News That Creates Connection and Transforms Communities

Earlier this week, a slice of the RVA Weblog Consortium hung out at the Times-Dispatch chatting it up with a few members of their editorial and interactive teams. The conversation covered a lot of ground, but essentially we were all focused on one thing -- the power of community news, whether it originated from a massive, partitioned newsroom or from someone's living room.

As the Richmond region launches its 14th community weblog (I'm counting RVANews and the Fan District Hub in the mix), the Times-Dispatch continues to sort through ways to cover the 20 localities within their editorial spotlight most effectively and compellingly. That's not a bad thing.

In fact, as Suzanne Morse at the Pew Partnership for Civic Change notes, it's a very good thing:

Community news leads to engagement--for this purpose defined as a connection, awareness to your community. This is particularly important as communities struggle to fill the gaps left by economic downturn. While people often complain about their local paper, it is the one place that citizens can find information about the state of the local economy, new development projects, and an occasional good news story. About 15 years ago, the Kettering Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts pioneered an idea called "community or public journalism." There was a hue and cry from some journalists that this concept violated the principle of objectivity but at its core it was about bringing the community back into the community though news. We still need that and more.

Morse doesn't talk about the growing role of community weblogs in this space, but their impact is growing. The sites aggregated by RVANews generate more than a quarter of a million page hits each month, a number that has increased exponentially since that site launched last fall.

The synergy between these sites and Richmond's professional media also continues to increase -- even as the weblogs reference newspaper and TV news stories, the number of independently generated posts grows. Some sites, like Church Hill People's News, rely on the local news media for a small percentage of its stories. Others, like North Richmond News (which I edit), have been breaking news for the local news media.

There are three projects in the works right now that we think will transform not just the community news sites, but may also have a dramatic impact on the broader weblog community in Richmond (more than 300 sites aggregated by RVABlogs). And hopefully increase the diversity of voices in that pool along the way.

One initiative involves workshops in the community to help individuals create their own weblogs -- with a particular focus on a diversity of voices such as Richmond's youth, seniors and working class. A second, we hope, will be a partnership between the professional media and the community weblogs to help strengthen the voices of those already publishing online. The third project will bolster the RVANews community weblog network.

Our goal is pretty simple -- to continue creating connections within the Richmond community, and to transform the way Richmonders share information.