NYU and New York Times pair up to cover East Village

The New York Times has paired up with New York University's journalism school to create The Local East Village, a new hyperlocal daily news blog focusing on the East Village.

According to the "Hello Neighbors" message posted on the new website, "The Local is a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves."

"It's hyperlocal journalism and figuring out how local journalism works in the age of the Web," NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says in a video about the project.

The Local East Village is operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision "to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards," according to the web site.

"We're going to be right in the neighborhood covering the stories that are important to people who live in the East Village," NYU journalism professor Yvonne Latty said in the video.

The site launched today and will have a kick-off celebration on Sept. 23. Richard G. Jones, a former New York Times reporter, is editor of the site with oversight by Mary Ann Giordano, a deputy metropolitan editor at the Times. They will oversee the coverage. Content will come from NYU students and members of the community.

The site includes a "Virtual Assignment Desk" that allows anyone in the community to propose a story. Community members can also peruse a list of assignments that have been approved by editors and volunteer to take one on. "Story ideas" already on the list include meetings of local community boards and the Police Community Council.

"From the beginning of our discussions with The Times, a consistent mandate from the editors has been to involve the community in production of the site," Rosen wrote in a blog post today about the project. "This had to be pro-am journalism or it wasn’t worth doing. We quickly settled on an ambitious goal: as soon as we could get there, at least half the material should come from people who live in the East Village. That means half the posts authored by the community and half the ideas for what to cover coming from the community."

Jay Rosen shares more thoughts about the project in an interview with PBS MediaShift.

The Local East Village is one of several collaborative community journalism ventures the Times is embarking on. In 2009, The Times launched The Local focusing on the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In January, The Times turned over day-to-day control of the local news blog to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, its partner on the site. The Local remains on The Times’ website.

In May, the Times helped establish The Bay Citizen, which describes itself as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to fact-based, independent reporting on civic and community issues in the San Francisco Bay Area." The Bay Citizen produces the editorial content for the Bay Area pages of The Times, which appear on Friday and Sunday in local editions of the newspaper. The Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is another partner in that project.

In the Media Decoder column for the Times, Richard Pérez-Peña wrote "The Local blogs stand as an example of a fast-growing trend of mainstream news organizations farming out some of their reporting to outsiders. New organizations like ProPublica, Politico, Global Post and Spot.us, among others, have supplied articles to newspapers. Such arrangements can provide relatively low-cost reporting for cash-strapped papers, but at times they have also raised questions about how established news organizations can vouch for the credibility of less well-known start-ups."

A lousy week for journalists -- and j-students

KANSAS CITY - What a week to be at the ACP/CMA National College Media Convention! Here I am with all these eager young college students, many of whom harbor dreams of entering the field of journalism in the next year or two, and there’s nothing but carnage in the industry.

As David Carr writes in The New York Times this morning, “It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline."

Just consider:

• The Christian Science Monitor announced Tuesday it would cease publication of its weekday print edition.
  
• On the same day Time Inc., publisher of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff.
  
• Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, revealed plans to lay off 10 percent of its work force, as many as 3,000 people.
  
• On Monday, the Tribune Company announced it was cutting 75 more jobs from the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times, leaving it approximately half the size it was at the turn of this century.
  
• And The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest paper in the country, declared plans to reduce its editorial staff by 40 percent.
  

All this came amid news that the nation's daily newspapers saw circulation decline more steeply than anticipated. On Monday the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that average weekday circulation was 38,165,848 at 507 of the nation's leading dailies in the six months ending in September, a 4.6 percent decline from 40,022,356 a year earlier. Up till then, advertising revenue had risen quarter after quarter.

Here at the Marriott in downtown KC, where nearly 1,800 students and advisers involved in college media are gathered for five days of workshops and panel discussions, we urge students to develop new skills. We encourage them to "think multimedia," we teach them how to create interactive maps, audio slide shows and video reports for the Web so that they'll be able to do things that 25-year veteran reporters and photographers can't. We tell them they need to be flexible, creative and skilled in many areas to survive and thrive.

But even with such new media skills, where are they going to get jobs? News Web sites are struggling too. And online publications do not appear to be the savior of their print counterparts.

As Carr notes in his column, "More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day."

Two weeks ago, the Times and other news media reported that online revenue at newspaper sites was stalling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

The impact here in Kansas City is palpable. Only three media companies sent recruiters to the convention, down from about 14 in previous years. Why should they meet with potential employees when they have no jobs to fill?

And still we talk here about the power of "capital-J" journalism. We encourage our students to seek out the truth, to expose wrongs, to, as the old saying goes, "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

What will students here be thinking as they head home Saturday and Sunday after sitting through session after session and speech after speech? Will they mull over the words of inspiration and the heartfelt advice from media professionals and journalism educators? Will they pledge to develop new skills and embrace new media?

Or will they simply think about changing majors. Maybe philosophy isn't so impractical after all. At least opportunities for philosophers aren't evaporating before their eyes.

The New York Times hosts essay contest

Have you dreamed about seeing your byline in The New York Times? Well, here's your chance.

The Times has launched an essay contest for undergraduate college students nationwide on the topic of love. To enter, students must write a personal essay between 1,500 and 2,000 words that illustrates the current state of love and relationships. The winning essay will be published on May 4, in a special issue of the weekly Modern Love column and on NYTimes.com. The winner will also receive $1,000 and be featured on MTVu, MTV’s 24-hour college network, as well as on mtvU.com. The deadline for submissions is March 31.

Essays should be submitted via e-mail to essaycontest@nytimes.com.

“Each week Modern Love redefines what love means as seen through the eyes of a different beholder,” Trip Gabriel, editor of the Times' Sunday Styles section said in a news release about the contest. “We’re very excited to hear the voices of our college-age readers who tackle life and love in a vastly different way than the generations before them.”

Launched in October 2004, the Modern Love column appears in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times. Writers are invited to submit personal essays about a wide range of relationship experiences including marriage, personal loss, dating, divorce, and parenthood. An online archive of Modern Love columns can be found here.


A book of the best essays from the column, “Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit and Devotion,” edited by Daniel Jones, Modern Love column editor, is available at bookstores and online at NYTStore.com.

This isn't the first time the Times has sponsored a college essay contest. In July, the magazine published "What's the Matter With College," an essay by the historian Rick Perlstein, online and invited college students to respond. Some 600 did. You can read the winning essay and four runners-up, as well as search 450 other entries by school, state and class year at http://essay.blogs.nytimes.com/.

Looking for story ideas? NY Times Mag

If you haven't already seen it, be sure to pick up -- or read online -- this week's New York Times Magazine.


The theme is "The College Issue" and it's full of great ideas student newspapers can localize to their own campus communities -- college admissions, Teach for America, affirmative action, and new experiments in education like re-engineering engineering and efforts to bring No Child Left Behind to the university level.

There's also a moving video about suicide on campus.

Be sure to check out the essays from the College Essay Contest. The 600 essays from around the country are responses to "What's the Matter With College," an essay by the historian Rick Perlstein, published in July. They are searchable by school and state. If you find one you like from your college or university, contact the writer and see what else they have to say. Maybe you'll find your next columnist.