Today we launched the most significant revision to the Media Mouse web site since the fall of 2003. Not only does the new site incorporate a variety of new features that will make the site more useful for current readers, it also contains a number of enhancements that will help attract new visitors and allow us to become a more viable source of independent media.
In January of 2004, Media Mouse began writing what we called “Daily News Updates” and posted them on this web site’s homepage. The content of the “Daily News Updates” has varied greatly covering topics such as the antiwar movement, downtown development, racial profiling and the police, the war in Iraq, the debate surrounding the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and numerous other topics of local and national interest. While these updates covered a wide variety of topics, all stories were simply posted on the homepage and were weighted the same, regardless of length, their local relevancy, or uniqueness of the information posted within.
In an effort to improve the “Daily News Updates” system, we combed through our nearly 1,000-story archive and assigned categories to each article (making for a far more useful archive) and divided them into “News Briefs” and “Features.” While the site will continue to function as a sort of hybrid blog system, the “Briefs” and “Features” system will allow us to weight articles with regard to their importance. Articles covering local events and issues, those providing coverage unavailable elsewhere, and those providing unique insight will be “Features” and will be displayed more prominently on the site, while the standard “News Updates” we have done over the past two years will become “News Briefs” and will consist of shorter one to two paragraph articles on various local, national, and international issues of importance. As always, our coverage will continue to emphasize independent media sources and issues being ignored or underreported by the corporate media. To this end, we have also begun putting together a daily roundup of news articles that are published elsewhere on the web, hopefully allowing us to partially make up for the fact that we cannot write about every issue we would like to address.
Additionally, we have worked to incorporate new technologies that have emerged since the last revision of the site. We have made widespread use of RSS feeds to expand the ways in which people view our content in addition to embracing various “social networking” tools that have come into prominence. For example, every article, book review, and commentary is now “tagged” (for example, this post was tagged with “independentmedia,” “grandrapids,” “michigan,” and “media”) allowing for us to flexibly categorize content (tags can be created on the fly and an unlimited number can be applied) and link it to the blog search service Technorati. These links to Technorati will increase our readership while giving our readers the opportunity to click on a “tag” and quickly find out what else has been written in the past few days about a topic. Similarly, we have begun to use del.icio.us to automatically generate a daily roundup of important news in addition to using the photo service Flickr to share and receive photos. We have also created our first Podcast to which readers can subscribe and have automatically have recent Media Mouse produced audio downloaded to their computer.
We have also added an events calendar, allowing local activist and progressive groups to post announcements about upcoming protests, meetings, video screenings, and other events. In our view, this is long overdue as this site is widely read and can hopefully be used as a means of boosting participation in the movements that we support and write about. Unlike the various other online calendars serving a similar purpose, ours offers an RSS feed so that you can have announcements about upcoming events downloaded directly into your computer’s newsreader. In the coming months we will also be developing an email announcement list that will contain event announcements.
Moreover, additional new features and are planned in the coming months, all of which are designed to increase the usefulness of this site as a hub for independent media in Grand Rapids.
Where We Go from Here
With the new site, we are making a concerted effort to expand our audience and slate of contributors. Since 2003, we have been the most read independent news source in Grand Rapids and in many ways were local innovators in “blogging” by providing a daily news update on what was happening with the war in Iraq and the antiwar movement. The site has increased its readership and usefulness dramatically since that time with the site now featuring multiple news updates each day, original articles on topics that receive little or no coverage in the corporate media, original commentary, and book reviews. As our coverage has expanded, we have increased our readership with an average of 100,000 readers each month.
In 2006, we hope to increase this readership by improving our news coverage and increasing our outreach. On many issues, the perspectives and, dare we say it, “reporting” provided by Media Mouse is not available anywhere else. For two years, we have provided the most substantive coverage of the antiwar movement, providing coverage of local events as well as national events such as the 2004 Republican National Convention. Moreover, over the past year, we have taken dramatic strides in improving our local coverage and our unique form of “citizen journalism.” While we can certainly make significant improvements in the way we cover various local events and issues, in 2005 we provided some of the more substantive coverage of the debates over the Grand Rapids Police Department’s hindering and opposing arrests and provided the only extensive coverage (aside from public access television) of the sole debate held in the 2005 City Commission race. Over the next year we will both expand and improve the quality of this local coverage in an effort to create a news source that functions less as a “radical companion” to the local corporate media and moves towards becoming a genuine alternative to the local corporate media.
As part of this effort, we are hoping to expand our slate of writers as a means of expanding the scope of our coverage. All too often our coverage reflects the biases of those involved, and while that is nothing to be ashamed of, our races, classes, political views, genders, and identities frequently limit the scope of what we cover. This year we are actively encouraging people to contribute and are inviting readers to submit news stories, photographs, and commentary (within the framework of our editorial policy). We would like to see this site shift towards a community collaboration consisting of the local voices that believe in the need for systemic social change and understand the way in which independent media can help foster and bolster movements for social change.
As always, please let us know what you think and expect many more improvements in the coming months.
