Hitting the Links: Hyperlocal News in Northfield

I spent a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon meeting with Doug McGill's journalism class at Carleton.  Doug's students are spending the fall term digging into issues of concern to Northfield and Rice County, and a selection of the best stories from the class are being posted on the Pressville news blog.  I had several good conversations with students who were exploring a wide range of issues, from the impact of the recession on school finances to the impact of buckthorn on the local landscape.  You can find the Pressville feed aggregated at the bottom of our right sidebar.

Pressville has been covered here on Northfield.org and on LocallyGrown, and is the subject of a feature story in the Northfield News. 

Also in attendance at the Carleton event were second ward city council member Betsey Buckheit, Northfield News managing editor Suzy Rook, Carleton's director of Academic Civic Engagement Adrienne Falcón, Mohamed Bakri from Carleton's ACT (Acting in the Community Together) office, local website designer Sean Hayford O'Leary, and LocallyGrown's Griff Wigley.

In a post on LocallyGrown a few days ago, Griff was critical of Pressville for "missing the new journalism boat."  One of his specific examples was the failure of two stories on National Coming Out Day—one of which was written specifically for Northfield.org—to link to a 2007 LocallyGrown discussion on the "gay-friendliness" of Northfield. 

In general, Griff was critical of the stories for being in the static, information-delivery mode of old journalism, rather than in the dynamic mode of new journalism, rich in links and productive of further online discussion.

In Doug's class at Carleton, the students started the term getting a grounding in journalistic ethics, the treatment of sources, the gathering of material, and other basics of good journalism, new or old.  As the term has progressed, the stories on Pressville have become more link-rich.  Meeting with the students, I was impressed with the depth and range of their journalistic engagement in local issues. 

Northfield is fortunate to have not only a traditional biweekly newspaper, the Northfield News, that's still around after 133 years, but also an active citizen blogosphere that includes both Northfield.org and LocallyGrown—and now Pressville.  Northfield is unusally rich in sources of hyperlocal content.

While Northfield.org has primarily been a community bulletin board for local events, in the past year we have featured stories by St. Olaf intern Amy Sack and summer volunteer Leah Burmesch, and we've begun to feature stories by Maia Rodriguez, who is working for Northfield.org through the Carleton ACT office. 

Northfield.org is your community website.  Our goal is to enrich the fabric of the Northfield community. Community members are always welcome to submit news and events.  Details on submitting content are available here.