Bemidji Community Internet Management Team Meeting

Meeting notes: Thursday, March 19, 2009 – 5 p.m.
Northwest Technical College

Present: Michael Meuers, Jeff Ueland, Katie Carter, Debbie Warne-Jacobson, Dennis Montgomery

The management group meeting was held at Northwest Technical College. The agenda for the meeting was to review the site for those who did not have a chance to do so during the last meeting, assess where we are at as a management group, discuss getting content contributors, and reforming the journalism club. With the attendance of Katie Carter, editor of the Community Supported Journalism project, much of the discussion focused on the CSJ section of the site. We also had an update from Jeff Ueland on plans to grow the eDemocracy forum in Bemidji.

The following items were discussed:

Community Journalism

• Expand the stories on the CSJ page beyond the stories sponsored by the CPB grant and solicit additional stories from the community on topics other than the designated issue.
• Stories would go to Katie for editing and a decision on if the story is appropriate for the site, and the location for the story.
• Katie would also be open to receiving press releases from community members for posting.
• Michael Meuers who works in public relations for the Red Lake Government, is interested in sending the press releases he generates to be posted as stories on the CSJ page. He will start emailing them to Katie.
• There was discussion about what types of news should be on the CSJ page vs. the News Page. It was the consensus that the majority of the stories that appear on that page should be original content that is created either by the CSJ project, or submitted to Katie via stories or press releases, and all content should be directly created by the community.
• We would need to have a way to visually label the stories that are part of the CPB grant.
• It was suggested to avoid confusion that the “News” page and left nav link should be renamed “News Feeds" to distinguish it from the original content on the CSJ page.
• There needs to be an easy way for people to send stories to Katie for inclusion on the site if they don’t have their own blog. A link on the page “Submit a Story to CSJ” or something similar, that links to a form where content contributors can send in stories and photos.
• There was some discussion about having an op-ed section, or whether the blogs feed fulfilled that.
• Add more stories on main front page, instead of just the lead.

Story ideas

• Michael Meuers is interested in doing a story on the recent local election
• Jeff Ueland is going to the Unconference sponsored by eDemocracy, and agreed to write a story about that.
• Interview Barb Meuers about why she consistently votes “no” on the Events Center.

Journalism Club

• There was discussion about restarting the journalism club. Katie would take the lead at meetings. Dennis is going to send out an email to those who have participated in the past and let them know we have an editor, a redesigned site, and are ready to use stories generated by the club.

Other site notes:

• Add a Link under “Your Community Missing?” that says “What do you think about this site?” in order to generate more feedback. Have a page to post the comments
• Local Search – would like to see categories here.
• “Contact Your Elected Officials” - Would like to see a place on the site that lists all local elected officials and links to their sites. There was some discussion about what would be considered a local official, everyone who represents you up to the office of president?
• eDemocracy
  Jeff is attending the unconference in Duluth
  Jeff is going to be working to have people table at parades and other summer gatherings to grow the eDemocracy list
• Management Teams
  We need a stable management team as there are different people at each meeting. We need to talk about how to accomplish that.

Meetings

We’ll continue to meet one Thursday per month. Dennis will email about our next meeting.