Responsibility of the News Organization:
At a local level, the news organization would be responsible for getting those first users through participation and working with local school districts. They would express the educational role the Web site would play and hopefully that would be enough to get the school districts interested in promoting the locker to their middle schoolers.
The news organization would have administrators (probably only one would be necessary at first) who would monitor use of forums, groups, etc. In the beginning, the groups will be pre-decided (ie, I love football, soccer, math, slurpees, etc.) It would evolve so that students could request that groups be created and maybe eventually students would be able to create groups to promote discussion, etc. The administrators would moderate conversation and make sure that nothing is being said that could endanger any users. Some of the groups being created will and should pertain to newsworthy things (I love Hilary, Barack is my Rock, etc. Also community things like Volunteers at the Shady Pines Retirement Home, Boy Scouts of America, etc.
The news organization will obviously add to the locker features as the user-base grows. They would get advertisers for the site geared toward this middle school age-group (probably much different than their normal advertisers).
Within the lockers are the users’ own personal things, pictures, books, etc. Most of that content will either be provided in the news stories the news organization already provides or through user-uploaded photos and things that the user may not share with other users online. The administrators will have little to do with this.
The news organization will provide content (stories) that are both of interest to middle schoolers (one of their classmates wins a national award, a law is passed requiring middle schoolers to start school earlier than high school kids, sports, etc.) We are asking that the news organization also keeps in mind that kids are often turned off by newspaper content because they can’t understand it. This may require slight editing of some stories so that they are appropriate for the middle school-aged demographic.
The days from page headlines will also be provided within the lockers as something that is not optional. This will again be part of the responsibility of the news organization.
2 comments:
One other task we had talked about either last week or 2 weeks ago was using the sites to have projects shared to other networks. Because we are not a social networking site, users initally will only be able to share projects (this is specifically pertinent to the notebook groups) within their network. In the event they want to share a project with a corresponding group in another network (for instance, if this expands beyond the one initial news source sponsor) those projects would be sent to the site admin, who would approve them, and then be sent to other networks. I think this is one area where there is a need for at least one general site admin for a rather extended period of time.
It should be clear that the site would not just provide childish news. Yeah, a little-league team wins the championship, but also Oprah just backed Obama. With the slight alteration of the presentation of news, the site could have tremendous sucess with child comprehension.
Users sharing stories is one form of participatory journalsim. Also, we feel that the book blogs are another way that users can get involved and make news their own.
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