Residents of Greater Fulton Hill are invited to a meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 12, at the Neighborhood Resource Center to discuss plans for creating a Web site with news and information for and about the community.

The meeting will begin at 7 p.m. at the Neighborhood Resource Center, 1519 Williamsburg Road. After free pizza and soft drinks, the discussion will focus on creating an interactive portal for Fulton Hill “ a Web site to which œcitizen journalists and everyday users could easily upload text, still photos, audio, video and other content.

Fulton Hill residents can offer their ideas about what kind of news stories and information they would like to see on the Web site. Residents also will have a chance to sign up for free classes on how to write news articles, take photographs and video, and post content online.

The School of Mass Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University, working with the Neighborhood Resource Center, has received a grant to help launch the site and train citizen journalists.

The grant was awarded by a program called New Voices, which supports œinnovative community news ventures in the United States. The program is funded by the nonprofit Knight Foundation, which promotes journalistic excellence and a free press.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch and NBC 12 also are partners in the project to create a news Web site for Greater Fulton Hill. Representatives of those media outlets will be at Wednesday’s meeting.

Under the New Voices program, other communities have created Web sites that include blogs, message boards, polls, surveys, searchable databases, interactive maps and other features. Some sites include a wiki, “a living encyclopedia” constantly updated by residents. (A wiki, for example, might say where families can find day care or explain the community’s history.)

Wednesday’s meeting is expected to last about an hour and a half.

The programming and format of this site is based on work by John Murden, who started Richmond’s first community news blog, Church Hill People’s News, and who has helped launch other community news blogs in the Richmond area.