COMMUNITY CLOUT
YOU'VE GOT IT ONLINE; NOW FLAUNT IT
by Melinda Gipson
One word separates what online newspapers do from the Yahoo!s of the world: passion.
John Raess started the Mercury Center's online teen section, Digital High, in 1994 when he couldn't pry his 14-year-old daughter from the America Online chat rooms. Digital High (www.mercurycenter.com/digitalhigh/) is a hip, irreverent site written and edited by high-school kids whose mission is "to preserve a place where teen voices can come through."
You'd think it would be obvious for an online newspaper to create teen space but, in fact, Digital High was born out of the newsroom of the San Jose Mercury News, not the paper's celebrated Mercury Center. Raess was the newspaper's teen editor. Its other adult supervision comes from Theresa Poon, a youth reporter who quit to take the contract position supporting the site.
The commitment and the superior skills of the site's teen staff make it fresh and raw. Teens talk honestly about sex and peer pressure, about the prom and body piercing, about traffic hassles and why Asian and white parenting styles differ. They hash out freedom-of-speech issues, such as when a young cartoonist was suspended for using the name of his ex-girlfriend in a strip.
Charlotte Harbor, Fla., represents the other end of life's spectrum. Ronald Dupont Jr., Internet editor of The Sun Herald's online service Sunline, says, "The challenge was to take the county with the second-highest concentration of senior citizens in the United States and bring the Internet into the homes of our readers--literally." This morning paper of 36,628 circulation in Southwest Florida "wanted to do more than run stories about the Internet. We wanted to put the Internet in the community."
In two years, Sunline educated more than 30,000 people in free monthly public classes. It wrote manuals and tip sheets, introducing the Internet to a population that often fears the Net.
Sunline asked participants to show up for a photo of all of them holding computer mice in the air and called the photo, at www.sunline.net/mice, "The Mice That Roared." More than 400 showed up.
Its editors and production people also program community organization and personal home pages for free. Sunline's combined sites now have more than 300,000 such pages. You might get the idea that there's passion here for the medium and the community it serves. So how come you don't read about that in Internet World? Members of NAA's New Media Federation do what they can, awarding Digital High and Sunline prestigious Digital Edge honors for Public Service at their Connections conference last month. Read about the winners at www.digitaledge.org/connections98/edgies.html.
But that's not enough. Nobody seems to be getting the word out that online newspapers are the best resources on the Net because they share the same values and see the world through the same eyes as their neighbors. Try getting that from a server farm in Santa Clara.
NMF President Peter Levitan, president of New Jersey Online in Jersey City, says, "We have to be positioned as the leaders in the industry." So, with public-relations firm Fleishman-Hillard International Communications of Washington, D.C., the NMF is launching a campaign to communicate the collective strength of the industry and the importance of online newspapers in bringing the Internet home.
Drive that message by sharing your successes. Send your stories to Rob Runett, NAA manager of new-media analysis.