A Prairie Publishing Venture

Grinnell students are helping to launch an online journal at the College while also experiencing what it’s like to be entrepreneurs.

Titled Rootstalk, the interdisciplinary journal focuses on the prairie — the ecosystem and the region as a whole, including its architecture, art, and native people as well as fiction, poetry, and multimedia. The journal is launching this spring.

Neither Jon Andelson ’70, professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Prairie Studies, nor Mark Baechtel, director of forensic activities, had ever started a journal before. But they thought learning how to do it would make a compelling class.

“This is a great project to approach teaching entrepreneurship,” Andelson says. He and Baechtel developed two courses, Interdisciplinary Publishing I and II, to give students hands-on experience building an online journal from the ground up.

They invited several alumni with significant periodical publishing experience to advise the class on topics such as market research, editorial processes, and sustainability.

“If we were trying to behave like content experts [in developing a journal], we would have become frauds,” Baechtel says. “But we had an enormous field of alumni experts who could lead students.”

During the fall semester, 16 students helped with the planning, audience research, and editorial structure.

“The second semester is about implementation,” Andelson says. “Students are deciding what content to put in, what the website format will be, and how to promote it.”

Ajuna Kyaruzi ’17 was looking for a class to challenge her with her writing. “How many times do you get to work on an upcoming journal?” she says about her decision to take Interdisciplinary Publishing II.

The computer science major didn’t expect to use her tech skills as much as she is. As part of the design group, she is helping develop the new journal’s homepage and user interface.

“It’s interesting how Mark and Jon are putting so many decisions on us,” Kyaruzi says. She’s one of eight students working on implementation during the spring semester.

Kyaruzi feels more drawn to entrepreneurship now. “It’s interesting being in a class where my final product isn’t a paper I’m going to recycle. It’s a product that other people will use. It’s real life. I really like that part about the class.”

Already accepted for publication in the first issue are

• an essay by Iowa’s poet laureate, Mary Swander, about an Amish friend building a bell tower for her house, which used to be a one-room country school,
• an article by agricultural economist John Ikerd on the problems of industrial agriculture, and
• a reminiscence of his grandmother by local farmer Howard McDonough who restores carousels. 

“We aim to have a diversity of voices represented in the journal,” Baechtel says, “including voices of people one normally wouldn’t expect to see in print.”

The journal published its first issue May 1, 2015.

Ajuna Kyaruzi ’17 is a computer science major from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

The Wilson Program in Enterprise and Leadership also helped make the project possible.