allgodspeople.com
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$150,000Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$190,000Expected amount of time to complete project:
Two yearsAllgodspeople.com is a community-building project based on a journalistic/informational foundation. The focus is Christian community in the Madison, Wisconsin, area.
Typically a Christian community is defined as those who gather together in one particular house of worship. In the words of the New Testament this is referred to as the Body of Christ. Each person is part of the body and has an important role to play to keep the body alive and active. By using the internet, we believe that the Body of Christ, with each person playing an important role, can also describe the Christian community in a city and surrounding area. We are putting our model to the test in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin.
Our first goal is to create traffic for our website by offering fresh daily news stories of particular interest to the local Christian community, either news about personalities or developments in that community that's not available from other news outlets or else links to news stories that may be of particular interest to those readers. Thus far 80 to 90 percent of our stories have been of the latter variety, because we lack resources to pay stringers to write local stories.
With the website then as a resource for the community we want to report on what individuals and congregations are doing to make the Madison community a better place to live.
It's not that churches haven't been doing this type of thing in the past but today the needs seem greater and many evangelical churches which used to focus mostly on personal salvation are now focusing more widely on serving the community.
Our final goal is to sell advertising to support the website and also raise money for ministries that are focused on addressing unmet needs in the Madison area.
0 commentsHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Improving News Delivery for the Madison Christian Community
News coverage of the faith community is typically one of the areas most frequently overlooked by the main stream media in most cities. This is despite the fact that the community of faith is one of the largest sub-groups within that city. Nationally, more people visit a house of worship on any given weekend than attend any kind of sporting event. Yet religion coverage is nothing compared to sports coverage (although admittedly there has been some noticeable yet small improvements in religion coverage over the past several years).
The lack of in-depth consistent news coverage of the faith community means that this community is largely invisible to others who are parts of different congregations, as well as others who don't attend any particular congregation.
By providing a consistent source of news about real activities in the Madison faith community we will be nourishing a broad community of concerned citizens who care about civic improvement, a community that is often overlooked by the political establishment. This is a community that is motivated by personal faith to get involved and make personal sacrifices for the betterment of all.
0 commentsHow is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
INNOVATION
Allgodspeople is innovative because it's aimed at using a journalistic model based on the the internet to break down the walls of separation that typically exist between Christian communities in a given city. Furthermore, its aim is to help the diverse members of the Christian community to better understand each other and be better motivated to actively serve each other and those who are typically under-served in the broader community.
In addition, by selling advertising, we hope to not only be able to sustain our website but also raise money that can be poured back into the community to assist other faith-based organizations which are involved in serving the community.
0 commentsWhat experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
AGP Experience
We have a diverse group of individuals who have been working on this project for several years. Some have business experience, most have experience with various forms of volunteer ministry. And the news editor for the project has been a journalist in Madison for most of the past 35 years.
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