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The Vision for WinnipegFIRST Going Forward

Ross McDowall, Wil Alambre, Chris Clarke and Julian Moffatt working late on WinnipegFIRST
photo: Julian Moffatt

Timeline

As you have no doubt noticed, the pace of WinnipegFIRST has slowed down from its previous incarnation of being first to everything. Yes, during John's run, WinnipegFIRST forced the hands of many of the local media outlets. They had to react to what a small start-up - from out of nowhere - was doing in the local news scene. Had things worked out as everyone had planned nothing would have changed and we would still be kicking ass like we were. Sadly, when the money ran out, WinnipegFIRST went offline from May until now.

There was a fairly prophetic post over on NewWinnipeg.com where cancelbot starts his thread with, and I quote, "Commendable attempt at grassroots local media with an impressive-looking lineup of contributors, but how long will it last?"

While the previous version of WinnipegFIRST carried a staff of professionally trained reporters who worked in shifts around the clock (well, with 6 hours offline each night) to bring you the news as it happened, we cannot take this approach again.

If you thought the budget on the last version was small, our current budget is ZERO dollars. That is right, ZERO. We have nothing to invest other than our time, skills, services and belief that Winnipeg deserves and needs a source for local and community news.

While we have a decent pair of newspapers in the city in the Free Press and the Sun, neither delivers a very good level of detail on community news. The stuff that happens in your neighbourhood. The stuff that matters to your friends, your next door neighbour and the widow that lives on the corner. In going forward, WinnipegFIRST is going to transition to a community based news site.

To that end, we have done a few things to help everyone get started:

  • we have given anyone that is registered for the site the ability to write stories on WinnipegFIRST. Right now if you click Contribute, you can start writing articles into the site. At present, we will be notified of your contribution and we will review it before launching it live to the public.
  • we are developing a system for letting you, the community journalist, earn the right to publish live to the site (look for more on this in a future post as we iron out the fine points of this system)
  • we have written guidelines for content contributions
  • we have put together terms of use to protect your contributions and ensure that you keep your intellectual property rights

On the further development of the web site - see http://dev.winnipegfirst.ca which is our stripped down development area which currently won't let you into the contribute area as we work on it - we are doing the following:

  • brought in a recent comment area that will let you watch where the current discussions are taking place on the site
  • we are building a tool to let you get notifications of comments on your articles, or get comments on articles you have commented on
  • we are creating a statistics system for giving you a further look at how your articles are doing
  • we have consolidated all the media to one location and are now serving all our photos, videos and audio clips from the same box that serves the site. You will notice there is a lot less lag on the videos
  • we are building a system that lets you upload your media (to go with your article) to our server, or provide the embedded code if you choose to put your video up on YouTube.com to leverage the social media scene
  • we are building a system to let you notify us of offensive comments or posts that happen to make it past our volunteer editors
  • we are reviewing our categories and looking into expanding them in order to provide a slightly broader range of areas you can write to

As Chris mentioned in his post, New Family Moves Into Neighbourhood, new owners have taken over. We have taken over because we believe in the site. We believe in the need for local news. We want news articles and stories about our communities because we cannot find it easily right now. We want you to be part of this.

Chris and I, along with our business partners Karla (Spacecadet Design) and Doug (Visual Lizard) are in charge now. We didn't intend to be, but we are. However, without your participation, the site will not succeed. So we are tasking you, the reader of this article, to get involved. Tell your friends (use the sharing tools up top) and get them excited. Stop by your local community club and pick up their calendar of events and then write about what you find interesting. Go out and do things you want to do, then come back here and tell us about them. Take pictures. Take video. If you happen to be first on a scene, turn yourself into Clark Kent and get the scoop, but remember, you are not Superman, and neither are we. We are in this together and we are happy to be here. We hope you are as excited as we are.

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