Hello from Chicagoland
public
group: Newspapers on Drupal
marylopez68 - Mon, 2007-06-18 21:43
Hello from the Chicago area. In February, the Sun-Times News Group launched a new citizen journalism site, www.neighborhoodcircle.com using drupal and I am finally getting some time to get on here and tell you all to take a look at our site. I believe Yelvington blogged about it. We are still working through little glitches here and there and trying to find the best ways to get locals involved. We launched this in the far western suburbs of Chicago to get our feet wet, but we would like to grow the sites in other communities.
Take a look and tell us what you think.
Thanks,
Mary Ann
Welcome!
Welcome, Mary. I was particularly interested in NeighborhoodCircle because my wife's family has roots in Yorkville.
Most of the conversation here is about technology, but I'd be interested in hearing about your content and promotion strategies.
Thanks for the welcome
Well, I'm not too technical, although I have put in more than my 2 cents on this project. My designer has done a lot of the hard work figuring out how to get drupal to do what we want and make the pages look the way they do. So, I’ll just tell you a little bit about the journalistic side of things.
As to our content, we are gradually getting more user-submitted content. The items of greatest interest in this area seem to be events, so the majority of our submissions are about local events. As you know, this area is more than 50 miles west of Chicago and a lot of families have moved west looking for cheaper housing and safe communities, so they are looking for things to do. We are starting to get more users who are submitting stories and photos, but again, the majority of the user-submitted content is events.
We have tried to put all the local information a person might need in one place. We have links to local info from the e-mails for the town council to local weather and traffic links. We provide feeds to local news and also have links to other Sun-Times News Group publications.
We have a small staff that is writing stories and posting events and doing a lot of legwork, which means not only reporting but contacting locals and educating them about the sites. I don’t think we are doing anything groundbreaking in regard to our approach. We’ve taken a very grassroots approach from the start.
In some instances we have gone door-to-door to businesses telling them about the sites, we have handed out flyers to people we’ve met and attended meetings of local clubs/organizations. For example, I met with one of the local Rotary clubs to tell the members more about who we are and what we are doing and why they should use the site. So, the contact has been very grassroots. We just had a fairly big event in one of our communities so we were out taking photos and handing out some water bottles.
Our registration continues to grow and the number of people visiting the site also continues to grow.
A lot of what we are doing is education; at least that is what I call it. It’s more than just public relations or marketing, we are really trying to educate people about the concept of citizen’s journalism. This concept is still very foreign to a lot of people, especially adults who hear the mySpace stories and get freaked out and think everyone on the Internet is a predator. So we are trying to make people aware of the sites and let them know that we are real people who are here to help them use the sites if they have problems or questions. We have tried to create a friendly place that won’t be intimidating to users.
It’s all a work in progress and I’m sure things will change as we go along. Based on my experience with these projects, there is a sort of tipping point where people realize, “hey, my neighbor posted some photos. I can too.” And, then more people start to make the site a gathering place. So we’ll see how it will go.
Of course, I'm open to any ideas, comments, suggestions.
Cheers,
Mary Ann