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.