The New News Organization plays an important role here as an outlet for experienced, professional journalists to train local bloggers and citizen journalists how to cover their communities with more depth, detail and accuracy. That training would then help the NNO expand its daily coverage of education, local politics, crime, business, sports, entertainment and nightlife. (See our post from yesterday on the staffing breakdown for the NNO.)

Mike Reicher, a CUNY J-School grad student, wrote about his experience at The Local this summer recruiting experienced journalists to train budding community reporters and photographers.

Also, in our interviews with several not-for-profit news sites, we found experienced investigative journalists like Trent Seibert of Texas Watchdog training everyday people around the country how to properly cover their communities. Doing so has allowed Trent and his colleagues to raise more money for their investigative news site, which will play a vital role in the future of journalism.

And as local coverage grows, there will also be opportunities for professional training in citizen sales. In the larger framework, business-to-business services like a white label email and online marketing training service — or even in-person training sessions — could provide viable revenue opportunities for a new news organization. Those services also represents the kind of broader community outreach people like Steve Buttry have been calling for in various places and in response to some of our models. As a result, citizen sales training could help independent local bloggers grow their ad revenues without the need to hire a full-time sales person.

What do you get when seasoned professional journalists train novice teenage bloggers in the tools of the trade? We’ve started to answer that question this summer at The Local, The New York Times’ collaborative blog covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New Jersey.

Ready...Set...Blog! student Kaseim Watts (Photo by Tamara Best)

Since launching in March, one of our goals at The Local has been to publish work by contributors from many perspectives in the community. But since the infants of ex-Manhattan moms are still a little too young to blog, The Local sent out word to high school teachers, community leaders, and youth groups that we wanted to recruit neighborhood teenagers interested in journalism.

We didn’t just want to give them a video camera, though, and say shoot. So, the students went through a three-day intensive workshop, called Ready…Set…Blog! Fellow CUNY Graduate School of Journalism student and Local intern Lois DeSocio and I developed the curriculum and led the workshops.

On day one, students learned the basics – how to write a news story, how to conduct an interview, how to sniff out news and a primer on journalistic ethics. The next two days they learned media tools – how to shoot photos and video – and they hit the streets.

Samples of the students’ work, which we’ve already posted on The Local, are available here, here and here. And then there’s this video of a local musician.

In total, we trained 16 students – eight in Brooklyn and eight in New Jersey. For the most part, though, we weren’t doing the teaching. Lois and I recruited volunteer professional journalists and journalism educators who wanted to train teens how to effectively cover their own communities.

Ready...Set...Blog! students taking diligent notes. (Photo by Mike Reicher)

In Brooklyn, Indrani Sen from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, who also teaches high school journalism in The Bronx, led the discussion on news values and the elements of a news story. Two local reporters, Jennifer Maloney from Newsday and Sophia Hollander, a freelancer who contributes to The New York Times, taught interviewing and ethics.

Sandra Roa, a grad student at the CUNY J-School who interns at NYTimes.com guided the students through the basics of photojournalism, and I led the video seminar.

The next phase of the program is to pair students with reporters from The Local and from The New York Times, so they can work together to produce at least one story this summer. We’re anticipating a range of topics, from youth summer employment to teen violence.

Just last week a group of teenagers allegedly beat a college student into a coma. As many stories tend to do in this neighborhood, it has evolved into a discussion of race and class. This is the type of divisive local issue we’d love to have covered both professionally and from a teen’s perspective.

That is what Jessica Mayberry, co-founder of the global social media network Video Volunteers, has brought to underdeveloped and underreported communities in India. Her organization trains everyday citizens how to cover newsworthy subjects like local government inefficiencies, health and class divisions.

Most of the training is performed through workshops, where aspiring community producers are taught how to perform research, create story outlines, use the equipment and software, and then go out and shoot. The successful ones are then compensated by the organization for their work. Since 2006, Video Volunteers has trained 150 community producers in 350 villages with the help of other nonprofit organizations.

A live video screening in India

“What we’re seeking to demonstrate is look, you can produce topical videos,” says Jessica, a New York native who spawned the idea for Video Volunteers with her partner, Stalin K., in 2003. “What matters is that you’re from that local region, you know the issues there, and you have the communication skills to get the best stories out.”

The idea behind using video to tell those stories — apart from its visceral impact — is that many of the targeted communities have low literacy rates, she says, which keeps newspapers and magazines at a distance. Her organization’s work has resulted in a heightened awareness among audiences of how their communities function.

“Some of our community producers did a story a while back on the closing of a water treatment plant in their region,” says Jessica. “A lot of people got sick, and after the producers started to record what was going on, the local government came to one of the community screenings and told everyone, ‘No, no, no. We’re going to reopen the plant.’

“The purpose wasn’t to bring fresh water to India, but to empower local people with the communication and information tools to solve these problems on their own.”

One of the organization’s initial challenges was finding the money needed to buy cameras, computers and the right software. Fortunately in 2008 Video Volunteers won $275,000 in the annual Knight Foundation News Challenge, which awards several million dollars a year for innovative ideas that bring new “platforms, tools and services” “to community news, conversations, information distribution and visualization.”

Their other challenge has been keeping morale up among the community producers they train. Very often the effort put in outweighs the compensation — just like with most journalism (or advocacy) in America.

“It’s a tough job,” says Jessica. “They love it because of they attention they get, and producing videos is far more interesting than what they were doing before. But, they work really late at night and they feel they’re not getting paid enough, especially knowing that they have this very monetizable skill. If we were a bricklaying organization, they would know exactly how much they should get paid for their work and that pay would be far more concrete.”

Now as Video Volunteers extends its reach to other communities around the world, Jessica hopes to see her current model pick up enough momentum to sustain itself.

“The thing we need to figure out is how to do this in a way that’s permanent and ongoing,” she says. “What we’re trying to figure out is: what’s the lowest cost model to keep this going? How do we equip tens of thousands of marginalized people around the world with the necessary tools to tell their own stories?”

Video Volunteers co-founder Jessica Mayberry