Rural News Network project sets out to link students, communities online

By Sara Lettus
J-School Web Reporter

Rural News Network, a new School of Journalism online project, intends to link students, rural communities, multimedia reporting and citizen journalism.

“The world is converging on the web. It’s all sort of crashing here,” said Keith Graham, pointing at his computer screen.

Graham, professor of photojournalism, is one of the masterminds behind the project. Also on the committee are New West editor Courtney Lowery and journalism professors Michael Downs, Sheri Venema and Denise Dowling.

The project involves broadcast, print and photo students who will go into small towns, preferably ones that have lost their newspapers. The project has started Dutton, Mont., which recently lost the Dutton Dispatch.

UM students will go into the town, cover the news and help create an interactive news website for the town. The goal is to teach the town’s citizens multimedia journalism.

“It’s getting students out of Missoula, into the town to find the rural issues,” said Graham.

With hands-on experience teaching the citizens the ins and outs of journalism, the students will be learning as well. Students will have to evaluate and break down what they have learned at the School of Journalism in order to teach it to someone else. Their final project involves a double bylined piece with a member of the town, making it virtually impossible for the students to walk away without a better understanding of life there.

The installation of computer kiosks in public places is still up in the air, Graham said. Nothing’s really definite, as he called it a “pilot project.”

“If we’re not done at the end of the semester, we’ll go another one, until we’re finished,” he said.

The goal is to have the website up and running and for the citizens to have gained enough knowledge so they can continue it. With success, the hope is to receive another grant from the present backer, the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.

J-lab’s calls itself “an incubator for innovative news experiments that use new technologies to help people actively engage in critical public issues.”
Its core mission “is to improve public life by transforming journalism for today and re-inventing it for tomorrow.”

J-lab’s projects are funded by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, two organizations with goals similar to J-lab: interactive journalism using various media.

The money for Montana’s project, as well as nine others, comes from the 2006 New Voices program, administered by J-lab and also supported by the Knight Foundation. The grant winners include those who desire “better hyper-local information,” and have an “appetite for using cutting-edge technologies.”

The UM School of Journalism applied for the grant in 1998 but didn’t receive it.
“Since then, we’ve been pushing to do more multimedia and online journalism,” said Graham, who also teaches multimedia and online journalism, magazine and newspaper design.

The committee was reformed last year to come up with a project idea. Lowery suggested the idea of rural news, and Downs wrote the grant combining rural issues, the online world and citizen journalism.

“The grant recipients will receive $12,000 in the first year to start up their projects,” according to the J-Lab criteria. “They will be eligible for $5,000 follow-up grants next year if they successfully launch their projects and supply matching funding.”

“Journalists of tomorrow need to know multimedia journalism,” said Graham. “With more grants, more students will really understand the art and craft of journalism.”

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