All the comforts of home
On Friday, we launched our third Hometown Hub, this one in Pleasant Garden.
It joins hubs in Summerfield and Rock Creek, which is our name for the rural-to-suburban transformation going on in Eastern Guilford and Western Alamance counties. We plan to host four more from other communities across the Triad before the year is out.
As envisioned, Hometown Hubs are online communities aimed at providing a place for people to share news big and small with their friends and neighbors. News & Record staff members are not doing the bulk of the writing; you who live in and care deeply about you community are.
"The Hometown Hubs project is our attempt to connect more closely with the communities we serve, to get citizens actively involved in this process we call journalism," said Betsi Robinson, community news editor. "It actually turns the traditional journalism model on its head. We aren't dictating the news to you, or telling you what we think is important for you to know. You, the citizens, are making those decisions. Why? Because you know more about what's going on in your communities than we could every hope to.
"The Community News Team here has laid the groundwork for this project, but its success depends almost entirely on you, our readers and contributors. We're simply providing the forum. We're asking you to provide the content, to share your news and photos with your neighbors, friends and co-workers."
The hubs start on our Web site -- click on the Town Square tab. We then publish the best submissions in the newspaper. Pleasant Garden's page is published in the paper Fridays, Rock Creek's on Saturdays, and Summerfield's Sunday (see page B3).
The Hubs will become more robust as time goes along. We expect that more and more people will share stories about people and events that are important to them: the Little League championship, the church mission trip, the PTA fund-raiser, the break-in down the street and the club social.
If we help citizens publish what's meaningful to them -- whether it is a report about a town council meeting or questions about a neighborhood restaurant rating -- then the community is served, and you will have a better newspaper.
If you think it is news, you can make it so. If you live in Summerfield, Rock Creek or Pleasant Garden and want to contribute, send Betsi an e-mail.
(If you live elsewhere, you can always put your news online by clicking on the Town Square tab and going to "Submit your own articles.")
In other newspaper news, we continue to add exclusive content -- information that's not in the newspaper -- on the Web site. Photographer Jerry Wolford has literally given voice to today's front page story about restrictive deed covenants on homes in a powerful multi-media project online. He's taken the story reported and written by Nate DeGraff and transformed it into something closer to a television news feature. It's only four minutes long, and hearing the actual voices of some of those affected and the racist wording on the property documents is chilling. Go here.
Finally, if basketball is your thing, we greatly supplement our newspaper coverage of the tournaments with information online, including photo slide shows of every game and real-time coverage of the sights and sounds of the tournaments.
Join us as we expand the ways we can bring you news, and open up avenues that you can talk with us and each other.