Bearded Studio

Once we helped get The Public Square Project operational, we turned to their first initiative: an online citizen journalism web site, focused on local government transparency issues, called The Pittsburgh Citizen. Bearded named and branded the Citizen (enlisting the help of illustrator John Passafiume), and developed a web site to display the news stories, as well as a behind-the-scenes web application which allows journalists and editors to collaborate on stories, and publish them to the site. Bearded also spent a day shooting photographs of notable Pittsburgh landmarks, resulting in a library of Pittsburgh-specific stock photography for journalists to include with their articles.

To help promote the launch of the site, Bearded also created a promotional piece and printed it live at HotHouse, the Sprout Fund's annual event, on a 19th century foot-powered press. The resulting letterpress piece explains the Pittsburgh Citizen's mission, and instructs HotHouse attendees to use their Twitter accounts to report the event, including the tag #hothouse. These tweets were then displayed on a page of The Pittsburgh Citizen, as a way of reporting the event live using hundreds of volunteer journalists.