Approach to Community News

A distinctive approach for covering and presenting local news — wide-ranging journalism for and with the community, starting at the neighborhood level and extending to city hall and beyond — is built into the Banyan model and its publishing platform. Banyan-affiliated news co-ops will be independently incorporated and managed, using our model as a base but with significant latitude to fit their coverage approach to their own communities.

Under our model, a professional editor not only covers city hall but also directs freelance writers and interns in creating a robust community news report. The co-ops, as community civic institutions, are designed to engage as many community residents as possible, as outlined below.

The co-op editor will be responsible for all that is published on the co-op’s news site, making sure that the content fulfills three ideals that underpin the Banyan model:

1) Journalism as the reliable information that people need to make their best life and citizenship decisions.

2) The value proposition that readers will experience the co-op’s journalism as relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy of their trust.

3) Commitment to serving the broad public, not just the affluent readers who newspapers tend to target.

In a time when journalism is widely distrusted, making these ideals explicit on co-op websites will let the community know what to expect. Fulfilling them creates trust, a value the co-op can monetize through memberships, and widens the potential universe of members.

The recommended basics

• Day-to-day coverage of institutions, issues and community happenings ranging from city council meetings to school sports, plus features that reveal the community and celebrate the lives of its people.
• Regular coverage of topics including business, the environment, arts, and education.
• Question of the Week, a feature that engages the community in the site’s digital public square, and in the process often turns up information that leads to news stories. Members will be asked to submit questions they think are crucial to community betterment.
• What’s Working, a weekly feature focusing on things that go well in the community an affiliate co-op serves.
• Quarterly major reporting projects that use a collaborative process that engages the community in identifying what demands coverage, then in crowdsourcing to help the professional who will report and write the project.
• Life-issue reporting, concise but useful items that help less-than-affluent people deal with the life issues that press on them and their loved ones, such as personal finance, health and jobs. Banyan will provide items that affiliated co-ops may customize if they wish.
• A local resource bank offering a wealth of links to reliable information, especially community resources that people can tap to make their lives better and to help one another, as well as a comprehensive calendar of community events.
• Community pages where engaged residents, working in relationship with a site’s editor, chronicle the happenings of neighborhoods, schools, sports teams, and other community groups.

Banyan will urge affiliated co-ops to use a tone and writing style that reflect the lives and experiences of the broad public and never to write in the jargon of experts and elites that is so common in the mainstream press. Banyan will encourage a focus on the stories of regular people, to be told in language they’re comfortable with.

The publishing software Banyan will supply to affiliated news co-ops is designed to deliver journalism that is primarily text, supplemented with still images, graphics, video and audio. The devotion to text rests on Banyan’s mission to strengthen democracy, in which text has special power in that it engages reason more easily than images do.

The co-ops may present the news not only on their websites but also through daily e-mail newsletters, mobile phone apps and podcasts.

Staff and writers

The minimum staff Banyan recommends for affiliated co-ops consists of two full-time professionals and a half-time administrator who serves as office manager, membership and advertiser service rep, and tech coordinator. In addition, an array of community members should engage with the news-gathering process, greatly expanding the news report that a small staff can produce. Regular non-staff writers will be paid from a substantial freelance budget. Ideally, all engaged will live in the community or otherwise have a sophisticated knowledge of it. Here’s the recommended cast of characters:

Executive director — The person in day-to-day charge of all the co-op does. This position is half publisher (optimizing all revenue streams and controlling expenses) and half community organizer (building community relationships, stirring civic engagement, and maximizing co-op membership). The co-op board will hire the executive director, who will report to them. The executive director will oversee the work of the editor, write a weekly column about goings-on in the community, contribute to a weekly newsletter for co-op members and, if it seems necessary, add and supervise a commissioned ad sales person.

Editor — The newsroom leader will personally write major stories while largely superviseing the work of an array of freelancers, neighborhood correspondents and college and high school interns. Duties include selecting and assigning freelance writers, including those who conduct the quarterly major reporting projects. Most fundamentally, the editor will ensure fulfillment of Banyan’s value proposition, journalism definition, and commitment to serving the broad public. This editing and approving every bit of news content before it’s published.

Freelance Writers—Experienced reporters who take specific assignments from the editor or who follow a topic such as business or the environment. All will be co-op members who work under a formal agreement as “producer members” with specific duties and who understand that the co-op’s editor will supervise them. They will be paid from the co-op’s freelance budget. (All non-staff writers, from top freelancers to high school interns, will work under this kind of arrangement; less skilled producer members, including high school interns, will receive modest honoraria.)

Neighborhood correspondents—A resident of each neighborhood or outlying community that a co-op serves will be recruited to round up brief items about what’s going on in the neighborhood and with its residents. The correspondents will be not be professional journalists but engaged residents.

School sports correspondents—Nonprofessional correspondents will track the progress of every school sport during its season. (Freelancers will be assigned to cover major games.)

College interns—Students recommended by faculty of local or nearby community colleges or commuter colleges who are looking for journalism experience will ideally be students who grew up in or near the community that the co-op serves. The editors will work out each intern’s responsibilities individually.

High school interns—Students recommended by high school teachers will help with nonjournalistic information-gathering efforts such as a community calendar of events (supervised by the administrator) and will produce one news article per semester (supervised by the editor). If the teachers approve, the article can be done as part of course work.

The readers will also play an important role in the news effort. Banyan’s publishing platform is designed to invite richer feedback from readers than legacy-model editors have ever known. This reader/editor collaboration is an expression of the kind of shared voluntarism that fuels peer networks of all kinds, from food co-ops to service organizations to Wikipedia—and it adds efficiency that means the Banyan model will significantly expand the scope of coverage possible with a small staff.

This widely distributed community engagement in the news-gathering process will give the editor an unusually clear view of the community’s information needs.  This offers a view into corners of the community that legacy journalism models rarely explore and makes it possible for editors to make news judgments more from the people up than from institutions down.  

Local resource bank suggestions

In a prominent space, the site will offer a vetted guide to community resources the broad public will find relevant, including:

• Weather widget, with links to local weather stations, and current moon stage widget.

• SeeClickFix widget

• Events calendar, curated by the staff administrator with assistance from high school interns.

• Obits—Widget that opens to a landing page that features links to obits that are posted on the websites of local funeral homes, updated daily—perhaps by the funeral homes. And perhaps the landing page would display sponsorship ads from the funeral homes.

• Schools—a page for every school in town, with the potential to grow into a highly interactive service.

• Pets—lost pets and pets available for adoption.

• People Helping People: Links to the local time bank, resilience circles, freecycling, tool exchanges, swap sites and other ways community members can help each other and join forces on projects. Perhaps this is just a list in a box, or it could be a widget that shows one PHP site at a time, in sequence, and links to a landing page that displays every link with a thumbnail description of the service.  Some, if not all, of these resource guides may be part of the site’s digital public square.

• Link to a weekly garage sale map and listings.

• Links to community-based organizations that meet the life-issue needs of community people, including health clinics, food banks, credit counselors, credit unions and other co-ops.

• Lists of all real estate transactions.

• Lists of all building permits.

• Links to all relevant governmental offices.

• In election years, links to lists of all campaign contributions by commuity residents and businesses.

• Widget that opens to a landing page that features links to local bloggers of all kinds, from mommy blogs on up, that have been vetted for decency.

• Link to profile pages for local business (if news co-op members) and local bands (ditto).

• Anything useful to the community that can be displayed straight out of an existing API (traffic and local gas prices, for example). 

Life-issue reporting 

Concise but practical items that help the broad public deal with the life issues that press on them and their loved ones should be among the most potent material news co-ops can offer.

Banyan’s software is designed so that the life-issue items will run in blog format in a prominent place on affiliated co-ops’ home pages. Even though these items will rarely arise from a community served by the co-op, they will have local impact — on the readers. Co-ops will be able to add local information to every item where there’s a local resource. Here are two sample life-issue items:

Banks that Nibble at Jobless Benefits

People who receive their jobless benefits on prepaid debit cards can be subject to a variety of bank fees they can ill afford to pay, according to the National Consumer Law Center. The prepaid cards appeal to people who can’t get direct deposit because they have no checking account. Practices vary from state to state because state governments negotiate the terms of agreements with card providers. In many states, charges apply for using ATMs, checking balances, and even for not using the card enough (“inactivity fees,” as high as $3). The law center’s report calls these fees “junk.” Each state has only one card issuer, so it’s important to learn the charges imposed in your state so you can take steps to maximize how much of your benefits go to you and minimize how much goes to the bank. State-by-state charges are detailed at the end of the report.

 

Eating Late Hazardous to Weight?

To hold your weight down, don’t eat late at night. This is the finding of a study published in the journal Obesity. Northwestern University researchers followed the sleeping and eating patterns of 52 people over seven days. They discovered that eating after 8 PM was associated with a higher body mass index, suggesting that late-evening calories are more hazardous to your weight. Why? More study is needed to figure that out, the scientists say. Meanwhile, eat early.

As soon as possible, a feature will be added to the publishing platform to aggregate the life-issue items, tagged by topic in a closed, searchable database. That way, when a particular problem enters readers lives, they can search for stories that might offer help.

More Editorial Ideas to Test

• Run a crowdsourced effort to get the community to define the community’s heart-and-soul attributes. Update it every year.

• Ask readers to nominate people in the community who are doing things that make it better, and profile them.

• Run a personal essay contest and publish the best ones. Also a contest for photos that reveal the community.

• Set up a system to cover every little league game in every sport through parents or other stringers using smart phones and special Twitter hashtags to provide live updates – and get lots of people’s names “in the paper.” Also, offer live coverage of the community’s high school sports events.

• Offer discussion space to every school in a co-op’s community and to community-enriching organizations without their own websites.