Formerly titled Fulton Hill Interactive Portal Dr. Judy VanSlyke Turk, Director, School of Mass Communications, Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA
CONTACT INFO
School of Mass Comm.
Virginia Commonwealth
University
W. Main St/VCU Box 842034
Richmond, VA 23284-2024
(804) 827-3707
To train local citizen journalists and build a news and information portal for Fulton Hill, a low-income neighborhood in Richmond, Va. Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Mass Communications will work with the Fulton Hill Neighborhood Resource Center to help local residents produce stories, photos, audio, video and a Fulton Hill wiki.
2007 grantee Jeff South talks about the creation of site content, advertising to generate a greater audience and the support of New Voices. This interview took place on April 5, 2008, at the New Voices 2007 Grantee Meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn in Washington, D.C.
GreaterFultonNews.org grows into the future
August 2009
If you want a measure of just how much GreaterFultonNews.org has grown in a little more than a year, you just need to look at the number of unique visitors to the site over that period. In July, 2008, 511 visitors came to the site. One year later, that number has blossomed to 4,215.
And along with the growth in readership has come accolades. This past fall the site received special recognition from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) - where it is based - and that reflects a significant impact in the community, said Jeff South, the project’s director.
VCU marked its 40th anniversary in 2008. As part of the commemoration, the university conducted a competition to designate “40 Acts of Caring” - the 40 most successful university-community partnership projects. VCU announced the award at www.40th.vcu.edu/caring/capacity.html. The Fulton Hill project was recognized, with other “40 Acts” winners, at a ceremony last October 24 at VCU’s Siegel Center.
GreaterFultonNews.org has also been able to consistently generate content. Since July 2008, more than 220 top-level articles and about 300 comments have been posted on the site.
While there is widespread participation in the website, a relatively small number of users (such as Vicki Mallonee, the site’s Webmaster, and John Murden, a prolific blogger) still account for most of the articles posted. Mallonee has generated significant original content - even racing to a crime scene one night to get pictures and ask police what had happened.
Meanwhile, readers can comment on any article. The comments have attracted widespread community participation and often are as interesting as the initial article, said South.
GreaterFultonNews.org has been able to consistently generate content. Since July 2008, more than 220 top-level articles and about 300 comments have been posted on the site.
In addition, VCU journalism students have added a considerable number of original stories. They include students from the School’s Multimedia Journalism Master’s Program; from MASC 203 Journalism Writing; and from the School’s Capital News Service course. In addition, during the Summer 2009 semester, students in MASC 303 Reporting for Print and web wrote a series of articles about homelessness in Richmond. These articles were published on RVANews.com, which provides content of interest to the entire metro area, and they were promoted on GreaterFultonNews.org.
Another major new area of content was coverage of the Virginia General Assembly. This was made possible by the VCU School of Mass Communications’ Capital News Service program. And the students who were reporting from the assembly provided focused coverage of the legislators who represent the Fulton Hill area: Sen. Henry Marsh and Delegates Jennifer McClellan and Dolores McQuinn.
South has also offered to conduct additional citizen journalism training workshops for community leaders recruited by the Neighborhood Resource Center of Greater Fulton Hill (the site partner on the project). The goal is to develop (as Murden said) “a few good citizen editor/publishers who can harness the community’s inherent connectivity.”
South points out that the Fulton project also had impact not in a geographic way but on the citizen journalism community as a whole: Lynne Perri used comments from Mallonee, Murden and others in creating an interview guide for citizen journalists, now available at www.kcnn.org/interviewing.
GreaterFultonNews.org has taken one small step for citizen journalism, but a giant leap for its community. It has hired its first part-time administrator. She’s local resident and graphic designer Vicki Mallonee, whose job is to post, post, post - blogs, photos, other content - monitor citizen contributions, and make improvements to the overall design.
A recent provocative post shows that Mallonee is determined to engage her neighbors in a conversation about community needs:
“Would anyone be interested in starting a Neighborhood Association for the Fulton Hill Area? ... Now I know what comes to mind when you think of a Neighborhood Association - You can only paint your house a certain color, you have to have your trashcans hidden by a wooden structure or you can’t put lawn ornaments in your yard. ... An association can help bring the community together, it gets people involved in the happenings of the community, addresses safety issues, crime, blight, but overall it gathers homeowners together to protect their property values and to improve the neighborhood.”
And so begins a dialogue on the value of community organizing.
GreaterFultonNews.org is a thriving community site in a city that’s gaining a reputation for its many placeblogs. Even Richmond.com couldn’t ignore the trend, covered in a recent story called “A Hotbed of Citizen Journalism.”
There’s a sense of urgency to some of the Fulton Hill posts: “Hail of Gun Fire from Woodcroft Apts this evening!” But mostly the site shares good news, like the opening of a new dog park, plans for new community gardens, coverage of school board elections, and a discussion of Richmond History.
This summer, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Mass Communications, the administrator for the project, sent a team of public relations students to the Fulton Hill community. They talked to residents, solicited feedback and will pull the results together in a marketing plan and awareness campaign to boost participation in the site.
Even before the push for traffic, the site is on a strong trajectory. The number of unique visitors doubled each month in the first four months of the year.
Building Capacity for Change
March 2008
“This is not a newspaper or magazine. We are a neighborhood news blog, a grassroots publication with no staff reporters or editors. We are dependent on readers and contributors for all of our content.”
So begins Greater Fulton News’ call for community volunteers.
“We would especially like to find someone to report on events at the local schools, and would be delighted to have representatives of the local civic organizations. This is a chance to share your insights, knowledge, and opinions.”
And the sharing has begun. Launched at the tail end of 2007, GreaterFultonNews.org is a collaboration between the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Mass Communications and the Neighborhood Resource Center (NRC), a grassroots educational and cultural center in Richmond, VA. The site features contributions by VCU journalism majors along with postings by local residents, from calendar listings about community meetings to announcements about lost dogs. A Fulton Hill channel on YouTube hosts videos on the site, including student-produced profiles of Big Mama’s soul food cart and Joyce’s Beauty Lounge.
VCU has held four training session for both youth and adult residents on different aspects of content creation. Presenters gave a show and tell about other citizen sites and talked about good journalistic practices and editorial/column writing. Participants brainstormed ideas for their site. In later sessions, they got the chance to play around with the equipment and learn how to post blog entries, and edit and upload photos.
As a powerful new tool for community engagement, the project may encounter some editorial dilemmas. Locals are somewhat cautious about the face Fulton Hill projects forth to the online world. According to VCU’s dean Judy VanSlyke Turk, “Neighborhood residents did show a preference for avoiding content that puts their neighborhood in a ‘bad light.’ No one has yet written anything very critical, yet residents seem concerned that this might happen.”
So, the partners are developing a set of rules about what can be posted, explains VanSlyke Turk. “There’s been a great deal of discussion of freedom of speech vs. some degree of control over content to project a positive image of the community; the Neighborhood Resource Center staff and the neighborhood associations are leaning toward something less than a fully free site.”
But some speech on the site remains completely free: classified ads. GreaterFultonNews.org does hope to raise enough revenue through advertising to cover its basic costs. Right now, it is offering an incredible deal, charging only $5 for a small banner ad for six months.
To help make the project sustainable, it has also recently posted a job announcement, hoping to hire someone in the neighborhood for five hours a week:
“The web manager is responsible for monitoring all posts, comments, images, video and sound published to the website, making sure that they adhere to the site’s publishing guidelines. The manager will work with community organizations (including the civic and business associations; nonprofit organizations; local business owners; churches; and other community groups) to regularly develop and publish stories that focus on the Greater Fulton area. Knowledge of basic HTML required; experience with WordPress or other blogging tools and image editing software, such as Photoshop, highly desired.”
Fulton: Full Steam Ahead
November 2007
A new citizen-fueled news site for Fulton Hill is set to officially launch in December 2007.
Since May, the team from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) has met regularly with representatives of the Greater Fulton Hill neighborhood to build a trusting relationship while developing a plan for the site. At VCU, participating faculty divvied up responsibilities for training citizen journalists, tech development, website management, and project coordination.
The project held its first town meeting in September 2007 to acquaint the community with the website plan and recruit participants to the training program. Organizers promoted the event by distributing flyers to every household in the neighborhood. At the meeting, they screened a local teenager’s video about his first day of the new school year, to demystify the process and show residents how easy it is to share their stories and make media. Community members at that meeting voted in favor of the Greater Fulton News as the name for their site.
The project has purchased an LCD projector, a voice recorder, a still digital camera and media card for neighborhood news contributors to use. And, local TV Channel 12 donated computers to the Neighborhood Resource Center, greatly expanding the community’s access to the Internet, since most residents do not have computers at home.
Four citizen journalists attended a training workshop in September. Another training was planned for October.
In the mean time, project leaders are drafting rules and crafting a tutorial on posting content and compiling a list of resources for citizen journalists. Advanced TV News students have been assigned to create a package of stories about the Greater Fulton Hill neighborhood to be posted to the site. And a Flickr site has been set up for posting photos.
Judy VanSlyke Turk of the VCU School of Communications says that in recent months, project leaders have even begun to look ahead beyond the launch, discussing sustainability of site. They’ve been asking themselves, “Who will serve as Webmaster after the first year of the grant? How can community activists be compensated after the grant expires for their work with the project? How can we sustain the VCU-Greater Fulton Hill relationship after the expiration of the grant?”
“This is not a newspaper or magazine. We are a neighborhood news blog, a grassroots publication with no staff reporters or editors. We are dependent on readers and contributors for all of our content.” 
VCU has held four training session for both youth and adult residents on different aspects of content creation. Presenters gave a show and tell about other citizen sites and talked about good journalistic practices and editorial/column writing. Participants brainstormed ideas for their site. In later sessions, they got the chance to play around with the equipment and learn how to post blog entries, and edit and upload photos. 
The project has purchased an LCD projector, a voice recorder, a still digital camera and media card for neighborhood news contributors to use. And, local TV Channel 12 donated computers to the 
In the mean time, project leaders are drafting rules and crafting a tutorial on posting content and compiling a list of resources for citizen journalists. Advanced TV News students have been assigned to create a package of stories about the Greater Fulton Hill neighborhood to be posted to the site. And a 
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New Voices is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. 