The Middletown Press thinks readers should decide what is news, and we’re embarking on a project we think will involve readers in the news process in a way never before considered.

The Ben Franklin Project, named in honor of the inventor-innovator-printer-publisher-newsman-statesman, is a challenge: Can we produce a newspaper using only free web-based tools and involve the community in the process of journalism?

At its heart, the Ben Franklin Project is about independence, according to John Paton, the CEO of Journal Register Company, The Middletown Press’s parent company.

"On July 4 we will declare our independence," Paton said. "We will declare our independence from the kind of thinking that has kept our company and industry from transforming to a multi-platform news company. And we will declare our independence from an industry that ties itself up with expensive proprietary I.T. systems and processes that are outdated almost the day they are installed."

Luckily, we at The Middletown Press are not in completely uncharted waters. Sister newspapers have already successfully completed the challenge. The News-Herald, one of our dailies in Ohio, and Montgomery Media, one of our weekly groups in Pennsylvania, recently completed a 30-day Ben Franklin Project challenge successfully where they created, published and distributed news content on the web and in print, using only free tools available on the Internet.

They used programs like Gimp to edit photos and Scribus to lay out the paper. Free word processing tools were used and Google calendar was utilized to compile events.

Perhaps a more interesting aspect of the Ben Franklin Project is the community involvement. As regular readers will know, we encourage community participation here at The Middletown Press, and the Ben Franklin Project offers us a chance to engage our readership at the very start of the process.

"By using digital tools, we are going to the community to find out what they want covered and, by involving them in that coverage, we can dive more deeply into important subjects than we have been able to do before," Paton said.

The News-Herald, for example, put together a community forum, where readers could share with editors and staff what news they thought should be covered.

"The Perkasie News-Herald invited readers to a town hall meeting — a mix of old-school outreach and the new-school crowdsourcing approach,” said Journal Register Company Vice President of Content Jonathan Cooper. “The Q-and-A session of the meeting served as a news meeting where residents requested stories on the local electric rates and the community’s pay-as-you-throw trash collection system. Reporters and editors still did the work but they knew from the time story assignments were conceived that these stories mattered to the audience."

So get ready! In the coming days, we’ll want to hear from you, what you think is important — what we should cover and how we should cover it. This is an unprecedented way for you, the reader, to get involved in the news process, and we want all the help we can get.

For more about the Ben Franklin Project, check out http://jrcbenfranklinproject.wordpress.com, leave a comment below or send an e-mail to me at vsundqvist@middletownpress.com.