by Denise

We’re not certain whether this is the beginning of a new tradition in Grand Rapids’ daily paper, but three of our contributors’ pieces were reprinted in Wednesday’s edition of The Grand Rapids Press.

• ArtPrize: Social networking that bleeds – ArtPrize voting relies heavily on Internet technology, and phone apps and texting make it easy for viewers to record their votes. Chris Smit plans on taking advantage of this but exhorts ArtPrize goers to interact with the artists.
  “We should know that our ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ were not the kind of interactions these talented artists were looking for while creating their work,” Smit reminds us. “Instead, they were looking for conversations about human conditions, artistic values, politics, genders, sexualities, powers, and other real-life elements in need of prolonged speculation, contemplation, and conversation.”
• ArtPrize: Whose vote counts most? – Art historian and professor Elizabeth VanArragon has had a year to chew on last year’s ArtPrize happenings. She shares her observations on the public’s unspoken criteria for judging art and encourages viewers to take advantage of the plethora of art education opportunities available during ArtPrize.
• ArtPrize 2010: Essays and Critiques - George Wietor’s staff editorial explores what we hope in year two as The Rapidian matures. In year one, we saw sweeping pieces and recaps of under-covered events. As an arts community organizer, George hopes that since there’s an open platform for the arts community to take advantage of, we’ll collectively take it to the next level by helping one another critically consume issues and events.

The teaser with our logo on the front page led readers to A17, brimming with Rapidian content and not an advert in sight. The Press had been in open communication with us about collaborating prior to this printing.

Since one of The Rapidian’s goal is to increase the flow of news and dialogue in our community, we see this as a positive. The Press has a different audience from The Rapidian, and its print audience is likely a different crowd from even their online audience (The Press does regularly push their readers to us in link aggregations and regular blog posts like this one from Troy Reimink). Over 50% of traffic coming to The Rapidian is via social media, and recent findings by Facebook’s media team supports that this sort of lifting exposes new audiences to The Rapidian.

The natural question that comes up would probably be along the lines of how do we feel about The Press lifting content? How does this affect professional journalism? The short of it, I don’t expect the Citizen Journalists Chronicle to be a regular thing if it does become a tradition. For one thing, however much staff may try to seed stories, citizen reporting is not predictable, as story ideas bubble up from community members. You can figure out from there why it wouldn’t have a big impact on job security for professional journalists.

This shouldn’t in any way be read as a blanket statement for free content, but in general, I’m a big proponent of the concept of a local media ecosystem. Every media outlet has things they do well, and when we supplement, are in open communication with one another and try to reduce redundancy, we serve our public better.