Boosting Production of Local Civic Journalism

Amy Gahran offers more practical ideas for implementing the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Digital Needs of Communities in a Democracy in her latest post to the Knight Digital Media Center’s Leadership 3.0 blog. This time, she tackles the question of who will provide local civic news if news organizations and professional journalists are not committed to doing so.

Gahran’s poat includes excerpts from an interview with  Peter Shane, law professor at Ohio State University who served as Executive Director of the Knight Commission. Shane discusses the prospects for engaging educational institutions in new ways of thinking about curricula that may help to address shortfalls in local news production.

Gahran proposes several actions that local educational institutions, journalists and news organizations can take. She suggests a good starting point is organizing institution-wide, public discussions assessing the contributions each institution currently makes to the local civic sphere. Then, use these conversations to explore new partnerships with others in the community that could lead to more local civic journalism getting done.

Read Gahran’s most recent log post and find links to her previous posts on the Knight Commission here.