Can you help improve our grant application?

We’re submitting two items to the Knight Foundation:

1.) A standard text document explaining the project and the people behind it. We want to include your thoughts, hopes and vision for the project as well. Simply complete the text form below.

2.) A video pitch. Most applicants would include the board members or founder. We want to be different.

In addition to videos from the founder and some of the staff (similar to Tom’s video here on the site) we want to incorporate your videos as well. They don’t have to be serious or even related to journalism. For example: you might like gardening and appreciate that the Citizen provides a free and local online forum for your group or blog.

Simply complete the form below or record a video (30 second maximum). Upload it to YouTube and send the link to jnelson@duluthcitizen.org or include it in the text area below and submit.

If you’re not good with editing feel free to email Jacob and arrange a time to stop by the office where we will transfer the video.

This attempt to engage the community in the founding of a news project is extremely rare. If effective it will be powerful and a huge advantage over other applicants.

Thanks for your time and support.

-Citizen Staff

Submit Your Testimonial Here

An important  (somewhat stale but informative) video for our present core audience shared by David Cohn at spot.us. He and his team are doing great things with community funded stories in California. Check out the site and support them if any of the pitches apply to your life in some way and you have the means to do so. Our mission should reach beyond MN borders.

This nascent community/news website is founded on journalistic idealism, web know-how, chutzpah, and a little bit of server bandwith.

What are your hopes for DuluthCitizen.Org? Share them on your blogs, or comment here. If you’d like to go public with your Duluth Citizen love, stand and be counted! I’m going to send out some media releases soon and would love to have some Duluth Citizen members — like you — share your hopes and experience so far with the site. Better to have you talking than me.

Chris Julin, journalism faculty member at UMD, is willing to shoot and edit some video so we can get more, and more beautiful, faces up in that corner on the right of the home page. Don’t worry, he’s very easy on the talent (although I should put “quotes” around talent when referring to me

Send me a message, friend me, comment on my blog, comment here, whatevah. Let’s make that bandwidth meter spin a little faster ….

If you started a blog it can now be found at yourblogname.duluthcitizen.org without the annoying /community/ at the end of the address. All posts have been retained. If you use bookmarks to easily access your blog login panel or anything else on the community site please update them by removing /community/ from the web address.

Feel free to send bug reports or site suggestions directly to this address. We hope that early adopters can be heard during development. With your input duluthcitizen.org will become an honest reflection of the city and the people.

The momentum created by your activity thus far is amazing. 46 members and 23 blogs in two weeks with no promotion. Not too shabby. It’s great to see what a few concerned citizens are doing to help.

We also thank you for your patience. It is a bit strange for a news organization to begin by launching a site under active development. It is also highly progressive as it will take radical strategy to launch and sustain a financially nimble news organization in the “new media” environment.

By participating on the site you are effectively becoming our local news wire service and you will be at the heart of professional reporting in 2010 as we build the news site around citizen content.

THANK YOU

The URL of your blog will change next week to yoursite.duluthcitizen.org vs. yoursite.duluthcitizen.org/community/. All of your content and activity until that point will remain. We’re also working on attaching your profile image to your blog in the member blogs directory.

Thank you for you patience and understanding. This is strictly a volunteer effort at this point.

Please register an account today. It takes but a few minutes.

You can even get your own free blog instantly when you sign up at http://duluthcitizen.org.

Thank you to those who signed up already. So much great feedback. Very humbling.

We look forward to serving you.

Anything you add now will remain on the blog. The only change will be the url.

Send suggestions and bug reports to staff@duluthcitizen.org. Thanks!