Two weeks ago, I set up CT News Wire. Over this time, I’ve been trying to come up with as concise a statement about what CTNewsWire is and made efforts to get people to start using it.

CTNewsWire is a public mailing list for state and local agencies, elected officials, candidates and advocacy organizations in Connecticut to use to more effectively communicate with the constantly changing world of bloggers and citizen journalists.

There are 115 state agencies in Connecticut, 169 municipalities, 151 State Representatives, 36 State Senators and numerous advocacy agencies. Many of them send out press releases to what seems to be an ever-decreasing pool of traditional journalists. Their communications directors don’t have easy ways to find new people, such as bloggers and citizen journalists that might be interested in receiving their press releases, and new bloggers and citizen journalists can find it difficult to get on the media lists of all the groups they are interested in.

So, I set up a CTNewsWire Google Group that anyone can subscribe to, and anyone can send media advisories to. During the first few weeks, I forwarded some of the press releases I received to the group and started contacting communications directors and public information officers. I also started to slowly spread the word about CTNewsWire.

It is still just a small handful of bloggers and citizen journalists that subscribe to CTNewsWire, but the number is growing. More importantly, the number of communications directors starting to use CTNewsWire has grown.

With that, let me highlight three events coming up over the next few days that I found out about via CTNewsWire.

On April 1st at 10:30 am at the Fairfield Public Library, Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, and State Representatives Kim Fawcett and Tom Drew will meet with business leaders to discuss affordable healthcare for small businesses and non-profits.

Then, at noon, Love Makes a Family will make a major announcement about the organizations future in room 1D of the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.

On “Thursday, April 2 at 5p.m., students, parents, teachers, principals, board of education members, legislators and advocates will gather on the north steps of the State Capitol for a rally and press conference to talk about public charter schools in Connecticut’s budget and to recognize charter schools’ legislative champions.”

Rounding out the week, on Saturday from 9:30 am until 4:00 pm the Shoreline League of Democratic Women will hold their Third Annual Green Lifestyle Fair at the Clinton Town Hall.

Looking forward, people in Massachusetts are looking at setting up a similar NewsWire. One person pointed out that the CTNewsWire has a RSS feed, so the articles can be subscribed to and listed on people’s blogs. I may do that on my blog.

So, if you know of people that should be sending their press releases to CTNewsWire, or who should be reading CTNewsWire to learn more about what is going on in Connecticut, please, let them know and if you can make it to any of the events listed above, please go, and then blog about it.

(Originally posted at MyLeftNutmeg.)