harnisch awarded the check in New York this morning. The university will be putting out a formal press release, but I don’t want to get scooped. So you will read it here first, unless you follow Ruth Ann on Twitter, she sent a Tweet as the check was giving granted.

The Harnisch Foundation has supported the Representative Journalism concept from the very beginning. In fact, without Ruth Ann Harnisch’s inspirational, intellectual and financial support, Representative Journalism would probably just be an idea rather than a concept that is now being tested at Locally Grown in Northfield, Minnesota.

The funding will open the possibility of seeding more Representative Journalism projects, and I have always said this concept will work best when there are dozens of Rep Js across the country. In fact, I am in the beginning stages of a trial project with a public broadcasting station, but more about that later. First a gigantic thank you to Bill and Ruth Ann Harnisch for their visionary support for the future of journalism.

McGill’s students have been posting an impressive series of local journalism stories and posting them at Locally Grown. Their work is worth watching, hearing and reading.

Here is a description of McGill’s class:

272. Truth vs. Power: A Journey in Journalism

Journalism is in turmoil today. Bold experimentation is needed to meet such dramatic new challenges to journalism as the Internet, the decline of newspapers, multilingual readerships, and global crises requiring activism more than “objectivity.” The class will move between a theoretical focus — exploring journalism’s basic theories and often-contradictory methods, purposes and aims –and a practical focus inviting students to strive towards their highest journalistic ideals. Students will be challenged to blend journalism’s indispensable norms of factual accuracy, fairness and quality writing with new technologies such as blogging, podcasting, videocasting, social networking and RSS feeds. 6 credits, AL.
Fall — D. McGill

Here are my full responses to Glaser’s email inquiries:

I know you have received foundation funding to get RepJ off the ground. Do you see a crowdfunding aspect of this work in the future?

David Cohn and I are talking about trying an adaptation of the Spot.Us model to help raise funds for a Representative Journalist  now working at the Locally Grown blog in Northfield, Minnesota.  The RepJ experiment aims to learn if communities of interest or geographic communities, which are not getting all the news and information they want or need, will fund valuable journalism on a long-term basis.

Cohn’s Bay Area experiment is episodic, story-by-story funding. I am looking for long-term sustainable funding for the RepJ model. So there would have to be an adjustment, but the basic structure of Spot.Us looks extremely promising. It’s easy to understand and easy to use. That’s incredibly important. Plus we know from Kiva that crowdfunding for a good cause works extremely well.

We also saw crowdfunding work during the Presidential Election process. Barak Obama, via small contributions from the crowd, was able to dwarf the old top down models. The best recent example was when US Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, got on Chris Matthews’ Hardball and said Obama was unpatriotic and should be investigate. Spontaneously the left via crowdfunding raised more than a million dollars for her Democratic challenger Elwyn Tinklenberg.

So outrage works too. Hey, maybe there is a business model in that. When Sarah Palin starts pushing back against the media, the crowd angrily responds with massive funding to underwrite a huge endowment to support investigative journalism. David Cohn, tweak Spot.Us now, install an outrage button.

How has your experiment worked out so far in Minnesota? What has been successful and what hasn’t?

Something that differentiates the Rep J model from the Spot.Us model is that for ours to work we have to do lots of relationship building with the community. Our universe is much smaller. We are dealing with a total Northfield population of just 17,000. We have to literally weave together an information community of members willing to pay for high quality journalism. So we have to work on three fronts. One we have to provide high quality journalism, two we have to get the community to know our journalist, and three the community has to feel that their membership in the community and the news and information it produces has value worthy of their financial support. Then they might click on the Spot.Us button and fund the journalist.

We have been at our Rep J project in Northfield for just four months, so it is too early to tell if this project will work, but we are learning a lot. Our journalist Bonnie Obremski,  who is being underwritten by a grant from the Harnisch Foundation, has done a great job of embedding herself in the community. She gets lots of support from Griff Wigley, Tracy Davis and Ross Currier, the triumvirate who run Locally Grown blog, and just now we have reached the stage where Obremski can fully concentrate on the journalism, which is why she is there.

What’s your vision for how RepJ might be a part of the future of journalism?

There are several ways this could work, mostly as a cooperative or nonprofit. One would be for an entity like PBS – are you listening PBS – to adopt this model for backpack video journalists. I am convinced overnight they could have 100 RepJs filling the video news void, just as NPR filled the audio news void. Can Georgia, for example, find a 1,000 people willing to pay $100 each annually to underwrite a Georgia reporter to be in this national reporting pool? I say yes. Can they find another 1,000 people in Georgia willing to underwrite, let’s say, a reporter covering water issues? I say yes. Could Michigan do the same with a Michigan reporter and another reporting on manufacturing? Maybe two or three in California covering the state plus another covering alternative lifestyles. Of course, they could. You could do that with two reporters in all 50 states, that’s 100 reporters. PBS has the funding mechanisms in place, it has the platforms, it has the expertise in shooting video. And now shooting video is just as cheap as making radio. PBS would then have a website with at least 50 news stories a day. It would be updated constantly. Also the next time there is a national crisis PBS would have 100 reporters around the country covering it and then PBS becomes vital to the nation. In other words, RepJ with a little crowdfunding and a little community building can make PBS a news powerhouse – if PBS wants to become a news powerhouse.

The other option is for me or someone smarter than I to build a national full service RepJ Hub, which provides journalists to communities of interest – let’s say folks interested in endangered species in Florida – and geographical communities. You pay $2 a week and get your endangered species reporter, plus 99 other reporters covering other issues who are funded by other communities of 1,000. So you come to the RepJ site each day and get 50 new news stories every day. Is that worth $2 a week per information community member? I think so.

Or let’s get serious for a second about the Sarah Palin thing. If you think the nation’s news media is under siege and high quality journalism might disappear, would you pay $2 a week to be part of a membership community owning the News for Democracy site? I would hit the Spot.Us payment for that. Wouldn’t you?

New York Times media columnist David Carr chronicles recent newspaper gloom writing:

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

After writing about other moribund news operations he writes:

At the recent American Magazine Conference, one of the speakers worried that if the great brands of journalism — the trusted news sources readers have relied on — were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become a “cesspool” of useless information. That kind of hand-wringing is a staple of industry gatherings.

But in this case, it wasn’t an old journalism hack lamenting his industry. It was Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.

I think all of us in the industry have to say and believe:

• High quality journalism has value.
• If it has value, consumers should be willing to pay for it –just like they pay for a haircut or cable TV.
• We must make consumers aware that the coming cesspool of useless information is figuratively about to backup at their electronic doorsteps
• And without journalism, their city sewers are literally apt to back up in their front and back yards.
• We must provide the high quality journalism and market it extensively, while building high quality information communities with our audiences, who will spread the message virally and ensure it is heard, understood and championed.

• Emerging Career Options: Digital Media and Your Future
• Whither Journalism: Emerging Directions
• Not-So-Idle Chatter: How Blogging and Social Media Can Build Your Career

I do believe that at least some environmental journalists will have great opportunities if they pick up on the Representative Journalism model. More later.

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.