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.

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 irredeemably 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 audience member said that old media may need to simply absorb new media, presumably 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.

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.