The Public Square Project

I've been a little absent from the blog lately (OK, more than a little), but I hope that you'll forgive me, as I've been spending a lot of my time working hard with the fantastic designers at Bearded Studio to finish up development of PittPoint, our new online community news site and citizen journalism publishing platform, which will be ready for launch next month. You can read more about PittPoint here, and check back very soon for updates about the launch.

I've also been meeting with many professional and citizen journalists over the last few weeks to spread the word about PittPoint and to grow our ranks of citizen journalists. With the newspaper business being what it is these days, there is a lot of interest in journalistic experimentation and, locally, PittPoint and The Public Square Project are at that the forefront of that experimentation.

In order to prepare for PittPoint's launch, we hosted a series of four two-hour citizen journalism training workshops during the month of March. I hope that some of you reading this post were able to make it to a few of the sesssions. The idea behind the workshops was that even though Pittsburgh has many outstanding citizen journalists, those citizen journalists often don't have access to the kinds of training and support that could take their journalism to the next level. So we invited prominent journalists (current, former, traditional and citizen) to cover different topics each week from nterviewing skills to the basics of defamation to reporting and effective news writing. You can take a look at the full agenda here. The workshops were even more successful that we expected. We trained over 40 citizen journalists during the course of the month.

As we enter the next phase of the project, the launch of PittPoint, I want to make sure that the training materials that we used during the workshops are available to everyone. So, I have attached the slides and handouts from each of the workshop sessions below. Unfortunately, we don't hold the copyright on some of the materials and so we can't post everything that we used during the workshops. Nevertheless, I hope that you find these materials useful and please feel free to contact us at info@thepublicsquareproject.org if you have any questions or ideas for improving the workshops.

Here are some notes and highlights from the workshops to put the materials in context:

Workshop #1

The reason that we decided to start PittPoint in the first place is that we believe that there are too many stories out there about local government and public policy that just aren't being covered either because they are too local to matter to the readers and viewers of traditional media outlets, or because there are simply too few reporters to cover everything that readers might want to know. So among the other topics that we covered at the first workshop, we asked participants to tell us what kinds of stories they would like PittPoint to cover, and here are some of the story ideas that they came up with:

• Status of infrastructure improvements in the City of Pittsburgh (particularly important of light of this story).
• Water quality of the rivers.
• State of tree care in the City of Pittsburgh (interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, there were a number of environmental stories that made the list).
• Review of the recent Pittsburgh Housing Authority audit.
• How the new Act 47 five-year plan will be drafted.
• Coverage of what's happening in Pittsburgh's immigrant communities.
• Better coverage of Pittsburgh's Boards, Authorities and Commissions.

Workshop #2

At our second workshop, Mike Madison, author of Pittsblog and Professor at Pitt Law gave a thought-provoking talk about the need to move citizen journalism from an individual-focused enterprise to an institution-focused enterprise in order to ensure, among other reasons, that citizen-driven media are sustainable in the long run. A blog post about the talk can be found here on the University of Pittsburgh School of Law Faculty Blog.

Bill Labovitz, a media law expert and former journalist also gave a talk about the basics of media law and how we can all avoid a defamation lawsuit (very useful information). Check out his handout on avoiding defamation attached below.

Workshops #3 and #4

The final two wokshops were all about the nuts and bolts of effective news writing and editing (inverted pyramid style, writing a lede, outlining a news story, etc.) and were led by long-time print and broadcast journalist Gregg Ramshaw, PittPoint's journalism guru and mentor, and Charlie Ban, friend of PittPoint and reporter for the Valley News Dispatch. Be sure to check out the handy self-editing checklist and story outling tool that we used for these two workshops attached below.

We are planning to hold another series of citizen journalism training workshops this fall. In the meantime, we hope that you will put these materials to good use. Perhaps by writing for PittPoint? You know, I'm just sayin'...

In fact, we have citizen journalists working on stories right now in preparation for PittPoint's launch. Do you have a story idea that you would like to contribute to the inaugural edition of PittPoint? Drop us a line a info@thepublicsquareproject.org and let us know. One of our editors will be in touch to get you started.