infobong.com

The Bakersfield Californian has started an interesting project. Its spinoff The Northwest Voice is a neighborhood paper with a newshole filled entirely by readers and residents. All of the stories and photos submitted are posted to the paper's Web site after a cursory editorial review, and the pick of the crop are published in the twice-weekly paper edition. The Californian hopes that the project will increase community involvement and interest in the main newspaper. I know nothing about Bakersfield geography, but I suspect Northwest Bakersfield is an affluent part of the city, if there are sufficient numbers of digital cameras and competent writers to produce a paper edition twice a week. Perhaps the paper is trying to increase readership in a wealthy part of town by publishing their kids' Odyssey of the Mind results and girl scout cookie sales.

In addition, the paper gets free content and more places to sell ads. When I read the quote, "The open source model offers us a new way to connect with readers, to better understand their worries and joys, and to enable them to share some of themselves with the world," I wondered if "open source' suddenly meant "Free Labor." Mary Lou Fulton, the exec quoted in the story has launched a site, opensourcejournalism.org to explain her philosophy.

Of course I'm being critical, a project like this has the potential to bring community-specific issues to the forefront and give ordinary people the ability to have the experience of creating media without the worries of covering production costs, but I wonder how white-bread the news is. If The Californian operated a similar project in South Austin, would it allow Save Our Springs activists to publish stories about battles over Wal-Marts? If the paper chooses not to publish stories on controversial issues, I wonder how beneficial the project is to the community.