• About Community Journalism

Route 7 is a community journalism project produced by the members of the Coolville, Ohio community in conjunction with the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

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• TBD is CTD: The fast rise and fall of a CJ startup from Community Journalism
• UPDATE: Please see corrections in third and sixth paragraphs and clarified language in the eighth paragraph. I regret the errors and any confusing prose, and greatly appreciate TBD.com’s Steve Buttry contributing the corrections. Buttry’s response can be read at http://bit.ly/fj7nIP. -- Bill R.
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• Additional thoughts on TBD.com from Community Journalism
• My recent post regarding TBD.com’s pending decline generated some feedback, including quite a bit within TBD.com itself. Steve Buttry, director of community engagement at TBD.com and a veteran community journalist, weighed in heavily on his personal blog. He also pointed out some factual errors that I have since corrected. I encourage those interested in the issue to read Steve’s reply and the ensuing dialog (and I also am envious of the commenting forum on Steve’s blog, and hope we someday offer the same on this site).
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• Keep Local Money Local? from Community Journalism
• "Freedom of the press" is an important concept, but of course there isn’t much about producing news that is "free." Employees must be paid, expenses covered, bills reconciled. That takes money. Community media often need considerably less money, given their smaller staffs and operating costs; however, the potential revenue in small communities is often quite limited, too. For community journalism outlets, "scale" is at the heart of the money issue.
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• Anonymity in a Small Town from Community Journalism
• According to the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, journalists are supposed to "give voice to the voiceless." But a recent trend in the journalism business has been to refuse to give voice to the nameless.
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• Hyperlocal Sports Sans Community Context? from Community Journalism
• Gannett recently announced its plans to expand its prep sports site, Highschoolsports.net, to provide "hyperlocal" coverage of 100 distinct schools. That coverage would then be "co-branded" with Gannett’s community newspapers serving those schools.
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• A Fifth are Offline from Community Journalism
• One in five U.S. adults do not use the Internet, according to a recently released survey report by the Pew Internet & American Life project.
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• Locating ’Local’ from Community Journalism
• AOL’s spreading local-news service, Patch.com, is not your father’s big-media community-journalism effort. By targeting suburbs and small towns without their own newspapers, and hiring local residents to produce content (some fresh grads of J-schools), Patch has the potential to be a major player in the community-journalism market.
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• What is ’community journalism’? from Community Journalism
• There’s a lot of buzz in both the industry and the academy these days about ’community journalism,’ and many pros and profs who are doing the talking think the concept is somehow new.
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• Too Little, Too Late from Community Journalism
• A recently reported scandal in the blue-collar L.A. suburb of Bell, California, shows how a lack of community journalism can result in obscene levels of corruption in local governments. The L.A. Times broke the story more than a decade after the city of Bell lost its strong community paper; the city government had only received token coverage for some time.
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• Small Papers, Big Courage from Community Journalism
• In late June, I attended the annual conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, which this year was held in and around Richmond, Ky., and Eastern Kentucky University. ISWNE is a small but active group of mostly independent weekly newspaper editors from the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and some other nations.
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• Not Insignificant from Community Journalism
• Several years ago, when the venerable Wall Street Journal was up for sale by Dow Jones and being aggressively pursued by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., we witnessed on a grand scale how the "community journalism" issue too often flies under the radar.
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• CJ and the Jena 6 from Community Journalism
• One reason community journalism tends to fly under the radar of media watchers (including many in journalism education) is because the work is intensely localized. A simple example can be found every election day - community media often report on the outcome of local races (county offices, town council, school boards) that would be of little interest to people not living in those localities. Rarely does a story published in a community medium get picked up by regional, national or international news media.
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• What’s the difference? from Community Journalism
• At first pale, there may seem to be little difference between community journalism and the so-called ’mainstream media’ journalism of big-city newspapers, global magazines, national broadcasting and cable media, and national/international Web sites. But there are many profound differences, and countless subtle differences. Here are but a few:
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