The 5th Estate: Citizen News

News Site Keeps Focus on Town’s Recession – NYTimes.com.

1.For the Elkhart Project, which is entering its fifth month, MSNBC.com assigns one staff member to Elkhart, Ind., at almost all times to ensure a regular output of blog posts, slide shows, videos and Twitter messages. In Elkhart, readers and viewers see the effects of job losses, foreclosures and stimulus money projects — what MSNBC.com calls “stories of struggle and recovery in America.”

2.The project is not exactly a model of hyperlocal journalism (a term for Web-powered neighborhood news) because it leaves most of the day-to-day reporting to the local newspaper, The Elkhart Truth, which it counts as a partner.

Instead, “we’re focused on the themes that are familiar to all Americans and using our reporting in Elkhart to deal with those universal issues,” said Jennifer Sizemore, the editor in chief of MSNBC.com, which is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.

3.Dan Gillmor, who runs a center for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, praised the project’s ambition, but suggested that MSNBC.com should encourage genuine collaboration with the people of Elkhart, perhaps by incorporating local blogs and videos more fully. “The people of the community could contribute a lot more if they weren’t being seen as sources for interviews or anecdotes, or, to put it less kindly, as journalistic lab rats,” he said.

To buttress its big-picture coverage, MSNBC.com shares reporting with The Elkhart Truth. Ms. Porter said she was most intrigued by the collaboration of the national news organization and the local one.

Rather than merely parachuting into a local story, she said, “this is a commitment model, integrating the local news resources with the national perspective over the long haul.”

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