media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

The Straw-Bale Paper

(Dec. 4, 2008)  There is nothing that represents a rural community like a straw bale. Friends in Ferndale built a house out of straw bales this year. And in these pages, Amy Stewart taught us how to build a vegetable garden on top of one. Now I want to show you how you can build a news publication with one.

That’s because I worry about the health of local news. The Internet increasingly provides more goods from outside the area than stores can provide in it and so the advertising model that used to produce nice profits doesn’t work in isolated communities anymore.

But we need a way to know what’s going on here in our local community. So, inspired by Amy Stewart, I thought I’d make public my secret recipe for a straw bale newspaper. That way, the next time some wealthy newspaper owner pulls the plug on your local paper you’ll still have a source of reliable news.

Ingredients you will need: One straw bale. You can get it at the Farm Store for less than $10. One cell phone that comes equipped with voice mail or, in lieu of that, a roam phone and an answering machine. A computer and Internet connection. You don’t necessarily need broadband. Despite what everyone tells you, as long as you have a lot of time and patience a slow modem will work fine. A pen and notepad. An e-mail address.

Step One: Put the straw bale in a place sheltered from rain and wind. Sit down on it with your phone, pen and notepad.

Step Two: Start calling everyone you know and find out what’s going on around town. Write down what people tell you. Make sure you when you write down a piece of information you write down the name of the person who gave you that information. The first way to build credibility as a citizen journalist is to make sure your readers know where you got your information. And don’t think you will remember. Your memory is not your partner in this venture and will try to play tricks on you.

Step Three: Go to your computer and create a blog. That’s a name for a Web site where you post information for other people to read. Some people use it for personal diaries. Other people use blogs to showcase their art, music, poetry or philosophical musings. You can use it to create a news publication. There are a number of free blog hosting sites. One, through Google, is Blogger.com. There are more sophisticated, hipper and, I’ve been told, easier ones. But Blogger is pretty simple to figure out. You will need a valid e-mail address to sign on, but otherwise it’s free. Give your blog a clever name that you think you could stick with a long time and that will outlast you when you hand the job over to someone else.

Step Four: From all the information you got on the phone from all those people you know, determine three things that you feel other people in your community might not know about but should.

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