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A project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program
Today, particularly on the Web, openness is supposed to be the watchword when it comes to communication. But, oddly enough, rules that govern much of our information currency are being written by regulatory agencies and lawmakers in closed private meetings, accountable to no one.
While home broadband adoption continues to rise, with an average of well over 60% of Americans having high-speed internet available in their homes, African Americans, Latinos and people in low-income communities continue to lag behind by double-digit margins. As both the Knight Commission Report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age and the National [...]
The journalism industry is in turmoil. The digital revolution has hit content providers of all kinds, changing their business models and in some cases altering the nature of the underlying content itself. Music has seen this most starkly. But print content, most particularly newspapers, have also faced significant disruption. Digitization and the communications revolution have placed in the consumer/user the tools to access the content they want, when they want it, at little or no cost.
We’ve just published our first two information ecology case studies, which take a close look at the local conditions in Seattle and Scranton. When we started investigating these media ecosystems, we used the Knight Commission Report, “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age,” as our guide.
KnightComm is pleased to provide an advance download of the Aspen Institute Communication and Society Program’s publication, Of the Press: Models for Transforming American Journalism. The report addresses a critical aspect of the Knight Commission’s deliberations: the need to develop innovative business models for “sustainable, meaningful, local journalism”. It is written by Michael R. Fancher, [...]
Community connectedness and diverse revenue streams are critical ingredients for success for nonprofit news organizations. That’s my headline the conversation at the Knight Foundation’s “Seeking Sustainability” roundtable discussion of about 50 people representing 18 nonprofit news organizations Monday in Austin.
History suggests that independent private sector providers of information such as Nielsen and Arbitron will develop over time to give a finer grained understanding of such measures of impact. That said, the measures of impact required are more measures of the “public good” that such media is generating rather than advertising value which is often the priority of private measurement companies focused on private sector advertiser driven media. In a world where the audience is sliced ever smaller across a larger and larger set of channels measures of impact such private companies will work to generate will be validity in measures of demographic slices rather than measures of of community reach and engagement.
A new report in the US IMPACT series of studies, How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at US Libraries, examines in detail how libraries are helping people meet a variety of online needs. It provides particularly intriguing insight into who’s using library internet to engage with community life, and how they’re doing it. Keeping up with the news is a big part of that picture…
How fast is your home broadband connection? Is it slower than you expect? Are you really getting the speed that your Internet service provider advertises? How does the broadband service in your community compare to other communities around the country?
There’s a new tool available at www.broadband.gov designed to help consumers get information to answer these questions. According to Ars Technica, 150,000 [...]
Scranton, PA – One of the tests for an informed public advanced by the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is: Does the community have at least one high-quality online hub? Until 2009, the newspaper of record here avoided the drastic cuts already underway or completed in other metro area, and each of the three major commercial television networks aired local news.
No one has developed a system for scientifically measuring the quality of a local community’s information environment although, following the release of the Knight Commission report, efforts to do so are now underway. But communities can begin to take stock of their information environments by considering the following eight features that the Knight Commission report [...]
Libraries and news organizations have much in common. They both seek to keep people informed, and they both have a long history of providing civic information. Thus, they may be well positioned to support each others’ evolution—as well as healthier communities.
By Amy Gahran
Like news organizations, libraries have been challenged by the proliferation of digital [...]
Expand local media initiatives to reflect the entire reality of the communities they represent. Media institutions, old and new, will inevitably continue to be major players in the information networks serving local communities. As democratic institutions, they can serve their communities most effectively, however, if they reflect and help give voice to all segments of the public in the way news is gathered, analyzed, and shared.
Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism. Throughout American history, the main source of journalism has been private enterprise. The Commission does recommend below that the United States intensify its commitment to public media.
Increase the role of higher education, community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities. Nonprofit institutions are reservoirs of expertise. Local community organizations, such as community development organizations, churches, fraternal organizations, and chambers of commerce, are critical in the transmission of information.
