They’re not citizen journalists so much as “three citizens shooting our mouths off,” Wigley said.
Swearing and faux news happen on Locally Grown, and the co-hosts rarely miss a chance to make fun of their own work, or each other.
Still, civility is a byword. Locally Grown and Northfield.org, for which Wigley was chief contributor for years, have reputations as debate venues free of the bile and bad feelings inevitable in most communities as politically active as Northfield.
At the invitation of Bernadine Joselyn, Director of the Blandin Foundation’s Public Policy and Engagement Program, I spent the day at KAXE – Northern Community Radio‘s headquarters in Grand Rapids, brainstorming on how to best foster the development of citizen journalism / community media in their bio-region. (Click photos to enlarge.)
In the conference room, L to R: Jeremy Iggers, Executive Director, Twin Cities Media Alliance; Bernadine Joselyn; Scott Hall, KAXE Community Access Coordinator; Louise Mengelkoch, Chair of the Mass Communication Department at Bemidji State University; Ross Williams, community volunteer; Heidi Holtan, KAXE Outreach Producer; Maggie Montgomery, KAXE General Manager; Dan Houg, KAXE engineer.
Later in the afternoon, I did a video interview of Scott and Maggie about their long history with KAXE for the Media Giraffe Project. (Click play to listen to the audio. 44 minutes.) However, I neglected to get the story on the community radio art work in the corner of the conference room (center). Hopefully, I can entice one of them to attach an enlightening comment here. Right photo: You know you’re in northern Minnesota when the external doors of the hotels have this sign on them.
Yesterday, I spent an hour at the James Gang Hideaway visiting with Thor Henning Lerstad, News Director for the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK). He’s visiting Minnesota this week to “study best-practice examples of Consultative/Participatory/Public Journalism.”
(Last September, I spent an hour at the James Gang Hideaway visiting with a colleague of his, Jørgen Jensen, a journalist with Danmarks Radio (DR), Denmark’s national broadcasting corporation. He also wanted to learn about all the citizen journalism/community media/civic blogosphere stuff we’ve been doing here in Northfield for the past decade.)
Northfield.org’s Anne Bretts was kind enough to pick him up in the Twin Cities and bring him to Northfield for the day… and return him. How’s that for Minnesota hospitality? I brought him to lunch at Northfield Rotary (“Hey, everybody, a real live Norwegian named Thor!”).
I’ve included Thor’s email to me and Anne below in case others are interested in what he’s up to. Now we just need a similar visit from a journalist in Sweden to complete aScandinavia trifecta and maybe top it off with visits from journalists in the other Nordic countries of Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Continue reading Scandinavia and Northfield’s culture of citizen journalism
I did a video tele-conference presentation on community/citizen journalism this morning for the Blandin Foundation’s Broadband Initiative program. Audience members were primarily coordinators in rural Minnesota whose communities had recently gotten broadband internet access with Blandin’s help.
A handful of people gathered at the Northern Dakota County Chambers of Commerce office in Eagan where I did the presentation. Another two dozen or so were scattered about the state in a half-dozen locations. Click photos above to enlarge. The photos were taken by Gregg Scott, CTO for InfraSupport, who handled the tech setup for the video conference.
