Hasta Luego Message from Kara: “Tell them journalism is made of people!”
It’s Thursday and it’s my last two days as community organizer for Spot.us. I have accepted a Fulbright to go down to my native Guatemala to do research on citizen journalism spaces and to implement a citizen journalism Web site that is described in more depth here: www.ojonow.com/guatemala. It’s in its first throes here at HablaGuate.com and HablaHonduras.com. Now I digress (a habit I got from David)! So it’s really not my LAST days at Spot.us, it’s technically a “sabbatical,” but much can happen in one year in such a dynamic nonprofit as Spot.us. In my eight months, the organization has undergone such quick growth and adoption in the community, among journalists and news organizations that its quite staggering.
It’s been a lovely winding road these months and it has taught me a great deal about where journalism, community, and nonprofit work converge for a greater good – something that gets to the spirit of what journalism is both as a process and a product. Ultimately, it’s about something else for me. I wrote it like this for the SXSW workshop I proposed a few months back for Spot.us (rifting off a line from my favorite movie “Soylent Green“) I made the headline: “Tell them journalism is made of people!” If you know the movie well then you know that cannabalism is not the way to go, but the phrase does get to the heart of how the news media industry has lost sight of its people – those who stopped paying for newspapers and started getting their information needs met elsewhere on any device that was convenient to them and gave them control over how to access and engage in a larger conversation. You know the deal and how the American newspaper industry dug itself into its current situation.
In many ways I feel strongly about the need to experiment and to create as many alternate models such as the community-funded and nonprofit models being implemented by Spot.us, Newsdesk, Public-Press, Kachingle and others as written about in this great Mashable article.
The part I’ve been most interested in helping to create was this replicable hybrid model formed when the ven diagrams of nonprofit, journalism, business, startup and technology platforms meet. What are the things that you can take from each of these circles to create a more democraticized space for determining content, producing it and connecting people to one another in that process?
Connecting people to one another and to larger communities in the interest of creating relevant, timely and impactful stories has been my job here and it has shaped me in ways that I will write more about during my sabbatical. I look forward to the next iteration of my role as the organization grows – sky’s the limit, don’t hit the roof. If you need me, I’m keeping my kara [at] spot.us address.
See you in October 2010!
Related posts:
I really like the quote “journalism is about the people” and I wish you luck as you continue to engage communities around this goal. Spot.us will miss you in human form over the next year but I know you’ll be watching and helping from afar. Buen viaje!
[...] Spot.Us’ community organizer, Kara Andrade, has received a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship. What this means – Kara will be leaving for Guatemala to work on a journalism project. She leaves mid-September and will be gone for around nine months. To hear it straight from the Kara’s mouth read her sabbatical post. [...]
Good luck Kara!!