by Denise

Drew Storey, The Rapidian’s content facilitator, passed away unexpectedly yesterday.

Drew has been involved with The Rapidian since before it was named The Rapidian, when “Log Jam,” “Red Button,” “16th Bridge” and others were part of the naming smorgasbord. He spearheaded our editorial committee as a volunteer chair and hammered out a comprehensive editorial policy that has been the beacon for The Rapidian. After joining The Rapidian staff, Drew said being content facilitator was his dream job.

Although softspoken, Drew was all about community. He was an active volunteer with The Rapidian for nine months prior to being hired on, a board member for the Grand Rapids Community Media Center and also volunteered with many local groups to help with their communications.

He is survived by his high school sweetheart and wife of many years, Danielle (née Schmidt), and their young daughters Madison and Taylor.

The Rapidian will post information as we receive it in the coming days including how the community can make contributions to help with expenses and provide support to the family. For full obituary and memorial service details, please visit MLive.

by Denise

George and I recently presented at the Alliance for Community Media’s central states conference. Many people asked for our slides, so here they are:

by Denise

As a part of our Knight Foundation Community Information Challenge grant, we’re not only establishing an online presence but also four neighborhood news bureaus hosted at community centers in each quadrant of Grand Rapids.

Dun dun dun! And the first news bureau to step up to the plate: Cook Library! Our neighbors over at the Grandville Avenue Academy for the Arts have generously staked out a corner in Cook Library to establish a news bureau in what is predominantly a Hispanic community (72.7% in 2000, not including undocumented immigrants).

While we’re eager to establish The Rapidian as an outlet for this community, there are very unique questions coming up in such a grassroots approach. We’re currently putting together a Grandville-specific committee with members from the community. In the meantime, here’s a smattering of the sort of questions we’ve been trying to answer:

• Within the Hispanic community, who will the news bureau be most accessible to? Children? Teenagers? Adults?
• What is the most effective way to let people know we’re a resource?
  • Bilingual printouts?
  • Word of mouth via children?
  • Churches?
  • Schools?
• How do we create an applicable news bureau to the widest audience in the Hispanic community?
  • Equipment?
  • Software?
  • Volunteers and procedures?
• What type of media will the community most naturally gravitate toward? How can we encourage content creation and deemphasize equipment savvy?
• How do we add to the site to reflect new content from this community?
• How do we incorporate non-English content?
• If we’re able to establish ourselves within this community, how do we then open it up to others in the SW quadrant?

Cook Library is the first “guinea pig,” but “hyperlocal” isn’t just a way to describe news content, it’s also the definition of grassroots community building. I’m pretty sure every bureau that is established will become a guinea pig in its own right.

by Denise

Here at The Rapidian, we’ve tried to create a framework for honest and relevant content. A week and a half after launch is still too early to assess the outlet’s strengths and weaknesses, but here’s what we’ve learned:

Content type

Since the beta launch, we’ve discovered our site structure is not sufficient. Currently, we have three main categories: News, local life and opinion. News has the most sections, but the majority of content we receive are features that fit under local life. Of the rest of the submissions, it’s a toss up between news and opinion, but even news submissions aren’t necessarily time-sensitive.

Coverage

With little prodding, few people are initially going to look at citizen journalism as an opportunity to explore issues they don’t know the answer to. People are going to start out creating content on what they care about, what they know and what they’re involved in.

With our general target audience, it might be a hyped up assumption that citizen reporters are most valuable because they cover what’s not published by professional media. In professional journalism, the news section is the heftiest because news pieces are generally succinct. They don’t necessarily ask the audience to think critically as they consume. At least in the first week, we’ve realized that citizen reporters will naturally start out reporting on specific aspects of news that have not been explored in-depth by mainstream media.

Disclosure

So what does this mean? Ithaca College Student TJ Gunther asked, “what’s more important, freedom of citizens to report or truth and preservation of the Rapidian name?”

To us, these aren’t polar opposites; they go hand-in-hand. We’ll only have a name to preserve if our citizens report truthfully, and the citizen reporters will determine what reputation we have to guard.

However, we also need to do our part to tease out content that is relevant to everyone. Quality information can sometimes be obscured by first-person narratives that keep audiences from digesting content critically. To address this, once we take care of the quirks on the Web site, we’re going to add another text field to each submission that goes something like this:

Disclosure: What motivated you to create this piece? (300 characters max)

We’ve received pieces that use first person in the intro but then continue as features. We’ve also received some very self-promotional pieces that needed to be edited down. The disclosure text field is our attempt to nudge citizen reporters to focus on the subjects in their pieces rather than their first-hand experiences by providing a separate space for that.

Drew Storey, the content facilitator for The Rapidian, is an ex-homecoming king who simply assumed he’d become famous one day. Surprisingly, none of the jobs he’s had since age 15—bus boy, pool boy, pizza boy, janitor, postal carrier, cab driver, park ranger, truck driver, warehouse worker, reporter—led to stardom.

While cutting his reporter chops at a local weekly community newspaper, Drew honed his limited, but natural writing abilities and found his voice. When a deeply-ingrained contempt for authority led to his termination, Drew dabbled in freelance writing, movie making and experimented with creating a local literary zine. He spends his free time reading, playing outdoors and simultaneously catering to his two daughters while cursing their names.

Having lived on the West Side for the past 6 years with his wife and two children, Drew couldn’t help but develop a pride for the City of Grand Rapids while feeding an appreciation for Polish food and beer. He looks forward to using the aforementioned experiences to help mold The Rapidian into something unique, relevant and inspiring.

by Denise

A couple of days ago, in preparation for our beta launch, we tweeted that we were claiming #Rapidian for our own. If you saw breaking news going down in front of you, tweet with the hashtag #Rapidian to make it to our front page Twitter widget. We were expecting to see tweets like @TommyGSync’s:

Since then, we’ve had some surprising results. While most people use #Rapidian as a replacement for @TheRapidian, some particularly bright bulbs have used it to highlight pieces that actually don’t link back to The Rapidian. Before we even had a chance to turn our heads from the computer screen, @srdailey had made his mark on Rapidian history:

He had crossposted an opinion by Juliet Bennett Rylah on Founders Brewery forbidding a fundraising event on their premises for a politically controversial cause. After all, it is GR news.

Following the unveiling of The Rapidian, @ericbuist piggy-backed off the #Rapidian hashtag to bring attention to Spinneractive, a new interactive marketing group.

Then two posts from @hipphop:

All this to say that we asked our Twitter community to use #Rapidian for sharing newsworthy snippits, and you never know what sort of grab bag the interwebs will give you. These are the early stages, a time for experimenting. We’re looking forward to seeing how the community will determine what #Rapidian means.

by Denise

I was only partially kidding when I tweeted about HTML the other night. It’s been a while since we posted, but it’s because we’ve been in crunch mode. The site unveiling is just around the corner! So much to do!

Ron, George and I have been hacking away steadily on the Drupal site. Of course, Ron’s got the heaviest load with all that’s left to develop. George is working on graphics and permissions for the different roles we’ll have, from registered users to editors. I’m putting together all the static pages like terms and conditions, about us and pages that link back to the core static pages.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered Drupal through my work. In Portland, I worked on a project led by Denver’s Deproduction called the Open Media Project. Denver had already developed a Drupal tool set that allows site users to register for classes, reserve equipment, submit video content online and vote for favorite shows. Through a complicated algorithm, these votes (and many other factors) determine the cable access line up. They’re a pretty rad group that won a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant to generalize their tool set enough for other community media centers to adopt.

Drupal is a pretty overwhelming CMS. It can only be hosted on select web hosters and has an intense installation process. I used to attend the Portland Drupal meetups (I love and miss that group!) in hopes that I could ease into it. I came to understand some of the jargon used in Drupal, but when it came to web coding, forget it.

I like to mull over how I’m from Silicon Valley with family members that are all based in different branches of technology and engineering. In that respect, you could think of me as the black sheep since I shied away from anything to do with tech and web. My jobs just keep bringing me right back. Outside of design tools, I’m only proficient in HTML, am familiar with CSS and know I have to pursue PHP. I’ve been trying to build up to Drupal for two years.

It’s great because I feel like I’m getting kicked in the pants with this project. There is no time to be intimidated anymore, and as one of the admins for the site, I’m getting accustomed to the menus and set up. I’m seeing first hand just what Drupal is capable of and interacting with it. Ron is definitely doing all the heavy lifting here (we owe him something like a thousand cupcakes at this point), but even with my limited skills in HTML, I’m able to contribute. Together, we’re working on site interactivity and realizing what can be done in phase one by the time of the beta launch and what has to be done early in phase two.

Any structural things have to be done in PHP. I can’t help with that, but even with HTML, it’s amazing how one of the easiest web languages can be so incredibly empowering.

Check out the awesome Rapidian promo by Jen Proctor, super volunteer on The Rapidian steering committee! If you like it, consider embedding it!

Check it out! Laurie and George were interviewed by WZZM13