Like other media organizations this year, MSNBC.com wanted to show the wrath of the recession at the kitchen table level. So it began what is one of the most unusual experiments in online journalism to date: it ensconced itself in one city in Indiana and documented how that city grappled with the economic downturn.
For the Elkhart Project, which is entering its fifth month, MSNBC.com assigns one staff member to Elkhart, Ind., at almost all times to ensure a regular output of blog posts, slide shows, videos and Twitter messages. In Elkhart, readers and viewers see the effects of job losses, foreclosures and stimulus money projects — what MSNBC.com calls “stories of struggle and recovery in America.”
The project has won over some residents who were initially upset about the media’s portrayal of the manufacturing city of 53,000, which has an unemployment rate twice the national average and is sometimes treated as a national symbol of distressed middle America. The project has also been recognized by other journalists for its storytelling; last week it received the National Press Club’s online journalism award.
The project is not exactly a model of hyperlocal journalism (a term for Web-powered neighborhood news) because it leaves most of the day-to-day reporting to the local newspaper, The Elkhart Truth, which it counts as a partner.
Instead, “we’re focused on the themes that are familiar to all Americans and using our reporting in Elkhart to deal with those universal issues,” said Jennifer Sizemore, the editor in chief of MSNBC.com, which is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.
Vikki Porter, the director of the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California, called the project an excellent example of how a classic journalism model “can be mashed up with the 2.0 storytelling tools of the Web.”
Ms. Sizemore declined to say whether the Elkhart Project was a profitable enterprise, saying “our best news projects serve the consumers’ needs and interests first.”
According to Web measurement firms, MSNBC.com’s Web sites are among the most popular in the country, with about 40 million visitors a month. MSNBC.com would not say how many visitors the project has attracted, but put its audience in the millions.
The project’s genesis was in MSNBC.com’s desire to relate the economic recession to lives of ordinary Americans. “The adage that all news is local is absolutely true,” Ms. Sizemore said, adding that personal reporting humanizes a story.
The Web site had focused at length on a town before: in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, MSNBC.com employees tracked the recovery of two Mississippi towns in a series called “Rising From Ruin.”
Ms. Sizemore said that the hurricane was a local story with national interest, and the Elkhart Project is in many ways the inverse: “It is coverage of a national story through the lens of one location, and includes tools and data that are relevant no matter where you live.”
Elkhart was chosen after President Obama visited the town in February and, as Ms. Sizemore put it, “staked his administration’s credibility on the success or failure of the town’s recovery.” He had already visited twice as a candidate.
A deputy editor suggested that staff members visit Elkhart the next day on an exploratory trip, and MSNBC editors eventually decided that it would serve as the soul of the Web site’s coverage.
The project, at ElkhartProject.MSNBC.com, includes several strands of reporting, including the causes of the somber unemployment statistics, the impact of the federal stimulus funds and the views of young people about the economy.
At the outset in April, the Web site intended to report from Elkhart through the one-year anniversary of Mr. Obama’s February visit. Ms. Sizemore now says the site will stay to track whether stimulus funds show up, and whether they have the intended effect.
“It may be a story that we never really drop from our radar,” she said.
Seemingly every day, an Elkhart article appears on MSNBC.com’s home page, often illustrated by a photo of a local citizen. When Mr. Obama visited Elkhart last week, an NBC correspondent asked him questions submitted by local residents.
Residents seem to have warmed up to the project. In the spring, Jennifer Holderread worried in blog posts and on forums that the city was “in danger of becoming nothing more than a media plaything.”
But her outlook has changed. “I think the people who were initially sent here to cover the economy had the forethought that they were going to cover nothing but poverty and despair,” she said in an e-mail message. Now, though, they are covering events like the county fair and new businesses, showing a more nuanced view of the city.
Dan Gillmor, who runs a center for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, praised the project’s ambition, but suggested that MSNBC.com should encourage genuine collaboration with the people of Elkhart, perhaps by incorporating local blogs and videos more fully. “The people of the community could contribute a lot more if they weren’t being seen as sources for interviews or anecdotes, or, to put it less kindly, as journalistic lab rats,” he said.
To buttress its big-picture coverage, MSNBC.com shares reporting with The Elkhart Truth. Ms. Porter said she was most intrigued by the collaboration of the national news organization and the local one.
Rather than merely parachuting into a local story, she said, “this is a commitment model, integrating the local news resources with the national perspective over the long haul
