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Knight supports the Community News Commons, a 2011 Knight Community Information Challenge winner, to engage, mentor and train citizen journalists. Below, Noah Erenberg, convener for the Commons, writes about the development of the website since its launch in 2012.

This summer marks the one-year anniversary since the launch of Community News Commons, a web-based citizen journalism project, funded by Knight Foundation and The Winnipeg Foundation.

When I began the job as convener for the Commons, I wasn’t sure what to expect. We’ve all been witnessing major transformations in mass communications that have brought lightning-fast changes to the ways we gather and disseminate news, information and ideas.

The emergence of citizen journalism in this shifting landscape is creating a different kind of journalism. It is more about community engagement than about who broke the story or how many newspapers can be sold.

Perhaps the most impressive byproduct is the unique and creative ways this kind of activity builds capacity and relationships in our community. The synergy resulting from gathering together, either at a storytelling workshop, a public forum or even a one-on-one editing session with a citizen journalist, is impressive.

Two anecdotes illustrate the power of participatory journalism. We held a contest for “best story” in one of our story labs. A middle-aged professional woman won first prize. She later declared the experience of winning this contest to be one of the most significant things that had ever happened to her. Since then, she has written several well-crafted stories for our site on a range of subjects. Her energy, passion and developing skill are impressive.

Another individual, who joined the ranks of our citizen journalists shortly after the website launch, has a keen interest in photography. I have sent him on a few assignments and have published many of his photographs. One day while we were chatting, he mentioned he had just acquired a new cellphone number where I could contact him. I asked him where he lived, to which he replied, “in one of the local homeless shelters.” It turns out he has lived there for a couple of years.

Both of these stories— and many other examples—have given me a much more profound understanding and appreciation of the power of citizen journalism.

Like most people, citizen journalists are enamored with the prospect of publishing stories, but are quickly humbled by the demand that they produce quality work. They see it takes considerable heavy lifting involving research, interviews, writing, rewriting, photography, and sometimes videotaping, audio recording, tweets, links, etc.

One participant wanted to write a story about a debate about female priests at the church where she works. When she realized her reporting might jeopardize her job, she chose another story and suggested the church controversy be left to other citizen reporters to cover.

Another story lab participant reported on a civic traffic issue strictly from his own perspective. Eventually, he saw the value of stepping back and canvassing opinion from several neighborhood residents, which allowed him to build the story around general reactions of the local community to the issue.

Since launching the Community News Commons, we’ve experienced steady growth in both participation and readership. To date, 403 people have registered as citizen journalists and 76 have submitted at least one story. We have published more than 530 stories.

We also collaborate with a local community radio station, which provides a daily news audio podcast posted on the site. We publish a “photo of the day” submission as well as a monthly poll asking provocative questions for readers to vote on.

The web stats at the Community News Commons are climbing. We attract about 4,000 unique visitors each month to the site, generating about 5,000 visits and 9,000 page views. We’ve shown steady progress in the last year, while connecting the people of Winnipeg in new ways. They’re learning a lot from the process, but, just as important, we’re learning from them.

Noah Erenberg, convener, Community News Commons