Five more years!

Community Journalism Interest Group successfully "passed" its assessment by the AEJMC folks and you can now consider us part of the "permanent" landscape at AEJ. Here's what they said we should spend some time on:

• Define clearly what "community journalism" is. We may know it, but that doesn't mean everyone else in journalism and mass comm education does. We need a slogan, a label, so we can ....
• Get the word out about community journalism. In other words, market our IG. If community journalism is the hot trend, well, what are we doing to capitalize on that? And how are we letting the world know?
• Spend less time worrying about the number of research papers, and figure out what research we want to focus on. Perhaps it's in teaching, perhaps it's in public service (working with communities and news professionals). Focus our call for papers on a topic or 2.
• Make sure we document our activities beyond the convention .... national meetings we're part of, booklets we put together, etc.
• Understand that a lot of our diverse membership can come from our work with professionals (outside AEJ membership lists).
• Keep building the blog. Folks loved it.