Are you a Vermonter? Do you care about local politics? Do
you read the Free Press? Stop. Go to
VTDigger.org.
VTDigger.org is a Vermont based news gathering group,
operated primarily by the Vermont Journalist Trust, a non-profit. The goal of
the site is to bring relevant, locally sourced news and information to the
populace of Vermont. Featuring video and audio, VTDigger is an established and
growing source for any information important to concerned Vermonters.
To further engage the public, VTDigger makes ample use of
social media. The most common forms, Facebook and Twitter, are used in the
expected ways. Twitter serves almost exclusively as a means of advertising new
posts to the main site, with each Tweet a short headline and a link to the main
article or video. Facebook is used in a similar way, with slightly longer
blurbs on the update, as well as the ever present link to the main article. VTDigger's articles also feature buttons for StumbleUpon, Reddit and Google+, as additional means of sharing the articles and promoting the site.
The site also makes use of RSS feed readers, syncing easily
with every kind of reader I have tried (though to be fair I have only used a
couple). On top of this, VTDigger has a Youtube channel, which is underutilized
from what my experience, but still serves as a catalogue of past video featured
on the main site. The last piece of social media VTDigger employs is email.
It’s true that email is less social than the other forms of media being
utilized, but still, email is a standard part of nearly every citizen’s online
presence. VTDigger, quite brilliantly, dispenses with the constant email
updates that some news sites will bombard the reader with and opts for a single
weekly email that “wraps up” the week in Vermont news. VTDigger does offer
daily emails with highlights as well, for those less concerned with inbox
space.
Between Facebook, email, Twitter, RSS, Youtube and the main
site, VTDigger makes it’s presence known throughout the web’s suite of social
media tools. One aspect of VTDigger’s media presence that I found especially
important is the emblem they have created to go with their title. It’s a
simple, brown circle with a darker “V” in the middle of it. This little,
recognizable symbol is a heads up the reader that the post or tweet or Facebook
update is a VTDigger update. This simple little piece of information gets
ingrained in the user, now when I am scanning Twitter, I can easily pick out
VTDigger Tweets from the symbol alone. These little pieces of social media are
critical in making VTDigger stand out amongst the sea of other sites on the
Net.
VTDigger’s mission, as stated on their page, is to bring Vermonters
news on politics, public policy and consumer concerns; basically anything in
the public realm that affects Vermonters. While VTDigger is not itself focused
on any one cause in Vermont (aside from greater media literacy and public
participation), the site serves as a spring-board for nearly any politically
motivated citizen to engage in discourse. The site features daily Op-Ed’s,
sometimes more than one a day, from diverse sources all around and within
Vermont. By bringing politically minded Vermonters together to discuss issues
and, most importantly, to consider means of resolving these issues, VTDigger is
not a cause in and of itself, but it is a forum for many causes in Vermont.
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