Community Journalism in Sioux Falls: Stehly Launches Citizen's Advocate Website

Mr. Ehrisman grabs my attention and points it toward The Citizen's Advocate, a new website "facilitated" by well-known Sioux Falls rabble-rouser* Theresa Stehly. Stehly welcomes visitors and potential contributors with this mission statement:

The purpose of this website is to inform and educate the public about issues that are important to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to encourage citizens to step forward and participate in our government, and to spur discussion about our city.

We will be featuring different contributors who will be reporting on City Council meetings, Park Board meetings and other city happenings. We will also feature guest writers from time to time as well as citizen letters to the Advocate. To contribute to the Advocate, please e-mail me at theresastehly@yahoo.com and include your name and phone number [Theresa Stehly, Facilitator, The Citizen's Advocate home page, downloaded 2008.08.19].

I love it already! Even with just six articles from five writers posted so far (hey, that's enough to beat a lot of start-up blogs where one guy writes two posts that no one ever reads), here's what this community journalism website is doing right:

• Focusing on one place: "Hyperlocal" is one buzzword among the bloggerati for what Stehly and her neighbors are up to. She makes clear the focus in on civic affairs in Sioux Falls.
• Seeing citizens as participants, not consumers: This was a huge theme at the citizen journalism conference I attended in June. Viewing citizens as consumers kills journalism and democracy. The Internet makes it possible for citizens to participate in civic affairs and in the telling of those civic affairs in ways the mass media cannot and will not. Stehly appears to get this. Hits and readers are not her end goal. Stehly wants writers, not just readers. She invites conversation and interaction.
• No anonymous contributions: I don't see a formal policy declaration, but Stehly is asking for name and phone number with submissions, and all content currently on the site includes the author's name. That's a good thing. I'm taking the same position on the community website I'm building, RealMadison.org. We should come together as a community online as we do in any public space: openly, honestly, and putting our own names and faces with our words.

In the spirit of building lively community journalism, here are some recommendations for The Citizen's Advocate as it enters it second month:

• Open the gate: If this project takes off, Stehly will not want to have to wade through dozens of citizen reports and hundreds of reader comments in her e-mail inbox each day. That bottleneck will stifle conversation online. Maybe Stehly's mission is simply to provide certain texts as starting points for conversations and citizen action that will take place elsewhere, but in an online arena where Wordpress is a click away, why not create a public discussion space right next to the texts you want people to discuss? Open up comments, open up the submission process. Open the gate so folks who want to participate can do so right now.
  
• Dump Yahoo Sitebuilder: The site appears to be created by Yahoo Sitebuilder, which as far as I can tell can't be used to create a nice interactive website. (Their idea of "interactive add-ons": Loan Calculator, Yahoo Search Box... where's the Comment Box?!?) Unless Yahoo Web Hosting has a blog tool I'm unfamiliar with, get a Wordpress or Blogger account, set up a multi-author blog, and make the site instantly interactive. If you want to get fancy, you could also try some open-source content management software, like Drupal (that's what I'm tinkering with on RealMadison.org), Joomla, or DotNetNuke. That software takes more tech know-how, but it also opens up a lot more administrative flexibility in managing multiple users.

Community journalism websites, just like the stories they tell, are always works in progress. I look forward to seeing the direction Stehly and her neighbors—all 150,000 of them!—take this new website.

*Remember, Theresa, in my vocabulary, rousing the rabble is a noble calling!