(posted by Bill Densmore)
Azalea enjoyed hearing about Richard Anderson’s VillageSoup.COM because it reflects a community effort, she said.
Cecily Burt appreciated hearing about Clyde Bentley’s ability to recruit reporters.
Dave Johnson talked about making the Atwater Sunfish Gazette more responsive to the community if it had a website to amplify and emphasize things. He can see more of a purpose for it now.
Matlho Kgosi said it is not often that you see the human side of journalists. She appreciated hearing about the news on a small public radio station that Scott Hall works at KAXE in Grand Rapids, Minn. Journalists are people too, and she appreciated hearing that.
http://www.kaxe.org/familytree/staff/scott_hall.html
Scott said they moved into a new $900,000 office in Grand Rapids, Minn., built over seven years right on the Mississippi River, with lots of wildlife around. For 20 years the studios were hot and nasty. It’s now a lovely place to work. They have about 1,700 members of the radio station in a 70-mile radius. He says he has an excellent manager and the vision of community radio. His was the first rural commercial station in the U.S. and he CPB refused to fund them initially. “It was a lot of ready, fire, aim. There were a lot of dead ends.”
Scott said he felt great about Azalea’s presentation of the “Eco-newsroom.” He said the first project he worked on was oral histories of lumberjacks, iron miners, for three years. He got their stories on the air. He is still drawing on what he learned from them 18 years ago, in the reporting he does today. “That’s my bearings, I guess.”
Clyde: He says Scott Hall “has become something of a hero to me.” He is doing great citizen journalism, but his attitude is that he doesn’t feel he is doing it well enough. He has made an interactive organization that feeds back to the cultural of the area. He experiments because he doesn’t have any money.”
Peggy Holman was struck that the nature of the journalism profession is to look outward. The idea of starting with oneself and relations in the newsroom to learn how to have the capacity to bring that introspection to the outside world struct her as a radically different way of working in the newsroom—“actually about people.”
Martin Reynolds found it interesting to see the skill sets of people—who mulls over economics, or healing. All essential to getting a clear picture. Someone used the anaology of the hourglass. Input on one side, squeezed through; he’s interested to see what comes out on the other side.
Steve Silha said that when he worked at the Christian Science Monitor, he told an editor he would just “go out and see what happens” and the editor was perplexed. He wanted to reinforce the idea that at the last session there weren’t any citizens; and there are three now.
Peggy Kuhr is struct by the issue of control and journalists are afraid of losing control. She said we talked about young people and they love having control of multimedia and mixing and matching and being in control of the news rather than having it pushed on them. It is a different way of looking at control.
Jim Shaffer is impressed with the diversity of skills in the room and hopes that by Saturday at noon we will meld this diversity into a sum which is greater than the parts.