If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard.
– NPR’s Alex Chadwick, on Insect Communications (part 2)
NPR today announced a new journalism project to develop in-depth, local coverage, in a new effort funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation.
The new funding – $2 million from CPB and $1 million from Knight Foundation – provides a pilot group of NPR stations with the resources to expand original reporting, and to curate, distribute and share online content about high-interest, specialized subjects.
Participating stations will have access to the PBS embeddable video player from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which will feature some of the reporting on its web site, says Paid Content.
The two-year pilot will help a dozen stations establish themselves as definitive sources of news on a topic selected by each one as most relevant to its community, such as city politics, the changing economy, healthcare, immigration or education. These online reports will help fill the growing gap in local news offerings.
The CPB and Knight Foundation grants will allow about a dozen NPR stations throughout the U.S. with established news operations to hire new journalist bloggers. Each will focus exclusively on reporting and aggregating news about a topic relevant to that city, based upon its geography and unique characteristics. Stations will feed their work into NPR’s content management system, where the entire group of participants will have easy access to each others’ work to inform, enrich and add context as they create and present their stories.
Individuals now have access to professional recording tools and are discovering a natural resource right in their own back yard.
Take, for example, Abraham Ingle (right), who I met last night at a gallery show. He created Neighborhood Diaries.
In late 2008 I began recording the location-based memories of Portlanders, and weaving them into free, interactive audio tours. The results are over eight hours of memories.I encourage you to take part in interviewing (listening to) somebody. Through the act of listening, we offer ourselves an opportunity to witness the many unifying characteristics of our shared humanity.
Ingle got a host of Portland bands to donate music to create a soundtrack. You can download all of his audio tours on the Apple’s iTunes store (search for “hoodturkey”), or just go to his website.
Another great Portland oral history project is Boise Voices, a creative collaboration between youth and elders in Northeast Portland to record the stories of how the Boise neighborhood has changed over time.
Once we have an interview with an elder lined up (we conducted the majority of our interviews in a quiet classroom or in the school library), the students use the interviewing skills that they have learned to prepare a list of questions. Working in teams of two, we sit down with each elder for a 45-minute interview, which we record and edit.Following the interview, each elder receives an audio CD with their complete interview; we also donate a copy to the Oregon Historical Society. Excerpts from these interviews are then added to the website, so that a wider audience can benefit from the collective wisdom of our elders.
Rick Turoczy’s memePDX and Strange Love Live are entertaining and informative video podcasts about the local tech scene in Portland. KGW’s Live@7 has been embraced by the twitter community with producer Aaron Weiss trailblazing a tricky path for broadcast television, creating a product that resonates with many fans of both old media and new.
For all the glories of the blogosphere, people still don’t have much access to constructive information about critical issues facing their square block, concludes a study produced by the Knight Commission, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.
The tools are here to enable everyone to pursue their bliss — and share it with others. That’s a great leap forward.
