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Rickpawl, via Flickr (CC license)
Scenic Boulder, Colo. is the home of a new professional / community journalism effort. |
Boulder, Colo. is home to so many energy-aware engineers, academics and other environmental experts that you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen of them, said
Amy Gahran. Together with
I, Reporter business partner
Adam Glenn (another longtime environmental journalist), they recently received a
$90,000 Knight News Challenge grant to fund a professional / community journalism project:
Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker.
This project is a test bed for a novel approach to covering local issues that are harder to cover in traditional news media: aggregating experts and stakeholders, and provide ongoing conversation and coverage. While most of the project will be online, selected articles will be syndicated in print locally through YourHub.com and the Boulder County Business Report.
This project will cover at least the first year of the nation's first-ever municipal "carbon tax" -- a self-imposed tax that will fund the city's climate action plan. In 2002, Boulder city council adopted the Kyoto Protocol goals to curb greenhouse gas emissions for this city of about 100,000. The city has mapped a series of milestones toward meeting those goals by 2012. That such a tax could get enacted leaves many folks in most "red states" with their jaws dragging the floor.
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Initially, Gahran and Glenn will focus on engaging, aggregating and involving expert stakeholders in the community -- to have them weigh in on how they, in their informed opinions, think the city is progressing toward its carbon reduction goals. "We're not trying to get 500 people contributing. I think if we got a few dozen contributing we'd have something really hot here," Gahran said.
Bouldercarbontax.org also is open to anyone who wants to contribute. After the initial push to attract local experts, Gahran and Glenn plan to cultivate a broader cadre of citizen journalists and commentators.
"Right now, I'm getting in front of every group I can ... that has a relevant point of view on how the city ought to spend that (carbon tax) money, and what we're really getting for it," said Gahran. She said she's visited -- and will visit -- with organizations and institutions such as nearby government labs (NOAA, NIST, NREL, NCAR), the University of Colorado, local transportation and environmental groups, hospitals, land-use folks, city officials, the local Chamber of Commerce, and all others who have a relevant point of view.
With just a few dozen contributors, Gahran thinks this is model might work well for focused ongoing coverage by news organizations or independents. "They could look at this and say, wow, here's a way we can get to these kinds of issues covered without throwing massive resources at them."
Why did they choose this project? Gahran's secret was they didn't choose it so much as the Knight Foundation chose it. "This was one of 15 projects Adam and I brainstormed about and applied for," she said.
Does this project really qualify as citizen journalism in the broad sense?
Certainly this project is local, new and involves people not trained in journalism -- but does the recruitment of "experts" to provide authoritative content not erect the same kind of barriers that the public is seeking to tear down as they adopt Web 2.0 interactivity?
That may not be a great loss. Indeed, in a May 30 Editor & Publisher column, Steve Outing saw this project's narrow focus as a critical benefit.
What it does mean, though, is that the sustainability of this effort is critically dependent on the ability of the experts assembled to coalesce into an identifiable group -- and for that group to establish its own unique identity. Indeed, it may be that by cultivating strong participation by experts, the site will be able to avoid the almost predictable onslaught from that twenty-something percent who seem to hold fast to the belief that evolution is wrong and global warming is something approaching a hoax designed to, among other things, raise their taxes.
I think mainstream news orgs should watch this project. This approach can easily be applied to creating local online communities that could review governmental operations and policy issues from home building and real estate to criminal justice and health care.
Will this effort survive the one-year Knight grant and become a sustained, viable community of interest over the long term? Finding the key to sustainability, whether it be by gaining other institutional funders or through just the sense of community these experts gain among themselves, is one of Gahran and Glenn's main challenges. It is also the challenge that all who seek to emulate this model will face.
Guest contributor G. Patton Hughes is the founder of the citizen media venture Paulding.com (Paulding County, Ga.) Full disclosure: Amy Gahran edits E-Media Tidbits, and Adam Glenn and Steve Outing are contributors to this blog.
