The story of a cherished small shop getting pushed out by a large corporation is a trademark of our time. As the world markets continue to falter, struggling newspapers report the story everyday.
This afternoon, Harvard Interactive is localizing the story as a multimedia feature online.
The slideshow about the disappearance of small businesses met by an influx of banks and chains in Harvard Square serves residents of Cambridge and Greater Boston who care about the Square's future.
Local business owners, college students and long-time professors know their neighborhood is changing--they know the smell of frying burgers at Charlie's Kitchen is becoming overpowered by burritos on the grille at Chipotle, and that banks are filling the lots where old mom and pop stores have closed--but they don't have a good online platform to discuss the transformation. Today's slideshow offers a prompt for commentary and contribution. It addresses the news through photos that will hopefully compel Harvard Interactive's visitors to comment on our blog, @reply us on Twitter, or submit Flickr photos that continue telling the story; and some of those images, if the photographer permits, could end up on the Web site.
Featuring a slideshow up front is a way of encouraging visitors to click their mice on the homepage. They may take 20 seconds to race through the slideshow's photos at first, and then maybe they'll notice the display has captions, too--intriguing them to spend more time, and more clicks, on the page.
It's all about clicks, really. There is a certain rhythm to clicking your way through the Internet. Harvard Interactive tries to draw in news consumers and immediately accelerate their clicking so that the inertia of Web surfing might carry them to several parts of the site.
Once they're in, anybody who's a writer, an amateur photographer, or just a casual yet thoughtful Tweeter, is given a journalistic opportunity. This is the part where the site's editor puts a lot of faith in the talents of the community. Harvard Interactive can't afford to pay professional multimedia reporters due to the recession, so its content, at least early in the game, would rely heavily on citizen journalists. Yes, it's a challenge and a risk. But if only one city in the U.S. could foster a decent Web staff from unpaid yet curious residents, it would be Cambridge. This may be the most literate place in the world--and it's filled with young digital natives: those kids who logged-in to their families' first household desktops as toddlers, who are now adults with blackberries and iPhones, are quick to make themselves part of an online discussion. They understand the value of building a community on the Internet that mirrors a real life community built of bricks and pavement. Harvard Interactive will reach out to them on Twitter and other social networks as a basic way of keeping residents updated on new local stories, and as a means of increasing hits without paying a dime for advertising. Each time something is posted, a teaser and link will be tweeted within minutes. For this afternoon's slideshow, we could ask our followers on Twitter, "Have you ever counted the number of banks in Harvard Square? http://bit.ly/fawnQ."
When today's young adult blackberry users were teenagers, they knew one or two people at school who kept online diaries. Those people may have seemed nerdy or excessively open about their lives at the time, but soon blogs boomed, presenting the world with a new forum for political commentary, music reviews, and videos of cute kittens. It wasn't long before journalists started getting personal WordPress accounts, which quickly influenced Web editors to host blogs on news sites. In 2009, starting a blog is wildly popular--even romantic--and Harvard Square is swarming with bloggers. Naturally, Harvard Interactive has its own blog, The Pit. The Pit is a place where Harvard Interactive contributors give insight into the day's stories. It is a place where the quick and dirty content goes, and it's updated at least once a day. The Pit also has a podcast every Friday which packages and gives perspective on the past week's stories. Also, The Pit is a place where our audience finds other Harvard Square blogs. Of course, we don't include a site in our blogroll unless they're linking to us as well.
Once Harvard Interactive and The Pit develop a strong following, it's time to sell advertising space. We would make the pitch to local businesses--independent stores and chains alike, as long as they're paying--by showing them our site statistics and explaining why buying ads on Harvard Interactive is a good investment. The ultimate goal is to earn enough money to pay multimedia reporters. Once we do that, we can ensure consistent and professional slideshows, flash pieces, articles, videos, and graphics. While a single multimedia reporter can produce an in-depth feature with several components, it's tough for one person to handle an audio slideshow, interactive map, graphic, video, and timeline all in one day. Harvard Interactive's specialty is telling stories in modern, cutting edge ways. With money, Harvard Interactive could produce the best coverage of news events in the neighborhood. An on-call staff would take recorders, cameras and laptops to the scene of any important breaking news event. As one person live blogs in the field, another would sit at a desk compiling information and content for a Flash piece. Starting out primitively with a few unpaid contributors is fine. But eventually, the site would strive to be the best, most up-to-date source for news in Harvard Square. A force to be reckoned with and a site that stretches toward the future of journalism.
