Lauren Bradley, Finance & Management Services director for the city of Asheville, informed us today that the city/county evaluation panel has discussed and scored the finalists’ presentations for the Community Media Development Initiatives grant. Ponderwell’s proposal received the highest overall score and will be receiving the panel’s recommendation, which goes to Asheville City Council. Council is expected to vote on funding the initiative Oct. 11.
As we reported last week, Mountain Xpress and Ponderwell presented their proposals to an evaluation panel for the Community Media Development Initiatives grant.
Click here to view Mountain Xpress’s presentation and handout
Click here to view Ponderwell’s presentation notes.
Click the link below to view the final scoring spreadsheet for both the proposal and presentation portions of the process.
I’m just going to go ahead and say it: This proposal is not the best way to spend $120,000 of public money over the next three years.
It essentially cobbles together ideas from two or three other news aggregate sites and doesn’t seem aimed at creating more than one job. There’s no community outreach beyond a small minority of the community that is probably already deeply involved in said sites, there’s no actual job training in anything other than some holdovers from “old media”, and there’s no real mention of creating any industry or broad public good from this use of public funds.
If anyone disagrees, I’d love to hear how this proposal will do anything other than set Asheville back a few years in new media development.
Woefully underwhelming comes to mind. Especially disappointing, since Lauren Bradley stressed that they were looking for something “highly innovative and creative” to come out of the Asheville Community.
It looks like a later and lamer version of CNN’s iReport. Non-invigorating to say the least.
Its a lot easier to nay-say an idea than to actually be productive and help cultivate it to its fullest expression.
Well, that’s a stupid idea! /humor
This proposal has little to do with the original pitch made by Lauren Bradley at the