Rural News Network
Keith Graham, Associate Professor, University of Montana School of Journalism
• Missoula, Mont.
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Rural News Network
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CONTACT INFO
Rural News Network
University of Montana
Missoula, MT 59812
(406) 243-4001
The network will recruit and train residents of three rural Montana towns to report on news and information for rural Web sites and plans to locate a computer kiosk in each community to ensure access and the ability to contribute to the news.
Check back for future news and updates.
• End of Year One: November 2007
• Spring 2007
• November 2006
• August 2006
On Saturday, May 5, 2007, 30 citizens from Dutton showed up at the Dutton-Brady School for a party to launch the new Web site, the Dutton Country Courier. Over hot dogs and hamburgers, a little catch and touch football, residents of rural Dutton, Montana celebrated a new beginning.
Six months later, the Rural News Network’s second site, CrowNews.net, burst on the scene, with content by, for and about tribal members of the Apsaalooke nation and residents of Crow Agency, Montana.
Keith Graham of the University of Montana says the journey to DuttonCC.org took many unexpected turns. “We changed our syllabus almost weekly as we kept figuring out how best to accomplish two goals - getting students an education in rural journalism and establishing a citizen journalism Web site.”
How did they do it?
“The librarian has written two wonderful pieces,” says Graham . “She also recalls some of the history of the community. And she has a wonderful sensibility for story telling,”
The biggest struggle the project faced was distance. Dutton is a three-hour trip from campus and it was difficult to get students up there more than two or three times during the spring 2007 semester. The challenge will be even greater with Crow Agency, which is a six-hour drive away.
Five Native American students in broadcast news, photojournalism and print journalism are participating in CrowNews.net.
Graham plans to use some matching funds to cover travel expenses and purchase an inexpensive point-and-shoot digital camera and audio kit for the town.
Graham says in the process of launching Dutton Country Courier, he learned that students have to get involved quickly in a town, making connections with the residents. “It is important for the journalists of the next generation to learn what is vital to the rural communities of today. It is important to put in face time in your community. The townsfolk must get to know and trust you - a basic tenet in journalism.”
In its first week (November 2007), CrowNews.net posted a video about the community, coverage of a Lodge Grass homecoming football game, and a competition.
The Rural News Network launched the first of its town sites in March 2007 in Dutton, Montana, an agricultural community of about 375. Some of the first content on the Dutton Country Courier (duttoncc.org) was co-authored by pairing a University of Montana journalism student with a citizen journalist.
A natural for the launch’s lead story was the change in ownership of the Café Dutton, the town’s restaurant and main gathering place since 1954. To write about it, grad student Mary Hudetz paired up with Bev Pedersen, who was retiring after owning the café with her husband for more than 20 years. Pedersen kept notes from her final days as owner of Café Dutton before selling it and offered some history of the watering hole.
Now the site has a couple of regular columns: “Jean’s Book Ends” from the town’s librarian, and “From the Mayor’s Desk,” written by Dutton Mayor Susan Fleshman. The site has audio interviews, slide shows and photos that are uploaded to the Flickr Web site.
Through the spring semester, the project leaders assigned students to develop story ideas and find a Dutton resident to work with them in producing the story. Co-authoring pieces, “gives [authors] confidence to publish,” project director Keith Graham advised at a March New Voices meeting.
And they are seeking more Dutton citizens to be consistent site contributors.
“We really struggled with whether or not to train these people how to do journalism,” Graham said. “We came to the conclusion that we really don’t have to.”
For the fall, RNN will move to a second town. The top choice is Crow Agency, at the heart of the Crow Reservation. This effort will be led by a Native American graduate student who is returning to class. Graham reported that he is excited at the prospect of having, “an intriguing Native American town to pursue.”
RNN is discussing other possible towns for inclusion in the network. One possibility is the town of Wisdom, which is in cattle ranching country and “is home to a fine trout stream,” Graham said. Other possibilities are in the northwest portion of the state.
UPDATE: Rural News Network has launched a beta version of the Dutton Country Courier, its Web site covering Dutton, Montana: www.duttoncc.org.
Citizen interest in the University of Montana’s Rural News Network is high. Keith Graham, the project director, proudly reports that about 80 people in the town of Dutton attended a meeting about the RNN in the fall.
“We couldn’t believe it,” he writes in a progress report on the project. “We got some effective questions from the floor that evening. After that meeting we really had a sense of what people want to see on their site. Now we just have to get it developed and designed.”
Graham hopes to launch the site at the end of March 2007. In preparation, students have been writing stories and building contacts in the community. At that town meeting, residents were given surveys, and 36 people returned them. Graham had been concerned that citizens in rural areas wouldn’t have home Internet access, but 30 of the respondents said that they had home computers. Three or four people also expressed interest in volunteering to work on the site.
The fall RNN class was made up of seven students that represented many facets of journalism. There were two reporters, two photographers, one radio reporter, one videographer and a Web designer. “This is the only class this semester where we have this kind of cross-discipline work,” Graham writes. Five of those students will continue to be in the class in the spring semester, and Graham is trying to recruit another participant.
The Web designer took suggestions from the class and has been designing the site. RNN is using Typepad to make it easy for citizens to participate.
For the fall semester’s final assignment, students teamed up with Dutton citizens to create stories. The radio reporter, for instance, produced a project on family heritage with interviews recorded by students in a high school class that has received reporting instruction from the RNN students.
One reporter worked with a woman who sold a local café she had owned for years. The student wrote a background story on the history of the place, and the owner penned “a nice reflective piece,” Graham says, on how she felt about leaving the restaurant. That story, he says, will serve as a model for other reports. None of the stories will appear on the Web until the RNN site debuts.
As Montana’s Rural News Network plans to launch, the project directors have been reaching out to rural communities to learn more about them and recruit citizen journalists. And students at the University of Montana School of Journalism in Missoula have been taking an active role in developing and designing the RNN Web site.
This summer, Associate Professor Keith Graham and Courtney Lowery, managing editor of NewWest.net, a UM alum and the creator of the project, made a summer scouting trip to Dutton, one of at least three towns that will participate in the RNN. Local residents will report and write the news for their community’s page, while UM students in Graham’s RNN class will contribute stories on rural issues to another section of the site and help train resident reporters.
Graham and Lowery also visited the nearby town of Brady, which recently consolidated its schools with those in Dutton, a major issue for area residents. Their road trip included a tour of the ranches and farms in this region of northwestern Montana.
In conversations in Dutton with the mayor and her assistant, the town librarian, the high school principal and his secretary, the English/yearbook high school teacher and several citizens, Graham got a very positive response. The mayor and the librarian were interested in training to be citizen journalists, and Graham and Lowery felt the high school secretary would participate as well, since she helped publish a monthly newsletter in Dutton after the local paper folded. One woman outside a church in town told Graham, who now has visited Dutton three times, that residents miss their newspaper and RNN would be a welcome addition.
Throughout the summer, Lowery tackled the technical side, choosing software for the RNN site and starting to design it. In the fall, Graham’s RNN class of seven students from various journalism disciplines started to produce content for the site, brainstorm on ideas for how the project will work, and instruct a Dutton high school class in the basics of reporting.
In November at a town meeting, Dutton residents will give their input about the design of the Dutton page on the RNN site. By the end of the semester, the site should be ready to launch, and in the meantime, Graham has asked the students to start thinking about the second town the project should approach.
Part of the challenge has been to figure out ways to teach basic reporting to citizens who are novices in journalism but experts on Dutton. Graham’s class has suggested putting a “community reporter’s notebook” section on the site with how-tos on covering city council meetings and high school football games. “It’s really kind of a messy project. It’s a project with so many moving parts,” he says. “But it’s also involving the citizens in as many ways as we can.”
The UM students’ final project will be to coauthor a piece with a town resident. It’s a great way to make this a “hyperlocal” citizen journalism project, Graham says, plus get students involved in covering rural issues.
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