New Voices: 2006 Grantees: Creating Community Connections

2006 Grantees

Creating Community Connections

Suzanne McBride, Director of News Reporting and Writing/Journalism,
Columbia College Chicago
Chicago

CONTACT INFO

Chicago Talks/
Creating Community Connections
Suite 201-E, 33 E. Congress Parkway
Chicago, IL 60605
(312) 344-8907
E-mail

Web site

This project plans to recruit and train neighborhood journalists to cover five ZIP codes in central Chicago. Columbia journalism students and citizen journalists will cover the local police district, school council, neighborhood groups, church events and businesses. Content will be edited by staff at a new citizen media start-up, Chi-town Daily News, and published on chitowndailylnews.org.

Check back for future news and updates.

• End of Year One: November 2007
• Spring 2007
• November 2006
• August 2006

Successful Soft Launch

End of Year One: November 2007

UPDATE (4/5/08): Creating Community Connections is now in the process of re-branding itself as Chicago Talks. Both CreatingCommunityConnections.org and ChicagoTalks.org will now take you to their site.

As of November 2007, CreatingCommunityConnections published 358 original stories on a range of topics: From stories about residents upset with street musicians banging drums in the middle of the night, to a decades-old ice cream shop managing to stay afloat, to one neighborhood upset by the amount of dog poop left on sidewalks.

“Our goal has been to tell stories that otherwise would go uncovered,” says Barb Iverson, who co-founded the site with Columbia College Chicago colleague Suzanne McBride. “We’re pleased that we’ve been able to provide the residents of several Chicago neighborhoods with news they need and want, and until now, couldn’t get anywhere else.”

The pair is especially proud of an exclusive investigative series published in April about Chicago aldermen who employ relatives in their taxpayer-supported ward offices. The series included a searchable database of more than 40,000 city workers. To increase traffic, they jointly published the aldermen stories with The Beachwood Reporter, another more heavily viewed local site.

Three weeks later, CreatingCommunityConnections published a package of stories, photos and video on immigration. “It was just hours before more than 100,000 people marched in Chicago at what turned out to be the nation’s largest rally on the controversial issue,” says Iverson.

Page views and registered users continue to grow even in this soft launch period with no formal marketing or promotion yet. “We plan a hard launch in the fall. We are getting to know how the site works and tweaking features.” In response to community and user requests, they’ve added new beats and neighborhoods to the menus on the site. They also use a CiviCRM package to do an e-mail “blast” to share a general report about the site’s progress with registered contributors.

Iverson and McBride have asked Chicago Tech for programming assistance and help to further customize the site and make image uploading easier to use. “And because we are using open source software, some of the features we develop for our site will be available for other citizen journalism sites to adapt for their use at no charge,” says Iverson.

As of November, 2007, CreatingCommunityConnections had 181 registered users and has published 358 stories. The site meter has tracked 9,052 views for the main page. Since June, they have added 8,050 site visits from 5,722 unique visitors. About one-third of visitors are return readers; the rest are new to the site. And a group of bloggers is now contributing to a section called “Talk Around Town.”

“About half of our traffic comes from users who type in our URL,” says Iverson, “so for a ‘soft launch’ period when we didn’t see much attention we are doing well with word of mouth. Visitors look at an average of four pages for about four minutes, so we appear to be getting readers, not just lookers, which is a good sign.”

CreatingCommunityConnections continues to reach out to new neighborhoods and community organizations. One successful bridge was built to the Chicago-based Friends of the Park (FOTP), a group of 10,000 volunteers who serve to protect, improve and promote urban parks. The Chicago Park District consists of 7,300 acres of parkland, 552 parks, 33 beaches, two conservatories, 16 lagoons, and 10 bird and wildlife gardens. There are more than 100 park advisory councils in Chicago. FOTP has been able to use the CreatingCommunityConnections site to engage people interactively. For example, FOTP volunteers shared their stories and photos from activities like the Late Night Bike Ride and annual clean-up drives. The site will also begin a forum on bikes and bike trails, as FOTP works with the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and other organizations on creating and maintaining bike trails throughout Chicago and its parks.

“This is an exciting development because one of our early goals was to connect with community groups and help strengthen what they’re doing,” says Iverson.

“The challenge in coming months is to build sets of portfolios of residents who want to be involved in the site, whether it’s providing story tips, spreading the word in their neighborhood about the site or submitting content,” says Iverson. Columbia College journalists are actively contributing to the site and full-time paid interns covered the month of August, when there are no journalism classes the college, ensuring fresh content gets posted on the site at least five days a week. Future plans include hiring a Citizen-J editor, who will recruit Chicago residents to help with the site, and offer stipends to content contributors.

Politics, Immigration Issues Fuel Connections Site

Spring 2007

Creating Community Connections launched in April 2007 after weeks of reporting by 13 undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia College Chicago on the city’s aldermanic elections. Some of the student coverage outpaced the city’s major media.

Now the site is populated by news from a growing group of city neighborhoods and on such topics as politics, art and entertainment, and planning and development.

A recent round of stories on immigration issues, including video of a May 1 immigration rally in the city, has animated the site.

Users can now vote on their favorite stories: A “thumbs-up” gives a story one point; “thumbs down” takes away a point. The voting results are shown under “What’s Hot.”

Project creators Suzanne McBride and Barbara Iverson, who teach at Columbia, collaborated with CivicSpaceLab.org to remodel and polish the Web site. Content is searchable via neighborhood categories (South Loop, Lincoln Park, Hyde Park) and by interest categories (parks, schools, entertainment).

Since last fall, Creating Community Connections has increased its coverage from just three wards to many more of the city’s neighborhoods. Still, Iverson, McBride and their student contributors want more continual local content. Iverson says a new goal is to have “one fresh story on the home page” every day.

It’s been an exciting time to cover Chicago neighborhoods. All 50 aldermen faced re-election in February. “The major Chicago newspapers have published some stories on a few of the races, giving our citizen journalists in training plenty of opportunities to report and write about issues and the candidates not being covered,” Iverson said.

The project leaders worked with other community groups to organize a candidates’ forum in the Second Ward. It drew more than 100 people and cultivated many new connections within the South Loop neighborhood. McBride, a self-described ‘traditional journalist,’ likes this new idea: “It is a very interesting change in my mind to partner with community groups instead of competing with them,” like many traditional media do.

In the future, McBride and Iverson say they “envision helping organize similar forums with the aldermen in other areas of the city after the elections to help citizens get connected and stay in touch with what’s happening in their neighborhoods.” Their ultimate goal, McBride says, is to be able to do town halls - covering them on the Web site and “getting the conversation going” in communities.

Another goal is to create Web portfolios on local parks and local entertainment to increase content and make the site more relevant to all residents of Chicago.

Now that the site is up and running, McBride and Iverson are spreading the word about their operation. Their hard work creating personal connections at the college, in the libraries, in the local governments and in the communities themselves is helping them keep lines of communication open to generate story ideas and to promote the site to potential readers and a base of contributors.

According to their progress report: “Local news might have faded from Chicago mass media, but it is clear that interest in neighborhood news remains as strong as ever. We’re excited to be moving toward establishing our place in the media landscape and one day serving as a model for other citizen journalism projects.”

Students Gear Up for Feb. 27 City Elections

November 2006

Site construction continues at creatingcommunityconnections.org. Project directors signed a contract with Civicspaces to design the Web pages, and in early January, a prototype was nearly complete. Barbara K. Iverson and Suzanne McBride at Chicago’s Columbia College say they began talks with the company after consulting with other New Voices grantees and various experts.

In the meantime, Iverson’s and McBride’s students are reporting and writing about communities in and around the city’s downtown - and learning that connections are important. “The more time students spent in their neighborhoods, the more connections they made with ‘mavens,’ as author Malcolm Gladwell terms influential people in his best seller, ‘The Tipping Point,’” Iverson and McBride write in their progress report. “We soon realized that getting students hooked up with the key elected official in each neighborhood - the alderman - was critical to finding other movers and shakers in the area.”

The directors have hit upon three main goals as the site develops: give readers local news they can’t get anywhere else; prompt them to become contributors; and use RSS feeds and links to other Chicago-focused sites to transform “readers” into “viewer/users” of a dynamic site.

Because students have been most successful in covering neighborhoods when they made contacts with politicians, the project’s coverage plan will be redefined in coming months to emphasize the city’s wards - although the content will still be divided by neighborhood to be user-friendly.

Plus, Iverson and McBride want to gain momentum at creatingcommunityconnections.org with stories about the February 27 local elections. “By February, our goal is to have journalists covering news in at least 10 of the city’s 50 wards,” they write. “We’ll identify the wards based on a number of factors, most notably whether our student journalist lives and/or works in that area and if there is a contested aldermanic race in the ward.”

The big challenge, as with many citizen-journalist efforts, is to get residents to add content to the site - and to do so consistently. The site will contain numerous content streams from the viewpoint of a block, a ward or the city to help encourage participation. Iverson and McBride are also wrestling with whether to provide compensation to citizen reporters. They’re not fond of the MSM’s practice of handing out little or no pay to freelancers. “We like what OhmyNews has done: Pay reporters based on the number of hits on their stories.”

Chicago Neighborhood Journalism Project Seeks Out Community Input

August 2006

While it’s not accepting conent just yet, Creating Community Connections’ Web site is already up and getting the word out on what the site will do, what citizen journalism is all about, and what tools residents can use to write, film and record their stories.

Run by Suzanne McBride and Barbara K. Iverson at Columbia College in Chicago, this project will train citizen journalists in central Chicago to cover local news, along with Columbia J-school students.

McBride and Iverson have looked at three city neighborhoods for the first year of the project, trying to get a sense of what “community” means to residents there. Eight people came to their first public meeting in June to discuss what the Creating Community Connections could be, and the directors have met with other local community and political leaders in these areas. At their booth at a late July street festival in the South Loop, they recorded interviews with people in the neighborhood to identify story ideas and other community groups they could target.

There has been more outreach: The project directors have talked with Columbia College students interested in writing for the site, community groups, local chamber of commerce members, and those behind Chicago’s WiFi initiatives in the 10th Ward, which has worked on computer access issues - a key problem that can affect a community connection project. What they’ve found is a range of needs and desires. “One person wants to see neighborhood-focused health news, though he’s not sure he wants to help gather that content,” McBride and Iverson write in their progress report. “Another is interested in writing about growth and development that she fears is getting out of control in her neighborhood. And someone else would like to do some blogging.”

What McBride and Iverson have to do is be flexible. They’ll work on creating training workshops in public centers, possibly consulting with The Madison Commons Project, which has taught citizen journalists. On the technical side, they’ve gathered advice from other sites, such as TwinCities Daily Planet and MyMissourian, and decided to use open source software Drupal or Django and MySQL. They also have a local, inexpensive hosting service.

In addition to using citizen and student hyperlocal content, McBride and Iverson envision Creating Community Connections as a gateway to under-covered stories. “We think our site can serve as a portal for ethnic media and other alternative media voices,” they add. “Chicago neighborhoods are rich with niche media, but without a ‘virtual town square’ the voices echo only within small enclaves.”

McBride and Iverson believe future challenges will be keeping contributions from students and residents fresh, and attracting readers to the site.

Back to 2006 Grantees | Back to Home Page | E-mail This | Print This

• • Mission Contact Info J-Lab site Staff Links • Guidelines How to Apply FAQs Advisory Board • List of Grantees Project Updates • Citizens Media Spotlights Good Ideas Glossary • News Releases News about Citizens Media Speeches • • Blog Ask Questions Share Your Story • Sign up for New Voices e-mail updates!	2006 Grantees Creating Community Connections Suzanne McBride, Director of News Reporting and Writing/Journalism, Columbia College Chicago Chicago CONTACT INFO Chicago Talks/ Creating Community Connections Suite 201-E, 33 E. Congress Parkway Chicago, IL 60605 (312) 344-8907 E-mail Web site This project plans to recruit and train neighborhood journalists to cover five ZIP codes in central Chicago. Columbia journalism students and citizen journalists will cover the local police district, school council, neighborhood groups, church events and businesses. Content will be edited by staff at a new citizen media start-up, Chi-town Daily News, and published on chitowndailylnews.org. Check back for future news and updates. • End of Year One: November 2007 • Spring 2007 • November 2006 • August 2006 Successful Soft Launch End of Year One: November 2007 UPDATE (4/5/08): Creating Community Connections is now in the process of re-branding itself as Chicago Talks. Both CreatingCommunityConnections.org and ChicagoTalks.org will now take you to their site. As of November 2007, CreatingCommunityConnections published 358 original stories on a range of topics: From stories about residents upset with street musicians banging drums in the middle of the night, to a decades-old ice cream shop managing to stay afloat, to one neighborhood upset by the amount of dog poop left on sidewalks. “Our goal has been to tell stories that otherwise would go uncovered,” says Barb Iverson, who co-founded the site with Columbia College Chicago colleague Suzanne McBride. “We’re pleased that we’ve been able to provide the residents of several Chicago neighborhoods with news they need and want, and until now, couldn’t get anywhere else.” The pair is especially proud of an exclusive investigative series published in April about Chicago aldermen who employ relatives in their taxpayer-supported ward offices. The series included a searchable database of more than 40,000 city workers. To increase traffic, they jointly published the aldermen stories with The Beachwood Reporter, another more heavily viewed local site. Three weeks later, CreatingCommunityConnections published a package of stories, photos and video on immigration. “It was just hours before more than 100,000 people marched in Chicago at what turned out to be the nation’s largest rally on the controversial issue,” says Iverson. Page views and registered users continue to grow even in this soft launch period with no formal marketing or promotion yet. “We plan a hard launch in the fall. We are getting to know how the site works and tweaking features.” In response to community and user requests, they’ve added new beats and neighborhoods to the menus on the site. They also use a CiviCRM package to do an e-mail “blast” to share a general report about the site’s progress with registered contributors. Iverson and McBride have asked Chicago Tech for programming assistance and help to further customize the site and make image uploading easier to use. “And because we are using open source software, some of the features we develop for our site will be available for other citizen journalism sites to adapt for their use at no charge,” says Iverson. As of November, 2007, CreatingCommunityConnections had 181 registered users and has published 358 stories. The site meter has tracked 9,052 views for the main page. Since June, they have added 8,050 site visits from 5,722 unique visitors. About one-third of visitors are return readers; the rest are new to the site. And a group of bloggers is now contributing to a section called “Talk Around Town.” “About half of our traffic comes from users who type in our URL,” says Iverson, “so for a ‘soft launch’ period when we didn’t see much attention we are doing well with word of mouth. Visitors look at an average of four pages for about four minutes, so we appear to be getting readers, not just lookers, which is a good sign.” CreatingCommunityConnections continues to reach out to new neighborhoods and community organizations. One successful bridge was built to the Chicago-based Friends of the Park (FOTP), a group of 10,000 volunteers who serve to protect, improve and promote urban parks. The Chicago Park District consists of 7,300 acres of parkland, 552 parks, 33 beaches, two conservatories, 16 lagoons, and 10 bird and wildlife gardens. There are more than 100 park advisory councils in Chicago. FOTP has been able to use the CreatingCommunityConnections site to engage people interactively. For example, FOTP volunteers shared their stories and photos from activities like the Late Night Bike Ride and annual clean-up drives. The site will also begin a forum on bikes and bike trails, as FOTP works with the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and other organizations on creating and maintaining bike trails throughout Chicago and its parks. “This is an exciting development because one of our early goals was to connect with community groups and help strengthen what they’re doing,” says Iverson. “The challenge in coming months is to build sets of portfolios of residents who want to be involved in the site, whether it’s providing story tips, spreading the word in their neighborhood about the site or submitting content,” says Iverson. Columbia College journalists are actively contributing to the site and full-time paid interns covered the month of August, when there are no journalism classes the college, ensuring fresh content gets posted on the site at least five days a week. Future plans include hiring a Citizen-J editor, who will recruit Chicago residents to help with the site, and offer stipends to content contributors. Politics, Immigration Issues Fuel Connections Site Spring 2007 Creating Community Connections launched in April 2007 after weeks of reporting by 13 undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia College Chicago on the city’s aldermanic elections. Some of the student coverage outpaced the city’s major media. Now the site is populated by news from a growing group of city neighborhoods and on such topics as politics, art and entertainment, and planning and development. A recent round of stories on immigration issues, including video of a May 1 immigration rally in the city, has animated the site. Users can now vote on their favorite stories: A “thumbs-up” gives a story one point; “thumbs down” takes away a point. The voting results are shown under “What’s Hot.” Project creators Suzanne McBride and Barbara Iverson, who teach at Columbia, collaborated with CivicSpaceLab.org to remodel and polish the Web site. Content is searchable via neighborhood categories (South Loop, Lincoln Park, Hyde Park) and by interest categories (parks, schools, entertainment). Since last fall, Creating Community Connections has increased its coverage from just three wards to many more of the city’s neighborhoods. Still, Iverson, McBride and their student contributors want more continual local content. Iverson says a new goal is to have “one fresh story on the home page” every day. It’s been an exciting time to cover Chicago neighborhoods. All 50 aldermen faced re-election in February. “The major Chicago newspapers have published some stories on a few of the races, giving our citizen journalists in training plenty of opportunities to report and write about issues and the candidates not being covered,” Iverson said. The project leaders worked with other community groups to organize a candidates’ forum in the Second Ward. It drew more than 100 people and cultivated many new connections within the South Loop neighborhood. McBride, a self-described ‘traditional journalist,’ likes this new idea: “It is a very interesting change in my mind to partner with community groups instead of competing with them,” like many traditional media do. In the future, McBride and Iverson say they “envision helping organize similar forums with the aldermen in other areas of the city after the elections to help citizens get connected and stay in touch with what’s happening in their neighborhoods.” Their ultimate goal, McBride says, is to be able to do town halls - covering them on the Web site and “getting the conversation going” in communities. Another goal is to create Web portfolios on local parks and local entertainment to increase content and make the site more relevant to all residents of Chicago. Now that the site is up and running, McBride and Iverson are spreading the word about their operation. Their hard work creating personal connections at the college, in the libraries, in the local governments and in the communities themselves is helping them keep lines of communication open to generate story ideas and to promote the site to potential readers and a base of contributors. According to their progress report: “Local news might have faded from Chicago mass media, but it is clear that interest in neighborhood news remains as strong as ever. We’re excited to be moving toward establishing our place in the media landscape and one day serving as a model for other citizen journalism projects.” Students Gear Up for Feb. 27 City Elections November 2006 Site construction continues at creatingcommunityconnections.org. Project directors signed a contract with Civicspaces to design the Web pages, and in early January, a prototype was nearly complete. Barbara K. Iverson and Suzanne McBride at Chicago’s Columbia College say they began talks with the company after consulting with other New Voices grantees and various experts. In the meantime, Iverson’s and McBride’s students are reporting and writing about communities in and around the city’s downtown - and learning that connections are important. “The more time students spent in their neighborhoods, the more connections they made with ‘mavens,’ as author Malcolm Gladwell terms influential people in his best seller, ‘The Tipping Point,’” Iverson and McBride write in their progress report. “We soon realized that getting students hooked up with the key elected official in each neighborhood - the alderman - was critical to finding other movers and shakers in the area.” The directors have hit upon three main goals as the site develops: give readers local news they can’t get anywhere else; prompt them to become contributors; and use RSS feeds and links to other Chicago-focused sites to transform “readers” into “viewer/users” of a dynamic site. Because students have been most successful in covering neighborhoods when they made contacts with politicians, the project’s coverage plan will be redefined in coming months to emphasize the city’s wards - although the content will still be divided by neighborhood to be user-friendly. Plus, Iverson and McBride want to gain momentum at creatingcommunityconnections.org with stories about the February 27 local elections. “By February, our goal is to have journalists covering news in at least 10 of the city’s 50 wards,” they write. “We’ll identify the wards based on a number of factors, most notably whether our student journalist lives and/or works in that area and if there is a contested aldermanic race in the ward.” The big challenge, as with many citizen-journalist efforts, is to get residents to add content to the site - and to do so consistently. The site will contain numerous content streams from the viewpoint of a block, a ward or the city to help encourage participation. Iverson and McBride are also wrestling with whether to provide compensation to citizen reporters. They’re not fond of the MSM’s practice of handing out little or no pay to freelancers. “We like what OhmyNews has done: Pay reporters based on the number of hits on their stories.” Chicago Neighborhood Journalism Project Seeks Out Community Input August 2006 While it’s not accepting conent just yet, Creating Community Connections’ Web site is already up and getting the word out on what the site will do, what citizen journalism is all about, and what tools residents can use to write, film and record their stories. Run by Suzanne McBride and Barbara K. Iverson at Columbia College in Chicago, this project will train citizen journalists in central Chicago to cover local news, along with Columbia J-school students. McBride and Iverson have looked at three city neighborhoods for the first year of the project, trying to get a sense of what “community” means to residents there. Eight people came to their first public meeting in June to discuss what the Creating Community Connections could be, and the directors have met with other local community and political leaders in these areas. At their booth at a late July street festival in the South Loop, they recorded interviews with people in the neighborhood to identify story ideas and other community groups they could target. There has been more outreach: The project directors have talked with Columbia College students interested in writing for the site, community groups, local chamber of commerce members, and those behind Chicago’s WiFi initiatives in the 10th Ward, which has worked on computer access issues - a key problem that can affect a community connection project. What they’ve found is a range of needs and desires. “One person wants to see neighborhood-focused health news, though he’s not sure he wants to help gather that content,” McBride and Iverson write in their progress report. “Another is interested in writing about growth and development that she fears is getting out of control in her neighborhood. And someone else would like to do some blogging.” What McBride and Iverson have to do is be flexible. They’ll work on creating training workshops in public centers, possibly consulting with The Madison Commons Project, which has taught citizen journalists. On the technical side, they’ve gathered advice from other sites, such as TwinCities Daily Planet and MyMissourian, and decided to use open source software Drupal or Django and MySQL. They also have a local, inexpensive hosting service. In addition to using citizen and student hyperlocal content, McBride and Iverson envision Creating Community Connections as a gateway to under-covered stories. “We think our site can serve as a portal for ethnic media and other alternative media voices,” they add. “Chicago neighborhoods are rich with niche media, but without a ‘virtual town square’ the voices echo only within small enclaves.” McBride and Iverson believe future challenges will be keeping contributions from students and residents fresh, and attracting readers to the site. Back to 2006 Grantees \| Back to Home Page \| E-mail This \| Print This


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