1000: GR journalism gets a boost

Cheers to all who’ve made this happen. We’ve crossed 1000 and a fifty hits. Many would ask, ‘is it a significant number’? I should say, YES, as one we are low on promoting and two, it’s not a commercial site. It’s for grassroots journalism and it has found its takers. Slowly, but steadily. How?

In the first month of its launch, it had nearly 500 hits. And within the next 15 days only, we had another 500 hits and there are nearly 12 more days to go for the month to end. So the buzz is being created and we are almost reaching there.

However, there are some hiccups, which we’d like to smoothen up. The problem is of content. Grassroots journalism — I’d rather call it GR journalism — is not an easy thing to do. More difficult when there is no remuneration involved. Rather it is an effort, simply to involve people and reach out. The question is, so what do we post. Currently, I’d say, anything related to Himachal. As we progress, we get streamlined and as content starts flowing, people too get an idea what is expected from them, and it makes our task too much easier. However, we’d then have our task cut out to edit the stories. That’s a welcome role and I’d rather have the problem of plenty than the problem of not having new stories and feeding the audience stale news for days. One thing, I want this blog to have is — Shelf life.

Interestingly, as I see, out of the 1000 hits we’d have so far, most of them have been directed from the Yahoo group-him-vani. Secondly, from search engines. And the active keyword has been HRTC. I doubt, if the surfers found the right information, as the related article on HRTC was a mere experience of travelling in HRTC buses. The surfers, I presume were on a look out for either a time-table for HRTC buses or ticket booking. May be we can think of doling out that information, once we go full time commercial, as I think that too is a part of grassroots journalism. For now, we’d like to stick to more of developmental issues.

The forum is open for all to contribute and tell what they are doing? and above all ideas and opinions are open — how to generate content and what all would you like to read?