At the end of every semester, The Amherst Wire’s editors write a memo to Steve Fox, our faculty adviser, summarizing what worked well, what challenges we encountered, and what goals we want to achieve next semester.

Top among our priorities going into the new year, listed in the goals section of my memo, is this:

Modeling a new form of community journalism. AW is in a unique position to experiment with and serve as a model for a community-driven news site facilitated by professional (or students training to be professional) journalists. Everything we do next semester will build toward this vision.

We want AmherstWire.com to be a place where the barriers between editors, reporters and readers are completely lowered. Gone are the days where the only point of interaction between content producer and content consumer was a letter to the editor. The ability to post comments to stories online opened up new channels of communication and ushered in a new era of participatory media.

Now we’re looking to take the next step in this progression. We want members of the community we’re covering to take an active role in the site’s operations and to feel like they have a voice. We’re going to take the old model and turn it upside down. Here’s how:

Open-door policy
Newsroom meetings, held across the hall from the journalism department every week, will be open for anybody in the community to attend. The primary purpose of these meetings is to run workshop stations for reporters to work on their stories with editors and to hone their craft, and for citizen journalists to develop the same skills. Editors and faculty advisors will teach everything from research and interviewing, to writing, to video, audio, and photography, to blogging and web design.

Online newsroom
Next semester, we’ll be unveiling the web counterpart to our newsroom, an online forum where readers provide input on story ideas and tell us what they want to see. Our focus is on investigative reporting, so the question we’ll put to readers is “What do you care about, and what do you want to find out?”

Transparency
Another function of the Newsroom is to track story assignments and the reporters working on them. This will be viewable by the public, providing a layer of accountability, building trust, and reinforcing the belief in journalism as a public service.

Driven by community, fueled by journalists
The analogy here is that of a vehicle: community members choose which direction to steer it in — what topics to cover, what issues to talk about — while professional journalists (or in the case of college media, student journalists training to become pros) are the ones who make it hum.