Articles

In rural Dutton, Montana, 80 people showed up last fall, wooed by a notion of starting a local news site for this newspaperless town of 375 people. Months later, the community celebrated the launch of the Dutton Country Courier, DuttonCC.org.

In 2005, Lisa Williams launched a hyperlocal news site for her newfound community of Watertown, Mass. Writing with wry, self-deprecating humor, she called it h2otown.info and it was an instant hit.

New media initiatives emerge when citizens feel ‘shortchanged, bereft or angered by their available media choices.’

Civic journalism is growing and evolving rapidly because it makes a deliberate attempt to reach out to citizens. Civic journalism can take the form of town meetings–“real” or “electronic”–or watching CSPAN, going on-line or attending focus groups.

A report on race reporting by civic journalists highlights some common approaches.

As a federal court reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, I got a tip one Friday that something big was going to happen that would “involve the Halls of Congress.”

In its first effort at inventing a new relationship between the newsroom and the Internet, New Hampshire Public Radio came up with an elegantly logical idea. It created an on-line Tax Calculator that last year helped state residents actually compute the cost of different tax reform measures to their own ...

In Charlotte, N.C., more than 1,000 citizens have responded to lists of critical needs in nine of the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods. The newspaper collected the lists from neighborhood residents as part of what became its award-series, “Talking Back Our Neighborhoods.”