In a city where many feel that nothing good happens when journalists show up, Barb Iverson's Creating Community Connections aims to build trust by covering issues largely ignored by the big media in town. The project takes journalism students from Columbia College Chicago and embeds them in neighborhoods to find out what's going on and report it.
 

"I have to know the neighborhoods when I reach out," said Iverson, "so, I take our students on field trips. We get on public transportation; we visit Boys and Girls Clubs and eat at local restaurants.  Kids nowadays grow up in gated communities and they don't know neighborhoods."
 

CreatingCommunityConnections' masthead pulls in photos of Chicago posted on Flickr.  People are permitted to post to the site without advance registration. "Our purpose is to inform, entertain, connect, especially across physical boundaries. We want people from different neighborhoods to discover that they have some of the same concerns and can join to do something about it."
 

Some successes include an investigative series about Chicago Aldermen who hire their relatives. For that project, Iverson reached out to partner with the Beachwood Reporter, a collaboration that helped drive traffic to both sites.  Another success was a slide show of photos citizens posted from a city-wide late-night bike ride.
 

Iverson encouraged the group to re-think the term citizen journalists.  "Are journalists not citizens?  Do we lose our citizenship when we become journalists? Plus, not all of my students are in fact citizens. We are casting around for a word. 'Indigenous' postings is what I'm now hearing."

"Our goal was to end driveway rot and come up with
compelling content that people would read daily."
 

At the University of Missouri, Clyde Bentley launched MyMissourian, a challenge to tradition at a school that prides itself on being the home school for the newspaper industry. "Some faculty said you're going to ruin journalism. They questioned our ability to maintain credibility."  But Bentley said his site set up some basic rules for citizen participation and for the most part, people do comply.
 

After publishing online,  MyMissourian adopted a hybrid strategy. It uses online to drive readers to the print publication, because "that's where baby boomers are most comfortable and, that's where all the space is for advertising." The tabloid gets delivered to homes on weekends.
 

Bentley is a member of  the Cyberbrains, a group of Missouri scholars researching the impact of citizen journalism on free circulation papers.  But they could easily be studying the impact of print publication on Web sites. Within a month of going to print, MyMissourian.com more than doubled its number of registered writers.
 

"There is no field of dreams," said Bentley, "Successful citizen journalism requires hard work from trained journalists. I have reporters helping people, vetting for libel, editing for readability.  Our assistant city editor is the one who pushes the button to upload."
 

MyMissourian also publishes photos posted on Flickr (with permission) and has recruited local bloggers to share their content. 
 

Bentley said you can't wait for stuff to come to you.  You have to go out and make it happen.  "I found out that this local bluegrass band got a grant to go to China.  I gave them an old computer, set them up a blog and a Flickr account.  They sent me emails and I posted all of their material. We got incredible readership on this thing and we all saw more of China than we ever would."
 

Another partnership is the work is a project called, "My First Ward." A graduate student gave digital cameras to students in a historically black community.  The kids now blog about hip-hop music and readers love it.
 

Bentley also partnered with the local Fox TV channel to publish political essays, written by students in his Editorial – strike that -  Blog-writing class.  As a result, his students are now getting national bylines.
 

Bentley said he's spent a total of $1500 on the site. It's clear that creativity, student labor and citizen participation are an invaluable combination. The equation is simple, said Bentley, "Traditional journalism plus citizen journalism equals 21^st century journalism."