6/4/ small group: discussion

various comments:

• "Build it and they will come" doesn't work! If you want to build an online community, you have to nurture your users, show appreciation
• implications for DSU research: we can't just adopt some system and say to the organization, "O.K., everybody, start blogging!" We need someone at the tiller, helping to establish the culture of the online community: expectations, rules, boundaries, etc.
  
• Journalism should evoke interaction (again, we are participants, and we want everybody else to participate!)
• Citizen journalism is here to tell the stories the papers don't.
  • This isn't just beating the corporations and power-peddlers; this is telling about the debate team, the visits, the human things that maybe don't make the cut for the paper but which build community, which give different groups a sense of belonging.
  
  

6/4 Opening: Mary Turck, Building Community

Speaker: Mary Turck, editor, Twin Cities Daily Planet
Topic: Citizen journalism, building community

• Agrees with Matt that the challenge is motivate people to create content.
• Citizen journalists are deterred by criticism, negative feedback, catching heck from subjects of articles. [CAH: Think about how nervous kids are about writing reports for class, how sensitive they can be to criticism from profs. For most people, that's the last formal writing experience they had. Now you want them to write out loud, for public consumption? Uff da!]
• Getting people to participate takes work: mentoring, editing, encouragement, writers workshops. [Think of it as gardening!]
• Tech is a challenge: gotta fight spam, keep image files small [folks dump huge photos on community sites, don't think to shrink the file, maybe don't even know what huge resolution their cameras are operating at].
• Financing is a challenge, too!