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Special Baby Boomer report on tap
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A group of journalists is taking the notion of reporting to a new level by customizing its efforts on a single subject -- the effect retiring Baby Boomers will have on communities in Northern California.
The program is called "community-funded journalism" and will test the notion of whether people who are interested enough in a particular topic will pay to have that issue thoroughly investigated then written about. The effort comes from Spot Us, created by web journalist David Cohn with the help of a $340,000, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation.
Its first large-scale project is a planned three-part series: "When the Longevity Revolution Hits Your Town." The series is built on the notion that the 78 million Baby Boomers will have an impact on housing and services as they age.
The group notes in a Wiki posting that communities will be faced with the task of using its tax dollars to serve the competing needs of older and younger generations.
"Younger residents worry about competing with the aging boomers for limited services in their communities. Local governments worry about serving both," says the group.
Spot Us proposes three 1,000-word articles with photographs of life in various cities such as San Rafael, San Francisco, Oakland, Vallejo, Sacramento and Santa Rosa. The project will be completed within one month of reaching the funding goal and first published on RedwoodAge.com, a Bay Area-based news site focused on readers over 40. It would later be made available to any nonprofit media.
It would be written by Cecily O’Connor, a senior writer at RedwoodAge.com.
The series is conditional on the success Spot Us has in passing the hat, a method called "crowd-funding" -- a group of people ponying up for a specific purpose.
“Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public,” Cohn said in a New York Times article about the project.
For Tom Murphy, the RedwoodAge.com editor, the series speaks to the need of being forewarned then prepared.
"If you could help to avoid the next Katrina or the next Foreclosure Crisis, wouldn’t you?" Murphy wrote in the Wiki posting "The topic proposed here ... will certainly dwarf those issues in the not-distant future. Already, we’re seeing cities struggle with retirement costs and budgets that aren’t growing as fast as demand for services."
Here are the video comments of the reporter, Cecily O'Connor:
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