RNN

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KG: Well, we know the immediate future. We will never leave Dutton. There will still be an umbilical cord to Dutton. We will be communicating with them and working with the contributors, the editors on this project. But our next town is Crow Agency.

[Graduate student] Mary Hudetz, who is going to be coming back to the class in the fall – and she is from that area – she also wants to do her master’s project on all of this. That’s the short-term goal.

Courtney and I were at the New Voices grantee meeting last weekend in Washington, D.C. RNN is the brainchild of Courtney Lowery; she is the one who came up with this idea, the multimedia component. We were in D.C. and Jan Schaffer, who is the executive director of J-Lab ... she said that we can apply for $5,000 more [in] grant money, if we get a match from the university.

CL: What we want to be able to do is provide training and resources to keep small newspapers in small towns alive and vibrant as well as helping keep those communities vibrant by going into towns that want an RNN site.

The next step after Crow Agency is to do an application process. We’ll be sending out letters to targeted towns in Montana that we think might be interested and then have them apply to be the next town in RNN. Because that’s really a big part of it, and we learned that very starkly this weekend listening to a couple of the other projects. The key part of making this work is the town actually wanting a newspaper and seeing a need for it. And in Dutton, I knew as a local, there was a need for it and that’s why we went there to begin with.

I think Crow Agency – Mary knows there’s a need there and that’s why we’re going there. The next town, that’s a key part. We don’t want to sort of parachute in and say “We’re from the university and we think you need a newspaper.” We want to be able to give communities the tools they need and identified that they need. That’s sort of the next round of RNN 2.0.

KG: I think part of this, too, is that we have to realize that journalism is changing. We are seeing the shift to the online world. In the last bit of statistics, we saw a 36 percent increase of new visitors to news Web sites. So we are seeing that shift.

This online publication is actually perfect in that regard, and it’s also great for the rural communities because they will be able to be more connected. Yes, there’s still a digital divide. Yes, we need to get better connections in rural communities. But, Montana is very wired. If you look at the rural states, we’re at the top of that.

CL: And our survey that we did, it was very informal. We did it at the town hall meeting at the pancake breakfast, but I was amazed at how many people had Internet, used Internet, and had high-speed Internet, not just dial-up, because that was a huge online component. The reason we decided to go online is because that is the future.

We wanted to give Dutton something sustainable, not something that is going to dinosaur out in the next little bit. We’re very cognizant of the fact that we’ll have to have some sort of print component, whether it’s people printing it out at the library, or the librarian printing out ten copies and just piling them around at the café or whatever. I do think that the hybrid model of print and online will be the future of journalism, so not just strictly online. It was also a very low-cost way for us to do this.

One of the reasons the Dutton Dispatch went out of business is because of the printing costs and the mailing costs and all that were all very expensive. In a small town like that, you couldn’t support it. And as the grocery store closed and the Conoco closed and all these stores closed, the Dutton Dispatch had, like, four advertisers.

When you lose three of those, it’s not viable to keep going. This was a low-cost way of doing it. We kind of went in with that in mind – not really knowing anecdotally how many people were online in Dutton, but not really having any hard numbers. So, when we got those numbers we were like “Oh God, thank God, this is gonna work. People can actually read us.”

KG: And Courtney is right. We’re going to do this as a hybrid. We already had a couple of older people ask, “Can we get something printed out?”

The design class this semester is going to actually take our Rural News Network online site and do a print publication from that. So we’ll get some ideas in that regard. This project is supported a lot by this community, the UM School of Journalism community. We already have our eyes on other towns, and that’s really useful.