The Public Square Project

A key part of The Public Square Project's mission is to shine a light on what's happening in local government and to provide the necessary context to make the actions of local government more comprehensible to more people. Since this is the very thing that good journalism does, we decided early on that the Project should include a journalism component. But we weren't sure what that would look like.

We had a sense that there were stories out there about how the policy choices of local governments affect Pittsburghers in their communities and in their daily lives, but that weren't being told either because the stories 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 we began to think about how we could help build the capacity of traditional media sources to cover the stories that were falling through the cracks.

At around the same time the Project was coming together, I became very interested in the citizen journalism movement. We all know what blogs have meant to the democratization of information and opinion on just about every topic under the sun, but now whole news sites were developing that included only user-generated content; sites like NowPublic and GroundReport. With sites like CNN's iReport and CBS's EyeMobile, even traditional media outlets were getting in on the act.

So we began to think about how an experiment with the citizen journalism might work here in Pittsburgh. What would happen if we gave would-be citizen journalists training, editing support, access to government documents, and a place to publish their work? What kind of journalism would they produce? What we came up with is PittPoint.

PittPoint is a publishing platform that is specifically designed for citizen journalists interested in telling new kinds of stories about policy-making and civic affairs in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Combining offline training and editing support with online resources, including a government document library, virtual collaboration space, and the latest technologies for sharing audio, video, and photography, PittPoint will provide citizen journalists with all the tools necessary for producing high-quality citizen journalism.

Although PittPoint won't be ready for launch until early this spring, we are holding our first citizen journalism training workshops on consecutive Thursdays in March (March 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th) from 6-8 p.m. at the Union Project (801 North Negley Ave., Pittsburgh). Come to any or all of the four free Thursday workshops. We hope that you'll join us to learn more about PittPoint and how you can participate in our little experiment in citizen journalism. More information is available in our News section.

PittPoint is currently being designed and developed by Michael and Matt at Bearded Studio (they're great to work with, check out some of their work here), and is supported in part through a Seed Award from The Sprout Fund. We are very excited to be working with Sprout's terrific staff, who have been tremendously helpful and supportive of PittPoint.

Stay tuned for regular updates about PittPoint over the next several weeks and months.