When the ailing news industry is discussed, an often-asked question is: who will cover local politics if newspapers go out of business? In Chicago, where both the major news organizations have filed for bankruptcy, WindyCitizen.com (WC), a local news aggregator and community site, is experimenting with covering a Chicago City Council meeting this week.
The meeting of the Chicago City Council meeting will be streamed live from Council Chambers on the Web site of City Clerk Miguel Del Valle. With Chicago’s history of opaqueness toward news media, that in itself might be newsworthy, but WC is making it an interactive event. The discussion thread is unlikely to provide full coverage of the City Council meeting, even if Chicago’s best political reporters join the discussion, but as Clay Shirky recently pointed out, “Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”
Frequent contributor, Tamale Chica, a.k.a Mary Olvera, and WC publisher, Brad Flora have set up an interactive event on the WC site by hosting an open thread “where readers can chat about it as it happens with other folks who follow the hijinks of their elected officials.”
Olvera says, “I have no idea about what will happen in the thread, although there are enough Windy Citizens who have a keen interest in City politics to make this online ‘event’ happen. I’ve never done anything quite like this where we would be watching live stream of a government in action and commenting about it.” Whether it is journalism depends on how you define journalism, she says, continuing, “I just view the event as a fascinating, real time civic education about part of the workings of our City Government. I also view this as testament to how New Media has impacted communications and the transmission of information.”
Olvera, who has submitted almost 100 stories to the WC site, is a power user in the community with more than 600 “clout” points to her credit. Readers get clout points when they post, award clout points to other readers, and/or get clout points on items they have posted.
I chatted with WC’s Flora, and he told me that WC started up a year ago as a for-profit local news site. For the first 8 months, WC focused on creating local blogs. Then Flora “decided it was more useful to filter through the mass of local content, than to just create more of it.”
He reworked the site and calls it a “big reader-edited filter for local links.” He says, “We’ve turned news gathering into a big, group game with points and we let our members connect to each other with comments and private messages.” The addition of a contributor-initiated, open thread discussion to the live City Council meeting is a natural outgrowth of WC’s new community-centered form.
WindyCitizen.com has partnerships with theChicago Reader, and GapersBlock so readers can submit stories to the WC site with just a click. Currently, WC’s Flora is exploring a variety of revenue solutions, including sponsorships, display ads and sponsored content.
Last month a fund-raising drive raised $1,087 by enabling members to become micropatrons. Flora, the site’s sole founder, says the site has been breaking even since its inception, relative to the cash outlay, but is about “six months out” from compensating him for time spent working on it.
