At the Center , we study community journalism and answer questions on community journalism and provide workshops on community journalism. But as of last fall, we’re actually doing community journalism.
And what community are we covering in this city of three-quarters of a million people? We’re covering a ZIP Code, 76109, which surrounds the TCU campus, where the Center is housed. This “community” has about 23,000 inhabitants and covers about eight square miles.
The whole project came about only last summer, when we were looking for opportunities to get our student journalists off campus to cover the city. We adopted a community that didn’t exist — it consisted of lines on a Postal Service map. And if you asked someone from this area of south central Fort Worth where he or she was from, that person would never have said, “I’m from 76109.”
That’s changing. We named our hyperlocal website The 109, from the last three numbers of the ZIP. Our goal is to cover the people and events and trends of this area like no one else. The old Atlanta Journal boasted that it covered Dixie like the dew – and we’re not exactly sure if there’s anything comparable that covers the 109, but you get the idea.
This ZIP is part of a large city, but our coverage area is only the 109. Our reporters attend school board meetings, but we talk about the implications of votes taken for the 109. We cover City Hall, but only those actions that relate to the 109. Fort Worth had a big budget shortfall this year, for instance, but our focus was on service cuts and other implications for the 109.
During the November elections, we had reporters at polling places, doing stories on the 109’s precincts. We filed traditional stories and video pieces, news , features and a slideshow with lots of names and faces and opinions.
We even coined a word – at first, we called the people who lived here “residents of the 109.” Now? They’re 109ers. Cheesy, but it has caught on.
We are using entirely open-source software and have built the entire site using Drupal, a free content management system available to website developers. We hope to learn a great deal about website deployment that we can apply to Texas community newspapers.
So please check out The 109. Friend us on Facebook to follow what we’re doing in our own venture into community journalism. And let us know what you think.