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| Joe VanderMeulen is Executive Director of the Land Information Access Association and the founder of YourPlace. |
By Peter Payette, News Director
Interlochen Public Radio
On June 23, Joe VanderMeulen was a guest on Interlochen Public Radio's program Points North. He was one of three publishers on the show. The other guests were editors of print journals, Third Eye and Grand Traverse Woman. I put the panel together because I am impressed with the array of independent journals we have in this region and the persistence of the publishers. I wanted to find out how they define their audiences and what they do to reach them, besides keeping their publication free. You can listen to the entire discussion in either MP3 or RealPlayer. Here's an excerpt:
PP: Joe, the purpose of the online magazine is to get a discussion going about this region. So who is it you think you can engage online to discuss our place?
JV: We're hoping the whole broad public will get involved at some point... We'd like to get everyone talking about development and change in our broader community across the region. We think democracy is about conversations between people, and so we're hoping we can stimulate some discussion and get some back and forth out there.
PP: Why don't you think the whole broad public is not involved now in that discussion?
JV: As a non-profit, we work all across the state with local units of government as communities and we find almost none of us have time to go to planning commission meetings and different board meetings. And of course what townships and villages and cities do with their planning and zoning and capitol improvement makes all the difference to a community. It determines traffic flow. It determines where business go and that sort of thing. And so while we're not going to meetings and we don't have time to stop-if we know the planning commissioner-we don't have time to stop him in the grocery store, we really do need to have other venues, essentially, to have that discussion. We think it helps to have an online approach.
PP: What are the benchmarks for success for your project?
JV: The way I'm judging it right now is by the comments. Are people engaged in a discussion stimulated by one of the articles? We have an article...written by the city planner for the City of Traverse City, Russ Soyring. He calls it community deficit disorder. We think that's an interesting and difficult term. We thought it would generate some discussion, and we're starting to see some comments on it. So I'm looking forward to, kind of in the bloggish way, seeing some interaction between readers and actually the author.
PP: How much control will you want to exercise over the discussion on YourPlace?
JV: We have an editorial board that's pretty broad-based... One of the things I like about forcing folks to write it down is that it's a more considered thought, it's a more considered statement, and we end up with a little more care. You know you have to actually understand your own thinking and be able to express your own thought if you're actually going to write it down. It's a different thing to just shout something. So we're trying to avoid the shouting and bring it down to where we can have a real civil discussion. On the other hand, we feel there has to be that emotion in the piece or we're not going to read it.
