COMMUNITY VOICES
Part II

PLANNING A COMMUNITY NEWS PROGRAM WITH STUDENT REPORTERS

“In the future, we may well rely more on citizens to be sentinels for one another. No doubt that will expand the public forum and enrich the range of voices. Already people are experimenting with new ways to empower fellow citizens to gather and understand the news — whether it is soldiers blogging from Baghdad, a radio program on the war produced by students at Swarthmore College carrying eyewitness interviews with Iraqi citizens, or a similar effort by young radio reporters in Minnesota to cover local towns.”

The 2006 State of the News Media reported by Project for Excellence in Journalism

The key part of any plan is a vision. You need to envision your students as community storytellers who assemble narratives that are diverse, creative, and fun to watch. Your student’s natural enthusiasm and playful energy makes viewers come back for more. Viewers tune in to watch your students as local reporters and students watch themselves become celebrities and community advocates. Both students and viewers develop a deeper understanding of your community in the process.

As you create a strategic plan for your school program, it is important to keep in mind the enormous changes occurring within the world of journalism. You could not find a more opportune time to be building a community news program. Your community administrators face increased challenges to communicate to residents, visitors, and potential investors in your community. The media sources that these administrators traditionally relied upon to do this are changing and soon may be unavailable. Your student-based community news program teaches students technology and storytelling skills. It also creates community narratives that administrators can use. Frankly, your student narratives are more powerful than any news story that a traditional news reporter could deliver. You are empowering your students to be community change agents.

Before I outline the key steps to planning a student-based community news program, let’s examine some significant changes occurring in local news.

Challenges Facing Local News

News organizations are going through massive changes as they compete globally for revenue and customers. News organizations like newspapers and radio and television stations are a part of global media companies that depend on advertising as their primary source of income. Although advertisers expect to spend over $750 billion on advertising in 2007, competition for that money is ferocious. The Myers Media Business Report for 2007 forecasts a trend away from traditional TV and radio to nontraditional ways to reach buyers, like videogames, product placements, and movies. Video game ads are expected to increase 90%, product placement ads 35% and cinema advertising 15%, while the 30-second television commercial that local affiliates depend on is projected to decrease 5%. Some media organizations that own multiple stations in different communities broadcast news from a single newsroom, an effort that saves money but raises questions about localism and stretches reporters thin. Newspapers are also consolidating. In 2006 several well respected newspapers cut their newsroom staff. The New York Times cut its staff by 60, the Los Angeles Times 85, and Time Inc cut 205 jobs from its news division. Tom Goldstein, the former dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said at the time, “Unless they urgently respond to the changing environment, newspapers risk early extinction." Local news makers need to reinvent how they communicate with their communities, and your program fills a real need.

How to Take Advantage of the Opportunity
While contraction of the news industry creates anxiety among community leaders left in the lurch to connect with residents, it could spell opportunity for you. Your student-based news program fills the void left by inattentive or nonexistent media outlets. You teach students storytelling skills and help your community at the same time. To begin, you need to identify individuals in your community who need to communicate with residents or visitors. Consider administrators at the city and the schools and members of civic organizations like Chambers of Commerce and Tourist Boards as well as service clubs like Rotary and Kiwanis.

Make Your Stories Different
Traditional newscasts lead with crime and accidents. “If it bleeds it leads” is a standard news axiom. Unfortunately, this attention-grabbing, breaking-news cycle drives most news organizations. Human interest stories often take a back seat to stories about corruption or plane crashes. Make your stories different. Breaking news stories are important but human interest stories tell more about a community than do accidents or crimes. Community narratives may not be as dramatic as a plane crash, but these stories, like no others, tell of the resourcefulness of residents and the hope and heroics that bind your community together. Your students’ stories will be short narratives, 2-5 minutes long, self-contained, each with a student reporter placing the story in the context of your community and giving a final summary at the end. Your stories can be viewed individually at public meetings or during half-time at school sporting events. But they can also be placed end to end with segues or humorous skits between them and made into a cable television show. The flexibility of this short story format allows maximum and repeated coverage for your students’ work.

How Will the Stories Be Shown?
Early television evolved in the 1950’s as an extension of radio networks and television used the same production model as radio. Programming was produced centrally and broadcast to affiliates who rebroadcast the signal and added local news. Viewers passively watched programs at a time predetermined by the television networks. Digital Video Recorders like TiVo, portable video players like iPods, and video sharing like YouTube and SchoolTube has changed all that. Your student work can be uploaded to YouTube or SchoolTube free of charge and viewed by the world on-line, linked to social networks like MySpace or downloaded to iPods. You can also submit a DVD to your local access cable TV channel for a regular timeslot or post the show on your class website and/or your school’s or city’s website. You can present your students’ work at service clubs, city council meetings, and board of education meetings.

I cannot overstate the impact of taking your students to public meetings and showing community leaders a community story that students produced. It is a life-changing event for students, telling them that they have a voice and place in their community.


Bottom-Up Journalism
Scott Grant’s new book We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age chronicles journalism from the American colonial pamphleteers to present-day bloggers. His message is clear: A new market for citizen journalists is rapidly growing. A community-based news organization can give your students a career path while providing a needed service to your community. Bottom-up production is changing the way we view news and changing the way viewers impact the news they watch. As I write this article, CNN is preparing to initiate a presidential debate using questions posted by individuals on YouTube. Viewers are asking very direct and personal questions that scholars believe may change the way politicians conduct campaigns. Current TV also promotes bottom-up journalism. Current TV is a media company led by former Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt that invites individuals from all over the world to produce and post local stories about their community to the Current website. The stories are reviewed by Current producers, voted on by viewers, and assembled into a cable show that airs world-wide (in the U.S. on Comcast, Dish Network, and DirectTV and in Europe on Sky and Virgin Media). Current wants a global television network that gives viewers a voice in what they see. Current’s bottom-up programming is also an avenue to publish your students’ stories. You and your students can be a part of the global shift in the way local news is produced. Local news is now in demand both locally and globally. It is important for your local partners to know that.

Form a Strategic Planning Committee
Make a list of potential partners based on their need to communicate with residents, willingness to work with students, and resources to contribute. If an organization doesn’t have money, they could help raise money. The ability and time to raise money is a resource too. Survey potential organizations and prioritize a list. Then make an appointment to meet directly with the organization’s leader. Explain that you want to create a community news organization and you need their help to have student reporters tell local stories on cable television and the Internet. Offer to meet with their organization and introduce your students. Give examples of 3-5 minute news stories that your students could produce that directly impact on the mission of their organization.

Plan Your Equipment Needs
You need equipment and I go into greater detail about that in later articles. Briefly, you need a camera, tripod, microphone, headphones, and an editing computer. Ideally, you want a production station for each team of students. Three students need to work as a team to shoot the interview. Editing is where the story is created and students invest their individual personality into their storytelling style. The student who reports the story will want to edit it. You cannot paint a very good painting with a committee. Students can share a camera but you should plan to have as many editing stations as you have students or spend your time juggling student work schedules. You may already have the equipment but if you do not you should budget $5,000 for a camera (with tripod/microphone/headphone) and $5,000 for an editing computer with software. Media supplies run $3,000 - $10,000 per year.

Plan Your Curriculum
You need to carefully think through the curriculum component of your news organization. Will you teach it as a part of the curriculum for graduation credit or as an extra-curricular activity? You may want to start the program as extra-curricular and then add classes to make it part of the curriculum. To maintain a constant pool of trained reporters, you need to create a full media studies program: Journalism, Digital Editing, Digital Production, Digital Imaging, and Scriptwriting. These classes taught as beginning, intermediate, and advanced provide you with students who are trained and can compete for community reporter jobs. I recommend you pay your “professional” student reporters. They will earn it. These suggestions can get you started with your strategic plan. I’ll write an article on curriculum details at a late date.

If you have taken the time to read to the end of this article, you can already imagine a community news program at your school. Now take the next step. Get others interested in your vision and create a team to help you marshal resources and create stakeholders. You will have the time of your life doing it. In the next issue of School Video News I will write about interview and story-telling techniques that provide professional results with beginning students.

Community Voices
Part I

CREATING COMMUNITY VOICES

This series of articles is for educators who are interested in creating a video production program for K-12 students that will benefit the school, students, and community. As you know, school video news is a powerful vehicle to teach language skills, collaborative learning, and technology. However, I have found that it also has potential far beyond your school building. I want to share with you some ideas that I have developed over the past 14 years on how to create a media studies program that can become a voice for your community.

A Real-World Practium

The main practicum for the program I created was a magazine type cable television show, Bath City Beat, which was produced by high school students. Bath City Beat was a 30-minute show with 3-5 stories bridged by comedy skits. Rather than imposing a single narrator, the students interviewed residents and assembled these community voices to tell the story. Students reported on stories like the annual Bath City Festival, the ground breaking for a new community center, and the purchase of a new fire truck. The stories, told through resident voices, were compelling and the students were entertaining. The show was eventually requested by 30 surrounding communities and reached over 150,000 homes. I will explain how you can create a similar program in your community.

Storytelling is the core of the program. By telling stories about your community, and by publishing those stories on television and the internet, your students will help their community shape a narrative about itself. In the process, the students can become community change agents. Over the course of the next few months, I will write about why developing a master plan is the first step, and how you can do it. Next I will explain how to create assignments that focus the story; how to build a storytelling rubric; how to do research and conduct interviews that work; how to get your stories published on cable television and the Internet; how to promote your media studies program with other media outlets like newspapers; and how to inspire, respect and manage student humor.

A Voice for your Community
Let me begin by explaining my rationale for student community news. Communication is a necessity in today’s constantly changing world. School and municipal administrators are desperate to find ways to communicate with residents. Funding for both schools and cities is changing daily. Informed taxpayers may become partners, but uninformed taxpayers will definitely become passionate critics.

Your media studies program can create a community voice that will inform residents while teaching students powerful storytelling skills. Your school and city administrators will be unable to match the strategic partnerships you will build. Besides, you and your students will have great fun doing it. This is how the director of Mount Clemens’ Downtown Development Authority described the program I developed at the high school.

“Over his years at Mount Clemens High School, John was able to develop an award-winning program that was not only vital to the city’s students but also supported our broader redevelopment efforts by portraying the City of Mount Clemens, our redevelopment projects, and our events in a fun and engaging format. The program’s energetic and playful editing and production ensured that the programs would be watched by viewers well beyond our municipal boundaries.”

Arthur F. Mullen, AICP
Executive Director
Mount Clemens Downtown Development Authority

The value of a community voice cannot be overstated. Communities come in all shapes and sizes. They can be cities, townships, or school districts, but they can also be after-school clubs or historic commissions. Communities of like-minded people come together for a reason and they usually share stated or unstated objectives or a geographic location. Communication is the core building block to any successful community.

Communication fosters awareness of the community’s plans and the diversity of the talent within the group to reach its goals. Communication motivates members to act as a team, and it gives team members a sense of accomplishment as they see progress towards their goals. Your students can tell stories that enhance communication among the various communities in your region. The renewed sense of community that your program can provide is one of the top things public administrators want to achieve.

Student Reporters
You will also be teaching your students 21st century communication skills. This will not go unnoticed by media professionals at newspapers and broadcast television stations. The marginal cost of your program compared to production companies will also catch the eye of budget-conscious administrators. Your stories will get more news coverage and more viewers. It is a win-win for everyone.

Students will give a more genuine and authentic feel to a story than the polished media professionals that most administrators hire to promote their community. Here’s an example of what students can contribute. Mount Clemens received a grant to test its water intake from Lake St. Clair and in doing so would establish an early warning system for lake pollution. Mount Clemens city officials wanted to tell this story but it wasn’t newsy enough for broadcast television or local print media. Bath City Beat came to the rescue. Students valued being treated as serious television reporters and in doing the story they learned something important about water pollution. More importantly, residents listened to and believed these students. Residents invested trust in the students they watched grow up over the course of several semesters.

Multiple Voices Means Diversity

Your stories will also have multiple voices: multiple community voices crafted by high school students into entertaining videos. As these brief videos are assembled, a diverse patchwork of voices will emerge, showing your community as a unique and vibrant place to live and work. For instance, Bath City Beat devoted a whole show to reporting on events happening in Mount Clemens during the 2006 Super Bowl. Students reported on a chili cook-off, an ice sculpture exhibit and a Sports Illustrated VIP party at a local nightclub. The students were thrilled to get press credentials and interview Kid Rock.

People will respect the diversity that you will bring to your community’s narrative. Your students’ stories will be told from diverse perspectives: neither right nor wrong viewpoints but multiple viewpoints. Your students’ storytelling will enlighten residents not confront them. Mount Clemens disbanded its 113-year-old police department to save money. It outsourced policing to the Macomb County Sheriff and saved one million dollars annually. Residents argued passionately on both sides of the issue. Bath City Beat reporters carefully balanced multiple perspectives in their story. Their helpful report on the issues was a source of pride for everyone.

Residents will take pride in your students’ work and follow their development as your students play the role of professional television reporters. In the process, your students will become local celebrities. What’s not to like about that?

Documenting the Past and Present

I was recruited by Mount Clemens Schools in 1992 after producing a series of television documentaries about Flint, Michigan. They wanted me to develop the high school television station into a learning laboratory and teach students how to produce documentaries about Mount Clemens’ past.

Mount Clemens is a close-knit, historic town of 17,000 situated on the banks of the Clinton River. Its rich history began centuries ago with the indigenous peoples that occupied the area. Tribes of the Chippewa and Ottawa nations used the area as a summer campground. In 1862 oil prospectors drilled into the mineral rich salts deposited by ancient seas, and Mount Clemens started on the road to becoming a world famous spa town. By 1924 Mount Clemens boasted 35 bath houses that attracted the likes of Andrew Carnegie, Mae West, and Babe Ruth who came to town to “take the cure.” Mount Clemens was the place to be and be seen.

Mount Clemens also used its proximity to Michigan’s Great Lakes to attract John Hacker, a master boat builder who fitted automobile engines into his finely crafted mahogany boats and sold them to rich auto executives like Edsel Ford and J.W. Packard. One of Hacker’s employees, Chris Smith, went on to establish his own boat works called Chris-Craft. I couldn’t wait to tell these stories.

I came to Mount Clemens to tell stories about its past but quickly realized that, more importantly, Mount Clemens had no voice to talk about its present. To develop a similar program, you will need to find the stories about your community’s past and connect them to stories about its present. You will be part historian and part troubadour. You will be an English teacher, a technical wizard, and all around fix-it person. But mostly you will have fun. And you will teach students how to build a narrative about their school, their community, and in the process, about themselves.

Building E-Communities

I am writing these articles to stimulate a discussion. We are a community of media educators who are breaking new ground. Much has been written about the torrent of media assailing us each day. It is true that media can be addictive and that media organizations can use their power for corporate greed. Some would want to us to teach students to turn off media and ignore it. Media will not go away, however, and we need to teach students how to use it effectively as a language skill. Television and the Internet are powerful, but to me, that makes it all the more important for us to teach young students how to wield that power to build communities.

I hope this web log will create a lively exchange about how best to teach media. Please share your comments and join in our community.