This time around we’ll be inviting everyone to submit proposals for projects or activities or coalitions or new organizations or anything that you think might help improve and expand news coverage in Somerville. Our goal is to tap the city’s collective genius to solve the tough problem at hand.
Location: Somerville Media Center main studio
When: Saturday, April 27 from 12 noon to 2pm.
With networking from 2-2:45pm as before.
The Facebook event page is here:Â https://www.facebook.com/
The event is co-sponsored by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, DigBoston, and Somerville Media Center. Any Somerville-based civic, social, cultural, or media organizations that would like to co-sponsor, please drop me a line at jason@binjonline.org.
The meeting agenda will again be simple: This time around we’ll be inviting everyone to submit proposals for projects or activities or coalitions or new organizations or anything that you think might help improve and expand news coverage in Somerville. Our goal is to tap the city’s collective genius to solve the tough problem at hand.
Please submit proposals in writing by April 19 to me (again, at jason@binjonline.org). I’ll put all the submissions up on the BINJ website and also email them out to everyone by April 22; so that folks can read them in advance.
At the meeting, each proposal will be presented by its advocate(s) and attendees will discuss it for a period of time based on how many proposals we get.
Then attendees can sign up to work on any of the proposals that interest them at the end of the event, or later by email or social media.
Note: While it’s true that the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism will be presenting a major proposal for our new project, the Somerville News Garden, at the meeting, my colleagues and I want to make sure that we don’t push other potentially great ideas off the proverbial stage. And we think it’s critical that other participants with different ideas have the same access to the community of interest that we’re creating through this process.
We also want to stick to the statement I made in the DigBoston editorial I wrote immediately after the Somerville Community Summit that BINJ would “accompany” local activism for a better news media, rather than attempt to dominate it in a top-down fashion. So we’re definitely going to launch the news garden project, and invite Somervillians to join it, but we do not want to be the only game in town. Because we think creating an “activist monoculture,” if you will, is a bad idea that is less likely to lead to the desired outcome of improving and expanding news coverage in Somerville.
Also note that the Somerville Media Center will be making its own proposal “to build a stronger base of local media ambassadors though community media access and resources” at the meeting.
