Collaborative News Bloggers at Blog Group Thursday (3/6)
Folks from a news and blog project in Somerville, Massachusetts, will be the guests at Thursday’s blog group. This meeting might appeal to some of you local journalists.
"This week, Barry Rafkind and other folks from Somerville Voices will join us talk about what they’re doing. Somerville Voices is a new collaborative news & features blog for Somerville, and they’d really love input from blog group folks, particularly those of us who are or have been involved in other placeblog projects."
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
2nd Floor Conference Room
23 Everett Street
Cambridge, MA
7 p
Addendum: The discussion at the meeting has been very interesting. They require contributors to provide telephone numbers so there’s some level of accountability and they can follow up, if necessary. They’re quite concerned about people impersonating others, like someone writing in pretending to be a mayor. They require registration for comments.
The founders began doing this community news blog because of their dissatisfaction with the local media. One newspaper is short staffed and has a perspective many people think is less than neutral (what happened to NPOV?). Another one is reported to use strong language and sensational stories.
A few new faces joined us this week, including someone from a community news group in Roxbury.
One of the fellows affiliated with Somerville Voices expressed concern about Universal Hub pointing to this post because they weren’t really ready for people to find them on the Internet. Unlike here and on the blog group blog, Universal Hub links to Somerville Voices’ site. Erica and I were aware the Somerville Voices folks didn’t feel ready to have lots of visitors since they haven’t officially launched yet, which is why neither of us linked to them. We assured them that their site looks fine and they shouldn’t worry, but they’re a bit concerned nonetheless.
