Community Media Workshop

The Chicago-based Community Media Workshop (giraffe profile), published on Sept. 27, 2005 its annual guide "Getting on the Air and Into Print," in the Midwest. The book and CD ROM is a model for how citizens can seek to have their messages conveyed through mainstream media. The book was initially $55 for nonprofits. It features 4,000 media contacts, features on understanding radio, blogs and photography.
LINK TO GUIDE ORDERING

FROM THE WEBSITE:

"Community Media Workshop is a nonprofit organization of journalists and media relations experts helping other nonprofits doing vital work in their community connect with the media. We provide workshops, an annual conference, awards and recognition for journalists, a journalists'' tipsheet, briefing papers, sources, and a media guide.

The Community Media Workshop, founded by a journalist, Hank De Zutter, and a community activist, Thom Clark, is a small institution trying to encourage the media to tell the stories of the other Chicago, the oft-neglected neighborhoods and back streets of Chicago, where the problems are felt most deeply and where solutions are most likely to be born.

"The Workshop trains people working on these problems to tell their stories to the media, tips sensitive journalists to the importance of these stories, and tries to create better relationships between the media and the diverse communities which make up Chicago and the Midwest.

"Since its start in a Malcolm X College classroom in 1989, over 800 nonprofit organizations have received hands-on training and coaching for their newsworthy efforts. Over 2000 groups have subscribed to Getting On The Air & Into Print, the comprehensive Chicago media guide. Another Workshop publication, Newstips, is now distributed twice-monthly to over 700 reporters, editors and producers around Chicago."

CMW receives funds from Alphawood Foundation, The Chicago Reader, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Ford Foundation, Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, Gram Foundation, LaSalle National Bank, The Libra Foundation, the McCormick Tribune Foundation, Polk Bros. Foundation, Sara Lee Foundation and the Wieboldt Foundation. Now at Columbia College, we tap the talent and experience Columbia''s communications-oriented student body and faculty can offer to the city''s nonprofit community.