The Northfield Project was the Center for Sustainable Journalism’s first Community Supported Journalism project underwritten by The Harnisch Foundation.
What is Community Supported Journalism Northfield (CSJN) about?
CSJN is a nonprofit project of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia. The Center is run by Professor Leonard Witt.
As mass journalism markets unbundle and become niche markets, news operations, if they are to survive, will have to join the niche movement rather than fight it. Rather than think in terms of a circulation of, let’s say, 100,000, they should think in terms of 100 niche markets of 1,000 each and form membership communities around those niches.
The centerpiece for each membership community will be the news and information tailored to each community’s needs, with a reporter and editing support devoted specifically to each community of 1,000. Online social networking, interactivity, face-to-face events will all be used to build group cohesion.
We are a marketplace where independent reporters, citizen journalists, community members, and media organizations can come together and collaborate.
The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University takes a look at our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota and likes what it sees. Here is a snippet of what Mathew Ingram writes:
This is a fascinating effort, I think. Since the idea is that these local news operations will be “crowdsourced” or community-financed, in many ways it reminds me of Spot.us, the “crowd-funded” journalism effort from David Cohn — and in fact, the two are sharing ideas and sit on each other’s advisory boards (Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project and Lisa Williams of Placeblogger are also on the Representative Journalism advisory board). It’s not clear whether RepJ or Spot.us are viable long-term models for journalism, but there’s no question they are both interesting experiments. The Locally Grown Northfield project in particular seems like a thriving model for a local, community-driven news operation — and one that is worth keeping an eye on.
