RNN

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CL: Her next-door neighbor had a baby a couple months ago that was struggling and having some health problems, and they were having to go to all these specialists. Verna said it was really difficult to get that benefit together without the newspaper. It was one of the first benefits she’d thrown since the newspaper died, and she said it was really difficult to get people motivated and get them to come and get them to know about it. And so she called the Great Falls Tribune and they did a story about it, but apparently it didn’t really reflect what exactly the community wanted, and that’s going to happen any time you come in and cover something from out of town. But it was difficult, Verna said, to mobilize the troops, as it were.

KG: I think the other great thing is that the journalists that we’re training, the students, [are] the journalists of tomorrow. It’s helping them learn what’s important for rural communities. So that when they go out in those places, they understand the important issues of the day. I think that’s crucial for journalism.

The other part of this puzzle, too, is that it’s necessary to bring the rural community to the online world. That’s the other thing this does. It gets people connected to the online community. The newspaper not going to be a printed one. This is going to be an online publication. So that, I think, helps get the citizens there. So we’re going to create citizen contributors, citizen journalists, citizen staffers.

CL: We were kind of struggling at first with what this site was going to be. Was it going to be just a newsletter? A newspaper?

Here in the journalism school we think of journalism in very specific terms. What we’re trying to accomplish in Dutton is, by some standards, not the journalism that we practice here in the school. There’s a very real tug to want to do real reporting and investigations and all kinds of stuff, and there’s a need for that in that society, but there’s also a very basic need for just basic communication. And so we went back and forth with that in class, and it was definitely a struggle to figure that out, but then it became abundantly clear that what we were going to be doing here is informing the citizens about when the next pancake breakfast is, and what went on at the town meeting, and where they’re storing the Christmas decorations this year. Things that we as professionally trained journalists wouldn’t see as journalism. When I was growing up in Dutton, the Dutton Dispatch served a very specific role. When I got to college and started learning what journalism was all about, I sort of poo-pooed the Dutton Dispatch. I brought it into the college newspaper office and showed it off, and made fun of it. It was printed out on 11x17-inch paper, copied off in Bonnie Powell’s laundry room, and it wasn’t by any means what I thought of as journalism. “Oh, look at what us hicks out there do with journalism.”

But then as I got older, as the paper started dwindling and died, you see a very, very distinct need for that kind of information.

KG: I think the other thing with that, that we’ve learned that has been clear in the national media, is that when Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, said in November 2006: We are going to go to a 24-hour news Web cycle, and we’re going to be concentrating on local and hyper-local journalism. Well, this is what [RNN] is. This is very hyper-local journalism.

The example that is probably the best so far is Naples News in Florida where they are really getting very hyper-local with their coverage, mostly online. This kind of works with what is good training for students, because they’re going to need to understand what hyper-local journalism is. I think it helps the students, and I think we are benefiting the citizens of the Dutton community by doing it this way.

MJR: What do you think is the future of this project?