Another nonprofit newsroom has started up. TucsonSentinel.com launched Friday. It promises to bring news and dialogue. The site features a mix of national and international news services and a network of local correspondents covering border and immigration, local government, Tucson’s music scene, and Wildcat sports.

Among the news services it plans to use are the GlobalPost, Kaiser Health News, ProPublica and the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

It’s part of a trend.

A February/March 2008 article in the American Journalism Review cited new forms of nonprofit, grant-funded news operations:

• Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting,
• MinnPost.com,
• The Washington Independent,
• Propublica.org, an investigative news operation that opened shop in Manhattan

Earlier, I blogged about another one that recently started up – californiawatch.org.

We’ll keep an eye on them. If you know of others that I should add to my list, please feel free to drop me a line.

Suzanne Yada (@suzanneyada), a student at San Jose State, proposes what a 21st century newsroom should look like.

In addition to bandwidth, here’s what she proposes a newsroom needs:

1. Every reporter needs a kit containing a laptop, video camera, SLR camera, smart phone and an audio recorder.

2. A place to meet and a place for community.  This needs to be both virtual and physical.

3. A few moderators and 1-2 editors.

Yes, it will rankle some who say that will tarnish our journalistic ethics. But we won’t have any ethics left if we don’t have any journalists left. It costs money to make rich media.

Last, but not least … Every reporter MUST blog, tweet and Facebook and that’s just for now.

via Teach-J

Journalists and educators are helping community members in South Los Angeles document their neighborhood as part of a community reporting workshop. It’s part of a collaboration between the social and economic justice group, SCOPE, the South LA Report and the Metamorphosis Project, an Annenberg School for Communication project looking at change in urban communities of L.A.

For this feature, South LA resident Delores Kelley narrates an audio slideshow featuring photos of streets, alleys, lots in her neighborhood under the theme, “What Our Tax Dollars Pay For.”

It’s worth a look. It’s interesting as news organizations are looking more toward partnering with citizens to tell stories from communities, figuring out how to make themselves essential to people’s lives.

This workshop also helps folks organize such efforts in their own neighborhoods and provides cameras, and solicits for journalists and other media pros interested in helping teach workshops on storytelling.

“How News Happens may tell us more about the news industry than the study itself does,” writes Steve Buttry, the digital news innovator and veteran journalist in a recent post on his blog, Pursuing the Complete Community Connection.

Buttry takes to task a recent study of the news ecosystem in Baltimore that was published by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, and that I mentioned here yesterday.

The study found that most news online originates with newspapers.

Buttry says:

Though the report was limited and flawed, it produced some valuable understanding of how journalism works today. But its most important findings were not that most news comes from newspapers. I’m glad PEJ is conducting this kind of research. I hope it does more.

But this research has too many flaws and limitations to be taken very seriously, and few of those flaws were noted in some of the coverage.

Buttry says that the study findings were skewed toward old media because it focused on crime, government, the justice system, health care, meat-and-potato coverage for big media.

“So of course the other reporting in that case was going to be derivative of the Sun’s original reporting,” he writes. “If old media are losing audience because they are not covering stories that are relevant to their communities, this study would have no value in telling you whether anyone was covering the relevant information.”

Areas the study steered clear of included neighborhood news, sports, arts, schools (the study was conducted in July, when school is out).

Social media is playing a big role in most media companies efforts now and the esteemed granddaddy of big media, The Associated Press, is raising its visibility on this front as it named recently Lauren McCullough to the post of manager of social networks and news engagement.

Via mediabistro:

In her new position, McCullough will “direct the work of editors [in New York] and around the company in pursuing journalistic material from social networks, promoting AP’s presence and content on social networks, and providing feedback to news managers on topics of high interest on social networks.” She will also be working to set standards and practices that the AP’s reporters must follow when engaging in social network sites — other news orgs have also recently implemented such rules.