The Madison Commons Project
Lewis Friedland of the University of Wisconsin
• Madison, Wisc.
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The Madison Commons Project
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To create “boot camps” to train citizen reporters and university students in micro-reporting for 12 mostly minority neighborhoods and to establish a model “community information commons.” The Web site will include content organized by neighborhood, region and issue and will be produced by citizen reporters and community and ethnic publications. The Capital Times newspaper will regularly feature news reports produced by the project.CONTACT INFO
The Madison Commons Project
5115 Vilas Hall
821 University Ave.
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-7853
Check back for future news and updates.
Jump to progress reports:
• Final Report: October 2007
• May 2006
• February 2006
• November 2005
• August 2005
Two years into its mission, the Madison Commons citizen journalism project continues to provide residents a vibrant place to find neighborhood news and an open forum to discuss community issues. As of May 2007, Madison Commons has trained about 70 people throughout the Wisconsin city and nearby communities to be citizen reporters.
But while the response to the training workshops has been good, only about 10 of those volunteers have continued to be active contributors.
To recruit more participants, The Commons reached out and formed partnerships with neighborhood planning councils, local daily and weekly newspapers, television outlets, non-profit groups, and the City of Madison’s Department of Planning. They offered two six-week series of workshops teaching people the basics of journalism and how to write profiles and issue-based pieces. During this past year, they also included a session on developing blogs.
Getting volunteers to follow through has been an enormous challenge. While most participants complete their writing assignments during the training, and their stories are published on the Madison Commons Web site, many trainees just fall off the radar. Founder Lew Friedland says perhaps it’s “been a flaw in our original design. We believed that it would be most difficult to recruit people, but that once they attended workshops, they would continue writing for the Commons.” That hasn’t been the case. And it’s been hard to get writers to submit fresh content. “As a result, we rely on content from our media partnerships with the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times to populate much of the Web site,” he says.
To address this dilemma, Madison Commons has begun posting stories originally published in neighborhood association newsletters and Web sites. “These newsletters provide a bird’s-eye view of people and issues in specific neighborhoods,” says Friedland. “Often times, the stories don’t appear in large media outlets but provide rich ideas and accounts from which people around the city can learn.” And the relationship is mutual. Several neighborhood associations now provide links to Madison Commons from their own Web sites. Undergraduate students also serve as Madison Commons neighborhood reporters for an entire semester. This experience gives them a deeper understanding of the communities they will cover as professionals.
Other media have also benefited from the citizen reporters trained by Madison Commons. Some “graduates” have been published in neighborhood newspapers. One individual is leading a project to help neighborhood youth create video podcasts. And the Wisconsin State Journal and Isthmus’ Daily Page have both picked up some stories from the Madison Commons.
Beyond the neighborhood lines, the editors have also started reaching out to people who may be interested in covering beats that have citywide appeal, such as public transportation or housing developments.
Madison Commons plans to expand its reach in the coming years. With the help of a $100,000 Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment grant, they expect to branch out to other Wisconsin communities between 2008 and 2010.
Other plans:
By the end of its first year, the Madison Commons Project had launched a community Web site, trained 50 citizen journalists, established several partnerships with community organizations and the media but, its founder says, it needs more funding and content to be a viable model.
The project launched with $12,000 from J-Lab and $10,000 in university funding but recent funding overtures to two community foundations were unsuccessful.
“Sustainability of our model depends on local community foundations seeing the civic utility of the commons and making modest sustaining contributions that can serve as a base for others,” said Lew Friedland, project director and journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For the 2006-2007 academic year, the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication will match J-Lab’s contribution of $5,000. The Commons plans to try again to seek grants from the Madison Community and Evjue Foundations. In the fall Madison Commons will explore online advertising and small donations as revenue sources.
To remain a viable project, Madison Commons must also motivate more content contributions. Currently, it is dependent on high commitments from a small number of volunteers: 80 percent of the content is provided by 20 percent of its trained reporters. To create more opportunities for citizen to participate, the Commons is:
The ongoing demand for training sessions is a good sign for sustainability, Friedland said. Beyond the original citizen journalist training, shorter, one- to two-hour workshops were held in spring and have continued into summer.
“Our online curriculum has been used by other CJ (citizen journalism) efforts. While we feel it was a fairly good start, there is a lot of room for refinement, expansion, and improvement,” Friedland said.
This fall the Commons plans to conduct a major training initiative for Madison neighborhood newsletter writers to help them write for the Commons site.
Summer has proved to be a slow period for the project because student contributors are away. Friedland said that citizen efforts, content from the two local dailies and about five students volunteers have contributed to a reasonable flow of new content.
There is growing citizen interest in the site, also a good sign for sustainability, said Friedland. The project’s Web site attracted 100 unique visitors after its launch in March, but traffic has increased steadily and in June the site receives 343 unique visitors totaling 518 page views.
“We are receiving direct expressions of interest, including requests for profiles from local groups and requests to link to various civic organizations. We think we have established a foothold that will continue to grow,” Friedland said.
The Commons site now has 34 neighborhood pages and covers 19 topics areas.
Community and media partnerships have continued to grow. The first partners, the East Isthmus Neighborhood Planning Council and the South Metro Planning Council are situated in the more working-class and minority regions of Madison, and were chosen to expand voices beyond the university community.
Two more partners were added in February and March: the city’s Department of Neighborhoods of the City of Madison and the Northside Planning Council.
The Commons has built relationships with the two daily newspapers (Wisconsin State Journal and Capital Times), and also established a partnership with the weekly Isthmus and Channel 3000, the web operation of the WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate.
Madison Commons is also developing links to alternative media, including WYOU, the cable access channel, and WORT, an independent local radio station.
Friedland said he hopes the project will suggest a new model for a community commons to address such concerns as: Who will sustain local coverage when the major news organizations no longer practice civic journalism?
The commons model seeks to shift the responsibility for hyper local coverage to civil society and institutions (in this case a university program, the planning councils and the city itself) working with market-based media institutions.
“While we would by no means claim success in demonstrating that this is a sustainable model¬ – that remains to be seen – it certainly has proven to be a workable model in its first year,” Friedland said.
The Madison Commons Project has launched its Web site, www.madisoncommons.org, where neighborhood news stories written by the program’s students are being aggregated on the main page and can also be viewed in pages specific to each neighborhood.
The success of the launch can also be seen in both local Madison newspapers, The Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal, which are running neighborhood articles written for the Madison Commons Project.
The project’s site is more than just neighborhood news, though. It also offers discussion forums for attendees of the project’s community journalism training workshops, as well as a reporting toolkit for aspiring community journalists who may not be able to make it to the training sessions.
The toolkit links to lessons on beginning reporting, basic news reporting and writing good leads, as well as an explanation of the differences between reporters, editors and columnists.
Also offered on the site are several samples of well-written stories from local newspapers with notes added by the Madison Commons instructors that break down the different elements of a news story and how they are shown in the samples.
The site now covers more than 20 neighborhoods in the Madison area, with content coming from several sources.
The first source is the group of citizens who have attended the community reporting workshops held on Madison’s East and South sides. These areas are generally lower income and have a higher presence of minorities, said Lew Friedland, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin who runs the project. The project has conducted two workshops to far, training about 25 participants. Each workshop series consisted of three, three-hour sessions. At the suggestion of attendees, the Commons is revising the format to conduct training over four two-hour sessions instead.
The second major source of content is from journalism students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most are seniors in Friedland’s advanced reporting class and each student is required to complete five assignments:
“On the whole, the work has been very good and important for producing content for the site,” Friedland said of the students’ assignments.
A third source is from neighborhood newsletters and newspapers. “Madison has several very good neighborhood papers, corresponding to the East, South and North sides of town. We have collaborative relationships with each and use their material with full credit.” Friedland said.
Fourth is the group of daily newspapers that have partnered with the Madison Commons Project. When any of these dailies publish a neighborhood-relevant story, the Commons has permission to republish them with credit. In return, the dailies are using stories written specifically for the project.
The final source, still being developed, is content from small neighborhood bulletins. Friedland said the Commons is collaborating with the City of Madison to hold writing workshops this summer specifically for small newsletter and bulletin writers.
While Friedland said the general response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive, he did say there has been some cynicism from local bloggers who don’t trust the project because of its connections to local newspapers.
However, Friedland said he is not worried about the naysayers.
“I really do believe our content will have an impact across the board in terms of raising the visibility of neighborhood news and, more importantly, creating a robust common space for people to learn from each other,” he said
November 2005
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| Madison Commons Project Director Lew Friedland talks about the basics of neighborhood news reporting during the East Side Community Journalism Workshop. |
Plans are now underway to launch by mid-December a Web site where they can turn their training into community reports. They will also be contributing to weekly community reports to be published in the local dailies, The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal.
The project partnered with two Neighborhood Planning Councils to recruit the contributors. Fourteen signed up from the city’s south side – mostly African-Americans, Latinos and Hmong participants. They included neighborhood association presidents, single mothers, high school students, and at least one former addict working on her GED.
“About half the group had at least some college education, but all needed major coaching in reporting and writing,” said project leader Lew Friedland, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The students were promising. The former addict approached her task of reporting with gusto and by the end of the session had interviewed the mayor’s chief aide and convinced him to do a walking interview with her through the neighborhood.
Another woman uncovered a major development that would displace many of the cheap hotels on Madison’s beltline highway but would also displace the transient people who now live there.
“They showed us that with some basic tools, citizens really can report on their own communities and break news,” Friedland said.
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| Rose Johnson-Brown, a student in the South Side Community Journalism Workshop, listens as project Managing Editor Chris Long offers advice about the neighborhood news story she is working on. |
Still, each person “takes a fair amount of care and attention,” he said. Even those who have written for neighborhood newsletters or community papers “aren’t necessarily trained to report from a framework outside of positive neighborhood news.”
Now the planning council on the north side of town has asked for training, and the city of Madison has asked the project to run workshops for the city’s neighborhood newsletter writers. Meanwhile, students at the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication have taken an advanced community reporting course and may also contribute to the effort.
Various local foundations are being approached for future support and discussions are underway with the journalism school to fund a research assistant/editor for the site.
Meanwhile, the lessons of the three workshops are being used to draft a training curriculum. The participants recommended that a fourth session be added and that each session be shortened.
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| Brian O’Donnell, a student in the East Side Community Journalism Workshop, works on his neighborhood news story in the computer lab. |
Conducting the workshops where people lived was important, Friedland said, because many people could come from work.
While training such diverse participants is a big challenge, a competing challenge is trying to keep the citizens voices alive. “Our goal is not to make everyone sound like a straight news reporter,” he said. “… Rather it is to develop a broad palette of community voices, while still developing a stream of news that otherwise wouldn’t be reported.”
Though money to launch this project was provided by J-Lab, the Madison Commons Project will approach a number of foundations, including the Madison Community Foundation, to continue funding the effort.
Where some citizen media projects invite people to contribute content without any training, the Madison Commons project has opted to develop a series of community journalism workshops to help neighborhood residents develop basic news skills.
The curriculum consists of three 3 1/2-hour workshops over dinner that will begin in October and cover:
Partnerships have been developed with the East Isthmus Neighborhoods Planning Council and the South Metropolitan Planning Council to train residents in their areas.
Once trained, people would be able to report for a community web site and contribute to weekly community news columns in Madison’s two daily newspapers, The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal.
Project leader Lew Friedland, a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, is also helping to develop a special Masters course in Community-based Web reporting to teach students civic mapping skills and neighborhood beat development.
Friedland says they are on track with the project’s first steps. “We are happy to be recruiting neighborhood reporters, the [master’s] course is filled, our Web site is in progress, and our curriculum is well underway.
“Once we are running, we are looking forward to becoming a regular, comprehensive community resource,” he said.
Copyright © 2004-2005 J-Lab, a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism.