Newshare-reporter
Contents
Like a circuit-riding judge, the Newshare reporter will play a role in multiple communities defined by the physical spaces they visit. They are beat reporters with a twist – a new explicit commitment to inspire learning, participation and sharing by community members. Here a scenario about their role.
Simply, to use the latest developments in infotechnology to revive public discourse at the local level by creating a network of public sites (in coffee houses, bookstores, libraries, for instance, even in newsbars or a subway-station platform) where teams of citizen journalists assisted by professional journalists create hyperlocal newsWebpapers – can we call them Newswebers?
Q: How do they work?
Imagine a typical cafe on the main street of New England town, an urban neighborhood or in a retail strip on the edge of a suburban subdivision. Let’s say our coffee house is named Fuel – as in Fuel for Thought – and it’s run by a young couple who believe they will best prosper by making their coffee house a place exchange of the ideas and news of the day. The Newshare reporter will help take the natural gossip and give it factual basis.
What do they look like?
In the storefront window of our imagined coffee house is a large – say 27” -- flat screen monitor on which is displayed the local Newshare news site being produced within that very coffee house. People passing by stop to watch and read the latest happenings in their community. When they reach their home or office -- or come into the café with their laptop -- they can access that page – and the links to the complete reports.
Mixing the hyperlocal stream
What they see is a package of headlines, photos and nutgrafs. There are three or four such packages that rotate onto that screen every 10 minutes. This storefront screen is the equivalent of the old town crier. The news of the community comes from the circuit reporter, and from Newshare members – some of whom have earned rights to contribute to the continuous Twitter-like stream. Public officials, businesses and NGOs contribute to the stream – appropriately labeled. The Newshare reporter watches the stream, commenting on its contents and advising its community contributors.
On this particular day, the topic of one of the news packages is a proposed charter school that challenges the practices of the public school and even threatens the public high school’s financial support from the state. It turns out that Newshare broke the story about the charter school because of its many sources within the community, who have nowhere else to turn since the regional newspaper cut back its coverage of outlying towns.
Supporters of the charter school want their kids to have a more intensely academic program, with a concentration of arts and environmental studies – subjects trimmed back at the public school; opponents characterize the charter school as an elite private school at public expense. There are numerous blog comments on the articles associated with this issue.
Curating from a corner
Inside our coffee house, the Newshare setup is in a back corner. There is a table where Newshare collaborators gather. A single professional journalist is on call this morning, on his rounds of Newshare cafes in the district. She is joined by a Newshare collaborator – a night-shift worker at a local hospital who is spending a couple of hours working on the charter-school story because his child wants to attend the new school. Using Skype, he’s recording an audio interview with the regional school superintendent. A small camera captures the scene and audio and streams the discussion live to the the Newshare community web video channel. Later, the hospital worker will use edit the audio he captured with Audacity software and wrap it into a narrative account.
The Newshare reporter’s role is to empower the hospital worker to turn her concerns into meaningful dialog, to elicit and convey facts – to build a bridge between advocacy and helpful debate where none exists today – to find a middle ground. With our journalist is a core of citizen newshounds, adding items to the Newshare Newsweber. Nearby, people are leaning over to add their comments to the process, or simply to watch. Their remarks and observations become part of the flowing commentary. Mounted to the wall behind the Newshare desk is another newscreen. Around the news table conversations – and at times, debates – are going on. At the desk, the journalists are assembling queries to be posted on Newshare, and editing and posting submissions for the full Fuel site. The copy, video, photos, text has either been collected at the coffee house or sent in by Newshare correspondents. Those able to post material have earned the privilege, having been trained in the etiquette and ethics of news presentation much as citizen programmers at the local LPFM station, with whom the Newshare site is affiliated and for whom it provides news content, are trained in broadcast protocols.
The Newsweber is not a static information-on-a-page format. It uses social networking design to create a community of news sharing, letting the ferment of ideas and news generate a vivid sense of engagement and participation in civic affairs that is reflected in the active, flowing current of news on the Newsweber.
But the Fuel coffee house is not the only location within the town for a Newshare node. There is one in the high school, local library and community college branch, bookstore and even at a village lunch counter.
By the way, the issue of the charter school has not yet been resolved. There is a public meeting this coming week between the school committee and the alternative school proponents. Newshare will be there – and as a result, so will the larger community.
