CCJIG 2007-2008 goals established

Officers of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group have settled upon the following goals for the group in the 2007-2008 year. Commentary is both welcome and invited; use the "add a comment" feature below to weigh in with your thoughts.

These goals grew from discussion among officers at the recent AEJMC convention in Washington and were elaborated upon through a series of e-mail discussions over the past month since the convention ended.

Goal No. 1: Continue the conversation defining civic/public and citizen journalism, their meanings and missions. This blog will be a primary tool for meeting this goal, as will the group's programming at the 2008 convention in Chicago. Look here on the blog regularly for information and commentary about the state of the craft, examples of civic/citizen projects in action, and discussion of CCJIG's organizational mission and roles. The latter will be increasingly important as the group approaches the 2008 convention, when it will need to submit its three-year renewal petition.

Goal No. 2: Enhance the pedagogy of civic and citizen journalism instruction. The blog and convention program also will be tools for this, along with a project to create a compendium of teaching ideas and examples that will be overseen by Teaching Chair Glenn Scott.

Goal No. 3: Enhance the visibility of of civic and citizen journalism scholarship. Research co-chairs Burton St. John and Sue Ellen Christian will be working on a project to update the scholarly resources section of the CCJIG Web site to highlight important recent research, especially by interest group officers and members. CCJIG officers also expressed interest in some sort of special research project to align with the 20th anniversary (in 2010) of James Batten's 1990 address that was a bellwether moment in the citizen journalism movement. Look for further discussion of those plans here on the blog as well.

Goal No. 4: Formally adopt a set of bylaws. This is a piece of unfinished administrative business that the group will address before the triennial renewal next year.

As noted above, comments are welcome. Please weigh in with your thoughts and ideas