“In the past six months,” says Ward Norris, “we’ve noticed that the bulk of our news content has focused on the Cookeville community. We’ve decided to embrace that focus and develop our coverage of one community at a time. CookevilleTimes.com is the Cookeville-specific section of what we hope to build as a true Upper Cumberland news resource going forward.”
Last June the new name was placed at the top of the site and staff additions were made to take this Cookeville news source to a new level.
The news site is pursuing a different kind of vision:
The old model of journalism in the U.S. isn't working.
Great journalism, in which an educated and ambitious professional goes out with a team and investigates, producing a package for the evening news, is a valuable thing -- but expensive to produce. And, unlike other products that are produced and sold repeatedly, the effort is obsolete the moment it hits the paper, magazine or digital distribution system.
Combine that expensive model with the fact that the public has come to believe journalists to be biased and less credible than in past generations, and it is easy to see why the old model of journalism is in trouble.
There is a place for magazines, newspapers, books with pages that turn... and it is possible that those forms of media will be with us for a long, long time. Many of us enjoy them immensely.
But today's society seems to be asking why they should wait for tomorrow's paper or next month's magazine when information can be texted within seconds? How long does it take today's student to learn that school is out for snow? CookevilleTImes has the information posted within 10-20 minutes. But by that time, hundreds of students are already informed.
People are getting their news from people they know. As a society at large -- we are already creating a new form of journalism with the phenomenal growth of social networking, Twitter, YouTube and Blogs.
We are building relationships with each other and sharing what we learn as we learn it.
Those trends have led us to what we are dubbing Collaborative Journalism and that model is what we want CookevilleTimes and UCDailyNews.com to become. Taking lessons from the fastest growing sites and technologies, we want to be a blend that is like one part YouTube, one part CNN, one part Wikipedia, one part Twitter and one part collaboration..... we are not those brands, but we intend to learn from them and use their ideology in the continuing formation of CookevilleTimes.
We are a small team of professionals. We enjoy producing news packages and bringing you footage and photos and stories. But we also know that if we create a large staff of reporters, the enterprise will ultimately fail. Supported entirely by advertisers, the enterprise would be both costly and out-of-touch with the times in which we live.
Our vision of Collaborative Journalism is a little different.
We are creating "The New Front Porch." The front porch is a place for dialogue... a place to put your feet up and chat with a friend about what's going on in the world around you. It's where the newspaper hits your door...but that's just the start. People walk by, engage with each other and form a strong sense of community on those front porches.
That sense of community is what we want to build at CookevilleTimes and UCDailyNews.com. We've started with a few journalists who volunteer their time to create content for you.
But in addition to our focus on our investigative journalism efforts, we'd like to invest our time supporting you...the educated, insightful, uniquely informed residents of the Upper Cumberland region -- in communicating your own content. Your stories, your pictures, your video, your views....now that will be an exciting website.
We want everyone to be involved with this news site. Today, many people have cameras on our cell phones. We have the ability to quickly communicate and share information.
Imagine what will happen when our entire community starts truly sharing information --- pictures from the games, updates on road conditions and information on critical events as they unfold?
It will be The New Front Porch. It will be, truly, a new model of news for our community. It will be phenomenal.
You don't need one expert in your life telling you what to think. You are educated, interested and perfectly capable of forming your own views, given all of the perspectives.
This is your news site --- your place to contribute information, exchange information and views, and form new ideas that build and strengthen our community.
Let's collaborate.... let's build together a new model of journalism for a new era of community growth in the Highland area.
So what's on your phone camera today? What have you seen or learned about that you'd like to discuss with others? What's worth our focus? Send it today ....and tomorrow...and the next day. Be a part of the New Front Porch.
