Running a one-man site, The McGill Report, my first concern is always: “What can I do with my limited time and resources?” There are tons of good ideas, but only micrograms of minutes each day in which to realize them.
With the war underway, I’ll try to leverage those minutes to reach more people than I usually do, by tapping into the web’s innate ability to accommodate reader contribution and thus to create organic traffic and readership growth.
The main way I’ll try this on The McGill Report is by organizing conversations about the war among Minnesota residents, as well as local Iraqi immigrants and exiled Iraqis around the U.S. and abroad.
My experience is that people love to be given, and also they deeply need, a chance to formulate their own ideas about something as complex and urgent as war. Online discussions with others is a great way to do this.
I started The McGill Report a few weeks after 9/11, to explore ways to help people in southeast Minnesota better understand the world in which we live. That site and a more recent one, The Global Citizen, are explicitly experiments in localizing global news and globalizing local news. They have readerships of several hundred on good days, when I publish a big story and advertise it with an e-mail blast of 500 or so, including notices to every newspaper, radio, and television journalist in the state.
So far, the sites have been a platform for my own journalism – essays, editorials, and reportage that I then syndicate to local newspapers, especially the Rochester Post-Bulletin. Every article that I write looks for the local angle of global news, or a global angle on local news.
During the war, I expect to be putting on my editing cap more, and my reporting and editorial caps a bit less.
Here in Rochester, there are lots of Mayo Clinic doctors and IBM engineers who have incredibly busy days with absolutely no outlet giving them a chance to form and then to articulate their thoughts about war.
Some of my most popular web site articles have been those where I invite these folks to participate in a moderated conversation where they can write their ideas and then see them in comparison to their peers in the community.
Two recent examples are the article “Four Middle Class White Guys Wrestle Over Iraq” on The McGill Report, and this post, written by a Mayo Clinic doctor as part of an exchange on The Global Citizen.
Several readers have noted how dramatic a conversation can be when it is joined by someone with first-hand knowledge of what’s being discussed. For example, several participants in the blog discussion that I recently edited were strongly in favor of the war. When they heard a radio interview recently with a local Iraqi exile who is both strongly against Saddam and yet also strongly against the war, that gave them important pause.
Therefore, bringing in the views of local Iraqis living in Minnesota, as well as from abroad, will add tremendously to this feature on The McGill Report.
I also plan to ask local school teachers in Rochester to ask their students to write brief essays explaining their thoughts and feelings about the war, and I’ll publish those as well on The McGill Report. With kids, it will be even more important, I think, to find kids in other countries, especially in the Middle East, with whom they can correspond.
My hope is to make The McGill Report a meeting ground for those kinds of pen-pal relationships. I can just hear a Minnesota kid saying “I don’t want the U.S. to drop bombs in the Middle East – my friend Ismail lives there!” That’s an important opinion for society to hear, I think, and it’s one the web would seem ideally suited to elicit and widely distribute.
If these ideas go well, I will publish these grown-up conversations and the student essays and letters on a web site named “www.iraqinminnesota.com,” an internet domain I have just purchased with – back to the old theme – another allotment from my limited, but this time I hope well-leveraged, resources.
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