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- Neighbor to Neighbor: Embedding Citizen Journalists
Neighbor to Neighbor: Embedding Citizen Journalists
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
The Neighbor to Neighbor project will embed citizen journalists throughout our city to create media seeking to broaden civic engagement. By utilizing technology in innovative ways, the project has the potential to serve as a model nationwide.
Supporting organization:
Cambridge Community Television (CCTV)
URL:
http://www.cctvcambridge.org
City:
Cambridge
State/Region:
MA
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
CCTV is launching Neighbor to Neighbor—a new project to embed citizen journalists in each of the city’s five neighborhoods to create media about local issues and events. Neighbor to Neighbor will provide residents the information they need to more fully participate in civic life, and will foster individual and collective action to improve the quality of life in Cambridge. Freed from the constraints of commercial television, segments produced through Neighbor to Neighbor will vary in length and range from traditional reportage and documentaries to first person narratives and video art.
Citizen journalists will highlight issues that have local significance, have not been adequately explored in the media, and offer opportunities for meaningful public participation. Segments will feature the viewpoints of residents, organizations and community leaders who are affected by and involved in these issues. These activists will identify ways in which residents can participate, and will be trained to utilize web-based tools to facilitate that participation.
Episodes of Neighbor to Neighbor will be produced monthly beginning in June, 2007 and will be shown on CCTV’s three community cable channels, streamed live on CCTV’s web site, and archived for on-demand viewing. The community residents, organizations, and leaders featured in the segments will utilize the blogging and group functions on CCTV’s web site, as well as their own newsletters, email listservs, and phone banks as organizing tools. By utilizing different media and technologies, CCTV hopes to broaden civic engagement and involvement in critical local issues.
It is our belief that developing the Neighbor to Neighbor project into a low-cost, self-sustaining program with a strong following will provide the potential for replicating the model in public access stations nationwide.
Sustainability (financial) model:
CCTV has a history of successfully raising funds to pilot projects that are then incorporated into our regular programming. For example, a mini-grant to provide media literacy training in the Cambridge Public Schools developed into a year-round youth media program and recently culminated in the establishment of Cambridge Educational Access, a new school department.
CCTV has received funding from J-Lab’s New Voices initiative to support the initial costs of establishing Neighbor to Neighbor, and we will launch a new sponsorship campaign to raise funds to sustain the project. It is our intent to recruit one lead business sponsor from each of the city’s five neighborhoods. In exchange for their sponsorship, businesses will be acknowledged at the end of each Neighbor to Neighbor segment on CCTV’s channels, quarterly newsletter, and on CCTV’s electronic bulletin board and web site. In August of 2007, CCTV’s Director of Marketing and Development will begin to recruit sponsors that have demonstrated an investment in the community, or are in need of opportunities to promote their services. We believe this is a model that can be utilized to finance similar projects in communities across the country.
Potential obstacles:
CCTV is committed to assisting local residents, particularly individuals from underserved communities, in developing the skills they need to fully participate in community life. In order to involve individuals from communities typically misrepresented or disenfranchised by mainstream media as embedded journalists and segment content providers, we will need to overcome obstacles of language, age and culture.
CCTV will need to direct special effort towards promotion, as viewers are faced with hundreds of media options competing for their attention. CCTV is currently working to identify and quantify viewers and to develop targeted promotion for particular types of programming.
Resource Needs:
CCTV is a nationally recognized public access media arts facility, named number one in the country six times by the Alliance for Community Media. As CCTV successfully launches Neighbor to Neighbor, we will utilize networks like the ACM and Netsquared to promote the project and encourage others to replicate the model.
Using the open source content management system Drupal, CCTV is building its web capacity to foster interactivity and aggregate local content through RSS, blogging and podcasting. As more content is incorporated on the site, we must develop a cataloguing and tagging system so that content is easily retrievable.
Key Milestones:
Beginning in April 2007…
-CCTV staff will recruit and begin training five citizen journalists and assign one to each zip code within the city.
Beginning in May 2007…
-Citizen journalists will begin working in their assigned neighborhoods, identifying local concerns and developing relationships with community residents and leaders. Under the supervision of CCTV staff, the citizen journalists will develop a plan for each segment, including how the media that will be produced will foster greater civic participation.
Beginning in June 2007, each month…
-Five segments, one from each of the city’s five zip codes, will be produced highlighting news and events from across the city.
-Segments from each neighborhood will be edited into one 30-minute program that will be cablecast on CCTV’s Channel 9 four times each week. Programming on Channel 9 is streamed live on CCTV’s web site (http://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/214/play), and in addition to the live stream, each segment will be available for on-demand viewing and download. Segments will also be incorporated into the Cambridge Media Map (http://www.cctvcambridge.org/mediamap), CCTV’s web-based map.
-The community residents, organizations, and leaders featured in the segments will utilize the blogging and group functions on CCTV’s web site as organizing tools, as well as their own newsletters, email listservs, and phone banks. “Action links” will be developed for each segment on the web, directing viewers to other resources for further exploration into the issues introduced in segments. Residents will have the opportunity to understand each others’ issues, make connections, work together when feasible and learn from each others’ efforts.
Project Summary:
CCTV is launching Neighbor to Neighbor—a new project that seeks to broaden civic engagement and involvement in critical local issues by creating a synergy between community cable channels, the Internet, and other electronic and print media. The project will embed citizen journalists throughout the city of Cambridge to create media that highlights issues that have local significance, have not been adequately explored in the media, and offers opportunities for meaningful public participation. Segments will feature the viewpoints of residents, organizations and community leaders who are affected by and actively involved in these issues. The activists featured in the segments will utilize the blogging and group functions on CCTV’s web site, as well as their own newsletters, email listservs, and phone banks as organizing tools.
As a low cost project utilizing multiple forms of communications technologies in innovative ways to promote involvement in community issues, Neighbor to Neighbor has the potential to serve as a model for public access centers nationwide.
