Cloverdale entrepreneur seeks to scale ‘civic information network’
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A business owner and entrepreneur in the Putnam County town of Cloverdale is looking to expand what he calls a civic information network piloted at Cloverdale High School.
Taulbee Jackson launched Citizen One as a means to deliver news “in a more efficient way to different communities,” particularly those considered “news deserts” without a local newspaper or television station.
The platform, which utilizes a website and mobile app, that is designed to provide news on a hyperlocal basis for Cloverdale residents.
Jackson told Inside INdiana Business the idea stemmed from conversations with officials from Cloverdale Community Schools.
“They had reached out and were interested in figuring out how to better communicate with students and parents and the citizenry in my hometown, which is Cloverdale. And we came up with the idea of doing a mobile app,” Jackson said. “That turned into Citizen One, which is a program where we bring all of the technology and tools and education into a school district to partner with community servants—people like the town [council] or the the fire chief or the police chief in the smaller towns where a lot of these news deserts are—to produce news and information that is fact checked.”
Jackson said while the platform wouldn’t necessarily produce long-form investigative journalism, it does provide a service for residents in smaller communities that may only be getting their news from places like social media.
“I don’t think that this is a model that can replace [investigative journalism], but it certainly can fill the gap that exists in the lack of news and information that that we have in these news deserts.”
He said one of the big drivers they found for audience engagement with Citizen One was “proximity relevance.”
“The closer something is to you, the more relevant it is to you,” he said. “[That includes] public services or what’s happening with the police department or the fire department or a town council or the mayor’s office in these smaller towns, where news deserts tend to proliferate. So, it really leans into kind of the hyperlocal component and proximity relevance for the content to work.”
Jackson, who is also an assistant lecturer in the School of Journalism and Strategic Communication at Ball State University, said the Citizen One pilot also brought benefits to local students. He said it essentially provided a journalism program for Cloverdale High School.
“Students can partner with community members to produce and edit and fact check news and information and publish it so that it’s publicly available in news deserts. And this all happens kind of at the school district level.”
As the pilot began to take shape and adjustments were made, Jackson said they started to see growing interest in the content that was being produced.
“Google started to index it, because there’s no source of information for a lot of this stuff,” he said. “It started to appear in Google results after about the first 60 to 90 days. It was published on a website as well as a mobile app, so we were getting indexing and growing audience really organically from that.”
The platform’s website and its content is currently unavailable as it is being migrated to a new server, though Jackson said that should be complete in about a week or so.
Cloverdale has a population of about 3,000 people, and Jackson noted that Citizen One achieved 48% market penetration during the pilot.
And now, Jackson said he’s wants to expand the platform into more communities, starting with additional school districts in Putnam County. The first challenge, however, is funding.
“We’ve been applying for some different grants, but one of the unique things about the way that we’ve structured the organization is it’s a 501(c)3 that owns a for-profit entity whose job is to monetize and provide funding for the program,” he said. “So that means we can take on donations, we can take on grant funds as a not-for-profit, but we also can work with people who are interested in making some money on the commercial side.”
Citizen One is currently looking to raise between $250,000 and $500,000, which would primarily be used to build out the technology infrastructure to turn Citizen One into a network of locations instead of a single location.
Jackson said he would like to partner with a school that already has an established journalism program in order to enhance the news and information provided to different communities.
Ultimately, he said, the goal would be to take Citizen One to news deserts across the country.