As the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project picks up steam, people in Boulder and elsewhere will probably want to follow the action. We’ve made that easy by offering free daily e-mail alerts and simple feed subscriptions.

Sign up to receive our e-mail alerts by entering your e-mail address in the form on the right sidebar of the home page.

Just below our e-mail signup form, you can click to subscribe to our RSS feed in any of several popular feed readers. If your feed reader isn’t there, just add this feed to your subscription list: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BoulderCarbonTaxTracker

You can help make this site great. Volunteer now!

Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker is a community journalism and discussion project, so we need your help!

We don’t want your money — we want your enthusiasm, curiosity, skills, and a little bit of your time. Training and guidance are provided.

You don’t need to live in Boulder to help, although being local does give you more opportunities to participate.

Please fill out our volunteer form. We’ll contact you shortly to get you started.

Thanks!

Salt Lake City temple at dusk

Public radio station KCPW in Salt Lake City gave over a live, 20-minute midday interview segment yesterday, June 29, to our Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project. Blair Feulner, station president and host of the KCPW’s Midday Utah segment, interviewed me about the project, with a focus on Boulder’s global warming initiative and the journalistic challenges of covering it, as well as the basic ideas behind citizen journalism.

Feulner described the project nicely in his intro as a “new way to combine digital journalism and community interaction. … the web-based project is meant to keep the focus on this single community issue, and add to the dialogue a variety of opinions from many sources, including the public, professionals, and city government. The idea is to go beyond the spotty media coverage important community concerns often get.”

Hear the full interview.

FBZ, via Flickr (CC license)

Despite what you read in the papers, news doesn’t really arrive all wrapped up with a bow. Technorati Profile

Since Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker is a community journalism project, we’ll sometimes do things here quite differently from what you’d see in traditional news outlets.

Contrary to what you often experience when reading a newspaper, news and information almost never arrives in a neat, complete package. In traditional journalism, the stories you read usually are the result of a great deal of research, consultation with sources, and back-and-forth between writers and editors. Generally the finished product reveals only the results of that process.

In contrast, this site’s coverage and discussion of the unfolding issue of how Boulder is spending (and what we’re getting for) our carbon tax dollars will lay the process of journalism bare… (more…)

mediainfo.com

Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker just received high praise from a major news-industry magazine. Thanks!

Editor & Publisher, a leading publication about the newspaper industry, just published a thoughtful and very positive column about Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker. See: Knight People To Help Build Digital Communities, by veteran new-media analyst Steve Outing.

The best part about this column is that Outing managed to articulate a larger aim and potential application of this project, which Adam Glenn and I haven’t really articulated well. Here’s what Outing said, in part…

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So now that we’ve shared the official news about our Knight News Challenge grant for this project, here’s what we really think of it. Adam and I are both the first and last segments of this short video of many of the News Challenge grantees’ reactions:

Knight Foundation / Tu Multimedia

Adam Glenn and Amy Gahran in a video interview about their News Challenge grant.

How serious are we about doing this Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project? Try $90,000 serious. We’re pleased to announce that this project has won a News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

All of the News Challenge projects are great — check out the full list of winning projects, and video interviews with all the winners.

Earlier this week, Adam Glenn and I traveled to Miami, FL for the official award ceremony. Generally I’m not one for formal ceremony, but this was a thrilling experience because all the grantees got a chance to meet and know each other. What fabulous conversation! The best part is that all the grantees will be contributing to a group blog and sharing expertise and insight. We couldn’t have asked for a better support network.

But now that we have the money to fund this for a year, we need to knuckle down to the real work: building out this site more, and assembling and training the community of volunteers who will help us flesh out this project and make sure it’s relevant and helpful to the Boulder.

In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s what this project is about…
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People in Boulder love to talk. They especially love to discuss and debate energy and environmental issues. Everyone here seems to have their pet issues and solutions on that front, and plenty of Boulderites take action in one way or another.

Last November, Boulder voters passed the nation’s first-ever municipal “carbon tax” — a small tax levied on utility bills for Boulder residents. Through 2012 it’s expected to provide $1 million per year for the city to implement Boulder’s Climate Action Plan (CAP). The tax went into effect April 1, and you’ll see it listed on your next Xcel Energy bill.

This is actually big news. There’s a lot of interest in Boulder’s carbon tax throughout the US — especially in government, energy, utility, and environmental circles. Several cities have tried to pass a carbon tax, but so far Boulder is the only place that’s done it.

You’d never guess that Boulder’s carbon tax is big news from following the local media. There was a flurry of coverage around the election, and since then near silence. (I’m not kidding: check out the patterns of news coverage yourself.)

Municipal carbon taxes and other climate change initiatives are controversial. Does it make sense for local governments to independently address a global environmental issue? How can you prove what effects municipal programs actually have on greenhouse gas emissions?

Given this situation, I’m pleased to announce that my I, Reporter business partner Adam Glenn and I recently received funding to do a one-year project to cover the implementation of Boulder’s carbon tax and climate action plan.

We’re very excited about this opportunity, and we need your help…

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