A Question of Training

Two founders of hyperlocal start-ups, in their talks in the first session at the Citizens Media Summit, both emphasized the importance and need for training of citizen journalists.

Maureen Mann, who is editor of the The Forum in Deerfield, NH, said that now that it’s passed the one-year mark, its next big step is training, both for kids, in order to get more local schools involved (Mann is a former teacher), and for adults.  With adults, Mann said the thought is to create teams of people who will train and help each other, with one person writing a story, and a second or third person copy-editing and coding the stories. The skill sets needed are rudimentary journalism, since The Forum says its contributors aren’t pretending to be professional journalists but rather “the people in the news actually writing the news.” With kids, the skills are similarly simplistic, i.e. how to write a small story, how to take a picture. And kids are already used by the site to gather news -- The Forum sent a bunch of them out to a big country fair this summer, for instance, using digital cameras and notebooks.

From TCDailyPlanet in the Twin Cities, founder Jeremy Iggers said, for its part, it is getting help from an independent media center to train bloggers and others at the paper. And former New York Times reporter Doug McGill has been running multi-session citizen journalism trainings at a local resource center, and has developed a syllabus. Now, he’s planning on an expansion into various neighborhoods to train citizens who will write for the site's various aggregated subsites. -- A. Adam Glenn