E-Media Tidbits

The Guardian The Guardian's new Katine project aims to go beyond covering an issue to directly helping people get involved.

Launched over the weekend, Katine appears to be a new approach to the typical holiday-season "good cause" story. The goal is to improve the standard of living and quality of life in the north Ugandan village of Katine, which currently struggles in conditions resembling the middle ages. In this project the Guardian has partnered with Barclays Bank and the non-government organization Farm-Africa.

The third, and potentially most intriguing, partner being courted for this project is the Guardian's readership. Editor Alan Rusbridger asks: "Would it be possible to find a way of dramatizing an issue so that it held attention beyond Christmas, even for as long as three years? Of connecting the ideas, goodwill, resources and expert knowledge of 15 million readers around the world and focusing them on one problem?"

Normally news organizations raise awareness through journalism, context and analysis. But Rusbridger suggest that they also could involve "a huge community of readers and Web users around the world and find ways of linking them in to what we're doing. ...Among our readers are water engineers, doctors, solar energy experts, businessmen and women, teachers, nurses, farmers. ...We would like a technical know-how bank of people who are prepared to offer time and advice."

In other words, crowdsourcing -- but not like what we've seen so far from news organizations, which tend to ask readers for help in gathering or analyzing information for a story. This kind of crowdsourcing might directly address the actual issues identified by the story.

Even more creditable, this project concerns a topic (rural conditions in the developing world) that does not normally make the pages of most newspapers.

The Katine site itself is impressive. It includes a virtual village, short videos by the GuardianFilms, audio, and a number of blogs "where Guardian writers and filmmakers, staff from the African Medical and Research Foundation, and (eventually) the people of Katine, will write about their experience of the project. Guardian staffer Peter Walker wrote that the project will be "a place for debate about the wider development issues Katine raises."

Interestingly, there is also a clear attempt to portray the villagers as more than just "suffering Africans," with pieces on local music and style

Of course, there are some areas where this project could improve:

• Play up the crowdsourcing. Currently, Katine offers no clear link to its promising crowdsourcing element. If you're going to announce it, allow people to at least sign up for an e-mail alert to tell them when the system is up and running. Don't just say (as Rusbridger did) "We'll let you know how to get involved as we go."

• Make it easier to follow the action. The Katine site does offer an RSS feed. However, the interactive map promises updates but asks people to "come back every week or two to follow the updates." This may be a weakness of Flash, but some creative thinking would surely prevent the need for people to set themselves a reminder.

• Mobile alerts. Why not use Twitter or other mobile alert systems to keep Katine on people's agendas?

• Embeddable video. The site features some lovely video but it's not embeddable. If your goals is to raise awareness, then you should enable and encourage people to place your video on their blogs.

What do you think of this approach? Please comment below.

Guest contributor Paul Bradshaw teaches online journalism at the Birmingham (U.K.) City University. He also blogs about online journalism.