August | 2015 | The Wired City

WNHH station manager Lucy Gellman and New Haven Independent editor Paul Bass.

John Dankosky stood before the 20 or so fledgling radio hosts who had crowded into the New Haven offices of La Voz Hispana de Connecticut and told them not to be afraid to assert themselves in the face of an overly talkative interview subject.

“It’s your show and it’s your microphone and they are your guests. You need to be the gatekeeper,” said Dankosky, vice president of news at Connecticut’s public radio network WNPR and host of the daily public affairs program “Where We Live.”

Dankosky was leading a session of Radio 101 for WNHH, a low-power FM (LPFM) community station scheduled to make its debut on August 11. The station is being launched by the New Haven Independent, a pioneering online nonprofit news site that debuted 10 years ago next month.

Read the rest at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

I’ll be talking about how I researched “The Wired City” this Friday as part of a panel at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which is being held this year in San Francisco.

The panel is titled “Creation of Community in the Magazine Form: Legacy to Online.” I’m calling my talk “Observing the Online News Community,” and I’ll discuss the value of in-person observation and reporting when conducting research of this nature.

The discussion will be held from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. and will be moderated by Sheila Webb of Western Washington University. Other panelists will be Elizabeth Hendrickson of Ohio University, Amanda Hinnant of the Missouri School of Journalism and Michael Clay Carey of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.