[...] Witt has been expanding his “representative journalism” model, which I wrote about at the Nieman Journalism Lab. There’s also a new startup called Oakland Local, founded by former Aol VP Susan Mernit, that [...]

[...] or what project founder Leonard Witt calls “representative journalism” — in a recent Nieman Lab post. Much like the NYT plan, Witt’s project involves a trained journalist or intern writing news [...]

That’s my pingback above but I wanted to add a little more here.

We think that participation/engagement is going to be key to developing a systemic solution to the problem… specifically, a large dose of collaboration and transparency between the local journalists and the citizenry.

The more local freelance journalists engage with the local citizenry throughout the process of pitching, producing, publishing and promoting a story, the more likely it is that citizens and local institutions will financially support their work. It’s the relationship, stupid!

The more local journalists see the citizenry stepping forward financially, the more they’ll practice their craft with more transparency and collaboration. The better they get at it, the more they can charge for their work. We hope that local foundations will step forward to fund stories that the citizenry might not want to hear but need to hear.

We’re also thinking that it’ll be best for the local RepJ journalists to NOT be attached to any one media organization… like David is doing with Spot.us. Their stories could end up on our Locally Grown blog, the Northfield News (weekly newspaper), KYMN (local radio station), or NTV (local public access cable). It seems like this approach would accommodate to the financial ups and downs of the local media orgs while allowing the journalists the flexibility to have their work published as widely as possible.

Like everyone else, we could be wrong, tho!

[...] the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab) [...]

[...] don’t know the Nieman Journalism Lab guys personally but Mathew Ingram’s blog post today, “Locally grown” news gets a boost acknowledged the good stuff happening here. The ‘boost’ to hyperlocal sites like ours that [...]

And best of luck with the project. From the looks of it, you and your group have been at this kind of thing for some time now — since before there were blogs, or Twitter or any of that. If anyone can make it work, it’s you guys.