Creating a News Network

A team of University of Montana students and professors are building a new kind of journalism in the rural communities of Montana

The Rural News Network was started in 2006 by Keith Graham, a journalism professor at the University of Montana, and Courtney Lowery, the managing editor of an online news site called New West. It became clear that a need for a rural news connection was growing, so Graham and Lowery jumped on the opportunity to create a news network. Funded by J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, through that organization’s New Voice’s program, the Rural News Network began in Dutton, Montana, Lowery’s hometown. Located northeast of Great Falls, Dutton was once home to the Dutton Dispatch newspaper. But the Dispatch folded, and Lowery and Graham hope the RNN Web site will allow people in Dutton to publish their own news.

RNN students at UM visited Dutton during fall semester 2006 to photograph, report and create multimedia stories for the Web site. Students also worked to help community members write their own stories, take their own photographs, and conduct their own audio interviews.

The goal of the project is to teach the town’s citizens how to contribute to their own online news network and provide them with the appropriate resources  to do so. Eventually, Lowery and Graham plan to take the project to other rural areas in hopes of creating a larger network.

MJR sat down with Graham and Lowery to discuss the necessity of RNN, its benefits,  and its future.

– Eleena Fikhman

Montana Journalism Review: Why do you think the Rural News Network is necessary?

Keith Graham: Well that’s the question, why’s it necessary? That’s a great question. It’s necessary because two-thirds of our population in the state of Montana live in rural areas. So it’s an underserved populace, the rural community. We’re going into small towns where towns have lost their newspapers or never had any. We’re replacing them with online sites to give them a sense of community. The streets of the rural areas create a sense of community and a newspaper provides part of that.

I’m going to try to rephrase [a quote from John Barrows, executive director of the Montana Newspaper Association]. Essentially he says, “What’s necessary for a town is two bars, a newspaper, and a school.”

Courtney Lowery: As quickly as rural places are depopulating, there’s a lot of towns that are striving to maintain their sense of community, and as some of the matriarchs and patriarchs start dying off, there’s really fewer and fewer people to kind of carry the flag for community building. That’s one of the reasons that people move to small towns. It’s one of the reasons people stay in small towns, and so a newspaper is just a good reflection of a community.

When a newspaper dies, the community starts to feel less cohesive, and we’ve seen that in Dutton. We’ve heard that from just about everybody we’ve talked to. When we first scouted out the town, everybody said there’s no way of connecting. If there’s no way of knowing who’s getting married, or who died, or who was born, or any of those things, there’s just less connective tissue in the town.

KG: I think it was Betty Brumwell, the district clerk of the superintendent of schools, who told us that, you know, it’s the school that is so important. They’re going through a school consolidation, and the other thing is once the newspaper died they really missed that community connection. The paper serves that purpose to help people stay connected, just makes a stronger community.

CL: Like Sepp [Jannotta, a student in RNN] was saying, when he was talking to Verna [Schluter], they were trying to get together. Verna is the town hairdresser, His & Her hair design, she’s been cutting my hair since I was wee. She still charges like $8-$10 for a really solid haircut, which is awesome.

KG: It’s a deal.

CL: She’s sort of carrying the torch for being a community leader, and she helps with the Dutton Fun Day and benefits and that kind of stuff.