Community-Based Classwork

"I am the Executive Director of a non-profit Community News organization called West View Media. In the Fall of 2015, we were lucky to have a group of students from the University of Utah's MPA Nonprofit class assigned to us to help us get feedback from contributors and readers of our quarterly newspaper, The West View, which has a circulation of 20 thousand copies, is mailed to every residential and business address on the west side of Salt Lake City.

The MPA students helped us gather some valuable information by interviewing a few community contributors and conducting a survey of some of our readers. MPA students attended one of the West View Community Newsrooms to get a better understanding of how our citizen journalism model worked, and then later, a couple of the students stood outside of the Glendale Library at one of our public outreach events and surveyed library patrons about the paper. They also surveyed participants of the public outreach event, which was part of the requirements for a grant that we had received from Utah Humanities.

The feedback they compiled was helpful to us in learning how to better engage local residents in the paper in the future. The feedback also helped us in the evaluation process of the grant. Having a team of students help us conduct a survey was quite helpful, and we appreciated the opportunity to connect with MPA students in this way."

Charlotte Fife-Jepperson, Executive Director & Publisher, West View Media

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For more information about West View Media, visit:

http://westviewmedia.org/

 

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