PenPoints newsletter
PenPoints newsletter
Citizen Journalism (continued)
By Suzanne Hanney, IWPA President
The recollection also took me back to my first job out of college as a “society editor” on a county seat daily newspaper in Downstate Illinois. Early on, I decided that I had to listen to the consumers of my newspaper. In the words of the first Marshall Field’s, I “gave the ladies what they wanted.”
University of Illinois extension units, for example, had the same lesson each month and they filled scrapbooks that they submitted for statewide judging; they told me they counted on me for clippings. There was good information here, so I started rotating coverage of the lesson around the county. This way, every unit had one photo feature over the course of the year.
I also listed every group’s upcoming meetings in a standardized calendar. Because handwritten, odd-size sheets of paper were hard to keep track of, I had fill-in-the-blank forms printed so that the women could provide me the proper information as to date, place and time of meetings and some tidbit that made them interesting. I did similar forms for birth and wedding announcements. Making readers feel connected across the county was our paper’s role and we must have succeeded, because we had 107 percent market penetration (some people took the paper both at home and at their business).
In a recent Chicago Reader column about the acquisition of three Lerner neighborhood papers, Michael Miner put it in perspective. He quoted the publisher, who learned that one reporter at each of the three neighborhood papers was key to the acquisition because local people counted on them to cover their events. “Local stories, local ads. Local calendars. Just more of that uberlocal coverage.
That’s where print journalism is going to thrive and survive – that local focus.” Today at my street newspaper in Chicago, what I have taken from the Downstate experience and from the cab driver is that news is sometimes simply what people are interested in. My paper encourages volunteer writers, whom I see as akin to bloggers.
I could be proprietary about my editor’s role, but often that would be counterproductive. A better approach for me is to act as a teacher to these volunteer writers, or “citizen journalists.” Before giving them wings, I coax from them why a larger audience should care about their story ideas. I tie trends together and I ponder ethical issues if it seems they are too close to a subject.
Keeping myself open to the possibilities has produced some real gems. A new columnist has experienced mental health issues and has the expertise to write about them. A neighborhood movie theater is being preserved with proceeds from events ranging from the Three Stooges to La Leche League. A woman wrote about how she took charge of her life after a childhood of neglect.
I can’t be everywhere, so if I am going to obtain grassroots news, I have to tap into people’s passions.
IN THIS ISSUE:
FOUNDED IN 1885
Feature Story Citizen Journalism Authors/Awards Luncheon Member Profile
IWPA February Luncheon Top-Notch Judges WITASWAN Event Member News