E-Media Tidbits

greatlakeswiki.org You never know who might be interested in your feed, says MSU J-prof Dave Poulson.

That's pretty cool.

Each day at Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism we search for environmental news stories on the sites of 35 Michigan daily newspapers. We then create one-sentence summaries linked to the full stories. We then publish this digest, Michigan's Echo, by feed and e-mail.

Echo is immensely popular with journalists, regulators, environmentalists, lawmakers, academics, lobbyists, consultants, industry representatives and regular people. Since we tag stories by region and story type, they can get precisely the environmental news they want.

A group tracking water quality in northern Michigan can subscribe to receive only those stories. Also, people can syndicate the content of our feed to appear on their own site.

Never when we launched Echo did I anticipate its use by the Michigan Mountain Biking Association. But a savvy Webhead from that group took our stories tagged "public lands" and "recreation" and piped them into their forum.

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Many of those stories don't elicit much response. However, those about limiting access to public lands prompt dozens and even hundreds of posts.

Ordinarily a story about the proposed purchase of a Boy Scout camp by a developer is of mostly local interest. But when such a sale on the west side of our state appeared on our feed, mountain bikers from throughout Michigan weighed in vociferously.

On the forum, someone posted a link to a local newscast about the issue. Someone else posted a link to an online petition that protested the sale. Another person posted information about a fund raising effort to buy the land and put it into public ownership. Others questioned whether they would be allowed to ride even if another purchaser was found.

Property rights were debated. People got mad. They became engaged.

Journalism was happening.

Inadvertently we had a hand in creating an instant community defined not by geography nor even by broad environmental interest. This was a hyperlocal community driven by a narrowly focused desire to ride mountain bikes.

We brought a story to a group of people with a vested interest in a sale that likely they wouldn't have otherwise known about.

And we certainly never saw it coming.

It doesn't always work that way. A coalition of recyclers took our news stories tagged as waste and recycling issues. The very first one to pop up on their site was a column by a waste industry executive asserting that recycling did not pay. Their members were furious and the group immediately removed the feed.

I think that was a mistake. I believe that it is in their organization's interest to know what others are writing and reporting. But then, it's not my call.

We're doing what journalists have always done: deliver the news. What the public does with it next is anyone's guess -- but it sure is fun to seewhat happens.

Guest contributor Dave Poulson is associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.