A Prairie Publishing Venture

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

The interdisciplinary journal, Rootstalk, 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 launched 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. Alumni consultants include:

• Jeremy “Sequoia”  Nagamatsu ’04, starting a journal, editorial processes
• Dan Weeks ’80, editorial processes, market research, and sustainability
• Alice Rogoff ’71, editorial processes
• Mike Ellis ’89, social media as part of a journal operation marketing plan
• Jeff Dickey-Chasins ’81, editorial policies and methods, startup, market research
• Priscilla McGeehon ’81, editorial processes
• Sarah Eagan Anderson ’98, Web design

“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 was about implementation,” Andelson says. “Students decided what content to put in, what the website format would be, and how to promote it.”

“It’s interesting how Mark and Jon put so many decisions on us,” Ajuna Kyaruzi ’17 says. She was one of eight students working on implementation during the spring semester.

The journal published its first issue in May and included:

An essay by Iowa’s poet laureate, Mary Swander, about an Amish friend building a bell tower.

An article by University of Missouri agricultural economist John Ikerd on the problems of industrial agriculture.

A reminiscence of his grandmother by Grinnell area 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.”

Read the online journal at prairiejournal.grinnell.edu.