danah shares a great case study of how people used the Social Media tools
(wikis, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, etc.) to help educate people around
Hurricane Gustav. It provided a vital resource for people affected in
the area that got the attention of Rick Sanchez and the folks at CNN who realized quickly a small community was able to produce the news and gather resources faster.

The key thing to remember is innovation is not always around the
technologies themselves, but how people converge and use the tools
around them.

Editor’s note: This is being posted for Josh Wilson, one of our guest bloggers today at Google.

It’s an overcast Monday morning in the Bay Area, even down here in
one of the most economically upbeat corners of America — Google HQ, in
Mountain View, Calif., not far from the Shoreline Amphitheater.

The famed Googleplex is like walking around a giant college
quadrant. It hearkens back to visiting a pal at MIT once upon a time,
the architecture open and breezy and brightly colored, the interiors
done up like a series of playrooms for brilliant pre-teens gifted with
the world’s biggest box of Lego or Tinker Toys.

On my way down to to this event, I am struck by the diverse
information services and stark social contrasts I experience en route.

* I logged on the night before to reserve a car through San
Francisco City Carshare, and printed out directions via Google Maps.
* That morning I scanned SFGate.com for updates on local news and
issues, but learned little about where I live, or the South Bay
communities I was headed towards. The headlines were all about
Hollywood, and sports, and local sensational crime, and the evicted
tree sitters over at Berkeley.
* Cruising the highway as the morning rush hour flowed and pulsed, I
listened to KFJC 89.7 FM, an LPFM radio station out of Foothills Junior
College that specializing in unusual and noncommercial music,
particularly of the local variety.
* On the way, their public service announcements informed me about an
art space in San Jose, Space 47, that besides sounding genuinely
groovy, made me realize there is a thriving, self-starting cultural
community in Silicon Valley that is largely cut off from the main
information circuitry of the region.
* My Google map is rife with wrong turns. I get stuck behind impatient
commuters leaving the tree-lined boulevards of their Palo Alto suburban
enclaves, make a few more wrong turns and like magic wind up the
markedly lower-income city of East Palo Alto.
* Here, the buildings are not shiny, nor new, and are usually concerned
with cheap food and automobile repair rather than software development
and online commerce. This transition is abrupt, approximately 30
seconds total of driving time. I do a u-turn and finally spot the Four
Seasons hotel that is my primary landmark, perched exactly between the
two cities, gleaming like a beacon, guiding me back to the information
superhighway.

Localized information sources CAN serve community needs … but only up to a point.

Information on about that San Jose art space is probably not turning
up too often in the Mercury News. Those local bands on KFJC are most
likely not getting reviewed in the major metropolitan newspapers of the
region.

Similarly, I found a disconnect between what the panelists brought
together by Knight are asking for, and what local media are providing.

In the following posts, I’ll identify some of those specifics.

But the question remains: What next?

Now, having learned specifically what communities — or at least some
of the diverse communities of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area — are
looking for, how will our media landscape change, here, to fulfill democracy’s articulated but unmet needs?

Editor’s note: This is being posted for Josh Wilson, one of the guest bloggers for this Commission event.

(Roundtable #3: Technology & Innovation)

PART ONE: THE VIEW FROM TOMORROWLAND

We’re blogging to you live from the future, and it’s very exciting here!

I mean, we’re having this meeting at Google HQ, in the middle of
Silicon Valley — the place embodies much of the hope and imagination
for the future of our democracy, our economy and our world.

It is — or will be — better here in the future. As soon as we can
figure out what it’s all about. As soon as we can figure out how and
why people use information technology, we can build the perfect device
that will seamlessly integrate their information needs with
hyperpersonalized delivery mechanisms — speaking of which, can’t you
wait until the iPhone costs as much as a transister radio?! — then
everything will be fine.

The economy will grow robustly and sustainably, because in the future it will all be running on clean tech.

Deepening efficiencies will drive down costs — which means all the
lower-rung workers who have been effectively organized by Raj Jayadev
to join unions will be earning the wages necessary to fully engage with
the immersive mediaweb through affordable wireless technology.

That’s the problem with the future. It’s look-at-the-stars solutions
are indeed thrilling, but it’s ankle-deep in the mud of today.

PART TWO: A MOVING TARGET

Forget about the future. The future is not where it’s at. In the
future, we are going to be in the exact same place that we are now —
Planet Earth — but things are going to be worse. The climate is
changing, the oil wells are drying up.

We can’t be living in the future, when there’s so much that needs innovation today.

Living in and for the future can bite you on the behind.

Panelist Chris O’Brien notes that the ambitious Mercury News project
to “blow up the newsroom” and reinvent how a print paper navigates the
new media economy was canceled in January.

Most of the folks guiding the project have, in fact, been let go, he told me over lunch.

Was this a vision of the future that simply didn’t match reality? Or
did the great powers of the Merc’s parent company get cold feet? Was
the approach too topheavy, too sweeping, or too half-hearted?

It would be fascinating to delve into the conflicted internal
process that led to both the newsroom reinvention project and its
cancellation.

The Merc’s misfire brings to mind the same sort generalized ambition
but inadequate ground-level implementation that makes KQED — so
well-financed and connected — paradoxically so out of step with the
majority of the Bay Area’s diverse communities.

The problem is that these top-down enterprises, guided by the
strategic goals and profit expectations of Wall Street and its
satellites, may not be appropriate to the new media economy, which is
massively decentralized, multisourced, and generally, from a
content-production and -consumption perspective, non-cooperative with
the monopoly production model.

PART THREE: INNOVATION DAY BY DAY

Chris also noted that news media thrives when it is a center of
innovation — which demands the question of what, exactly, are the
conditions that encourage innovation?

Independence, for one thing.

All of the successful strategies and scenarios described by the
panelists emphasized the ability of media producers and consumers alike
to post and access material spontaneously, without the barriers erected
by the traditional gatekeepers.

This is not about technology — it’s how people use it. It’s about
the social phenomenon of technology. And therein lies the keys to
innovation.

danah boyd, one of the Knight commissioners, noted the amazing
success of local blogging and text-messaging around Hurricane Gustav in
New Orleans, an unmediated phenomenon that occurred in an open
information architecture without interference from monopoly gatekeepers.

She further elucidated the point by noting advocacy campaigns around
specific legislative issues, in which interest groups mobilize their
constituencies via cellphones and text messaging to spark a flurry of
calls, emails and faxes aimed at key elected officials.

Holmes Wilson of the Participatory Culture Foundation is singing a
similar tune with his Miro project, an online video platform that aims
to “eliminate gatekeepers” and make everyone a content producer.

We are already seeing what this can do on the blogosphere — the
achievements of which are considerable, and matched only by its excess.

As Amra Tareen of AllVoices.com notes, most blogs don’t get read,
which hearkens back to the initial panel’s concerns about the
information glut — something that at once distracts from access to
meaningful information, and fragments dialogue around it.

Her solution is to opportunistically merge media (Web, SMS, email,
etc.) to produce up-to-the-minute coverage of news across the world.

Using some cool widgets, AllVoices.com triangulates on topics, pulls
together a variety of coverage, and represents it dynamically on a
world map on the site’s home page. Click on an indicator, and you’ll
wind up with a cluster of related stories and blog postings

This approach places all its eggs in the crowdsourcing basket, and it’s good that they’re taking the chance on it.

Whether it’s the solution remains to be seen — but it’s encouraging
to see the money behind the media warming up to the idea of empowering
producers and audiences, and appreciating them as interchangeable.

PART FOUR: AD-MODEL INVERSION

This is a key concept — that producers and audiences together can
successfully guide access to and creation of relevant community
information.

The relationship between the audience and the media outlet has inverted, also, to the detriment of the ad-sales department.

Mike McGuire, a research VP at Gartner and a mainstream media guy,
pointed out that content really is king, and if so, why are the content
producers the ones getting the short end of the stick?

Why not start cutting sales staff at the failing media outlets instead of reporters and editors?

He asked this and grinned, and the audience laughed, as well they should.

But it’s a serious question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily.

The State of the News Media 2008 report noted that increasingly, the
newsroom is the place recognized as the wellspring of innovation in
media companies — and the ad-sales departments are the ones most bogged
down by the failed assumptions of the past.

What sort of innovation is required to make a future we can all live in?

Chava Bustamante
from the SEIU starts off by asking how many people in this room were
(1) born in another country (2) born in a other state, (3) born in
Mountain View to get an idea of the diversity of the attendees.

Chava is working towards bring ’strangers’ together and to find ways
of how media can be used to foster democracy. He feels being part of a
democracy is having access to all the opportunities in this society to
achieve every dream possible.

Miilions of people live in poverty and don’t have access to the
tools ot better their lives. Feels too much time is wasted to find
information on how to get things like GED or training opportunities for
a better job. Had he had this access, it would have allowed him a
chance at a better education. Instead, he worked in the fields for 12
years.

Media can play a more active role by publishing more informtiton
about programs and organizations that help people accomplish their
dreams. News outlets should highlight roles organizations play in their
communities.

Our lives are intertwined, we should work together to build a stronger society.

Jim sees the
adoption of online news resources as both a benefit, and a detriment to
existing ‘traditional’ papers.He lives in an environment where they are
training future journalists, but can’t honestly say where those new
journalists will be employed once they graduate.

He shared an interesting survey around a local action (widening of
Oregon Expressway project in Palo Alto) that found most of the stories
generated around this ‘event’ came from traditional outlets, not
independent websites, blogs, etc. - and Palo Alto is in the center of
the tech industry.

Information wants to be free (be accessible to all), and by nature,
it wants to be expensive (to support costs of this initiave). The
tension between both ideals will not go away. They key is to find a
path that allows for both for long term success.

Question
from Danah Boyd: Seeing a big difference between push and pull
strategies. In the past, information was pushed out to the communities.
Now, it seems most organizations are focused on pulling information to
aggregate it. What are some of the push strategies you are using to
help people who are not online or now pulling news on their own?

• Judy – Using public libraries to get information to the public and
  making information available that will engage people to do things they
  like to do. Need to focus on the younger generation to show the value
  of community and educating them on civil actions.
• Muhammed - Creating communities of interest with a subset, i.e.
  working with teachers to start Math Clubs or Science Clubs to engage
  younger generation and get information to them that way.
• Matt - Going to the trusted organizations within the communities
  (churches, schools, etc). Most people don’t know their neighbors - the
  key is to get people in the same room to solve problems together, then
  use new technology to get/keep them informed. Just about everyone has a
  cell phone so they found sending text messages out was a great way to
  communicate.
• Kim - Think it is more about push information out who will ‘pass it
  around’ - using things like email from people who signed up for
  announcements.

Question from Michael Powell: Feels the power of integrating
information around ‘place’ (community, neighborhoods, etc). Is this the
key?

• Matt - most everyone in CA knows the school system is broken. Just
  having an informed public is not enough. Need to find organizations or
  institutions who can take information and then DO something about it.

Linjun created
the Albany Today blog a year ago to provide local news to the 16,000
residents in her community. Does not post personal commentaries - stays
true to journalism values. Uses photos, slideshows and videos to
enhance experience.

Compared to a local newspaper, her blog is richer in content and
provides a better user experience. Interesting to note, Albanydoes not
have a local newspaper. Started with 50 pages views a day, now at 6k
views. Shows demand is there. LOCALLY.

She receives announcements from parents, neighbors, local offices
and others to share their news through her blog. She has become the
‘trusted source’ in Albany. Interesting note: Linjun moved to Albany
less than a year ago and her actions have stirred the local school to
launch a new series of classes to teach online publishing skills. Teach
the teacher. Love it.

Exploring possiblities to commercialize the project and ensure longevity.

I love hearing personal success stories like Linjun’s as this shows
all it takes is one individual willing to put the time and effort in to
effect change.

Editor’s
note: This is being posted for Josh Wilson, who is one of the guest
bloggers today at the Knight Commission’s community forum at Google.

I want more from this panel. The fault lines and fragmentation of the
Bay Area’s media ecology have been made clear, but I’m not sure the
gaps can be bridged.

Linjun Fan of the Albany Today blog, and Raj Jayadev of Silicon Valley
De-Bug (a marvelous, youth-focused labor organizing project) — they
both did a marvelous job of defining and describing how new media has
radically empowered disadvantaged or undercapitalized communities.

In the former case, Fan’s blog fills a vital community information
needs in a town where, she says, there isn’t even a local paper of
consequence.

I interviewed Jayadev myself many years ago on KUSF-FM, a San
Francisco community radio station, about the underground tactics his
group used to organize the janitors and assembly line workers in
Silicon Valley’s software mills.

Those stories were amazing — I still have the audio somewhere, and
will dig it up for the online archives — and his inclusion on the
Knight panel was astute, given his connection to the needs of the
starkly disenfranchised demographic of largely migrant laborers who do
the lowest-paid and least-fulfilling tasks of the information economy.

He represented those themes on the Knight panel — and like Fan, he
demonstrated how directly media empowerment can activate, engage and
even BUILD communities, particularly those that previously have been
cut off from the media circuitry.

At this point, however, the plate tectonics and fault lines come into play.

HOPING FOR A SHAKEUP

As Jim Bettinger of Stanford’s Knight Journalism Fellowship program
noted, fears about the decline of the professional, commercial news
industry remain acute.

And while new media is, clearly, a viable hope, its still hasn’t
overcome one major challenge: Its inability to support media economies
of the scale and comprehensiveness once expected of local daily papers.

Dave Satterfield, the managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News,
affirmed that dismal trend on the print side, by noting the ongoing
retreat of his paper’s reporting staff, as well as of the depth and
comprehensiveness of his local coverage.

He concluded his comments by essentially calling out for help,
restating the day’s oft-heard Dickens quotation that it is “the best
of times and the worst of times” for media and democracy in the Bay
Area.

His gloom was offset by George Sampson, the news and program director
of the local radio station KLIV, and quite bullish in that role.

Perhaps more at home in the lower-budget world of local information
radio, as opposed to the daily-print landscape of leveraged buyouts
and massive accompanying debt, Sampson spoke of hiring reporters who
grew up in the region, and who know all its quirks and crannies and
regional pronunciations.

Indeed, his take on “hyperlocal” journalism anchored the tradition of
extremely local coverage not in the still-emergent blogosphere, but in
the old-fashioned world of radio carrier frequencies, which is a damn
cheap medium that requires neither satellites nor fiber-optic and
cable infrastructure to effectively reach diverse communities within
very specific geographic regions.

MEDIA AND SOCIAL DIVISIONS

Now, an extraordinary contrast is revealed. It is the fascinating to
consider the wide disparity between KQED, the foremost public
broadcasting outlet for the entire Bay Area, and a small station such
as KLIV-AM.

Linda O’Bryon, chief content office at KQED, spoke broadly about unmet
information needs, about activating ad covering interest groups with
the Bay Area, such as scientists, to educate and inspire the populace.

During the Q&A section she also asserted a deep interest in more
effectively reaching broad cross-sections of the Bay Area community as
well as drilling down into those communities and their subgroups.

My question is — can KQED fulfill this role? As a massively
centralized and massively traditional public media outlet, KQED is
remarkable for its paucity of relevance to the breadth and depth of
the Bay Area’s communities.

A scan of the nighty lineup on the TV station reveals little that
could appeal beyond the stereotype of the public-media donor.

A spin through the radio dial to the KQED call letters reveals the
usual array of wonky talk shows, some compelling indeed, but many
simply recirculating a usual-suspect circuit of commentators,
announcers and issues — all anchored by the ubiquitous, authoritative
but definitively remote, non-local and unaccountable voices of that
NPR capital ship, All Things Considered.

It’s NOT that these programs are irredeemiably aloof, or stodgily
missing the boat all the time.

Quite the contrary — there are times when you absolutely have to tune
in Michael Krasny’s Forum, to get the most vital and urgent
conversation on local issues.

But despite this, there’s a lack of stickiness to KQED’s programming
that simply will not serve to pull in and keep around people who don’t
already match, again, the NPR/PBS archetype.

All the funding in the world, all the high profile initiatives and
astute strategic planning matters not a whit if the Bay Area’s biggest
public-media dinosaur refuses to evolve, and make itself as relevant
to underserved communities as Fan’s and Jayadev’s projects have.

BRIDGING THE GAPS

One of the panelists noted that new media is essentially
collaborative, and that the old, monopolist model of running a
commercial news operation may not be possible online, on the same
scale as the old print economy.

Bad news for the Merc!

And this may also be bad news for KQED. I’m told that of its $50
million annual budget, only $5 million is actually from donor pledges.

That funding gap is the embodiment of public media’s relevance
challenge. It speaks to me of a profound disconnect between the
organization and the bulk of the population it would serve.

It also represents a KQED’s opportunity — indeed, the opportunity for
any large-scale media outlet:

Make yourself relevant. Know your communities. Respect their needs.

Look across the informational schisms in your culture that separate
rich media from poor (or lower-budget anyway), and learn how the
communities represented by those media differ, and are similar.

Finally, there is the closing of the schism, which represents nothing
less than civic enfranchisement across communities.

The big media, the rich media, even as it struggles for profit and
relevance, needs to connect in meaningful ways to the producers of
local media — like Fan, like Jayadev, like Sampson — who have a
profound sense of place and demographic need.

As Jayadev noted, the Internet is a gateway drug for young people who
are hungry for relevant information about their lives — but the
technology itself is not the point. It’s just a tool.

The challenge before the Merc, before KQED, is to pay attention to
these needs, and respond to them in an an authentic fashion.

One audiencemember said that old media may need to simply absorb new
media, presumeably to make the most of what’s working online — video,
photo galleries, blogs, etc. — but it’s not just the tools and
widgets of new media that are succeeding.

It’s the simple, unadulterated relevance of messages delivered by
Albany Today, by Silicon Valley De-Bug, by the local commercial outlet
KLIV-AM.

You can’t do that with a focus group. Market research will only get
you so far.

To really make the connection, you have to live in the communities,
immerse yourself in this life on the ground, and respect the issues
that don’t appeal as readily to your advertisers and big-ticket donors.

I just don’t know traditional media as it exists today can do that.

Chris starts off
by admitting he is a Twitter user. Funny. Almost like it is a guilty
pleasure. He works for the San Jose Mercury News and is one of the few
journalists that is excited by the innovations happening in his
industry. Granted, he is slightly younger than the folks on the
previous panel and I am sure that plays into his mindset greatly.

He is finding alternate ways to connect with their local community,
whether through podcasts people can listen to while commuting to work
to posting (gasp!) printed flyers on campuses to get the word out to
the younger generation. They are experimenting with what works best for
the people they serve.

Something he said hit home and sums up ANY business these days: “You have to be a center of innovation to retain relevancy”

Raj is the
Founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug and is working to empower underserved
communities by educating them on how use the tools to share their
voice/opinion and make a difference in their community. I already love
this guy and he is only one minute in.

It does not take a lot of resources to become a ‘media mogul’. Most
of the younger generation is using the free online technologies
(Facebook, MySpace) and text messaging to communicate with one another
and using news/civil actions to organize, like the recent march for the
rights of immigrants. The march was self organized via MySpace and text
messaging, and turned into the largest organized protest in the Bay
Area’s history. This is extremely powerful. People who understand this
will be able to effect change.

He shares the thought that media has become synonymous with
community organizing. Also sees ethnic media replacing traditional
media in certain areas, though would like to add that merely going ‘in
language’ does not automatically make it an ethnic media source (i.e.
just because you print in Spanish does not mean you are reporting on
issues that affect the Latin community).

So the big question is now…how do we make the newer technologies accessible to all?

Linda is the
Chief Content Office for KQED and believes there is no other place in
the world that places such emphasis on thought leadership as in Silicon
Valley (big ocean, big mountains, big sky…and big thinking). We live in
an area of open spaces and open thinking - what happens in Silicon
Valley does not stay in Silicon Valley.

Sees the online tools creating communities of people who have never
met in person, which is drastically different than 30 years ago where
you [mostly] only associated with the people who lived in your
neighborhood or you worked along side with.

I love the program KQED launched over 5 years ago, called Digital
Storytelling, where they encourage high school students to come in and
share stories of interest.  I love the fact that KQED has positioned
themselves in three various key roles: Enabler (getting kids excited
about creating content and sharing their items of interest), Mentor
(educating kids on how to use the new tools) and Publisher (pushing
content which will help bring traffic back to KQED and show they are
playing an active role in their community). It is a win-win-win.

Key takeaway is the need to provide media when and where people want it - whether online, mobile, print. Media’s role is to help cultivate as well as create.

Editor’s note: This is being posted for Josh Wilson, who is one of our guest bloggers today.

The other major theme in panel #1 was the problematic access to, and
inconsistent quality and relevance of, information sources in the
community.

Muhammad Chaudhry noted the “Lack of quality content for local
information needs” as well as an opportunity for new “partnerships to
disseminate info at a local level”

He also identified emerging social media — Facebook et. al. — as a
vital means of that dissemination, and admitted that it was only
because of his younger colleagues at the Silicon Valley Education
Foundation that he knew about or was able to use such platforms in the
first place.

Thus we are reminded of the importance of those in established power
positions to pay attention to what’s happening on the ground —
particularly among youth, in this case.

It’s happening at your workplace among the junior staffers, in your
neighborhood playgrounds and romper rooms, in your schools. Kids are
using new media, and what they’re doing with it and learning from it is
instructive.

Gates & Gatekeepers

Judy Nadler of Santa Clara University reminded us of the importance
of having trained, humble and engaged reporters and editors in place
who understand civic issues, such as local government and bond
measures, and who can explain these issues to the community in a
meaningful way, rather than gloss over or dumb down their coverage.

But it’s about more than having better gatekeepers. There’s also a
gaping need for improved venues for civic gathering and dialogue.

Indeed, the question of such venues is the question of access, and
thus we return to the issue of fragmentation, which impedes dialogue
across communities.

Nadler called for “New ways to engage people. They don’t know what’s in their community.”

Chaudhry spoke about organizing people around interest areas, and
“pulling them in” to coordinated information sources related to those
interest — something Walesh affirmed in her description of information
hubs (such as the multi-city arts listing service Artsopolis.com) that
can draw likeminded people to a central online location.

But is this true commnity?

Hammer of PACT says one major hurdle is that “there are very few
informal associations between people,” and that “most people don’t know
their neighbors.”

In other words, there are three major progress points to consider when addressing information quality and access:

* Improved training and education services for the intermediaries who produce and present the information in question
* Establishing, improving and coordinating/connecting outlets that are
willing and able to publish and promote that information
* Creating new dialogue and social habits around that information, so
that people are not disparate consumers, but rather engaged
participants.

Kim is the Chief
Strategist for the City of San Jose and spends a lot of time finding
ways to engage the public and disseminate information for them.

Some major challenges they have experienced over the last couple of years:

• Getting people to care about local community - almost a
  prerequisite to there being a need to gather information. As San Jose
  is the largest city in the Bay Area (went from 100k to 1 million in the
  last 30 years) - it has made it difficult for people to connect.

• People view themselves as global citizens - see success
  contributing to global community not as much to their local community. 
  They also don’t seem to get information from local outlets, like the
  Mercury News, instead they source it via NY Times, Singapore News, etc.
  How people get information has complicated ability to engage the local
  community and made it more expensive for the media outlets.
  Experimenting with Peak Democracy and The Alliance for Innovation -
  using Art, employment networks, etc to connect wiht the younger
  generations (under 35) as they don’t come to ‘traditional’ news sources
  and seem separated.

On a positive note, San Jose has been a leader in putting the
business of the local government on the web with public calendars,
videos, archiving of meeting notes, etc. to help get information out
there. Also done well in cultivating neighborhood networks, with 22
neighborhoods working to help distribute information within their own
local community - solely to determine how they should use their human
and financial resources (i.e. should they be buying more books, or more
computer terminals for the library?)

This goes a long way towards serving the local needs and interesting
to watch leaders and communication networks emerge naturally.

Judy is a Senior
Fellow in Government Ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at
Santa Clara University whose focus is helping people disseminate the
information provided to make better decisions.

She shares the power of ethics and transparency in government
agencies and the need for civil engagement. A nice example she gave was
around the San Jose, CA city government offices opening up their
calendars to the public to show when they were meeting, who they are
meeting with and why they were meeting - all in an attempt to educate
the public on what was happening in their local community and how
resources were  being spent. It is bringing more people to the town
halls and getting the community better engaged.

In her eyes, ‘providing information to the public is not a luxury -
it is a necessity’ and is critical to building and sustaining healthy
communities.

Judy suggests more local news needs to be produced, using more
friendly and easy to understand language. Journalists should have an
understanding of how the government works, and the channels we feed
news through.
As content and usability vary greatly from county to county (some use
webcasts that are archived, others use blogs, many do nothing) these
differences need to be addressedto ensure news is received by those
that need it and they continue to find ways to engage the younger
generation to ensure longevity of the media outlets and the strength of
the community.

This is a new blog of the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, one of four Knight Foundation
media initiatives. The Commission is jointly coordinated by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, directed by Charles M. Firestone, and the Knight Foundation’s Journalism Program, directed by Eric Newton.

We’ll feature commentary from guest bloggers, and the first bloggers, Josh Wilson and Kristie Wells, will begin by updating from the town hall Commission sessions Monday, September 8, 2008 on the Google campus.

Questions? Thoughts? Let us know in the comments.