Digital Arts Service Corps - neighbormedia

Learning from other projects

Julie Adler — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:08:11 +0000

I was in DC over the weekend at a grantee meeting. The following is a reflection from my CCTV blog for those who are working on and thinking about citizen journalism projects:

On Saturday, April 5th, J-Lab staff invited its 2007 New Voices grantees to Washington, DC to share program successes and challenges. Some of the grantees have learned valuable lessons so far -- insight that we can definitely use as we look ahead to the future of the NeighborMedia project.

New Castle NOW in Chappaqua, NY, like NeighborMedia, is trying to fill a news and information void in the community. "People do not know what's going on out there," says project editor Ann Marie Fallon. In a community driven by its public school system, the site strives to inform people so they won't be "afraid to participate in the discussion." New Castle NOW, which runs on Expression Engine. features real voices because residents are not interested in "pretend reporting," but does not currently allow its users to comment on posts. One challenge the project has faced is a digital divide issue: People above a certain age can't always figure out how to navigate around the site.

Jeff South of Greater Fulton News says his citizen journalism initiative, a Wordpress site covering an area of Richmond, Virginia, requires registration for top-level posts, but not to post a comment -- unlike NeighborMedia, which requires registration even for commenting. South's project is making strides into multimedia by having local students produce news packages; though he has offered training to residents on using flip video phones with built-in USB ports, it appeared that as with NeighborMedia, his bloggers have for the most part stuck to text and photo submissions.

OurTahoe.org is another project that depends on student reporting to cover issues that surround Lake Tahoe, California. Students receive disposable cameras to take photos for the site. OurTahoe.org was built in Drupal and had to be redesigned in Wordpress after Donica Messing received feedback that the Drupal platform was not very easy to use.

NewsDesk on AccessSF has been "chockfull of challenges," according to project coordinator Carter Paige. The access center has been recruiting not individuals but non-profit organizations to participate in training sessions and produce media. But creating relationships with organizations who are willing to dedicate a representative from their staff to four hours of training (2 hours of instruction plus 2 hours of practicum) has proved difficult.

Looking ahead

Julie Adler — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:02:32 +0000

Things in Cambridge are great. It's hard to face the reality that it's winding down soon. We are going to be shooting 3 more episodes of YVC, and then at the end of May we will wrap up production. NeighborMedia (the pilot round) will also finish up around that time, to leave time for the programmatic reflection/re-imagining/tweaking/re-development process. My goals for the next 2 months are as follows.

- To finish doing NeighborMedia outreach. We still need to hit a lot of neighborhoods. Our grand plan was to kill all the birds with one stone by presenting at the ACN (Assoc. of Cambridge Neighborhoods) meeting, but unfortunately the leader of that group fell ill and the next meeting is postponed indefinitely.
- To get the four citizen journalists who still have not produced any web video to put together some sort of multimedia package for the site. This could be just audio or a digital story, but text and photos alone don't count.
- To document, document, document.
- To gain some insight next weekend at the New Voices Grantee Meeting in Washington, D.C.

When I return from D.C. I will be meeting with the CCTV "steering committee" (that's made up of the 3 org. staff members with "director" in their title) to figure out a grand plan for moving ahead. Another specific action item we are trying to move forward with is getting promotional postcards made.

Anyone out there have decent design skills?

The latest from Cambridge, Mass.

Julie Adler — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:40:22 +0000

It seems I'm about four field reports behind, so I’m providing four links that will help explain what I’ve been working on. The first two relate to my organization’s citizen journalism project and the last two to the youth video journalism club I work with.

1. NeighborMedia citizen journalism site
The third quarter of my VISTA term has been focused on outreach for NeighborMedia. I have been working with our citizen journalists, one neighborhood at a time, to identify outreach opportunities in their zip codes. We are promoting the project as a source of news and information, while trying to stress the participatory nature of the media in the hopes that people will get involved. Due to the civic-mindedness of the people in the program, engaging community members in issues they’re covering has been successful. The only problem is that many of our cit-jos simply do not have the time to be the sole correspondent – or one of two – in their area. It is a full time job, they say, which is why our model is not working as well as others have, and we are looking to re-examine the direction of the project. Some of the stories covered so far: holiday festivals, neighborhood development issues, traffic calming and snow emergency regulations.

2. NeighborMedia episodes
Each month, we try to put together the best of the content that was produced the previous month. Since much of the video content comes from BeLives (30 minutes on the hot set), we are trying to get creative so the show is not just talking heads. I have been rounding up staff members (including myself) to voice over blog entries, and I have an intern who helps me lay the voice track over photographs the cit-jos have taken. We have been assigning production mentors to work 1-on-1 with participants who seem to have the time but just not the know-how to produce video yet. Many of the cit-jos come from backgrounds in print journalism, so the transition to multimedia has been a real challenge for them.

3. Youth View Cambridge
This is the online archive of our new student newscast at Cambridge Educational Access, a media arts organization affiliated with Cambridge Rindge and Latin H.S. In terms of progress, I feel that we have come a long way. (By we, I mean myself and the CEA staff members I am working with.) Since this is an after-school program and that doesn't leave much room for a training program, we have started to really focus attention on certain students based on their strengths, interests and availability. Instead of reaching out for fresh talent, we are trying to make the most of the students we have, because by investing time in them it's more likely they'll stay involved throughout their high school years. (None are seniors.) There is a group of work-study students at the Media Arts Studio where are based, and we consider them part of our Video Journalism club because they often serve as the crew who goes out and shoots stories for the reporters who don't get paid. These students have some degree of technical expertise. What we realized was that one of them was weaker in the production sense, so we recruited him to instead be a key player on the news team (Associate Producer). He gets paid twice as much to do this, and he's a sophomore, so the hope is that he will really soak up a lot of knowledge and be able to pass it on in the coming years.

In other news, we recently tried to do a live-to-tape studio shoot, but it was unsuccessful, so we are trying to figure out how to get organized and make that happen. We found that it keeps students on their feet, so it has the potential to make shoots go more smoothly.

4. YVC blog
We set up this blog as a forum for story ideas and students’ thoughts, but instead it became a good way for us to document recent developments with the video journalism club. As you’ll see in the blog, we took a field trip to channel 5 in Boston where one of our other club leaders works part-time. He gave us a great tour and students had the opportunity to view the live newscast from the studio and control room. Also since the new year, a new program began that was supposed to be part of my VISTA work-plan but had to be cut out due to time constraints. Instead, the idea – to create a news program for 6th-graders – was tweaked and is now being run by one of the media teachers. She is teaching a few 11-year olds basic video news production skills so they can produce segments for YVC.

Another youth media milestone for me was a cyber-discovery that I made: hsbj.org, an offshoot of highschooljournalism.org, which led me to the RTNDF broadcast journalism teacher listserv. The messages that come through are often very helpful, making the listserv an extremely valuable resource for the high school broadcast journalism community.
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(In news unrelated to my VISTA work, CCTV is hosting a Digital Divide pilot project in collaboration with the city and an educational nonprofit. Participating residents in a low-income housing development are receiving free wireless, refurbished computers and computer training. It's been a really interesting project to watch unfold, especially because it's so in line with the CTC VISTA mission!)

Beat

Julie Adler — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:33:07 +0000

Well it's been awhile since I've posted, and I know I could just copy and paste from my CCTV blog, which I'll do eventually (once I get back to writing longer blog posts instead of just the snippets I've had time to do lately). For now I must say: I am beat. I've never worked so many days in a row in my life, and it's all because I just held the orientation (Saturday, 9/8) and first training session (Sunday, 9/9) for citizen journalists for our new program, NeighborMedia. It went well, but I'm at the point of expiration. I will probably advantage of the Jewish New Year tomorrow to rest and restore.

We're starting to launch CEA programs too (the youth newscast component of my VISTAness), which is something I've been putting on the back burner that I really need to start focusing on. Thankfully there are some other staff members working on those projects with me, so I'm not alone in that endeavor.

Anyway, I'm thinking about posting some of my orientation materials on the wiki but I don't know how useful it would be to anyone else. I'd like to attach the file here but that's not working either (help?), so you can just check it out in my blog at http://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/1814. Does anyone know if there are other citizen journalism projects going on in the ctc vista world?