Pardon the Repeat, but ...

Please excuse the reposting, but the call for papers will go out soon and I need judges.

COMJIG is up for renewal next year and we'd really like to make a strong showing on research at the AEJMC Denver conference in 2010.

To that end, please consider submitting a research paper proposal for presentation at the annual convention.

Along those same lines, if we can generate strong interest in research papers, we need interested judges. Anyone who can spare a few moments to help nurture a paper through the process is asked to please contact research chair Joe Marren at marrenjj@buffalostate.edu

Thanks for your time and consideration

Looking for judges

COMJIG is up for renewal next year and we'd really like to make a strong showing on research at the AEJMC Denver conference in 2010. To that end, please consider submitting a research paper proposal for presentation at the annual convention.

Along those same lines, if we can generate strong interest in research papers, we need interested judges. Anyone who can spare a few moments to help nurture a paper through the process is asked to please contact research chair Joe Marren at marrenjj@buffalostate.edu

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Durham Voice begins

COMJIG founder Jock Lauterer sends word from North Carolina that Durham Voice has launched in that city as a cooperative venture between UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central Univeristy.

The site can be found at durhamvoice.org.

It serves the Northeast Central Durham community. The area is known as the "bull's eye" to police because of the crime rate.

Content for Durham Voice is being provided by UNC and UNCC journalism students and from teenagers in the community who are being mentored by those students.

The Voice will be published bi-weekly online through November and will add a monthly 24-page tabloid print edition in February 2010. The Daily Tar Heel, UNC's student newspaper, is covering the costs of printing 2,000 copies monthly for the first year of publication. The Voice will be distributed at neighborhood schools, churches and businesses.

Google provides search engine optimization tips

Google has a whole raft of videos and other resources for publishers who need to understand search engine optimization.

Rather than re-embed everything here, see this post on my blog:

http://commonsensej.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-explains-news-seo.html

Doug

Do Televised Meetings Help The Community?

Franklin (Virginia) has started carrying its city council meetings on cable television C-SPAN style. It's televised without any commentary. But will it lead to better government? Local journalist Steve Stewart talks about the advantages and disadvantages of the coverage in his column in the Tidewater News. The upside? A better informed citizenry. The downside: Possible outbreaks of pontification. But I really like his closing comment:

"There’s a misnomer that government should be pretty and smooth. Effective government rarely is. Lawmaking often has been compared to sausage-making, and the metaphor is apt.

More important than appearance is authenticity — and the ability of citizens to see for themselves their government at work, warts and all."

What happened to my COMJIG blog?

Yes, you might have noticed it has a new look - a logo, new stuff on the sidebar, etc.

We have switched from Blogger's old, HTML-based template to its new XML-based templates that have "gadgets" (another name for widgets) that mean we don't have to go in and hard code everything whenever we want to make a change.

We've kept all the old features and added some others, such as the ability to mark a post recommended or not recommended.

The logo was adopted at this year's business meeting. It's nothing fancy, but it incorporates what we are all about -- community AND communication.

Please, let Doug know if you have any suggestions or comments.

Convergent Community Journalism in North Dallas

Community journalism may be as important in the suburbs as it is in rural communities. Though suburbs may have major television stations in the area, individual 'burbs are not likely to be getting a lot of attention from them. That's why the Star Community Papers, publisher of 13 community papers in the North Dallas, Texas, area are now producing daily webcasts through to accompany their weekly publication schedule. Check out the example from the Carrollton Leader.

Call for AEJMC panel proposals

The Community Journalism Interest Group (COMJIG) is accepting panel proposals for the 2010 AEJMC Conference, which is scheduled Aug. 4-7 in Denver.

Proposals should consider that COMJIG defines community as more than just geographically centered. Community may also refer to social characteristics such as interest, ethnicity, culture, religion and occupation. Keep in mind, too, that community journalism is practiced across media forms (print, broadcast, online, etc.).

Proposals are due Friday, Oct. 23.

In your panel proposal, please indicate the following:

• The type of panel (research, PF&R or teaching).
• Possible co-sponsor divisions or interest groups.
• A summary of the session.
• Possible panelists.
• Estimated costs for speakers.
• Contact information for yourself.

Send panel proposals by Oct. 23 to Andris Straumanis, COMJIG program chair, at andris.straumanis@uwrf.edu.

PF&R panel proposals may also be sent to Ralph Hanson, PF&R chair, at hansonre@unk.edu.

Teaching panel proposals may also be sent to Eileen Gilligan, Teaching Standards chair, at egilliga@oswego.edu.

If you have questions, contact Andris Straumanis at andris.straumanis@uwrf.edu or +1 (651) 235-2915.

Community Journalism of a different kind in Elkhart

I had not heard about this MSNBC site focusing on Elkhart, Ind., until a story today in the New York Times.

But I think it's worth taking some time to look at as an interesting prototype of a community journalism in-depth site. MSNBC has partnered with the Elkhart Truth, which still does most of the daily stuff while MSNBC does the depth work. It's a model that might have some application elsewhere. Not that everyone's going to be able to partner with MSNBC. But your local university or foundation might be a good substitute.

(As a former Fort Wayne newsman, I know Elkhart pretty well. It was ripe, I think, for something like this, just as Hartsville, S.C., appears to have been ripe for our HartsvilleToday project. Making these sites successful is about having a special community mix. It is worth exploring further in research.)

AP: Community papers doing pretty well

AP is the latest to weigh in on the meme that community papers, with less competition in their markets, are still doing pretty well.

"CNN is not coming to my town to cover the news and there aren't a whole lot of bloggers here either," said Robert M. Williams Jr., editor and publisher of The Blackshear Times in Georgia, about 75 miles from Jacksonville, Fla. "Community newspapers are still a great investment because we provide something you can't get anywhere else."

The AP also says that while larger newsrooms were cutting, an Inland Press study found smaller newsrooms spending more in 2008 than 2004.

But the recession has still hurt, with the small papers' revenue down 20%.

Jeff Ackerman, publisher of The Union in Grass Valley, Calif., says it well:

"Too many newspapers have been operating in an ivory tower for too long," said Ackerman, whose newspaper is based in a county with a population of about 100,000. "I answer my own phone. Some newspapers are just now trying to develop relationships with the local communities they cover. Ours has been going on for 144 years."

COMJIG business meeting

If you are in Boston, please make time to come to the COMJIG business meeting from 6:45-8:15 this Thursday at the Sheraton as part of the AEJMC convention.

As we have in the past, we will first meet jointly with Civic and Citizen Journalism and then adjourn to our own short meeting.

The following people have agreed to stand for nomination and election, but nominations also will be taken from the floor:

Head - Doug Fisher
Vice Head - Andris Straumanis
Research - Joe Marren
Teaching - Eileen Gilligan
PF&R - Ralph Hanson
Secretary- ????

As you can see, we need a secretary. If you are interested, please let Doug know (dfisher@sc.edu)or come prepared to nominate yourself.

----
Also, here are two versions of a possible logo for the group. It might give us visibility or at least a unified look for the Yahoo Group, the blog and any mailings, etc.





Thanks,
Doug

A lesson in community journalism and blogging

The news director of a public radio station in western Alaska is out of a job after local residents discovered she had a blog that began last fall with a post that read in part, "I love living in a place where I can be treated as a respectable personage simply by dint of being sober, employed and totally uninterested in having sex with relatives or children." Another referred to residents of Dillingham "passing drunk women around like poorly rolled joints."

Eileen Goode "figured she was mainly writing for herself and her friends back in New England," reports Kyle Hopkins of the Anchorage Daily News. But she should have known that the searchable nature of the Internet would eventually bring the blog Chilly Hell to her neighbors' attention and endanger her job at KDLG, owned by the local school district.

Goode told Hopkins that the station manager told her last Friday afternoon that he wanted her off the job. "Over the weekend, a man pushed her in a ditch, but later apologized, Goode said. A local bar refused to serve her. On Monday morning, she resigned," Hopkins reports. Goode told him, "The first rule of living in a small town is, No. 1, be polite. And I wasn't polite." (Read more)

COMJIG Annual Report 2008-2009

Below is a copy of the 2008-2009 annual report for the Community Journalism Interest Group. You may want to pay particular attention to the group's goals for the coming year. We will be discussing these goals and how to achieve them at our members' meeting on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 6:45 p.m. during the AEJMC convention in Boston. Please join us as we chart COMJIG's course for the coming year.

Community Journalism Interest Group
Annual Report 2008-2009

1. Officers 2008-2009
Head: Elizabeth Hansen, Eastern Kentucky
Vice Head/Programming Chair: Doug Fisher, South Carolina
Research Chair: Andris Straumanis, Wisconsin-River Falls
PF&R Chair: Jennifer Wood Adams, Auburn
Teaching Standards: Eileen Gilligan, SUNY-Oswego
Secretary/membership: Bill Reader, Ohio
Webmaster: Doug Fisher, South Carolina
Past Head: Bill Reader, Ohio
Report prepared by Elizabeth Hansen and Doug Fisher

2. Demographics -- (Reported on separate form and not posted here.)

3. Overall statement of activities:

The Community Journalism Interest Group (COMJIG) had 99 members as of June 15, 2009, compared with 110 at the time of the 2008 convention. While the drop is a concern, we expect it is the result of the economy and we will work to increase our number of members as the economy improves. COMJIG is working to balance its activities among Research, Teaching and PF&R. COMJIG’s 2008 convention program and many of our members’ out-of-convention activities this year were focused on PF&R activities. COMJIG’s ties to the profession are emphasized in our PF&R goals (see PR&R section). The heavy emphasis on PF&R activities at the 2008 convention followed a year in which COMJIG had focused on Teaching.

Looking ahead, COMJIG’s 2009 convention programming includes a panel devoted to research opportunities in community journalism. This panel is an effort to increase awareness among not only COMJIG members but among other AEJMC members and graduate students as well. An examination of the titles of papers accepted by other divisions and interest groups shows that a number of them would have been appropriate for COMJIG as well as for the division or interest group where they were accepted. We revised our research paper call for 2009 in hopes of increasing paper submissions and are looking ahead to a special paper call for the 2010 convention as a way to encourage more research focused on community oriented news media.

In order to balance our programming and activities, we are continuing to work with groups both inside and outside of AEJMC. For example, COMJIG Head Elizabeth Hansen, who also chairs the academic partners of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, has invited some of those partners to share their efforts to help rural journalists at the 2009 convention and plans to work with the partners to increase research on rural media.

Research overview: COMJIG continues to struggle with attracting submissions to our paper competitions. We made research a focus for 2008-2009 and have scheduled a panel on research opportunities in community journalism for the 2009 convention. The quality of the papers submitted both last year and this year was good, but we would like to attract more submissions. For the 2008 convention, we had nine submissions and accepted five papers. For the 2009 convention, we had seven submissions and accepted five papers from five universities (Alabama, Auburn, Kentucky, South Carolina and Texas). A total of nine scholars were responsible for the five accepted papers. To increase interest in our paper competition, COMJIG added a cash prize to the top faculty paper award beginning in 2009, which complements the cash prize for the top student paper we began awarding in 2008. However, while we will be presenting a top student paper award in 2009, we will not present a top faculty paper award because of disagreement among the paper judges as to the quality of the faculty-submitted papers. Outside the convention, COMJIG members are presenting and publishing community journalism research in a variety of venues, with several members presenting work at the 2008 Newspapers and Community Building Symposium co-sponsored by the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media and the National Newspaper Association Foundation.

Teaching overview: After a strong emphasis on teaching at the 2007 convention, COMJIG programmed one teaching panel for the 2008 convention in Chicago. The panel, co-sponsored with CCJIG, examined strategies for incorporating digital media into civic-oriented student media and courses. At the 2009 convention, COMJIG will also co-sponsor, this time with Newspaper, a teaching panel titled "Pushing Students Outside Their Comfort Zones: The Challenge of Teaching the Sheltered Student Generation." COMJIG members continue to explore and develop creative ways of teaching journalism within the context of communities. A number of COMJIG members link their teaching activities to PF&R projects, using such activities as research for community newspapers or creation of a Web site to deliver news to an underserved community as vehicles for teaching journalism students in a real-world setting. Innovations in teaching continue to be one of COMJIG members' major contributions.

PF&R overview: COMJIG’s PF&R activities have traditionally been a strong suit both in convention and throughout the year. The 2008 convention had a particularly strong line-up of PF&R sessions addressing a variety of concerns of the profession. PF&R panels dealt with use of anonymous sources, dealing with offensive postings on community media Web sites, culturally-defined community newspapers in the Chicago area, and heroes of community journalism.
COMJIG also co-sponsored a mini-plenary session on the transformation of print journalism. At the 2009 convention, COMJIG is planning three PF&R panels: “Helping Rural Journalists Better Serve Their Communities,” “Reinventing Journalism: Designing Four Experiments,” and “The Health of the Ethnic Media and Their Role in an Evolving Journalism World.” We are also co-sponsoring a PF&R mini-plenary titled “Normative Theories of the Media Worldwide: Issues of Responsibility and Freedom.” We are also co-sponsoring with CCJIG a three-hour pre-conference workshop titled “Citizen Journalism and Media Literacy in the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks” and the J-lab luncheon that spotlights developments in community and citizen-journalism. Throughout the year, COMJIG members have been engaged in a variety of ways with the profession and through leadership roles and active membership in other groups, including such organizations as the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Newspaper Association, the American Copy Editors Society, and the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors.

Summary: While COMJIG’s in-convention programming emphasis varies from year-to-year, over a five-year cycle COMJIG has a good balance of research, teaching and PF&R activities, although because of the group’s strong ties to the industry, activities may be slightly skewed toward PF&R. The balance among the three areas is also reflected in members’ wide range of activities outside the convention.

4. Goals: Next year, last year

These are our most important goals for 2009-2010:

· Get out the word that the “community” in community journalism refers to more than geographic communities. While COMJIG programming has always reflected this, the perception outside the interest group seems to be that we focus only on traditional, geographically defined community newspapers. We want to change that perception and let people know that community refers not only to geographic communities but also to communities of interest, ethnicity, culture, religion, occupation, etc., and that the medium is not solely the printed word.

· Increase paper submissions by issuing a special paper call. A goal of COMJIG two years ago was to “Stop worrying about quantity of research" and the group continues to be satisfied with the "quality over quantity" approach to our research paper submissions. Nevertheless, we need to encourage more research about community journalism. In recognition of the relative strength of community newspapers compared to metros these days, we plan a special paper call asking researchers to examine how the community journalism model differs from that of the metropolitan media model and to explore what metropolitan newsrooms can learn from the continued success of community media.

· Focus on how teaching community journalism is changing as journalism is changing. While community media have always been a career destination for some, journalism students and professors have more often viewed them as the first stop on the road to a career with larger media. How do we teach and what do we teach when students’ first jobs, second jobs and perhaps whole careers will be spent at community media?

At its members' meeting in Chicago in August 2008, COMJIG set these goals for the year:

· Focus on Research activity for the 2009 convention in Boston, to balance out strong emphases on Teaching in 2007 and on PF&R in 2008.

While COMJIG took some steps toward reaching this goal, we were not completely successful. We organized and are the lead co-sponsor (with Newspaper) for a research panel titled "Research Opportunities in Community Journalism" at the 2009 convention. Despite revising our call for papers and adding a cash prize for the top faculty paper as well as for the top graduate student paper, we were not successful in increasing the number of paper submissions we received.

· Encourage more international/non-U.S. participation. Try to partner with the International Communication Division for at least one session at the 2009 convention.

COMJIG is partnering with the International Communication Division and the Religion and Media Interest Group at the 2009 convention to sponsor a mini-plenary titled "Normative Theories of the Media Worldwide: Issues of Responsibility and Freedom," which will include several panelists from outside the United States. Some other COMJIG-sponsored panels will also feature speakers from outside the United States. For example, Steve Knowlton of Dublin City University will participate in a panel on how universities can help rural journalists. COMJIG and CCJIG are also co-sponsoring a pre-conference workshop with an international component, "Citizen Journalism and Media Literacy in the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks."

· Emphasize the role of community journalism in urban/suburban areas. Boston and other northeastern metropolises (i.e., New York, Philadelphia) have many suburbs with strong local identities and strong traditions of community journalism in the shadow of major metro media (for example, many Boston suburbs are served by community newspapers).

Building on a session from the 2008 convention that looked beyond geographic communities in examining Chicago's community newspapers, in 2009 COMJIG is lead sponsor with the Minorities and Communication Division for a panel titled "The Health of the Ethnic Media and Their Role in an Evolving Journalism World" that will bring together academics and representatives of newspapers that focus on Boston's ethnic communities. Given the widely publicized troubles at the Boston Globe, this examination of the ability of urban community media to potentially assume more prominent roles is critical and timely.

*How may any or all of the Standing Committees help you to achieve your goals in the coming year?
The Standing Committee on Research could perhaps help us make other division and IG members aware of the scope of COMJIG’s research interests and help get out the word about our special paper call for the 2010 convention.

RESEARCH:

After having no research panel at the 2008 convention, research was the focus of COMJIG this year. A panel at the 2009 convention will be devoted to opportunities in community journalism research. Members of COMJIG and others continue to produce research in the field, but much of it is submitted to other divisions of AEJMC or presented or published elsewhere. COMJIG continues to struggle to attract more scholars to participate in our research competition. At the 2008 convention, the membership voted to add a cash award to the top faculty award in an attempt to attract more submissions. A $100 award for the top student paper was created in 2007 and presented for the first time in 2008. Papers submitted to COMJIG employ a variety of methodologies and are quite diverse in their approaches and subject matter.

The following data are for the 2009 paper competition and program.

5. Number of faculty research paper submissions 4 , including one faculty-student collaboration; number of acceptances ___4__; __100___%. The acceptance rate is higher than the Research Committee guideline of 50 percent.

6. Number of student research paper submissions _3_; number of acceptances ___1__; __33___%. The acceptance rate is lower than the Research Committee guideline of 50 percent, but it should be noted that one of the faculty papers accepted had student co-authors. Overall, our acceptance rate was about 71 percent.

7. COMJIG used the standard evaluation form available online through All Academic. The form required feedback on a 1-5 scale across 10 criteria: Clarity of purpose, Literature review, Clarity of research method, Appropriateness of research method, Evidence relates to purpose of paper, Evidence is presented clearly, Evidence supports conclusions, Writing and organization, Relevance of focus to COMJIG, and Significant contribution to field. Reviewers also were asked if they would recommend acceptance or rejection of a paper.

8. Total # of judges for 2009: 5; 4 judges had 3 papers to review and 1 had 2 papers to review. This was well within the Research Committee guideline of no more than 4 papers per judge.

9. Did your group conduct any other type of refereed competition? No.

10. Please list your in-convention activities related to research.

COMJIG has scheduled a research panel for the Boston convention titled "Research Opportunities in Community Journalism." COMJIG Is the lead sponsor and primary organizer of the panel, which we are co-sponsoring with the Newspaper Division. For Chicago last August, we accepted five research papers, three in a paper session and two in a scholar-to-scholar session. In Boston this year we will also have five papers, three in a paper session and two in a scholar-to-scholar session. A total of 10 scholars contributed to the papers accepted.

11. This is a partial list of out-of-convention research activities by some members. It was not feasible to compile a comprehensive list:

· COMJIG Head Elizabeth Hansen (Eastern Kentucky) and former PF&R chair and COMJIG member Al Cross (Kentucky) co-authored a paper titled “Keeping quiet or taking the lead: a study of editorial pages, local editorial material and political endorsements in one state’s newspapers,” presented at the 14th annual Newspapers and Community-Building Symposium, co-sponsored by the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media and the National Newspaper Association Foundation, St. Paul, Minn., in September 2008. Hansen and co-author Gary L. Hansen presented a paper titled "The Role of the Media in Developing Communities of Interest about a Community of Place," at the Rural Sociological Society annual meeting in Manchester, N.H., July 31, 2008. Hansen wrote a community journalism case study for inclusion in the new edition of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics book. She also supervised a research study for a community daily conducted by students in her Community Journalism class and is planning an article based on the findings.

· Vice Head/Program Chair Doug Fisher, South Carolina, continued research on Hartsville Today, the almost four-year-old community news site established in conjunction with the Hartsville Messenger. Upcoming is a survey of the membership, which is now at about 1,700 in a market area of about 20,000. Fisher is spending the summer in the newsroom of The (Sumter, S.C.) Item, helping the 18,000-circulation daily better adapt its community journalism to digital delivery and compiling a case study. He writes "Common Sense Journalism," a monthly column (and accompanying blog) aimed at community journalists, which continues to be published by press associations around the country and is close to its 100th column. His papers and publications include: "Building community online: A twice-weekly's experience extending its reach with the Hartsville Today citizen-based news site," presented at the 14th annual Newspapers and Community-Building Symposium, co-sponsored by the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media and the National Newspaper Association Foundation, St. Paul, Minn., and later published in Grassroots Editor (Winter 2008) 49(4) p. 12-18; “Building community online.” The Convergence Newsletter. (May-June 2009).

· Secretary and Past Head Bill Reader, Ohio, and John Hatcher, Minnesota-Duluth, have a contract from Sage for "The Foundations of Community Journalism: A Primer for Research." The book will include chapters from many COMJIG members, including Eileen Gilligan, George Daniels, Wilson Lowrey and Janice Hume. The book is on schedule for publication in 2010.

· COMJIG member Don Corrigan, Webster, presented “When The National News Media Hits Your Community: Kirkwood In Crisis," at the 14th annual Newspapers and Community-Building Symposium, co-sponsored by the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media and the National Newspaper Association Foundation, St. Paul, Minn. The presentation, which examined the Feb. 7, 2008, shooting massacre in Kirkwood City Hall in suburban St. Louis, was subsequently published in two magazines.

· Member Al Cross, Kentucky, who is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, presented “The Importance of Rural Journalism in Promoting Community Health: The key word is Local;” with co-authors Anna Goodman Hoover, University of Kentucky, and Laura Hall Downey, University of Southern Mississippi, at national Priester Extension Health Conference, Indianapolis, April 2009. He also presented “Partnerships for Supporting Local Health Efforts: The Link Between Journalism and Public Health in One Rural Community with co-authors Laura Hall, Carol Ireson and Douglas Scutchfield at the Higher Education Exchange, Kettering Foundation, summer 2008. An article published on the Institute's Rural Blog, “Vilsack calls for carbon credits for agriculture and forestry, with USDA oversight, and disagrees with EPA on measuring ethanol's carbon footprint,” was picked up by several national publications, May-June 2009.

· COMJIG member Ralph Hanson, Nebraska-Kearney, with co-authors Maryanne Reed and Briana Warner, presented “Community radio as an alternative to corporate and public radio” to the Western Social Science Association mass communication division.

· COMJIG member Rex A. Martin, Bowie State, contributed a dozen entries to the new six-volume "Encyclopedia of Journalism" that Sage is releasing in September. His entries ranged from "Controlled Circulation" to "Obituaries" to "Self-Regulation" to the "Stars & Stripes." Where appropriate, he inserted references to community journalism, and some entries - such as that for "Weeklies" - have obvious relevance.

· COMJIG member Michael Ray Smith, Campbell, published two articles in Grassroots Editor: 1) Smith, M. R. & Lilley, M. (2008, Winter). The seven questions and The Daily Record. Grassroots Editor, 49(4), 19-20, and 2) Smith, M. R. (2008, Fall). Hyperlocalism and The Daily Record. Grassroots Editor, 49(3), 12-17. Smith is also working on a book about the handwritten newspapers of John McLean Harrington.

· COMJIG member Brian Steffens, Missouri, published “Understanding Readers of Local Newspapers and Editorial Journalism in Small Communities” with Kenneth Fleming, associate director of research, Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri. He is working on another round of research questions for readers of community newspapers.

· COMJIG member Patricia Thomas, Georgia, has a pilot study under way, along with colleagues Drs. Ruthann Lariscy and Jeff Springston, called “Greene County: A Picture of Health by Our Youth.” They are teaching eighth-graders to be citizen journalists on the health beat in a rural, medically underserved community with great extremes of wealth and poverty. Their assignments are to profile health in their own family, their neighborhood, and their school. The researchers will edit it into a documentary that will be shown publicly when school resumes in the fall. Their hope is to learn from this – what works and what doesn’t – and use it as a springboard to a much larger youth citizen journalism project in multiple Northeast Georgia counties.

12. The research goals for 2008-09 were to actively recruit more participation in our research competition and to develop at least one panel for the 2009 Boston convention focused on research issues in Community Journalism. To stimulate interest in the research competition, we added a cash prize to the top faculty paper award in 2009, to complement the $100 cash award we agreed in 2007 to give to the top student paper starting in 2008. A top faculty paper award will not be made In 2009 because judges could not agree on the quality of the three faculty papers submitted (The fourth faculty paper had student co-authors.). The research goals for 2009-2010 are to continue to try to Increase participation in our research competition by issuing a special paper call and to try to focus some of that research on the differences between the community and metro models for doing journalism.

TEACHING:

13. As an interest group, COMJIG does not have enough programming slots to do multiple teaching, research and PF&R sessions at each convention. Instead, we have opted to rotate focus on one of these areas each year. Because our emphasis in 2007 was on teaching, at the 2008 convention in Chicago, we co-sponsored just one teaching panel (with Civic/Citizen Journalism) titled, "Whose Learning Curve Is It? Strategies for Incorporating Digital Media into Civic-Oriented Student Media and Courses." This session focused on course content and teaching methods. At the 2009 convention in Boston, where our emphasis is on research, COMJIG will also co-sponsor one teaching panel (this time with Newspaper) titled "Pushing Students Outside Their Comfort Zones: The Challenge of Teaching the Sheltered Student Generation."

14. This is a partial list of teaching activities beyond the convention by some members. It was not feasible to compile a comprehensive list:

· COMJIG Head Elizabeth Hansen, Eastern Kentucky, and her community journalism students conducted a readership study of both the print and online versions of a Kentucky community daily in the spring of 2009. This was the 15th community journalism project community journalism students at Eastern Kentucky University have conducted since 1991 – all but two of them under Hansen’s direction. Community Journalism is the capstone course for journalism majors and is used in assessment of the program.

· Vice Head/Program Chair Doug Fisher, South Carolina, teaches the senior semester capstone course that produces "The Carolina Reporter." Fisher teaches editing and multimedia in the program that immerses students in the equivalent of a mid-sized community newsroom. “The Carolina Reporter” was named "national finalist," third place as best all-around, nondaily college newspaper by the Society of Professional Journalists.

· Head Emeritus Jock Lauterer, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, is continuing to guide his community journalism students as they produce the Carrboro Commons, a Web-based lab community paper for the neighboring town of Carrboro. In its third year, the project now includes PDF printable versions of each story/photo package, and more Soundslide and video components. It can be viewed at http://www.carrborocommons.org.

· Member Al Cross established Midway Messenger, a student-written news site for Midway, Ky., pop. 1,620, a prosperous town that once had a newspaper and generates considerable news, some of which is not fully reported by the county-seat weekly. See www.MidwayMessenger.org, http://midwayky.blogspot.com.

· Member Patricia Thomas, Georgia, taught a graduate course in Health and Medical Journalism, spring 2009. Students in this reporting/writing seminar were each assigned to cover health beat in one Northeast Georgia county. They partnered with undergraduates in documentary photography to produce multimedia packages about each county. Their aggregated blogs are available at http://deepsouthhealth.blogspot.com. Go to www.grady.uga.edu/knighthealth to see the “Rural Health” package that the graduate and undergraduate students produced together. On that same page, click on “student portfolios” to see additional stories they wrote.

· Member Andrea Frantz, Wilkes, received a Faculty Achievement Award for her teaching and research.
15. The Teaching mission of COMJIG has always been twofold. The first is to use communities as places where journalism students can explore and hone the skills they learn in the classroom. The second is to provide communities that are in need of strong community media with quality journalism products that are, ideally, sustainable and influential. With our in-conference activities related to teaching and the strong, ongoing out-of-conference activities of COMJIG members, we believe that we consistently meet those goals. Our members provide a variety of community based experiences for students while at the same time serving diverse communities. Teaching awards our members have received both this year and in the past are a testament to the teaching skills of our members.

PF&R:

16. For the fourth year in a row, in 2009 COMJIG is co-sponsoring a mini-plenary PF&R panel, this one titled "Normative Theories of the Media Worldwide: Issues of Responsibility and Freedom." This panel advances COMJIG's goal of increasing its international focus and involvement.

We are also co-sponsoring three PF&R panels: "Helping Rural Journalists Better Serve Their Communities," which COMJIG is organizing with CCJIG as a secondary sponsor, "Reinventing Journalism: Designing Four Experiments, " for which COMJIG is a co-sponsor with CCJIG, and "The Health of the Ethnic Media and Their Role In an Evolving Journalism World," co-sponsored with Minorities and Communication. By comparison, in 2008 COMJIG co-sponsored a mini-plenary and four PF&R panels.

It should be self evident how all four PF&R sessions tackle, at least in part, the issues of free expression, ethics, media criticism & accountability, racial, gender and cultural inclusiveness, and public service.

The following non-AEJMC members are scheduled to participate on COMJIG PF&R panels at the 2009 convention, reflecting the group's ties to the profession. Panelists will include:
· Chris Stadelman, publisher and editor, The Parsons Advocate, Parsons, West Virginia
· Doc Searls, senior editor, Linux Journal
· Christine Stuart, editor, CTNEWS-Junkie.com
· Marcela Elisa Garcia, editor, El Planeta
· Elvin Miller, publisher, Bay State Banner

17. This is a partial list of PF&R activities beyond the convention by some members. It was not feasible to compile a comprehensive list:

· COMJIG Head Elizabeth Hansen, Eastern Kentucky, is chair of the Steering Committee of the Institute for Rural Journalists and Community Issues, headquartered at the University of Kentucky. The Steering Committee is made up of 26 academic partners of the Institute at universities across the country. She is also a member of the Institute’s Executive Committee. Hansen serves on the national board of the Society of Professional Journalists, which has members from community media, and is a member of SPJ’s national Ethics Committee. She has addressed inquiries to the Ethics Committee from staff of community media.

· Vice Head/Program Chair Doug Fisher is an instructor in Newsplex Summer Seminars, which help faculty from colleges around the world adapt and expand digital techniques in their journalism teaching with a focus on simple techniques that can be used in gathering news of their communities. He is also executive editor of The Convergence Newsletter, a 10-times-per-year electronic newsletter exploring issues of convergence around the world. The newsletter includes a special issue on convergence and communities.

· Teaching Chair Eileen Gilligan, SUNY-Oswego, writes a monthly column for Family Times, the monthly free magazine published by the Syracuse New Times. Her column, "Bright Ideas," won second place in the "family fun" category of the Parenting Publications of America 2008 contest. Gilligan reports that the Center for Community Journalism at SUNY-Oswego was put on hiatus in January 2009 due to state budget cuts. The Web site and some services remain available.

· Head Emeritus Jock Lauterer, North Carolina, was named a Faculty Engaged Scholar and received a $15,000 award from the UNC Center for Public Service for his public service outreach work in community journalism. He also received a $25,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation to help launch a community newspaper and Web site for inner-city Durham that will be staffed by local urban youth, mentored by UNC-Chapel Hill community journalism students and predominantly black journalism students from Durham HBCU, North Carolina Central University. Lauterer has partnered with the City of Durham office of revitalization, the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club, and the Durham Public School system to kick this off with a series of basic photography classes for urban youth this spring and summer. The UNC-Chapel Hill student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, has donated the first year of printing for free, and Lauterer anticipates launching the Web version of the Northeast Central Durham Community Newspaper this fall. Lauterer is also in his ninth summer of the Community Journalism Roadshow, having reached more than 130 community papers in North Carolina. so far. He is blogging the Roadshow for the Carrboro Commons this summer while the students are on break. Accounts of the Roadshow are also found in Publishers’ Auxiliary.

· Don Corrigan, Webster, who is editor of two community weeklies, won 2nd place in Column Writing at the 2008 Independent Free Papers Association Convention (IFPA) in Seattle, and his newspaper group won numerous other awards, including General Excellence. Corrigan won 3rd place for Best Outdoor Story for weeklies at the 2008 Missouri Press Association Convention in Columbia, Mo.

· Member Al Cross, Kentucky, conducted two seminars titled “Sorting Through the Smoke” on covering local tobacco and health issues in Danville and Madisonville, Ky., May 15 and 29, 2009. The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which Cross directs, received the 2009 Media Award presented by the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation.

· Member Deborah Givens and Head Elizabeth Hansen, Eastern Kentucky, and member Al Cross, Kentucky, are planning the 2010 conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, which EKU and UK will co-host at Eastern Kentucky University in June 2010.

· Member Chad Stebbins, Missouri Southern State, continues to serve as executive director of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and editor of Grassroots Editor, ISWNE's quarterly journal.

· Member Patricia Thomas, Georgia, continues to work closely with ethnic media in Georgia and neighboring states, striving to strengthen health coverage in these community news organizations.

18. Please describe briefly PF&R goals and activities of your division. Such description may include discussion of primary accomplishments, programming diversity, special competitions, faculty/student research awards, newsletter activities and other activities.

As the gap widens between the health of "big-city" and national news operations and the by far more numerous community media, COMJIG seeks to ensure that community media are included in the national conversation about journalism 's future. This making sure the operational, ethical and financial issues faced by smaller, community-oriented news organizations­– and which may be far different than those faced by the relative handful of larger newsrooms – are discussed at professional conferences and training seminars. This also means providing free or low-cost advice and training to community journalists, either through informal consulting or by conducting more formal workshops at conferences, seminars, and the like. Our third PF&R objective is to make sure that, collectively, we continue to expand our service to community media that are not simply "small-town newspapers" (which have been the primary focus of community journalism efforts for decades), but serve other types of communities (ethnic communities, occupational communities, communities of interest, etc.) and other media forms (radio, television, digital, magazines, etc.). At COMJIG's joint business meeting with CCJIG at the 2008 convention, members discussed a proposal from Bill Reader, Ohio, outgoing head of COMJIG, and Jack Rosenberry (St. John Fisher), outgoing head of CCJIG, for a collaborative project to reach out to daily newspapers in the United States to teach them how to more effectively use both community and civic journalism in their news operations. No progress was made on this proposal this year, but it is something COMJIG may reconsider in the future when volunteers are available to lead the efforts and the economy is more conducive to funding such training.

General Information:

19. Please attach copies of the newsletters sent by your group this year, and any othermaterial you wish us to note.

We do not publish a newsletter. Instead, we maintain a Web site/blog that serves as a newsletter and a forum for discussion of key issues. The URL is: http://comjig.blogspot.com/. We also maintain a list serve on Yahoo groups, which provides a timely and efficient way to communicate with our members and to make relevant documents available to them. Web master Doug Fisher oversees both the Web site and the list serve.

Editing pre-con at AEJMC

Following up on the post about the editing breakfast at AEJMC, Susan Keith has also asked me to pass along that the Newspaper Division's pre-conference session on the future of editing has some space left -- Doug:

Dear COMJIG members,

There are still a few seats available for the Newspaper Division's pre-conference workshop, The Future of Editing, which runs from 1 to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 4, at the Boston Sheraton. COMJIG members may be especially interested in two late additions to the lineup of speakers: Christopher Grotke and Lise LePage of iBrattleboro.com, a renowned citizen journalism site covering communities in southern Vermont. They will take part in a panel discussion of the future of online editing.

The workshop, which costs $35, will also feature discussions with top newspaper editors, including the Boston Globe's Marty Baron; copy editors; and professors who are teaching editing in innovative ways. It should benefit not only editing professors, but also faculty who want to incorporate discussions of editing or how newspapers are approaching newer media into journalism courses. To register, contact Susan Keith of Rutgers University at susank@rci.rutgers.edu or 718-683-7071

Here's a look at the workshop, session by session:

Session 1, The Future of Newspapers
A discussion on what's ahead for newspapers with some of New England's top editors:
-- Marty Baron, editor of the Boston Globe
-- Felice Belman, editor of  the Concord (N.H.) Monitor
-- Chazy Dowaliby, editor of The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., and The Enterprise of Brockton, Mass.
-- Leah Lamson, editor of the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette
Moderator: Newspaper Division head Jack Rosenberry of St. John Fisher College, a former editor at the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle and other newspapers.

Session 2, The Future of Copy Editing
What is the state of copy editing in the United States? What new roles are copy editors taking on? Those topics will be discussed by four veterans of copy desk transitions:
-- Gillian Charters, a copy editor at the Christian Science Monitor
-- Jim Franklin, assistant night editor/metro slot at the Boston Globe
-- Mike Richard, a New York Times Metro Desk staff editor who edits the Times' City Room blog.
-- Chris Wienandt, president of the American Copy Editors Society and business copy desk chief at the Dallas Morning News
Moderator: Susan Keith of Rutgers University, a former copy editor at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times and other newspapers.

Session 3, The Future of Online Editing
Does editing for online news sites mean something different than editing for print? What's the role of an online editor, anyway? Four professionals and a professor will take up these questions.
-- Christopher Grotke and Lise LePage, iBrattleboro.com
-- Damon Kiesow, online managing editor of the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph
-- Jeanne Leblanc, former online editor of the Hartford Courant
-- John Russial, associate professor, University of Oregon
Moderator: Leslie-Jean Thornton of Arizona State University, a former editor at several daily and weekly newspapers in New York, Connecticut and Virginia.

Session 4, The Future of Editing Instruction
What does the evolution of editing in the industry mean for how professors should teach editing? Hear some ideas from three professors with innovative approaches:
-- Andy Bechtel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
-- Rick Kenney, University of Central Florida
-- Jill Van Wyke, Drake University.
Moderator: Susan Keith of Rutgers University

Editing Breakfast at AEJMC

I'm posting this on behalf of Deborah Gump. I've always found this breakfast to be a great help and fun time, and for anyone teaching community journalism, you'll come away with some good ideas -- Doug

Dear all,

A few seats remain for the Breakfast of Editing Champions at the AEJMC convention in Boston. The breakfast is free and open to anyone who teaches editing, appreciates editing or simply likes to hang around editing professors - and that should be pretty much everyone. To attend, RSVP by e-mail to gumpdl@gmail.com by next Friday.

Our agenda is simple, yet fundamental to journalism that matters: the future of editing and editing education. Since the beginning of the breakfasts, we’ve invited local journalists to help guide our discussion by sharing their views from the trenches. This year, we are fortunate to have two Boston journalists who can provide both a newsroom perspective and an industry-wide perspective. Joining us will be:

* David Beard, editor of Boston.com since 2006. He plays a key role in integrating the site’s news, sports, business, feature and multimedia operations with the Boston Globe. He previously served as an assistant managing editor of the Globe, in charge of the paper's five regional editions. Before that he ran the Globe's City Weekly section and served as the paper's deputy foreign editor. Beard also reported and edited for South Florida's Sun-Sentinel, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, and The Associated Press, for which his exotic postings included Argentina, the Caribbean, and Mississippi. He is a native of Pennsylvania and a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He is a former Inter American Press Association scholar and has taught news reporting at the Harvard Extension School. For an example of the kind of work David’s site does, check out its seven-part series on Ted Kennedy at http://www.boston.com/news/specials/kennedy/.

* Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University (www.niemanlab.org), which was created to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age. The Lab is trying to find the best business models to support high-quality journalism and to craft strategies that can make our work better. Josh spent 10 years in newspapers, most recently at The Dallas Morning News, before spending a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from 10 foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in international journalism, and three times has been a finalist for the Livingston Award for international reporting. Before Dallas, he was a reporter and rock critic for The Toledo Blade.

Also joining us this year will be Jan Freeman, author of the popular “The Word” column in the Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/jan_freeman/). If anyone would like to talk about the column or offer her suggestions for topics, she'd be glad to linger after the breakfast.

A highlight of the breakfasts has been the Teaching Idea Exchange, which shares your best teaching ideas and strategies. This year, Andy Bechtel from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill takes the reins of the exchange. Share your best teaching idea or tip by sending it to Andy at abechtel@email.unc.edu, also by Friday. Be ready to discuss it briefly at the breakfast.

We’ll also be compiling a list of resources, and I always depend on your contributions. If you’ve discovered a Web site, book, magazine article, video, YouTube clip or another resource that helps you be a more effective teacher, send me the details. As always, we’ll include all breakfast material on a DVD for easy packing. Much of the material from last year’s breakfast can be found at http://www.editteach.org/specialprojects?id=63. I also have a few extra copies of last year's DVD, which I'll bring along to this year's breakfast.

If you know someone who would be interested in attending, please pass along this invitation and point out the requirement to RSVP.

Oh, one more thing: We owe our coffee and pastries this year to Rich Holden, executive director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund. The craft of editing owes much to Rich, and now we do as well.

To sum up:

• Time: 8:15 - 9:45 a.m.
• Thursday, Aug. 6
• Place: TBA, but the breakfast will be in the convention hotel.

RSVP (required): Confirm by sending an e-mail to gumpdl@gmail.com by Friday (July 31).

Teaching Idea Exchange: Send your idea to Andy Bechtel abechtel@email.unc.edu by Friday.
Deborah

Tour the Christian Science Monitor during AEJMC convention

Note: This event was a late addition to the Newspaper Division lineup, so details do not appear in the division's convention preview LeadTime newsletter and will not be in the formal convention program. It developed from an invitation from the Monitor to AEJMC members that arrived after the deadline for both publications.
For additional information or to RSVP, contact Newspaper Division Head Jack Rosenberry via e-mail: jrosenberry [at] sjfc.edu.


The Christian Science Monitor:
After 100 years, a radically new future

Representatives of the Christian Science Monitor will discuss its shift from daily print to Web-first journalism in a special event taking place during the AEJMC convention in Boston.

The meeting in the Monitor building, which is just across the street from the convention hotel, will take place 4 to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 5. Reservations are required by Friday July 31 so that Monitor officials can be told how many to expect. To RSVP, contact Newspaper Division Head Jack Rosenberry via e-mail: jrosenberry [at] sjfc.edu.

This will be an opportunity to learn about a respected journalistic institution, rub elbows with colleagues, and visit a landmark Boston address. Light refreshments will be served.

The event will include a tour of the Monitor’s newsroom and talk about how editors and managers view its groundbreaking shift from daily print to Web-first journalism while continuing their commitment to international and national news coverage. Participants will be able to get their take on how well the new three-pronged publishing strategy is working and what the reader reaction has been to the mix of daily online news coverage, a weekly print magazine, and an e-mailed subscription news briefing.

It will begin in the “Quotes” Café in the Christian Science Publishing Society lobby. This building, which houses the Monitor’s newsroom, is part of Church Center plaza, across the street from the Sheraton Boston hotel. To enter the building, walk along the reflecting pool and make a diagonal right turn at the corner of the church. As you near Massachusetts Avenue the main entrance is on the right, just past the entrance designated as the Monitor’s.

Boston Convention Research Paper Sessions

As you prepare to head to Boston for the AEJMC convention, pay special attention to the COMJIG paper sessions:

Wednesday 5-6:30 p.m. Refereed Papers Session
Reasserting Radio: An Exploratory Survey of Staff and Volunteers at U.S. Community Radio Stations, Dean Graber, Texas at Austin
Journalism's Role in Bridging Fragmented Community: The Case of College Sports Communities Chang Wan Woo, Wilson Lowrey, Jung Kyu Kim, Hyuksoo Kim
and Hyonjin Ahn, Alabama
Community Journalism and Community History: A Call for Stories of the Storytellers
Janice Hume, Georgia


Thursday 1:30-3 p.m., Scholar-to- Scholar session
Community Newspapers and Their Use of Newspaper Design Technology
Jennifer Wood Adams, Auburn
Community News Editors as Citizens: Individual Level Predictors of Social Capital and Community Engagement Seungahn Nah and Deborah Chung, Kentucky

News-Gazette, University of Illinois J-school unveil project to report on local economic disparities

My friend Rich Martin probably doesn't want to toot his own horn, so I'll do it for him, by cross-posting one of today's items from The Rural Blog:

Champaign County, Illinois, population 171,000, "is home to a world-class university, chic new downtown lofts and more than 350 restaurants. It is also home to more than 58,600 residents – nearly one in three – who are impoverished or near poverty, according to 2007 Census Bureau data."

So report freelance writers Shelley Smithson and Pam G. Dempsey for The News-Gazette of Champaign and Urbana, in the first of a series "to engage citizens, educators and other media in an ongoing examination of poverty and its related issues in Champaign County," an editor's note says. The project director is Rich Martin of the University of Illinois School of Journalism, and journalism students will be involved. The project will include an interactive Web site "where citizens can access and contribute information about these issues," overseen by Brant Houston, the school's Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting and former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

"While news stories will be a significant part of this project, a major goal will be to provide access to information about the community to those citizens who seldom get that access," the editor's note says. "The project is funded by the Marajen Stevick Foundation, a News-Gazette community foundation; a matching grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a journalism foundation based in Miami; and contributions from the University of Illinois." (Read more)

Early Bird Registration Deadline is July 10

Friday, July 10, is the early bird registration deadline for the AEJMC convention Aug. 5-8, 2009, in Boston. If you are planning to attend the convention, register by Friday and save money! The registration form and details are available on the AEJMC Web site, http://www.aejmc.org

Doug Fisher, COMJIG's program chair, has put together a terrific program for Boston. Details were posted earlier on this blog. I encourage you to attend the COMJIG program sessions during the convention and the COMJIG members' meeting at 6:45 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 6.

I hope to see you in Boston.

International weekly editors' group honors writers for editorials and Garrett Ray for service

The International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors concluded its annual conference yesterday on Prince Edward Island after recognizing 12 weekly editors for their editorials and giving its highest award to a man whom one nominator dubbed the dean of the organization.

Garrett Ray, right, former editor and owner of the Littleton Independent in Colorado and retired faculty member at Colorado State University, won the Eugene Cervi Award for a career of outstanding public service through community journalism. His friend Richard McCord of Santa Fe, N.M., said in announcing the award that Ray has won journalism awards for "almost anything you can win an award for."

Ray's awards included the 1980 Golden Quill, which ISWNE gives to the editorial deemed the best of the Golden Dozen, 12 editorials that are recognized at the group's awards dinner and reprinted in its quarterly magazine, Grassroots Editor. For the latest edition of the magazine, with the award winners and their editorials, click here For a capsule rundown of the awards and the conference, click here.

Need to know COMJIG members' accomplishments

It's time to put together COMJIG's annual report for AEJMC, and we need your help.

Specifically, we need to know COMJIG members' accomplishments for the past year in community journalism-related research, teaching, PF&R, publications, etc.

Sorry to be a bother, but we need this by June 8 -- next Monday.

Please help out Liz Hansen and me. Send me (at dfisher@sc.edu) any notable things you've done. Have you worked with your class to help a local community media outlet -- or create one of your own? Have you found a new teaching technique? Have a new book, chapter or article with a community journalism component? Been working with an online community ...

We want to hear about it.

Again, please let me know ASAP, Just fill in the blanks below:

Name:

Institution or affiliation


Notable teaching 2008-09 (community J-related):


Notable research 2008-2009 (community J-related):


Articles, books, chapters, other publications related to community J:


Teaching accomplishments:


Other accomplishments we need to know about:




Again, please send to Doug Fisher dfisher@sc.edu

Thanks,
Doug

Seeing need for local ownership, former owner buys back small daily paper he sold 21 years ago

Gene Hall of Charles City, Iowa, sold the Charles City Press 21 years ago. About a month ago, he and his wife Cathy bought it back, along with the New Hampton Tribune and associated publications. This week, in the Iowa Newspaper Association Bulletin, he explains why, and it's a terrific testimony to the value of local newspaper ownership. There are good chain-owned papers, but Hall has seen the bad side of both forms of ownership, and with the newspaper business in turmoil, his reflections are quite timely.

"I am coming more to the realization that in order for community papers to be the best they can be they must be locally operated and better yet, locally owned," Hall writes. "I repurchased the paper I sold some 21 years ago because this is my paper in my community and I care. I’m essentially a private owner of a public trust and I feel good about that." With a circulation of 2,800, the Press is one of the smallest daily newspapers in the country. (Encarta map)

Hall opines, "The business model of community/local newspapers is still strong and will remain so. What is broken is the capital structure caused by way too much debt; unrealistic profit goals set by private equity owners; operational plans put in place by “Wall Street” analysts whose lack of knowledge and experience in the business is only exceeded by their shortsightedness."

Hall notes that he was "a corporate officer in a publicly traded media company for more than 15 years." His piece doesn't name the companies, but he told us that they were, in succession, Hollinger, Liberty Group and GateHouse Media. "Never was there a meaningful discussion about the product being germane to the community. Never a sentence about putting something back into the product or community," he recalls. "What has and is ruining American media is that, like even baseball, it came to be run solely as a business. Newspapers are more than a business. They have obligations and responsibilities far beyond what a big-box retail store or a widget manufacturer has. ... Big business has corrupted a sacred covenant. Care must be taken with a commodity so central to democracy." (Read more, via RuralJournalism.org; this item is also posted to The Rural Blog)

NRJ to feature special issue on "The Future of Community Journalism"

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ISSUE OF NEWSPAPER RESEARCH JOURNAL FOCUSED ON "THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM"

The rapid changes in the newspaper industry have turned more focus in recent years to what appears to be one of the more stable branches of the newspaper business — small-circulation daily and weekly newspapers generally referred to as "community newspapers." In light of these developments, the Newspaper Research Journal is accepting research articles and conceptual/theoretical essays that will shed light on "The Future of Community Newspapers" for a special issue of NRJ (tentatively scheduled for the winter 2011 issue).

This call is for articles that provide insights into the modern role of community newspapers, as well as suggestions that would help community newspapers to adapt to the changing marketplace. Both social-scientific and cultural/critical approaches will be considered, as will mixed-methods approaches. Preference will be given to articles that draw upon and advance media theory, although insightful non-theoretical, descriptive studies will be considered.

Submissions will undergo NRJ's usual peer-review process, and must be original research that is not under review with any other publication (although modified conference papers will be considered). NRJ's published guidelines regarding length, citation style, and formatting of tabular material will apply. The deadline for submissions is Dec. 1, 2009.

Submissions should be sent as Microsoft Word files to guest editor Bill Reader of Ohio University. E-mail them to reader@ohio.edu.

Volunteer weekly started when chain closed one

Many readers of this blog probably read yesterday's Los Angeles Times story about citizens in a Colorado town starting a newspaper after their local paper closed. The story was fine as far as it went, but for those interested in more details about content, competition, ownership and other facets of the story, read this item in The Rural Blog.

Writer pens a love note to community newspapers, explains why her hometown paper thrives

"Dailies are on hard times, but weekly newspaper readership is hard core," the Daily Yonder says in introducing a piece by Betty Dotson-Lewis, singing the praises and giving many of the operational details of her hometown newspaper, The Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville, W.Va. "This small-town newspaper is a mainstay of Nicholas County," she writes. "On Wednesday evenings a little after 4 o’clock, you will see people braving the coldest or hottest weather, in sickness or health, driving to a nearby convenience store or Wal-Mart to get their copy of their small-town paper."

Dotson-Lewis says the key to success of small-town papers is that "Rural folk are neighborly in the extreme. . . . The majority of rural residents read their weekly paper for dependable and reliable local news." And the Chronicle is "thriving," she writes, because "The newspaper owners live in the community and are involved in community activities," and meet the needs of readers. "The paper is filled with local happenings of nearby small rural communities written about by local people."

The Chronicle recently went online, publishing for non-subscribers the first few paragraphs of a few major stories each week and giving subscribers the choice of the traditional print or the electronic "green edition." The cost is the same, $28.50, except that students can get the online version for $18. (We like that idea.) One couple switched their subscription, but switched back to print, Dotson-Lewis reports, quoting the wife: “I need to hold my paper, turn the pages back and forth, spread it out on the table and take it all in. and if there is a photo of my boys in the paper, I can cut it out.” (This item was originally posted to The Rural Blog)

Newspaper Division launches teaching-ideas contest

AEJMC's Newspaper Division is conducting an activity that may be of interest to COMJIG members, called Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century - TNT21, for short. This is a competitive call for teaching ideas, with cash awards in three divisions: full-time faculty, adjunct faculty and graduate students. The entry deadline is Sunday, March 1.

Text of the call and links to the entry forms follow:


Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century

A teaching ideas competition sponsored by the Newspaper Division
of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

What is the best way to introduce students to the craft of writing, reporting or editing? The Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is looking for your ideas. This spring the division is launching a new online competition -- Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century, or TNT21 -- designed to reward and publicly acknowledge full-time faculty members, adjunct professors and graduate student instructors for their good ideas for teaching foundational journalism courses.

AWARDS/ELIGIBILITY
Three $100 prizes will be offered for the best ideas, one from each of the following entrants' categories:
o Full-time faculty members
o Adjunct or part-time professors
o Graduate students
To facilitate participation by adjunct faculty and graduate students who are not able to attend AEJMC's annual convention in Boston, where most otherNewspaper Division awards will be given, the competition will be held completely online.
Top entries will be published in a downloadable PDF booklet available on the AEJMC Newspaper Division website.

TYPES OF IDEAS
Teaching tips should be suitable for use in newswriting, reporting or editing courses, though they might be tailored for specific versions of those courses. For example, tips for teaching newswriting across media would be welcome, as would tips for teaching a specific type of reporting, such as public affairs reporting, business reporting or environmental reporting. Tips can address teaching practical skills, such as tracking down public information in online records or editing to improve the organization of a story. Entries also can focus on conceptual knowledge, showing, for example, how to teach students to report ethically or edit to avoid libel. Tips that help professors address the challenges of teaching in a world where technologies are rapidly changing are especially welcome.

HOW TO ENTER
To enter, download and fill out the entry form (also available at this backup location). Then send the completed form and any supporting materials to the teaching competition coordinators, Susan Keith of Rutgers University and Andrea Frantz of Wilkes University, at 21stcenturyteachingtips@gmail.com. The deadline for entries is 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time March 1, 2009.

CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION
Teaching ideas will be judged for their originality, innovative nature, ease of application, completeness, writing and whether they would work in more than one course and/or at different types of schools. All entries should reflect original teaching ideas that have not been published elsewhere and have not been finalists on display in other teaching awards competitions.
Winners will be announced on the Newspaper Division Web site about April 15. If you have questions about the competition or would like to serve as a judge, please e-mail Susan Keith at susank@scils.rutgers.edu or call her at 732-932-7500, ext. 8235.

Lauterer on the future of newspapers

Jock Lauterer, the always optimistic founding head of COMJIG, has an article in this month's issue of Quill. Check out what he has to say about the future of newspapers at https://www.spj.org/quill_issue.asp?REF=1454.

Live from Louisville - your AEJMC schedule!

(Updated with new times on preconference session)

A little live blogging today from inside the closely guarded chip room and cranberry juice bar at the AEJMC winter meeting. We now have a tentative program for you for the Boston convention, Aug. 5-8. We think it's a great selection of panels:


Tuesday Aug. 4
1-4 p.m.: A preconference session with CCJIG on the Mumbai terrorist attacks, citizen journalism and media literacy.

Wednesday Aug. 5
10 a.m.: COMJIG and CCJIG - We kick off with Helping rural journalists better serve their communities. This panel explores university-based training programs and projects designed to help rural journalists better serve their communities. Several could become prototypes for programs across the country.

11:45 a.m.: CCJIG and COMJIG - We follow that great panel with Reinventing Journalism: Anatomy of a One-Year Applied Field Experiment. This panel takes a look at the one-year Representative Journalism field experiment in Northfield, Minn.

3:15 p.m.: COMJIG, International, Religion. Mini-plenary on normative theories of the media, including the special role community journalism plays in helping democracies flourish.

5 p.m.: COMJIG - Our refereed research session. Be sure to be there for some great papers!

And, of course, don't forget the keynote speech and opening reception Wednesday night.

Thursday Aug. 6
11:45 a.m.: Newspaper and COMJIG - A great teaching panel on Pushing Students Outside Their Comfort Zones: The Challenges of Teaching the Sheltered Student Generation. How do we get those sheltered students to deal with people who aren't like them?

1:30 p.m.: Our scholar-to-scholar paper presentations.

6:45 p.m.: Don't miss our always engaging members meeting, which once again will be held partly in conjunction with the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group.

Friday Aug. 7
After the AEJMC business meeting, don't forget that J-lab will be having its citizen journalism luncheon. It's always a fascinating presentation.

1:45 p.m.: COMJIG and Minorities and Communication: Ethnic news organizations as community media, their health and future role in an evolving media world. Boston is rich in ethnic media. Come talk with publishers, editors and those who study the ethnic media about their health and their future roles.

3:30 p.m.: COMJIG and Newspaper - Research opportunities in community journalism. A great research panel. You need to come if you have or are planning a research agenda in community media. And remember, we define community not just as geographical, but social as well.

We'll let you know more as the convention approaches.

- Liz and Doug

Community Journalism loses a hero

Tom Gish, the crusading owner of The Mountain Eagle, in Whitesburg, Ky., died Friday, Nov. 21, 2008, at the age of 82.


Gish and his wife, Pat, were among the heroes of community journalism celebrated in a COMJIG panel at AEJMC's national convention in Chicago last August.

Tom and Pat Gish bought The Mountain Eagle in 1956 and began operating it in 1957. In the Nov. 22, 2008, issue of the Lexington Herald-Leader, reporter Andy Mead wrote this about the Gishes:

"The Mountain Eagle became the first newspaper in Eastern Kentucky to seriously challenge the environmental damage caused by strip mining. The Gishes scrapped the paper's motto: 'A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper Published Every Thursday.' The new motto: 'It Screams.'

"The Gishes pried open the meetings of public agencies and took on corrupt politicians, rapacious coal companies and bad schools.

"They were respected nationally but made plenty of local enemies. In 1974, after the newspaper published stories about local police mistreating young people, an officer paid arsonists to throw a kerosene firebomb through a window at the newspaper, destroying the building. Mr. Gish said he later learned that coal company money was behind the crime.

"The paper came out on schedule the next week, published on the Gishes' front porch. It had a new motto: 'It Still Screams.'" Read more at http://www.kentucky.com/181/story/600788.html


The Gishes won numerous awards for their work. In 2004, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues headquartered at the University of Kentucky created the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. They were the first recipients. Read more at http://www.ruraljournalism.org/


In addition to his wife, Mr. Gish is survived by his son Ben, who edits the paper, another son, three daughters, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Filipino press organization focuses on CJ to recruit new journos

The Sun-Star Cebo newspaper in the Philippines reports on its Website of a conference focused on Community Journalism held recently in the province of Cebu, called "Reaching out to future journalists: community journalism forum."

According to the report, Sun-Star Cebo editor in chief Pachico Seares "observed that many Cebu journalists regard their work as not just a livelihood but also a means of 'serving the community they cover.'" The report also paraphrased Seares to say "Despite constraints and challenges, community journalists leave the national competition behind in covering their cities and towns."

Another editor at the conference, Stella Estremera of the Sun-Star Davao, reportedly stated that "Equating community journalism as 'the art of making friends and making do,' Estremera encouraged future journalists to regard ordinary citizens as their 'eyes and ears.' By listening to citizen journalists, newsrooms can be in touch with the authentic day-to-day problems, needs and aspirations of the so-called little people."

The newspapers are part of the Sun-Star Community Newspaper network, which publishes 12 newspapers across the Philippines.

Another metro veteran finds success in CJ

Earlier this year, I talked to a reporter for a New Jersey political Web site about where veteran metro journalists are going after they are laid off or take buyouts from big-city newspapers. Some go to work for politicians or large organizations to do PR, I noted, but one option a few are embracing is moving to small and/or rural communities to take over or start community media.

Poynter's Sara Quinn recently wrote about just such a person, Jim Denk, who was a news design specialist for a number of large newspapers (Wichita Eagle, Asbury Park Press, Detroit Free Press, and the Charlotte Observer) before he and his wife, Janet, bought the 11,000 circulation weekly Record in Matthews, N.C. Jim and Janet run the newspaper with a handful of part-time employees, and told Quinn that they enjoy the "doing it all" aspects of publishing a community weekly.

Quinn is a design specialist at Poynter, so naturally her profile of the Denks focused mostly on how they use high-end visual journalism to serve the community and to showcase the kind of news and information that is so common to community journalism – intensely local concerns. Denk has used visuals to tell compelling stories about poorly design sidewalks, wildlife that live in and around the community, even the passing of a pet rooster that was a fixture in a local hardware store. And, of course, the ads – Denk puts just as much effort into custom-designed ads for the businesses of his community.

Read the profile, and see some samples of excellent community-journalism design work, at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=151124

Good investments: Small, local media companies with digital components, banker and publisher say

Jeanne Straus, right, the president of Monroe, N.Y.-based Straus Newspapers, had a question for her fellow weekly publishers in the New York Press Association when she took over as president on Friday: "What do Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., Roger Ailes of Fox News and Strauss Zelnick, the investment banker, all have in common?"

I said, "They're all rural publishers," thinking that Zelnick might be one. Two out of three wasn't bad. As Straus noted and has been reported, Ailes recently bought the Putnam County News and Recorder in Cold Spring, N.Y. And she noted that News Corp. recently bought weeklies in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. She could have also noted that Murdoch decided not to sell Ottaway Newspapers, a former Dow Jones subsidiary that has weeklies and a large rural clientele.

Answering her own question, Straus said the three men "are all headed our way – to the local community newspaper business. Strauss Zelnick said in January of this year that he wanted to invest more in 'smaller businesses … that have digital components.' And apparently he believes in old line media companies because he thinks although we don’t currently have the answer yet on the digital business – we will eventually," Straus said. "So my talk to you today is really a pep talk. Some pretty savvy media watchers think you – and I – are perfectly positioned for the future – small, local media companies with a digital component." For her full remarks, click here.

The digital component was my topic the next day, at a presentation arguing that weekly newspapers need to enter the 24/7 world: "For decades now, Americans have grown more accustomed to getting their news for free: First from radio, then TV, then from the Internet. (I say people get news free from the Internet, because while they pay for Internet access, there are plenty of free news sites.) Now, on top of the phenomenon of news for free, is the phenomenon that is already changing weekly newspapering: Americans are increasingly expecting to get their news immediately. Increasingly, your readers simply will not understand why they have to wait several days to read in your newspaper the local news that they heard about at the grocery, the post office, the bar or the coffee shop. There will be a demand for immediate local news, in the form of text, and someone will fill it." (Read more)

Also at the conference, the publishers voted to add this to the NYPA by-laws: "NYPA members are urged to conduct business with high ethical standards and practice good journalism ethics as exemplified by the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics."