Home| About Us | News| Find Jobs| Events| Voices| Discussions| Features & Profiles| |

Seeking Community Writers for EPA.net

Seeking Community Writers for EPA.net

General Announcements@ EPA.net Posted 4/29/05 An EPA.net journalism workshop brings community writers together with journalism professionals. Seeking Community Writers for EPA.net "Journalism mentors" can provide support and assistance to writer Over the past six months EPA.net has been looking at ways to assist and support residents, nonprofit staff and local government staff who want to write articles for EPA.net. One method that seems to work is creating "content  partnerships" between community writers and volunteers with journalism experience. The volunteers are professional journalists, advanced journalism students, journalism educators and others with experience writing articles. It's a little like how reporters work with editors, except teaching and training is also provided as needed. We have been calling these volunteers "journalism mentors" and calling the working relationship between writer and mentor a "content partnership." Here's how it has worked so far... Community writers contact EPA.net with either an idea for an article, a topic that they would like to write about or interest in a writing assignment. EPA.net matches community writers with a journalism mentor and helps arrange an initial meeting of 30 minutes to set up a "content partnership" for that particular article. Topic, approach and a timeline are set at this initial meeting and then the community writer gets started with research and writing and creates a first draft. Community writer Raphael Miranda and Esther Wojcicki, EPA.net Journalism Mentor and journalism instructor at Palo Alto High School. The community writer then meets again in person with their journalism mentor and they review the first draft together. Then the writer makes use of the editorial feedback to prepare a second draft. (If a meeting in person is not possible, working by phone or email might be an option in some cases). Depending on the particular article, it might take two to four exchanges to reach a final draft that would then be published on EPA.net. Additionally, EPA.net would assist with photos, graphics, layout and training to upload the content to EPA.net. We currently have some support for writing in Spanish and are working to increase that. We can also help with translation between English, Spanish and Tongan. We have several journalism mentors assisting right now and are recruiting more, both from East Palo Alto and from the broader region. And of course, with nearly all EPA.net articles written by residents or other community stakeholders, we are always looking for more writers. Journalism Mentor Kim Chase working with resident Tony Martinez. Kim is a student in the Graduate Program in Journalism in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Because we need to have enough available journalism mentors to match needs and schedules of community writers, there can sometimes be delays in setting up the content partnership, but if you want to write an article for EPA.net working with a journalism mentor, let us know of your interest ASAP and we will set up the first meeting for the content partnership as soon as we are able to. If you want to write something for EPA.net, please contact Michael Levin, EPA.net Content Manager at mlevin@pluggedin.org or 650/322-1134, ex. 13, or just stop by the Plugged In office at 1836B Bay Road. And of course, if you have journalism experience and want to be a journalism mentor, contact Michael as well. We look forward to meeting more writers and mentors, and building new content partnerships, as the EPA.net community continues to expand.

Contributed by Content Manager

Approved by: Content Manager

• What do you think ? Add a comment