Northfield.org is an online citizen journalism project focused on a small city in Minnesota, USA. Its aim is to provide a virtual location for citizens of the town of Northfield to gather and become more involved in our community, retain that civic sense that we find important to a healthy town, and share their experiences in ways not available before.

Working from a typical blog interface, we have a group of volunteers and simple submitters running a local site dedicated to building a sense of “community” for a physical location in an online world. We encourage contribution from every reader and work at encouraging civic leaders, such as elected representatives and city government officials, to establish blogs and other means of communication to and with other citizens. We run an open community photo gallery, with emailbased submissions. There is also the “issues” list, which is a moderated, email discussion list, focused on problems and opportunities for the city of Northfield. The issues list also sponsored a face-to-face salon last December for members to attend, meet others, and discuss current items in person.