Boulder's ClimateSmart Lacks Online Community
Why the journalistically independent Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker fills a gap that local government web sites cannot.
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Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.
Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.
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Following the Carbon Cash in Colorado
When Boulder, Colo., voters passed the nation's first municipal "carbon tax" last fall, it was an engraved invitation for me and my partner Amy Gahran at citizen journalism outfit I, Reporter. As long-time veteran environmental journalists with years of online experience, we've been on the look-out for ways to explore participatory journalism's potential on a tough eco-issue like global warming, with a local focus on a story that has national and international implications.
Then the Knight Foundation gave us our opportunity last May by funding our plan to build and launch our Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker citizen journalism web site. Since then, we've plunged ahead, learning as we go about what it takes to involve local citizens in such a complex, slow-breaking, but crucially important story.
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One of the big lessons we've learned in just a few months into the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project is the enormous challenge of getting community members to think of themselves as journalists.So we're about to try a new approach. This week, we'll launch a new bulletin board service on the site with the aim of drawing in those citizen journalists through the relatively simple mechanism of the online comment.
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It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.
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