Eureka! I have found it

Så er jeg hjemme igen fra Californien, hvor jeg blev gæsteskribent på The Northwest Voice og The Southwest Voice. Se resultatet her:
Læse også redaktør Dana Martin's interview med mig her: http://www.northwestvoice.com/home/ViewPost/49263
Og om nabolages frivillige journalister:
http://www.northwestvoice.com/home/ViewPost/49382

By: Marianne Due, Special to The Southwest VoiceTopics:
larger view

“Why on earth did you choose to come to Bakersfield?”
This is the No. 1 question that meets me every time I tell someone that I have travelled all the way from Denmark to Bakersfield. The answer is: to learn about your neighborhood journalism.
I am first of all a curious journalist, then a newspaper area editor of three municipalities situated north of the Danish capitol Copenhagen. My newspaper, Frederiksborg Amts Avis, named after the castle in the middle of the town Hillerød, is a part of a media company that matches The Bakersfield Californian in size of circulation. So when in March 2007 I read an interview with Mary Lou Fulton that “The Northwest Voice is written by its citizens,” I had to learn more about these projects of participation journalism.
In Denmark you pay $2 for a daily newspaper as mine. It will contain almost no ads, and the circulation is declining dramatically, last year with 9 percent. The company earns its money through free weeklies (which contain ads) and the print work, so learning about new projects that are a success economically almost from day one, must be worth my journey half around the world.
And it certainly has been worth it. I have been interviewing the editors of The Voices, MÁS, Bakotopia, The Tehachapi News and Bakersfield.com, and I have the honor of meeting Mary Lou Fulton and publisher of The Californian Ginger Moorhouse.
Now I am much closer to understanding what you — the readers — love: to see pictures of yourself, your children or family, to share thoughts and experiences, to inform the neighborhood. All together, to build and have an identity through the Web site and magazine.
In Denmark, the first paper that started out with journalism known as participation, contribution, citizen, user generated or hyperlocal, began Jan. 8, and two weeks after 600 citizens had registered.
I have read in my guidebook about California, that the state motto is: “Eureka! I have found it.” Once it might have referred to land, or to gold or oil, but no doubt you can now also say this motto about your way of making the first steps into the future of journalism.
That’s why I have come to Bakersfield: to find it.