by Denise
Last night was our first appreciation party, *cleverly* named SUPER-lative! We’re pretty zeroed in on Grand Rapids, but from what staff has heard, it seems like The Rapidian is some sort of experimental journalism darling right now. Flattered, of course, but none of it is even remotely possible without the obvious: Our reporters.
We’re two months shy of our first birthday, and we couldn’t have done any of this without our volunteers on all different levels. Among the many unsung heroes of The Rapidian are those who email us feedback about the site, our devoted editors (Darin Estep, Mark Rumsey, Kolene Allen, Rickey Ainsworth, Jen Proctor, Linda Gellasch, Roberta King, Kevin DenDulk and Maryann Lesert), cheerleaders of the project and the most unsung of them all: Ron Woldyk, our Web developer.
Staff is putting together a video article of our recent appreciation party. Stay tuned to The Rapidian; it’ll be up early next week!
by Denise
Yesterday, we had our first nonprofit training session this summer. The typical NPO training session runs 60-90 minutes and covers how The Rapidian works and tips for content submission. The last part of the training is devoted to a rundown of how to distribute content through social media.
So why was this training session different? I recently joined the board of the Midtown Neighborhood Association, and since June, I’ve been posting content as a nonprofit neighbor. Our constituency is geographic, and since there are such gaps between each distribution of the quarterly newsletter, our goal is to keep neighbors connected through timely news.
As the primary contact for MNA’s Rapidian account, I’ve registered with a NPO mindset. The observations our staff has garnered has prompted us to add two new fields to NPO profiles: A place to link to your organization’s Twitter and an area to add a condensed mission statement.
Perhaps more interesting is what I’ve found from adding content.
So cin cin, fellow nonprofiteers! Here’s to bountiful content that asks the question, what is useful to our audience?
by Denise
Forgive the theatre in our title, but it’s true! On B3 of yesterday’s edition of The Grand Rapids Press was the first Rapidian article to make it to print. Midtown Neighborhood Association authored the piece about the Fulton Street Farmers Market. You can read the story here.
by Denise
Catalyst Radio has been airing on 88.1 WYCE for five years. Last week was the first show since it made its new production home with The Rapidian.
Traditionally, the format for Catalyst Radio has been a laundry list of the latest media-related news, an interview segment with a nonprofit and an events calendar. Linda Gellasch and Tom Schwallie wore multiple hats as the producers, engineers and co-hosts for the show.
While the format under The Rapidian hasn’t changed too much, the first segment will now be a dialogue about recent media developments. Interview segments will now also feature Rapidian reporters and stories. Linda and Denise will host the weekly show.
You can catch the show at noon every Friday on WYCE 88.1 or streaming live.
by Denise
A couple of weeks ago, a student working with Chicago Now to implement outposts in the Gold Coast and Old Town contacted us. She wanted to conduct an interview via email. Her questions were heavy ones, and it took me two days to answer all eight. The last one, however, is a lesson I’ve been learning since we launched. It’s been hammered in with all the unforeseen hurdles that have come up in The Rapidian’s short life.
8. Any advice for those just starting a community news site?
Make sure to match your capacity with your execution. Most groups starting community news sites are limited in resources and have small staffs. It’s breathtaking to see excitement and ideas bubbling up around the concept of citizen reporting, and while you’ll get tons of feedback from every corner of your community, it’s important to be more than an inch deep. We all want to show people we’re being responsive to their feedback, but freeing capacity to pursue fresh ideas requires streamlining processes and hammering out patterns. Be patient, and you’ll create a deep foundation to go miles wide. After all, branches only grow as far as their roots.
I know: The answer was a bit flowery. But I stand by my point.
At last week’s staff meetings, we outlined our goals for summer and fall and then took a critical look at our inefficiencies as a staff. What took up most of our time? Was there any streamlining solution or way to distribute the work so we could free up more capacity?
By the end of summer, we hope to have accomplished the following:
by Denise
We know, we know. Crickets. That’s how quiet, we’ve been. Since November, a lot of things have happened. We’ll try harder at posting regular dev updates. In the meantime, here’s a laundry list of most of what we’ve done (click on the links to skip ahead):
Matthew Russell joined our core staff in December as the content facilitator. Matt also works as a news/web editor for The Advance. He’s well-known in these here parts for his delicious vegan cookies, experiments with kombucha and rounds out our staff as a bike commuter.
Our site took a day off on Dec. 14, 2009 and returned the next day decked out in beta II features. To find out about changes, improvements and additions, take a look at New Media Planner George Wietor’s staff editorial.
We held our first press pit in November and have continued at a rate of one per month. An active reporter presents at each press pit about his or her process and tips. Afterward, we break out into smaller groups. Originally, press pits were intended to bring contributors and interested participants together to ask questions, brainstorm, share and mingle. Talking with our reporters, we realized that while there were many audience members who would love to contribute, they were intimidated by the idea of long, in-depth pieces and weren’t sure whether their story ideas would even garner an audience.
We had a great turnout in November, and that number started to dwindle to a core group with each subsequent gathering. We decided to try something different for March: A targeted press pit. It seemed that the more press pits we held, the less people needed a great deal of time to brainstorm, so for March, we asked two of our active reporters to present on their collaboration about development in the Heartside neighborhood. It was still the core group, but with much more participation and something for everyone, from registered users to seasoned contributors.
Based on instructor feedback from the first half of the 2009-2010 academic year, we’ve created an instructors manual to answer common questions and help walk our instructor-editors through the editorial and publishing process. We have yet to create a section on the site for instructor resources and are planning on brainstorming with instructors at the end of the school year so we can ramp up for the 2010-2011 academic year.
SW had its first “friendraiser” on March 10 at the Cook Library Center to increase The Rapidian’s exposure in SW and the Hispanic community. We’re still working at community building and awareness about The Rapidian.
We are partnering with Lighthouse Communities for the SE quadrant. With this quadrant, we feel it’s important to establish a SE presence on The Rapidian before heavily recruiting volunteer contributors. We will be meeting with various nonprofits, neighborhood associations and community-based organizations to encourage them to utilize The Rapidian to the fullest. Once we have formed strong neighborhood partnerships, we’ll begin identifying potential reporters together.
We held a low-key competition in February to increase and diversify contributions to our Flickr photo bank. Winners will receive a Rapidian t-shirt with a QR code that, when scanned, will take smart phone users straight to The Rapidian’s front page.
Catalyst Radio is a long-running program on WYCE Radio (one of the Community Media Center’s other branches). It has traditionally showcased nonprofits and community goings-on, starting with an overview of media developments, interview segment and closed out with an events calendar. The Rapidian will now play a part in the production. The first leg of the show will still be about media development and literacy but in dialogue form. The middle section will alternate between interviews, reporter showcases and audio stories. The events calendar will remain the same. First show to air in a couple of weeks.
After several tweeters asked us to set up a twitter feed for our content, we took the plunge and created @VeryLocal. You can read more about it in George’s staff editorial.
GRPRESS COLLABORATION ON A TOWN HALL
We facilitate a good many meetings: The local Drupal meetup, nonprofit Rapidian sessions and most recently, an indie PR session. They’ve all been sort of similar, but we’re partnering with The Grand Rapids Press to put on our first town hall. In journalism, town halls really sprouted out of the public journalism movement of the 1980s, early ’90s. The point was to translate awareness into meaning by physically bringing an audience together to discuss what a hyperlocal issue meant to them and whether there was any action that should come out of it.
We’re currently working on the details and are aiming for late April, early May, but both The Rapidian and The Grand Rapids Press are very excited about this.
There are a lot of other additions we’ve made, such as a weekly digest and weekly updates to all users and a weekly email of story pitches and goings-on (complete with potential questions) to reporters and editors on The Rapidian (we crosspost them on Facebook notes). We’re gearing up for spring and summer to increase our audience base and number of active contributors. We’ve created a user bar for the site since beta two launched. Most of all, we’re trying to hammer out routines so we can increase our capacity to tackle all the inspiring ideas we’ve received via feedback.
by Denise
In late May, Google announced its newest application, Google Wave. This application is supposed to revolutionize the Internet. Google developers described it as what email would look like if it were invented now.
A combination of live email threading, instant messaging and wiki editing, Google Wave dazzled web developers and professionals across all disciplines. To boot? It’s open source. For everything there is to know about Google Wave, read Mashable’s complete guide.
After four months of drum roll, Wave debuted in late September. Since then, there’s been a bit of confusion. For anyone who’s watched the Google I/O presentation on Wave, it’s exactly as the video described. Due to the sparse number of people using Wave, it’s also created this sort of experience:
In the one-and-a-half months since Wave hit the scene, there’s been very little news about what developers are doing with it. Invites have been slow to come. After more than a month on Google Wave, I only recently got the ability to distribute 20 invites. As we’ve seen in the past, developers create the infrastructure, but the most innovative uses for web apps come from users. Perhaps Wave would benefit by widening its early adopter pool.
Anyway, The Rapidian and Wave: I personally hope that Wave will replace our static commenting system.
In this social media age, conversations on the same topic in different forums is common. This is amplified if the original source for the material (i.e.: an article on The Rapidian) has a barrier to entry (i.e.: site registration; take a look at Chris Apap’s article). The material is reblogged, tweeted and crossposted to Facebook. Although these sites aren’t specifically themed, Quantcast will tell you each are dominated by socioeconomic strats and more. With these walled-off conversations, there is little cross-pollination of diverse perspectives. Often times, instead of building on a conversation, the same ideas are being rehashed.
Waves are embeddable on blogs and Web sites. My hope is there will be tweaks so that users do not first have to register a Google account to register for a Wave account; for Wave to be compatible with the way user accounts have been structured (i.e.: all Rapidian site users agree to a no-anonymity policy)*; and for existing accounts to be easily ported over to Wave accounts on the hosting site. Assuming this pie in the sky is possible, if Wave becomes the universal platform for commenting, then everybody would be participating in the same town hall despite where in the interwebs they’re coming from.
For more cool ways people are using Wave, check out Lifehacker’s compilation.
*I realize this has its own issues because not all sites prescribe to a no-anonymity policy. It looks like the web is starting to trend this way, but maybe if more sites became OpenID hosts?
by Denise
Having come from a journalism background, I care very much about the industry’s future. But as the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, I’ve heard more than one professional journalist say, “I get paid for my content.” Sometimes, it’s said with a degree of smugness and other times, with desperation.
Traditionally, citizen journalism has been viewed by professional journalists as the amateur hour. Regardless of what it is, it can still be useful to professional journalists.
As a citizen journalism experiment, we’ve billed The Rapidian as a supplement—not a replacement—to a dwindling local press. Together, journalists and citizens will have to find a solution to the shrinking news scape.
Of course, professional journalists are not only concerned about the existence of solid information but also the suspension of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, almost every journalism theorist and expert is emphasizing the importance of entrepreneurship in this uncharted and potentially innovative chapter of journalism. You see it in J-schools. You see it in tweets. You see it in posts like this. The self-starters will be the ones who get ahead in this rocky news climate. In the absence of a formula, the common advice is to catch up on your Flash, HTML and Wordpress. Register on Digg. Become the Jack and Jill of Internet trades.
But having taught social media classes where there was always at least one laid-off journalist, registering for a Flickr account just to keep up is not necessarily the right answer. After all, many people who are successful in social media are driven by their passion for the Internet or a particular hobby.
No, no.
This is where The Rapidian comes in. Not as journalists but as local citizens: Why not contribute to your hyperlocal news source?
I’m not saying report for The Rapidian the same way you would produce a story for WZZM. That’s up to you and your employer. There are so many opportunities to highlight topics that wouldn’t normally make it past the cutting room floor. Are you into architecture? Do an urban exploring photo essay that highlights unusual building cornices around town. Planning a family outing? Let other people (especially new families or new parents) know about family-friendly places and events like Eastown Street Fair. Use a medium that you are not expected to use in the professional newsroom. Photo slideshows, audio clips, comics, Flip-cam it up!
Professional journalists who are the most indisposable tend to be embraced outside of the newsroom. Take Tommy Allen of Rapid Growth Media or GRPress’ Gonzo. Not every journalist is granted a blog, though. Most journalists cover very specific beats.
The marketing hype around social media can basically be melted down to this: Social media is about making a brand of your life and interests. Twitter, Drop.io, Bit.ly—they’re just tools you can use.
The Rapidian is another of these platforms. It’s shaping up to be a positive place for the Grand Rapids community, and that community grows every day. Arguing for the validity of journalism as an industry doesn’t do much for saving specific jobs, but making yourself a fixture in your community makes you an asset to any company’s reputation.
Flickr photo by ShironekoEuro, used under Creative Commons
I am a husband, father of two and journalist who would rather be a proponent of free speech than sell my abilities for market value.
