Community Stories
Your Community Stories: Call for Content on PalacioMagazine.com
PalacioMagazine.com wants to be the source for community stories about Latino and other communities of color in Long Beach. It’s no secret that Long Beach is a “media desert”. We have one daily print newspaper, one mass circulation weekly, several biweeklies and two local online news websites updated daily. There are other niche sites covering mobility, promoting events, and entertainment.
Then, there is PalacioMagazine.com and Voicewaves.org. The latter (I was Community Outreach Coordinator 2011-2014) trains youth 16-24 in journalism and multimedia.
A Mission for Community Stories
PalacioMagazine.com’s goal is to report on news and issues that don’t always make their way into more traditional media. There are community stories that cross and affect all communities. However, as we’ve said before, there are specific community stories about the Latino, African-American, Cambodian and Filipino communities that will not get covered. Not because the traditional media doesn’t care but because their mission and our mission are different.
We welcome the opportunity to be a platform for community stories. PalacioMagazine.com’s mission is to Engage, Empower and Transform by sharing stories about the issues that impact the above mentioned communities:
- Education
- Economic Empowerment
- Affordable Housing
- Public Safety
- Political Engagement
- Arts and Culture that reflect those communities
Collaboration and Creating Community Stories
That’s why we are inviting both individuals and nonprofit organizations to collaborate with PalacioMagazine.com to create and share community stories.
We were reading an interesting post from several years ago, How To Engage Readers: 3 Sites Doing It Right.
It seems obvious that sustainability and engagement are inextricably linked, yet newsrooms regularly miss opportunities to bring the community into the storytelling process, leaving many voices excluded and important stories untold.
The post made me rethink how PalacioMagazine.com engages the communities we’ve targeted. Community stories was one of the goals behind the proposal we wrote for VoiceWaves.org to the Long Beach Community Foundation. They funded a redesign and reboot of the website based on the concept of uploading community stories directly from the community.
Now, PalacioMagazine.com don’t have that technical capability yet but the goal is still the same. Expand the concept of news to include community stories generated from the very communities you aspire to cover. This idea of community journalism or community stories is not not new. I remember having discussions on the subject back in the early seventies when I was in Washington, D.C.. Community newspapers, community radio and television were examples of those discussions.
Building Community Stories Together
VoiceWaves.org and Public Access Digital Network (PADNET) are great platforms fostering community content. However, PalacioMagazine.com wants to go further. We want to collaborate with individuals and nonprofit organizations to develop a platform for community stories that they generate. The individual or community organization decides the priority, PalacioMagazine.com provides the training to effectively tell those community stories and then we work together to publish and share it with as wide or narrow an audience you want.
These could be text and pictures, audio podcasts or video segments and programs. It’s your choice. However, we would work together to ensure that decision is based on an analysis of your goals and audience.
If you are interested in generating community stories produced by you or your organization, please complete the following contact form so we can schedule a consultation.