So, what have I been working on? What is this mysterious project I have previously alluded to?

Well here it is;

I’ve been developing and planning a hyperlocal news site for the Alberta neighborhood. It will be part of Newsnw.org, a Washington and Oregon- focused news aggregation site that will offer original news content that a friend is developing.

The site, which I will refer to as “The Alberta Street” project will be dedicated to a few things:

1.Providing original  enterprise reporting and features highlighting the people, trend, business, events, and places in the 97211 zip code.

2. Serving as a local hub, announcement space, and forum, for citizens living in and around the Alberta Arts district.

3. Aggregating information from other websites and blogs about the Alberta neighborhood in Portland, Oregon.

My partners and I, hope to get a website up by the end of summer.
I also figure that not too many people are reading this blog, but if you are a reader and want to take part in this project, check out our Craigslist ad and/or email us at alberta[at]newsnw.org.

I will post more updates about this project as they happen.

Also, check out the News Northwest production blog for updates on the site that will host the Alberta project.

The Oregonian archives at the library are amazing. Especially considering that you can access over 20 years of Oregonian articles and other databases  through the library website. You need to use your library card and pin to log-in. I found several articles that speak to a project about Alberta street I hope to start in the next few months.

Also, when I asked one of the library staff about census records, she told me I could find them online. While searching for census information about Alberta I found Portland Maps, a City of Portland website that allows you to look up public info by address. I found crime statistics, businesses, and public information about my house, through this site.

Finally, a lot of the information I found today will be going to my aforementioned future project. I will post details to this blog wants I get some preliminary work done.

I will do a more comprehensive search by Monday and will post a thorough update.

So, as promised here is a list of some of the things I will find at the Multnomah library

Procedures and general orders for Portland Police: For those of you not in Portland,the cop shop is blowing up with big news stories: three police-related shootings this year; reports of road rage by an off-duty cop,; and the tension between the former chief and city hall. I want to better understand how the police work, to better understand news stories.

My next two subjects involve my neighborhood, the Alberta arts district. According to both my friends and the Willamette Week, this neighborhood has gone through rapid gentrification over the past couple of years.

So, here’s what I’ll find:

News stories about the Alberta neighborhood: I just want to know what has happened in my neighborhood: notable events, crimes, and people from the past ten years. This is what I’ll be searching the Oregonian archives for.

Finally, Census results and other information for my neighborhood. Who lives on my street now? Who lived here ten years ago? 20 years ago? How have the businesses changed?

Hopefully, what I find out about my neighborhood will go to a future storytelling project.

An instructor once told me that the internet didn’t necessarily make information gathering easier and that you could find information easier through some traditional paper sources, like the city library or archives.

I didn’t scoff at her, but it did make me think. See, I am a wiki-taught historian. Since high school, I have used hours each day to adding to my knowledge bank by filling it with subjects from Goethe to famous fisticuffs.  At the beginning, I used snopes.com, Imdb, and yahoo searches to do this. Then, at the age of 18, an adjunct English instructor introduced me to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia became my new internet stomping ground. It’s nature, purpose, and evolving nature fit perfectly with my internet-based education.

But over the past two years, I moved away from wikipedia for anything beyond picking up tidbits or a primer. I have two reasons for this: Wikipedia’s sometimes unreliable nature. We’ve all heard of Wikipedia hoaxes and nearly every professor I’ve known has warned against using Wikipedia for research for this reason because most of its based on second-hand information taken from other sources.

The other reason has been my journalism education.

I was taught that a reporter needs a vast amount of information to be able to write a news story with clarity and meaning. This information needs to be specific, you need specific figures, explanations, and histories and wikipedia doesn’t always provide that information.

I have always been disappointed with was how little I could learn about the city around me through wikipedia. Sure the page to every city I’ve lived in has an entry including the history, elected officials, and noteworthy persons in my city, but it didn’t seem enough.

So, the Multnomah library project: Every city has its lore and rules, and behind these lore and rules are  the news stories, documents, and other records that tell your city’s story.

Objective: Take three-to-five specific subjects and lore, research them using the Multnomah county library, write a report, note my sources of information and present them on this blog.

Purpose: Get to know the information sources and stories of my city.

By the end of this week, I will have my subjects and post them to this blog.

I still have yet to decide what mediums I will use for my project, but since I don’t have a reliable camera, photos and videos may be limited.

I just graduated from the Evergreen State College with over a year of being a student newspaper editor under my belt and more experience covering my school for my fellow students.

Now, I have more than six months until I have to send in grad school applications. In the meantime, I just need  to work on my writing and storytelling skills, keep my information gathering skills sharp, and get to know my city – Portland, Oregon (or wherever else I may land).

I would like to eventually get a job as new assistant before starting grad school. Until then, I will use this space to explore the story-telling and writing tools and splorin’ Portland or whatever city I live in.