We have been handing out flyers about our LocalNews Daily citizen journalism project across the counter of your newsagency for a few weeks and these have generated considerable feedback but no site contributions. The feedback falls into four broad areas:
Great idea. Can’t wait to read stories. But no desire to post. How much to advertise? Will you pay me to post.? This is a new concept to me and I think I want to be involved, give me some time to think it through.
The last comment is the most encouraging.
We’re in a smaller pond in Australia and I’m suspecting that the tiny pond we are playing in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne is yet to have what is necessary to sustain a project like this. So we’re rethinking and planning on a broader push with some other newsagents maybe. We are committed to the project but need to do more research success stories from overseas. We also need to engage someone from a journalism background to help drive this forward – a partnership of technology, local focus and professional journalism.
We’re engaging with some former journalists and writers to encourage quality content. We realise that in our community we need to do more than build the framework so others can play, we need to show what it’s all about by delivering some content. We’re also taking the opportunity to make better use of the drupal engine our site is based on.
We’re finding the posts of people like Steve Outing at pointer.org to be most helpful in our planning to get this right. Especially his piece: The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism.
As we see things at present we’ve got another few weeks work to do (while keeping busy with our day jobs) before we get LocalNews Daily looking more like we want it to look.