Much more to come this weekend

I was away in Kansas City much of the week, teaching and learning at a journalism leadership conference. I talked with several professionals from around the country who are venturing into new web projects like the much-talked-about-here Flower Mound News Project. Most of the projects I saw at this conference were backed by established media organizations (ie: the local newspaper or cable company), so they weren't a direct apples-to-apples comparison with the totally grass-roots project we're going to build here.

But one of the key reminders I got while I was there was how cheap it is to get a project like ours running. The hard costs are very low. The challenge comes in recruiting volunteers, spreading the word, getting community buy-in, and teaching people how to use the site to make their own news. This last focus (teaching volunteer neighbors how to be journalists) I'll be talking more about in my next post here, sometime later this weekend.