The Internet is rapidly dissolving the walls between newsrooms and our living rooms.

At The Morning Journal, we want to improve upon our traditional print and online news coverage by helping community members to become community journalists, that is, bloggers.

We will help these individuals to create their own blogs on subjects they care about deeply and can write about regularly. By doing so, we can widen the world of information for everyone here far beyond what fits on a printed page; far beyond what any traditional newspaper staff could manage to cover.

Community blogs could be about all kinds of things: Neighborhood news from South Lorain or South Amherst, for example. Or sandlot baseball, or quality of life issues in any community. Perhaps Elyria politics is your passion. Or you are bursting with ideas to give Lorain an extreme makeover. Clubs, organizations, churches, schools, hobbies ... the field is wide open.

The community blog you write would be based online at www.MorningJournal.com. It would be your blog, not The Morning Journal's. We just provide a platform for your words and set some standards.

This is community news, not commercials, so no promoting one's business, please. Blogs that espouse the bogger's opinions will be labeled as opinion, in contrast to blogs that report news about a town, group or school.

You'll need your own computer, and you will blog from home; but for starters we'll teach you the fundamentals of reporting right here in our newsroom's Community Media Lab.

You will talk with, learn from, and no doubt teach a thing or two, to the reporters and editors you will meet on our staff.


Together, we'll shape the future of local news.

Want to give it a try? Send me an e-mail at tskoch@morningjournal.com telling me a little about yourself, the topic of your blog and maybe providing a little sample.

Or, if you just have a comment on all of this, click on the "comment" link below and Tell the Editor.