From Blackboard to Blog

A chalkboard newspaper has skipped paper but gone online.

Alfred Sirleaf operates the Daily Talk in Monrovia, Liberia.

Liberia, and my class project

I finished my class with Philip Meyer.  The final project was required to be a proposal for a new medium.

Ideas for a new medium are easy. It was more difficult to think of something that is doable for me and combines the values and lessons of the class — such as serving low-end customers or nonconsumers, and putting a priority on people’s “jobs to be done” and their priorities (making it easy for people to do what they want to do, in the way they want to do it), while still making it journalism (well-rounded meals).

The obvious nonconsumer market is youth. Much is already marketed to 15-35-year-olds. It’s smarter to think younger.

But the same lessons can be applied to just individuals but larger markets — such as underdeveloped countries. So I poked around and found a model for expansion, by Alfred Sirleaf, in Monrovia, Liberia. Lydia Polgreen of The New York Times wrote about him, so I wrote to her to see if she knows how I might be able to contact him. 

In the meantime, here’s part of my class paper.