To submit an application or for further information, go to www.informationneeds.org. Non-foundation community partners may participate, but they must partner with a qualifying community or place-based foundation. The application deadline is February 27, 2012.

Knight Foundation program directors will host a Web-based live chat at noon EST on February 8, 2012, to answer queries from foundations. The live chat will take place at www.informationneeds.org.

Susan Patterson, Knight’s community director in Charlotte, North Carolina, writes about the challenge, including past winners, on the Knight Blog.

Foundation leaders who want to learn more about supporting media and information environments in their own communities can attend the Knight Foundation’s fourth annual Media Learning Seminar, February 20-21, 2012, in Miami. Registration is open until February 1st.

The Community Information Challenge is one more way that the Knight Foundation is supporting the information needs of communities.

Related posts:

1. Knight, Local Foundations Partner on Community Information Needs
2. National Contest to Fund Local Information Experiments
3. News Leadership 3.0 — LIVEBLOG Mar 1-2: Community foundations, media/tech experts explore local info needs

By Tom Stites

Maybe we’ve been looking for models in all the wrong places. To find the elusive secret to making web journalism sustainable in community after community, maybe we need to take a peek behind the curtain into the secret sector of the economy.

For years now, people have been trying to devise business models for online community journalism that are both sustainable and replicable, but the usual sectors aren’t delivering: Only a few isolated for-profit sites are generating enough advertising revenue to support themselves while producing the original reporting that’s so crucial to civic health and democracy; on the nonprofit side, there are nowhere near enough philanthropic dollars to support enough sites, at least not for long (see part one of this series). And the idea of public-sector news publishing gets tangled up in the First Amendment.

It’s common to think these three sectors are all there are, but there’s a fourth — the cooperative sector — which future-of-journalism efforts are just starting to explore. U.S. co-ops take myriad forms and represent $3 trillion in assets, $500 billion in revenue, and $25 billion in wages; they include 7,794 credit unions and 864 utility co-ops that distribute electricity over 75 percent of the nation’s land mass. Few people know that co-ops are such a significant and healthy slice of our otherwise ailing economy — the U.S. government doesn’t keep statistics on them and, because co-ops are structured to build community wealth rather than investor wealth, business journalism largely ignores them.

What’s magic about co-ops is that for a long list of industries they offer stable and replicable business models that work in economic settings too arid to support for-profit models — the kind of situation many communities are experiencing with journalism after five grim years of plummeting newspaper advertising revenue that’s led to drastic cutbacks in original reporting (see part two of this series). Now that the news ecology has turned from verdant to desert-like, particularly in less-than-affluent communities where the majority of the U.S. public lives, might co-ops grow the hardy cactuses that journalism needs to thrive again?

Judging by experience in other countries, the answer is yes. Long-established reader-owned co-ops publish newspapers in Italy, Germany, England and Mexico. A worker-owned cooperative is creating an ambitious city-by-city set of news sites across Canada that combine to publish a national weekly newspaper. Also in Canada, listener-owned co-ops operate radio stations.

But to date there are no such co-op journalism efforts in the United States. (Despite their names, the Chicago News Cooperative and KOOP radio in Austin, Texas, are standard nonprofits. The Associated Press is a cooperative, but a producer co-op owned by the news organizations that it provides with state, national, and foreign news.)

Disclosure: The Banyan Project, which I lead, is building a reader-owned co-op model that’s designed to scale massively, the way depositor-owned credit unions and shopper-owned food co-ops have scaled community by community, coast to coast. Banyan has chosen Haverhill, Massachusetts — a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper has devolved into an under-resourced weekly and whose radio station has shut down — as its pilot community. As a news desert, Haverhill has very little focused coverage of issues facing the community or of life-issue reporting that its people can use to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Presuming that the pilot thrives, Banyan envisions scaling with each added community site run by its own democratically run co-op with hundreds of local member/owners; a federation would provide the co-ops with turnkey licenses for sophisticated software and other centralized services.

If other co-op approaches are being planned in the U.S., I’ve not discovered them — but there are many other possible approaches, such as the worker-owned co-op being developed in Canada. I’m cheering for lots of social entrepreneurs to jump in and cultivate their own ideas. The Citizen Media Law Project, part of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, wants to help all comers — it is researching the legal issues that journalism cooperatives will face and will post its findings on its online legal guide.

Recent events are making co-ops less of a secret: In 2009 the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives published a comprehensive study of co-ops’ role in the U.S. economy; more than 700,000 people moved their accounts from major banks to credit unions in response to the Move Your Money campaign inspired by the banks’ just-rescinded fees for use of debit cards, and the United Nations has proclaimed 2012 the International Year of the Cooperative. Co-ops are more common in Europe, where the form originated more than a century and a half ago, and in less developed countries where economic deserts are more common; worldwide, more than 1 billion people are co-op members.

Cooperative firms are fundamentally different from other business organizations. They are neither investor-owned businesses nor nonprofit organizations, although the IRS grants tax-exemptions for some forms. Community-Wealth.org, a project of the Democracy Collaborative, based at the University of Maryland, offers this definition: “A cooperative can be any business that is governed on the principle of one member, one vote.”

So the cooperative view of capital differs quite a lot from Wall Street’s. For example, the International Cooperative Alliance has established seven principles that include concern for community; many co-ops pursue the triple bottom line of financial soundness plus positive social and environmental impact. In this era of rampant deceptive business practices, says Tom Decker of the National Cooperative Business Association in Washington, a significant source of co-ops’ strength is the trustworthiness inherent in their democratic and accountable structure.

This is also an era of rampant mistrust of journalism, so co-op news sites’ trustworthiness has the potential to add value to what they publish. Further, the co-op form allows, or rather demands, that news coverage decisions arise from the what a community’s people need rather than from today’s dominant approaches: finding ways to sustain legacy news institutions or designing Web models to conform to various ideas about what technology seems to demand. The web is inherently collaborative — just as co-ops are — and at the local level this creates the potential for civic synergy that could add still more value to co-op community journalism.

###

Cooperatives arise as a bottom-up response to market failure: It’s a lot of work to start a co-op, so if for-profit businesses were providing needed goods and services at fair prices, why would people go to all the bother? Without economic deserts, there would be no co-ops, but over time there has been no shortage of deserts and there is no shortage now.

The Wisconsin study reports that the great boom in credit unions came, no surprise, in the Depression, after widespread bank failures created a credit desert. That’s also when electric utility co-ops came on the scene, with a boost from the Rural Electrification Administration, a New Deal effort. In the 1930s, cities were 90 percent wired but 90 percent of rural homes were not — investor-owned utilities shunned the high cost of wiring rural areas. Co-ops filled the void.

In today’s struggling economy, Decker says, co-ops are on the rise. The scarcity of reliable child care and home health care are arid zones that are inspiring co-ops to form. “Worker-owned home care cooperatives,” the Wisconsin report says, “are emerging as a way to both address high staff turnover and to improve the quality of home care services provided to the elderly and disabled.” Decker reports a rise in worker co-ops in other fields as people come together to invent livelihoods for themselves in a time when jobs are so scarce. He also estimates that as many as 300 food coops will form in 2011, many to meet demand for a coherent supply of local food that supermarkets don’t supply. “Local,” he says, “is the key.”

Now, news deserts are proliferating and the need is great. It may be that co-ops will be the only new journalism business model that can take root in current market conditions. May many species of news cactuses bloom.

Previous posts in series:

• Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism
• Layoffs and Cutbacks Lead to a New World of News Deserts

Tom Stites is president and founder of the Banyan Project, a pioneering a new model for Web journalism as a reader-owned cooperative. He was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Photo of banyan tree by Jeff Stvan on Flickr.

Related posts:

1. Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism
2. Layoffs and Cutbacks Lead to a New World of News Deserts
3. Seeking sustainability: The business of nonprofit journalism

By Tom Stites

Here’s a challenge: Name a straightforward two-word phrase related to journalism that you can enter in Google and get only one result.

Stumped? Try “news desert” — one, and only one, direct hit.*

Now check Wikipedia. “News desert” comes up entirely empty — but “food desert” gets 3,400 words. Any why not? Hunger is a crucial issue, and “food desert” provides a vivid frame that elicits a mental movie of hungry people crawling over arid dunes in search of an oasis for sustenance.

Frames matter. They determine how an issue is understood, driving this understanding into the language and thus into people’s thinking about what actions to take. One proof of the power of “food desert” as a frame is that a Google search yields thousands of direct hits — including links to serious actions people have taken, including the Agriculture Department’s food desert locator and to Food Desert Awareness Month.

But isn’t it also a crucial issue that a huge part of the American people, the less-than-affluent majority, is civically malnourished due to the sad state of U.S. journalism — and that the nation’s broad electorate is thus all but certainly ill informed? It has long troubled me, and many others, that an issue so central to democracy has such a peripheral role in the discourse about journalism’s future, which tends to focus more on crowdsourcing, Twitter and Facebook, aggregation vs. original reporting, how AOL is faring with Patch, and search engine optimization. These are important topics, but perhaps an energizing frame like “news desert” can widen the aperture of thinking about journalism’s future and sharpen the focus on people’s and democracy’s needs — on journalism as public good.

Elites and the affluent are awash in information designed to serve them, but everyday people, who often grapple with significantly different concerns, are hungry for credible information they need to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Sadly, in many communities there’s just no oasis, no sustenance to be found — communities where the “new news ecosystem” is not a cliché but a desert.

The Chicago journalist Laura S. Washington introduced me to the desert frame, and she credits a South Side community organizer for originating it. Washington used it in her remarks in April when she and I were members of a panel called Journalism and Democracy: Rebuilding Media for our Communities at the 2011 National Conference for Media Reform. Suddenly a movie was running in the little screen in my mind: The protagonists were losing sleep on a hot night, worrying over life issues they might be able to resolve if only they had the right information — but there was no news oasis in the landscape of their lives, so they just kept tossing and turning. I couldn’t see if movies were playing in the heads of the hundreds of people in the hall listening to our panel, but they clearly got exactly what Washington meant.

So I’ve been using “news desert” in conversations and presentations over the last six months. It never fails to communicate powerfully.

“Gee,” a community leader in Haverhill, Massachusetts, said when I used it. “That sure describes us.”

Haverhill is a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper and community radio station folded years ago and whose sole weekly is withering — and it will be the pilot city for the Banyan Project, a web journalism startup I lead that’s designed to sustain itself while serving communities and publics that other media tend to ignore. News deserts are places whose economies cannot sustain any established business model for journalism, for-profit or nonprofit, and Haverhill exemplifies one kind: municipalities whose news institutions have failed or faded as advertising has dried up and can no longer come close to meeting the information needs of the community and its people. Many rural communities fit this category as well.

Demographics rather than political boundaries define other news deserts categories. In a speech at the Media Giraffe Project’s 2006 Conference, I laid out how metropolitan newspapers across the land tailor their coverage to serve readers in the top two quintiles of the income distribution, ignoring the quite different information needs of everybody else — and that was before the five-year newspaper ad revenue nosedive caused widespread layoffs, further shriveling the supply of original reporting that is the bedrock of journalism’s public good. I didn’t have the news-desert frame back then, but when it comes to life-relevant original reporting it’s clear that it describes where the less-than-affluent American public tends to live.

Minority communities in big cities tend to be the most arid news deserts of all, a point Washington made in her NCMR panel presentation and in an In These Times essay. (A Chicago blogger’s item calling attention to her essay is the source of that one and only Google hit.) Washington’s desert phrase was a bit different.

“We live in a communications desert,” her essay begins. “How can this be, you say? Our 24/7 news cycle delivers…millions of words, bytes, video clips, posts, emails and tweets…Yet paradoxically, in this ‘revolutionary’ media age, our cities are parched for information and news coverage with context and quality.”

She cited foundation-funded research aimed at assessing the news needs of low-income and minority communities on Chicago’s West and South Sides. Low-income respondents in an 800-person phone survey were less connected than others on every measure tested. People told focus groups that they read Chicago’s dailies but found little that resonates with their lives.

And it’s not just the newspapers. In a speech in June, FCC commissioner Michael Copps cited a study that shows that black or Hispanic populations have fewer Internet-only news sites. “If the majority of hyperlocal sites are taking hold in affluent areas that can support advertising,” he said, “have we really dealt with diversity and competition, or have we just moved media injustice onto a new field?”

Laura S. Washington

Desertification is on the march, claiming more and more communities as newspapers continue to wither and few Web efforts manage to replace more than a fraction of the original reporting that newspapers have abandoned (see Part I of this series). There are fresh examples from week to week and from coast to coast, but none is more vivid, or sadder, than the dramatic increase in aridity that newspaper readers in San Francisco Bay communities are surely experiencing right now.

The Bay Area News Group, which had been 13 dailies published by the Denver-based MediaNews chain, last month cut 34 newsroom positions across the group and combined five of its titles into two; in total, more than 100 employees lost their jobs. In one stroke, three papers died and the 10 survivors were all wounded. Readers will find the papers less reflective of their communities — they’ll have local news sections and most will have familiar nameplates, but their general news, sports, and comics pages will be more uniform. And, with the shrunken staff, original community reporting, which has been drying up for years as newspapers laid off reporters, will become even more parched.

Eric Newton, now senior advisor to the president of the Knight Foundation, was managing editor of The Oakland Tribune 20 years ago. In a posting to the Knight Blog, he recalled that he’d supervised a staff of 130 full-time journalists; after years of attrition the newsroom was home to only a dozen reporters — and this was before the newest cutbacks.

Newton recalled that Bob Maynard, The Tribune’s revered late publisher, had referred to the daily newspaper as “an instrument of community understanding.” Newton added, “We need some new instruments.”

Next Post:  Might the elusive Web journalism model be neither for-profit nor non-profit?

Previous Post: Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism

Tom Stites is president and founder of the Banyan Project, a pioneering a new model for Web journalism as a reader-owned cooperative. He was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

* In addition to the single direct hit for “news desert”, Google also turns up 55,698 false positives, with “news” ending one phrase and “desert” starting the next. And, ironically, 48 hours before this piece was posted, my friend Doug Muder added a second, quoting me.

Desert photo by Maartmeester on Flickr. Photo of Laura Washington by Karen Kring.

Related posts:

1. Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World
2. Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?
3. Finding a new model for news reporting

By Tom Stites

It’s stock-taking time – five years since the Big March to the digital journalism future stepped off in 2006, strutting toward what was widely trumpeted as inevitable triumph.  Auspicious events amplified the cheering:

• The City University of New York launched its Graduate School of Journalism with an innovative curriculum and hired the outspoken citizen journalism advocate Jeff Jarvis to direct a new interactive media program and teach entrepreneurship.
• Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society widened its interest in the growing edges of news by adding to its roster of fellows Dan Gillmor, author of the seminal 2004 participatory journalism book We the Media, and the protoblogger Doc Searls.
• In his widely followed PressThink blog, New York University journalism Prof. Jay Rosen headlined an item The People Formerly Known as the Audience; it immediately became a defining meme for journalism on the Web, which empowers everyone to participate.
• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the premier funder of journalism projects, kicked off its $5-million-a-year News Challenge grants program.

So, five years on, how’s the Big March working out for journalism – and for the democracy that’s so dependent on it?

• As the digital march stepped off, newspaper advertising revenue also began a march – off the cliff:  five straight years of decline, verging on a 50 percent plunge.  The decline is a bit less grim as it moves through its sixth year, but it shows no sign of turning around.  The number of dailies has been in decline since 1973 and – no surprise – the failure trend accelerated after the 2006 ad crash.  Newspapers are just starting to make some headway with metered website paywalls that show promise of generating Internet revenue that can offset more than a tiny fraction of print losses.
• A parallel march, of laid-off reporters, editors and producers leaving newsrooms of all kinds, has cut the nation’s salaried news personnel by almost a quarter over the same period.  Despite contributions from varied Web journalism efforts, the net amount of original reporting, the bedrock of journalism’s public good, is declining sharply.  And so is journalism’s nourishment of civic health and democracy.
• Two Knight Foundation-funded studies of Web journalism efforts, including the comprehensive 2009 report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, have praised lots of interesting efforts but found no business models that are both self-sustaining and replicable from community to community.  The Knight News Challenge has run its five-year course and, after strategic review, the foundation says it will shift to three 12-week rounds in 2012; the foundation says it is shifting to a “social investing” venture capital strategy.
• The only Web journalism business model with corporate millions behind it, AOL’s Patch, is drawing wide scrutiny and little if any optimism outside AOL that it will prove sustainable (sample).

“Even as the [Knight] Commission did its work, the situation was getting dramatically worse,” Mike Fancher, the retired editor of The Seattle Times who helped write its report, wrote recently in a follow-up white paper.  “Perhaps most importantly, emerging media struggle to be sustainable businesses.”

The buzz about how bloggers and citizen journalists will save the day, once almost deafening, has died down to a murmur, although the buzz about Twitter, Facebook and cellphone video cameras saving the day has picked up thanks to their powerful contributions to coverage of major breaking stories, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.  But the triumphant march to the digital future, at least when measured in terms of original reporting, has yet to lead anywhere near triumph.

Yet the picture is not entirely bleak.

Here and there local Web news sites have figured out what it takes to sustain themselves – the West Seattle Blog, for one, is exemplary – but ambitious local sites, nonprofit and for-profit, almost all rely on the benevolence of grant-makers or people who donate their labor, often both.  On the national scale, the cluster of Talking Points Memo sites are a notable, and self-sustaining, reporting success.

As for newspapers and the Internet, Bill Keller, the columnist for The New York Times who stepped down as its executive editor in September, sees cause for optimism.  Keller writes that the Internet “has given us new ways of gathering news, and new ways of telling stories. It has enlarged our audience many fold. It has tapped into the creative energy of good journalists and engendered – at The Times, and elsewhere – an openness to experimentation.

On the nonprofit side, ProPublica’s 2008 arrival made a justifiably big splash, but it, like many major nonprofit sites, is heavily dependent on the continuing generosity of a major donor.  Funder-supported metro-scale online news efforts have sprung up in several cities, with some showing potential to become self-sustaining institutions, notably The New Haven Independent, MinnPost in the Twin Cities, and Voice of San Diego.

The great perils to nonprofit sites are that 1) foundations rarely engage in long-term support of nonprofit ventures; 2) wealthy people who write big checks to found high-profile nonprofits often find new interests and move on, and 3) volunteers burn out.  At a media conference a few months ago, an editor for a vibrant West Coast local news web nonprofit told me, with a grin, that its business plan included starvation.  And for all the attention that grants to journalism efforts have received, add up all that funding and it totals only a tiny fraction of what Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute estimated, in 2009, as a $1.6 billion annual reduction in newsroom salaries.  And an IRS decision to hold up a flood of journalism organizations’ applications for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status raises the question if nonprofit journalism efforts have a future, period.

So what would triumph look like?  The 2009 Knight Commission report lays out a comprehensive picture of the problems that need to be solved.  Here are my Big Three important challenges:

1.  Create self-sustaining Web journalism business models. Legacy models – newspapers, broadcast news, and magazines – were not only self-sustaining (to say the least) for more than a century but were also easily replicable from community to community.  Five years after the Big March stepped off, there is yet to be even one Web journalism site that has proven to be both self-sustaining (without continuing foundation support) and replicable.  If we can’t create Web journalism models that will work financially in communities across the land, there’s no serious way to address Challenges No. 2 and 3.

“Community news sites are not a business yet,” concludes New Voices: What Works, the Knight-funded 2010 report by J-Lab at American University, which studied 46 of them. Jan Schaffer, the executive director, wrote of the findings on J-Lab’s blog:  “Launching is the easy part; living on is hard.”

A year ago, after attending the first Block by Block conference for local news sites – about 125 were represented – Susan Mernit, founder of the widely admired Oakland Local news and community site, blogged plaintively,

“Folks, we have a movement, but we have no tangible support.

“We have voices applauding our willingness to work long hours for little or no pay, cheerleading the good – and the news – we provide to our communities – but not organized to fund us . . . and certainly not yet focused on helping us get the health insurance and the business infrastructure that will make our local endeavors flourish . . . .”

2.  Serve the broad public, not just the affluent. In a keynote speech at the Media Giraffe Conference on the future of journalism in 2006 – as the Big March was stepping off – I laid out how newspapers, which produce the vast majority of original reporting, had narrowed their focus to the affluent because current advertisers want to reach only upscale spenders.  Thus, they turned their backs on the less-than-affluent public who once had been their bread-and-butter readers.  Given that one size does not fit all – more than half of U.S. households have no investments, for example, so newspapers’ personal finance columns rarely help them – the majority of Americans are now ill served by existing media.  The situation has only gotten worse in the last five years, and almost all non-hyperlocal Web journalism is aimed at elite niches.  And AOL deliberately chooses only affluent communities for its hundreds of hyperlocal Patch sites.

3.  Deliver journalism that people can trust. This summer’s annual Gallup survey of confidence in U.S. institutions found only 28 percent of respondents reporting a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, and 27 percent saying the same of television news – down almost half from historic highs.  If trust is poisoned, the toxin infects all of journalism: How informed can the electorate be – and how well can they make citizenship decisions – if people have scant confidence in the journalism they’re getting or, worse, ignore it altogether because their distrust is so deep?

Doc Searls likes to say that the Internet is only 5 seconds out from its Big Bang, that we’re just starting to discover the forms it can take.  This long view is comforting – until you consider that our democracy is crumbling fast and needs robust journalism desperately.

“Journalistic institutions do not need saving, they need creating,” Fancher wrote in his white paper.  “America needs ‘informed communities’ in which journalism is abundant in many forms and accessible through many convenient platforms.  This will require experimentation. . . .  This is a time of discovery.”

NEXT POST:  A future-of-journalism frame that focuses on actual people – and democracy.

Tom Stites is president and founder of the Banyan Project, a pioneering a new model for Web journalism as a reader-owned cooperative. He was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Related posts:

1. Seeking sustainability: The business of nonprofit journalism
2. Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?
3. Reed Hundt to Present KnightComm Report at FTC Workshop on Future of Journalism

Adam Thierer

Adam Thierer’s most recent op-ed (“Thinking about the Future of Informed Communities and Journalism”) in his Technologies of Freedom column on Forbes.com is worthy of note– and not just because it mentions the work of the Knight Commission and the related series of eight white papers published by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program. Adam, who is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, authored one of these white papers, Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action, which was released earlier this year.

Incivility and outrage seem to be the fashion for a lot of public discourse these days. As we prepare to enter an important election year, Adam’s essay is especially notable, for two reasons. First, he brings a thoughtful approach to the big questions addressed by the Knight Commission, which are all the more significant as the country prepares for an election of major importance.

• Do we, as citizens, have access to the right sort of information to make informed decisions for our communities and the broader public sphere? And,
• Do we, individually and collectively, have the knowledge, skills and capacity to take action based on that information–action that benefits individuals, families, communities and the state of our deliberative democracy?

Second, his essay reflects the open-minded, democratic spirit and values that the bipartisan group of commissioners — 15 men and women from diverse personal, professional and political backgrounds — adopted as they went about investigating these questions. He recognizes that, even though people may differ on the best policies for promoting freedom and prosperity in the Information Age, the big questions are worth asking and discussing and we all benefit from the exploration and experimentation taking place. It’s the same sentiment that Adam brought to his white paper when he wrote,

There is no one-size-fits-all, best approach to designing high-quality local online hubs. A thousand flowers are blooming in today’s information marketplace and that is a wonderful thing. The more experimentation, the better at this point. But we should not assume that a hub model that works well in one community will automatically work for another. …Our primary concern should be underserved communities.

It’s easy for those of us who live in areas of relative affluence and information abundance, with a staggering array of information and communication services literally at our fingertips, to forget that there are still millions of Americans who do not have access to the technologies of freedom, or the resources to learn how to use them effectively for personal, commercial or civic benefit. Much of our civic discourse is moving to digital platforms, noisy spaces with new rules of engagement. We cannot sustain a healthy democracy with citizens who are forced into second-class status by an information divide. Adam is correct that the key to creating an informed, engaged citizenry in this new environment is maximizing the opportunities for information to flow and for people to acquire the skills they need to use it effectively.  The white papers offer a selection of specific steps and policies for a path toward a brighter future of informed communities and journalism.

Related posts:

1. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities
2. Mike Fancher: Contemplating the Future of Local Journalism
3. Measuring Informed Communities at the Free Press Summit

Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide is a guide for adopting civic innovation strategies to spur the development of news and information environments that address real community needs.  Civic leaders, elected officials, motivated citizens, community-based organizations and others can use this guide to understand how to integrate useful practices for assessing and building engaged, informed communities—communities with the civic capacity necessary to deal successfully with today’s many economic, social, environmental and political challenges. (Download PDF or Read Online)

*Watch related Roundtable Discussion*

Author Richard C. Harwood sets forth a set of assessment strategies that go beyond merely counting the information assets that exist in the community. While high-speed broadband, news websites, social media and local online hubs are important for expanding opportunities to participate in public life, in order for these technologies to be truly transformative communities need to create a receptive environment where citizens engage more fully with the spectrum of information and knowledge providers that contribute to the health and stability of a community: schools, businesses, libraries, nonprofits, other organizations and each other.

Harwood proposes a set of nine strategies, governed by four guiding principles, to help people in a community take effective action toward improving their information ecology. The paper also includes a checklist for getting started.

Among the key elements of his nine step plan are the following:

• Engage the community early on and focus on core community needs. Being in the community and hearing people talk about their community can yield valuable insights that lead to refocusing existing efforts, creating new types of content, developing new networks of partners, and building a more useful information infrastructure.

• Actively cultivate boundary-spanning organizations and groups.  Public and commercial media, community foundations, public libraries, and local United Ways are among the groups that bring people together across dividing lines, incubate new ideas and spin them off and reflect the aspirations and concerns of the community. These intermediary organizations should play an essential role in assessing and building healthy information environments.

• Tell the community’s story of change. Told well and over time, such stories can help a community create a “can-do narrative” about its ability to tackle change and invite people to step forward.

• Ensure enough entry points for people to engage. There must be sufficient “on-ramps” for people to participate in the information environment and community life. Technological on-ramps like high-speed broadband are important, but so are a variety of cultural and social access points.

Together, Harwood’s nine strategies and four guideposts will allow communities to focus on building information environments, engaging the community and taking action on what matters most.

This paper is the eighth paper in a series of white papers focused on implementing the 15 recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The white paper series is published by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Richard Harwood is the founder of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation.

Related posts:

1. Roundtable on Assessing Community Information Needs
2. Assessing Community Info Ecosystem and Needs in Southern Vermont
3. Updated: Measuring the Information Health of American Cities

On October 17, 2011, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released the final in a series of eight white papers aimed at implementing the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.  The paper—“Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide” by Richard C. Harwood—proposes four guideposts and nine strategies for communities to assess and build a healthy information environment. (Read it here)

The formal release took place during a high-level roundtable discussion among a select group of leaders, innovators, advocates and experts from the national, state and local levels on Monday, October 17 at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC. Following the presentation of the paper, these leaders and experts debated the best ways to incorporate the strategies at a time when citizens need to focus on re-building and re-engaging the community. Several strategies include creating authentic, credible steering committees to guide the work; mapping community concerns; mobilizing the community as a resource; cultivating boundary-spanning organizations; and telling the community’s story of change. Join the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #knightcomm.

Featured Speaker:

Richard C. Harwood is the founder of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation. For more than 20 years, Harwood has been dedicated to transforming public and political lives by supporting individuals, organizations and communities in their quest to create change.

Roundtable participants included:

• Joaquin Alvarado, Senior Vice President, Digital Innovation, American Public Media
• Kathy Brown, Senior Vice President, Public Policy Development and Corporate Responsibility, Verizon Communications
• David Crowley, President and Founder, Social Capital Inc.
• Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Principal Investigator, Center for Civic Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Bill Densmore, Principal, Densmore Associates, and Director and Editor, Media Giraffe Project
• Nathan Dietz, Associate Director of Research and Evaluation, Office of Strategy and Special Initiatives, Corporation for National and Community Service
• Mike Fandy, Vice President, Learning & Conferencing, United Way Worldwide
• Christopher Gates, Executive Director, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement
• Joe Goldman, Director, Omidyar Network
• Robert Hackett, President, The Corella & Bertram F. Bonner Foundation
• Darell Hammond, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, KaBOOM! Inc.
• John Horrigan, Vice President of Policy Research, TechNet
• Jacquie Jones, Executive Director, National Black Programming Coalition
• Bob Levey, Freelance Consultant, Journalist, Speaker, Fundraising Executive
• Caroline Little, President and Chief Executive Officer, Newspaper Association of America
• Lynn Luckow, President and Chief Executive Officer, Craigslist Foundation
• Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Founder and President, AmericaSpeaks
• Charles Meyer, Executive Director, National Center for Media Engagement
• Amy Mitchell, Deputy Director, Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism
• Forrest Moore, Executive Vice President, America’s Promise Alliance
• Mayur Patel, Vice President of Strategy and Assessment, Knight Foundation
• Wendy Puriefoy, President, Public Education Network
• Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism
• Paul Schmitz, President and Chief Executive Officer, Public Allies, Inc.
• Marsha Semmel, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Institute for Museum and Library Services
• David Smith, Executive Director, National Conference on Citizenship
• Nancy Tate, Executive Director, League of Women Voters
• Mary Thomas, Executive Vice President, The Spartanburg County Foundation
• Vivian Vahlberg, President, Vahlberg & Associates
• Lisa Flick Wilson, Director of Strategic Partnerships, The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation
  

Moderator: Charlie Firestone, Executive Director, Communications and Society Program, The Aspen Institute

Agenda: The roundtable began with a presentation by Richard Harwood, followed by a roundtable discussion with key policymakers and leaders about the recommendations and how they may best be implemented.

###

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy was a blue ribbon panel of seventeen media, policy and community leaders that met in 2008 and 2009. Its purpose was to assess the information needs of communities, and recommend measures to help Americans better meet those needs. Its Report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, was the first major commission on media since the Hutchins Commission in the 1940’s and the Kerner and Carnegie Commissions of the 1960’s.

The Commission’s aims were to maximize the availability and flow of credible local information; to enhance access and capacity to use the new tools of knowledge and exchange; and to encourage people to engage with information and each other within their geographic communities. Among its 15 recommendations the Commission argues for universal broadband, open networks, transparent government, a media and digitally literate populace, vibrant local journalism, public media reform, and more local public engagement.

The Knight Commission is a project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

About The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation: Founded by Richard C. Harwood over twenty years ago in reaction to the cynicism and distrust that permeates much of politics and public life, The Harwood Institute (harwoodonline.org) is today a leading change organization, recognized nationally for a unique approach to breaking down barriers and empowering people to make progress in improving their communities. Harwood has worked with thousands of individuals, guiding them to make more intentional choices which will lead to fundamental change and a different way of thinking, living and doing business in this country.

Related posts:

1. Chicago Roundtable to Launch New Report on Reviving Civic Communication
2. Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide
3. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs

Assessing Public Participation in an Open Government Era, co-authored by AmericaSpeaks’ Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Joe Goldman and David Stern on behalf of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, draws on the authors’ extensive knowledge of what constitutes high quality public participation.  Lukensmeyer, Goldman and Stern present a comprehensive review of federal agency open government plans that have been proposed in response to President Obama’s Open Government Directive, and compare those programs to objective measures of what they suggest “good public participation” should look like.

The report’s eight findings include the following:

• Finding One: The Open Government Initiative and most federal agency plans have failed to offer standards for what constitutes high-quality public participation. While some agencies do include commitments to establish more robust measurements for participation, few plans include indicators that would measure meaningful progress toward becoming more participatory.

  Finding Two: The public engagement activities described in open government plans display an admirable willingness to experiment with new tools and techniques to in- volve citizens with their decision-making processes. Nonetheless, even greater experi- mentation will be required to enable regular, meaningful public input opportunities.
  
  Finding Three: While some agency plans describe how staff will respond to the public and include its input, most plans do not provide enough information to assess whether the public’s input will be incorporated into plans, programs, or decisions.

  Finding Four: Open government plans include participatory activities on a wide vari- ety of topics and programs. Little is included in most plans, however, to ensure that agencies will continue to solicit public input on those issues that the public cares most about. Few clear examples exist of efforts to incorporate participatory activities throughout the agency.

  Finding Five: Agencies appear to be moderately increasing the number of people who participate in public engagement initiatives. However, few plans include strate- gies to increase the diversity of those who participate.

  Finding Six: Open government plans provide few descriptions of programs that educate the public regarding policy issues under consideration, although this may simply reflect a lack of detail in the plans themselves.

  Finding Seven: Agencies use a variety of online and face-to-face forums. However, deliberative processes, in which citizens learn, express points of view, and have a chance to find common ground, are rarely incorporated.

  Finding Eight: Many agencies are taking important initial steps to embed a culture of participation into their organizations, including recognition, training, and the cre- ation of new units and positions. These efforts should be celebrated, replicated, and expanded.

Read the full report here.

The Sunlight Foundation, which provides an amazing array of resources related to government transparency at the federal, state and local level, offers advice for the Obama Administration as it prepares to release a National Action Plan on government transparency as part of the international Open Government Partnership. Read John Wonderlich’s blog post today on what the U.S. plan should include as it seeks to push “the country beyond current practice” and move toward “the active engagement of citizens and civil society.”

Related posts:

1. Major Milestone Reached in Open Government Initiative
2. Knight Foundation to Support Open Government Groups
3. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs

Leading-edge thinkers in both fields have come together recently in several different venues to explore answers to this question. The early feedback on these discussions is that this is a worthwhile topic to discuss at a critical time for both institutions.

In April, Journalism That Matters convened a ground-breaking “Beyond Books” conversation among journalists and librarians at MIT’s Center for Civic Media. JTM’s Biblionews website is full of ideas for connections to explore, including information on pilot projects that are underway since the gathering at MIT. There is also an inspiring 7-minute video of the conference produced by the very talented Jacob Caggiano that describes what journalists and librarians can do together.

What’s possible when librarians and journalists meet? a video report from the “Beyond Books” event at MIT hosted by journalismthatmatters.org

Bill Densmore and Mike Fancher, who along with Peggy Holman are key leaders directing JTM’s fantastic work on innovating journalism at the local level, brought the discussion to the annual conference of the American Library Association, held in late June in New Orleans.

Mike presented his newly released white paper, Re-imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World, as part of a panel discussion on effective partnerships between libraries and journalists that create opportunities for local news and civic engagement. He also outlined how libraries are addressed in several of the other white papers on implementing the broad set of recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, a theme we will explore in future blog posts.  Mike was joined on the panel by Nancy Kranich, founder and leader of ALA’s Center for Public Life and ALA’s civic engagement membership initiative, and Annie Anderson, who heads the LibrariUS initiative at American Public Media. (Due to travel delays, Bill did not make it to New Orleans for the panel.) The two-hour session on “Competing in the Information Marketplace II: Strategic PR partnerships — Journalists and Libraries,” was hosted by the Library Leadership and Management Association.

Mike’s key takeaways from the ALA discussion, summarized on the Biblionews website, include ideas that resonate with the Knight Commission’s Informing Communties report:

Librarians see civic engagement as an important element in what they do and how they make their case for public support. Civic engagement helps democracy, but it also has economic benefits to communities.

Digital literacy is a core competency of libraries. It needs to be actively advanced and promoted.

Institutional inertia could be a barrier in some library systems. Students are being trained for a new library culture, but the needed cultural change may come slowly in some systems. (This is a great topic to explore for libraries and journalism.)

People are excited about early results from LibrariUS, a partnership among the American Public Media Public, the ALA and its Public Library Association division. Attendees offered several ideas and examples for extending it.

Several people spoke glowing about their experience at the Biblionews conference at MIT in April. Two items stood out: 1) the JTM methodology for bringing together people from different backgrounds and disciplines; 2) the use of information technology to capture the experience immediately and permanently. The librarians were particularly interested in the second item.

The library community is ready to move ahead; bringing journalists along may be a tougher challenge. (That’s my view, not the librarians’.)

Higher education needs to be a partner.

Among ideas raised by others in attendance were the possibility of libraries helping to map local news and information ecosystems and new ways to extend the Public Insight Network’s partnership with the ALA and its Public Library Association Division (described in the JTM video).

Related posts:

1. Finding a new model for news reporting
2. Libraries+Local News=Civic Engagement
3. Going on the record: Civic engagement is for journalists, too!

The authors note:

“Much has changed in media and communications technologies over the past fifty years. Today we face the dual problems of an increasing gap in access to these technologies between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and fragmentation of the once-common set of facts that Americans shared through similar experiences with the media. This white paper lays out four major challenges that the current era poses and proposes ways to meet these challenges and boost civic participation.”

The four challenges explored in this paper include keeping newspapers alive until they are well, universal access and adequate spectrum, providing quality information to citizens in communities, and creating a vibrant public square.

Related posts:

1. Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action
2. Creating Online, Public Accountability for Government
3. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Here is a sampling of some of the award-winning projects, as described in the Knight Foundation’s news release:

The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce: To experiment with a new funding model for local journalism, The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce will bring together 10 to 15 community leaders and media innovators in Detroit and two other cities to provide $1,000 microgrants to innovative journalism and civic media projects. By encouraging pilot projects, prototypes, events and social entrepreneurial ventures, the News Taskforce will encourage a wide swathe of the community to experiment with creative solutions to their information needs.

Associated Press’ Overview Project: Overview is a tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or freedom of information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read. There are good tools for searching within large document sets for names and key words, but that doesn’t help find stories journalists are not looking for. Overview will display relationships among topics, people, places and dates to help journalists to answer the question, “What’s in there?” The goal is an interactive system where computers do the visualization, while a human guides the exploration – plus documentation and training to make this capability available to anyone who needs it.

Adaptive Path’s iWitness Project: To bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media, iWitness will create a web-based tool that aggregates user-generated content from social media during big news events. Whether a parade or protest, election or earthquake, iWitness will display photos, videos and messages in an easy-to-browse interface. Created by a premier web design firm, iWitness will make it easier to cross-reference first-person accounts with journalistic reporting, opening up new avenues for storytelling, fact-checking and connecting people to events in their communities.

Media and Place Production’s Zeega Project: To help tell rich multimedia stories, Zeega will improve its open-source HTML5 platform for creating collaborative and interactive documentaries. By using Zeega, anyone can create immersive, participatory multimedia projects that seamlessly combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio and maps from across the Web. With this grant, Zeega will expand their experimental prototype to work on Web, tablet and mobile devices and pilot a series of collaborative and interactive documentary projects with news organizations, journalists and communities across the globe.

 The Miller Center Foundation’s The State Decoded: The State Decoded will be a platform that displays state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen. While many state codes are already online, they lack context and clarity. With an improved layout, embeddable definitions of legal terms, Google News and Twitter integration, and an open API for state codes, this project aims to make important laws the centerpiece of media coverage.

Matthew Ingram writes about the ”data as journalism” theme running through many of this year’s winners in, “When big data meets journalism” at GigaOm.

Learn more about all of this year’s winners here.

Related posts:

1. New Round of Knight Community Information Challenge Now Open
2. Re-imagining News & Community in Pacific Northwest
3. Progress Announced on Key Recommendations of “Information Needs of Communities” Report

Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans, Blair Levin, Former Executive Director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative of the Federal Communications Commission and currently Communications and Society Fellow at the Aspen Institute. The paper analyzes how to diminish second-class digital citizenship by assuring access by all to broadband services. Universal Broadband author Blair Levin rigorously and repeatedly engaged the broadband community and other, more general audiences from Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas, Nevada.  His in-person debates were reported in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and in the PBS space.

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action

Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

Re-

Assessing Local Information Needs: A Practical Guide

Related posts:

1. Aspen Institute to Advance Recommendations of the Knight Commission
2. Groups Advancing Knight Commission Recommendations Submit Comments to FCC’s Future of Media Inquiry
3. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities

The formal release will take place during a high-level roundtable discussion among a select group of leaders, innovators, advocates and critics from the national, state and local levels on Friday, June 10, from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. (CST) at The Chicago Club (81 E. Van Buren, Chicago, IL 60605). Following the presentation of the paper, these leaders and experts will debate the best ways to implement the recommendations at a time when citizens are demanding a more participatory society, and as systems for exchanging news and information undergo significant change.

Peter Levine

Featured Speaker:

Peter Levine is director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, and research director of Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.

Roundtable participants include:

Lisa Bardwell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Earth Force Incorporated
Susan Benton, President and Chief Executive Officer, Urban Libraries Council
Brian Brady, Executive Director, Mikva Challenge
Lisa Morrison Butler, Executive Director, City Year Chicago
An-Me Chung, Associate Director of Education, MacArthur Foundation
Thom Clark, President, Community Media Workshop
Steven Clift, Founder and Executive Director, E-Democracy.org
David Crowley, President and Founder, Social Capital Inc.
Paula Ellis, Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Barbara Ferman, Executive Director, University Community Collaborative of Philadelphia
Lew Friedland, Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin
Christopher Gates, Executive Director, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement
Robert Hackett, President, The Corella & Bertram F. Bonner Foundation
Don Heider, Dean, School of Communication, Loyola University Chicago
Joseph Hoereth, Director, Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement, University of Illinois at Chicago
Ngoan Le, Vice President of Programs, The Chicago Community Trust
Torey Malatia, President and Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Media
Mabel McKinney-Browning, Director, American Bar Association Division for Public Education
Heather Peeler, Chief Strategy Officer, Corporation for National and Community Service
John Sirek, Director, Civics Program, Robert R. McCormick Foundation
Scott Warren, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Generation Citizen
Lauren Young, Program Director, The Spencer Foundation
Constance Yowell, Director of Education, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Moderator: Charlie Firestone, Executive Director, Communications and Society Program, The Aspen Institute

*Please note that space is limited to members of the press who RSVP. Please RSVP to erin.silliman@aspeninstitute.org or 202.841.4968.

Related posts:

1. Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication
2. Roundtable on Assessing Community Information Needs
3. Roundtable on Digital and Media Literacy

Cindy Cotte Griffiths (editor) and Brad Rourke (founder and publisher) of Rockville Central

by Brad Rourke

When we announced in late February that we were moving our successful local blog, Rockville Central, entirely to our Facebook page and that we would no longer be updating our standalone web site, a number of readers were surprised and dismayed. And we ourselves were surprised when this move gained some national attention as people who think about journalism weighed in on whether Facebook was “the future of news” and whether our move was a harbinger of things to come. (See here for a wrap-up of some of the key reactions.)

Certainly, our move to Facebook may well provide an object lesson to those running news sites, especially local ones. However, we think there is a more interesting story embedded in our move to Facebook. It has less to do with journalism, and more to do with our role in the community. Rockville Central was, from the beginning, was not meant to be a news site but a community hub — not unlike the ones called for in the Knight Commission report and further outlined by Adam Thierer.

In our view, the question to ask about our move to Facebook is not, “Can a news site succeed on Facebook,” but instead: “Is Facebook a good place for a community hub?”

News Or Community

Over Memorial Day weekend in 2007, there was a piece in the Washington Post about local blogs around town. “Why isn’t there one for Rockville, Maryland?” I thought. I’d lived in Rockville, the county seat of Montgomery County, just outside of DC, for about five years and was active in the community. I had been blogging since 1996 on various subjects. So I spent the weekend setting up Rockville Central and asked some friends if they would be interested in joining me. Cindy Cotte Griffiths said yes because she had also read the article and wanted to start a site. Together we have been blogging locally ever since. Our vision from the beginning was to create a vibrant community space where people could talk about important issues facing Rockville.

Through the next few years, we grew. Traffic rose steadily. Rockville Central became one of the most-read local blogs in Maryland and was a fixture on the local political scene. We convened a local candidate forum in the most recent city elections. We were a part of TBD.com’s community network of blogs. We began to accept a modest amount of local advertising.

As we grew, and became known for providing news, this posed something of a dilemma for us. Journalism was not our point. The minor bits of news we provided were really the substance for people to engage around. While our chief goal was to draw new people into public life and to provide a civil forum for people to talk about local issues, we knew that such a site would have to have a certain amount of news. But, the most important element would not be the content but the qualities and characteristics of the space.

Throughout the growth of Rockville Central, as we watched traffic numbers climb modestly, the metrics we followed most avidly had more to do with interaction and engagement. How many people were commenting? How often? What kinds of things were they saying? Were they engaging with one another or just expressing their opinions? Were other local sites springing up to add their voices? Were people beginning to take action in the “real world” as a result of things that took place online? Some of these can be counted, but some (the ones we hold most important) emerge through anecdote and story. And we continued to see enough such stories to make us believe that we were on the right track.

The Move

When we decided to shift from a standalone web site to Facebook only, there was no single thing that drove it. In one of our periodic strategy conversations, Cindy and I asked ourselves, “Why do we need a web site? Why not go to where we know the conversations are happening, instead of trying to convince people to leave Facebook and visit us?”

And just like that, we thought we had a good idea on our hands.

There was a confluence of factors that suggested such a move might make sense for us:

• 35% of our referred traffic was from Facebook (the only larger referrer was Google);
• We personally knew that our key commenters were very active on Facebook;
• We had long been struggling with what to do about the fact that the conversations and interactions around Rockville Central were fragmented — some on Facebook, some on the blog (and, to a far lesser extent, some on Twitter);
• On February 10, Facebook began rolling out significant changes in the capabilities that Page admins had — suddenly it was much easier to stay plugged into Facebook.

But, the most important factor is one that everyone is already well aware of. Facebook has essentially won the social race and day by day it is becoming the chief social platform for user after user.

We realized that if we took to heart our mission being a community hub — a space that was devoted to a certain kind of interaction — then the fact that we had a separate online edifice was beside the point. Since we like to experiment, we decided to experiment with abandoning our website (actually, just making it static, essentially freezing it in time). We decided to take the conversation to the people.

Complaints and Praise

Media coverage notwithstanding, our February 23 announcement of our move generated a fair amount of reaction among the community of Rockville Central readers. The post where we revealed the news received over 60 comments which for us is a large number. As with many issues, the negative voices were louder than positive ones.

Many commenters said we had lost them — chiefly due to perceived failings on Facebook’s part. In fact, in some ways the comment trail reads like a referendum on Facebook’s policies. “Facebook is the garbage dump of the Internet” wrote one commenter. “I am not a member of Facebook and I do not have any intention of becoming one,” wrote another.

We kept the settings on our Facebook page at their maximally public, meaning that anyone (even someone who does not have a Facebook account) can read it fully. In order to comment on an article, a reader has to be logged into Facebook, but our judgment was that this is no different than our then-current commenting requirement. In order to post a comment, commenters must furnish us with a real full name and email.

Our sense was that for the majority of potential audience members, they have already made their decision when it comes to Facebook and they have decided they are OK with the embedded privacy trade offs.

We expected some negative critiques of our move and they did not faze us. Meanwhile, the positive views were less vocal but just as important. The announcement article (at last count) had 89 “likes” which is also a record for our small site. The number of “likes” of our Facebook page immediately began to climb by 20 and more on a daily basis. Even more encouraging, though, was that the kind of interactions beginning to happen on Facebook were exactly the ones we hoped for. People began posting their own content (questions, articles, and links) on our page, and we started seeing names we had not seen before.

Costs, Benefits

Public reaction aside, we were well aware of what we would be giving up substantively with a move to Facebook. By working solely off of a third-party platform, we would give up our deep statistics package, our ability to keep control over the particulars of our site, our ability to run our own ads, and other aspects of autonomy.

Our plan was to use the Notes application in Facebook to publish what used to be stories. We anticipate that Notes will continue to become more robust but, for now, it cannot be searched and cannot be tagged and categorized. So we were in essence losing the ability to archive and serve as institutional memory. That is a trade off, but we decided to consciously step away from that in favor of more real-time interaction.

We were also very clear about what we thought we might gain in return for giving up all that a standalone site can offer. It was simple: We were after better interactions between readers, more sharing of our content in a natural way, more connections between people’s online and offline worlds. We thought focusing on our Facebook page would make it easier for people to post minor items on our Wall instead of feeling they had to create a story and pitch it to us.

We also made a conscious decision to do less “reporting” and more sharing and Facebook makes this easier. We have never seen ourselves as real journalists, though we have come to be seen as a trusted news source. We don’t have the same set of journalistic drivers that professionals do. We don’t care about scoops, and don’t see competition between Rockville Central and any other news site. We are not trying to make any money.

We thought better use of our Facebook page would free us up to share other people’s content more — driving home our noncompetitive standpoint.

Indeed, many articles framed our move as the result of competition. AOL’s Patch had recently set up shop in Rockville and the local newspaper, the Gazette (owned by the Washington Post), had begun to ramp up some of its Web initiatives. Nieman Lab’s story carried this lede: “Say you run a community news site. In your spare time. And Patch has moved into your neighborhood. How do you, with limited resources but a desire to keep contributing to your community, stay competitive?”

It’s easy to see why the “competition” frame would come into play. After all, we look like a news site, and those competitors are news sites. But, looking at Rockville Central as a community hub, the increased journalistic coverage of Rockville and its surrounding area made possible our decision to move to Facebook. We felt Rockville was adequately covered and we could focus on our raison d’etre, engagement. We see our move as enabling increased interaction in an environment where the friction is low and the norms are already set.

Results So Far

We have only been publishing on Facebook for a short time. It is hard to make any definitive statements about our results. However, it is fair to say that the initial response is much more encouraging than we expected. We’ve just about doubled the number of people who “like” Rockville Central. Many of the people who complained bitterly when we announced the move and implied that we had lost them as readers, are now commenting in the new space.

Better still, because of the way Facebook operates, people are having conversations around Rockville Central content without ever having to come to the page itself. So, the reach of these conversations has extended. As more people join in, we hope that this will continue to snowball.

Most important, we are seeing new names commenting that we had never known before. Our hope that we would by and large gain new voices more than we would lose old voices appears to be holding true.

Our move is not one that would be suitable for many. We have no desire to generate revenue (in fact, we gave back some minor amount of advertising revenue when we made the announcement, as there were a couple of ongoing ad contracts). We have no need to survive as an institution or organization — and so we don’t have a need to brand ourselves. So an existing news organization that needs to make a living is probably not going to follow us right away.

However, that could change. There may be ways for publishers to create business models that exist within Facebook. (As my partner, Cindy Cotte Griffiths, told a BussinessWire blogger recently: “We’ve already heard of a local newspaper which has informed its staff that it will be shifting entirely to Facebook. However, sites which intend to take advantage of the projected increases in local online advertising probably would not be in a position to shift entirely to Facebook, since Facebook does not offer a revenue sharing arrangement.”)

Here’s where we see our own biggest challenge moving ahead. It’s the same one we have always had, but we think we are in a position to make progress on it: We are trying to increase the amount of offline civic activity that occurs as a result of online interactions. That goes along with our mission of civic engagement. Just having readers is nice, but it does not improve public life in our community. But as people begin to take their conversations from their online worlds to their day-to-day worlds, we hope that we can begin to see progress.

Brad Rourke is founder of Rockville Central and president of the Mannakee Circle Group, a civic engagement consultancy, located in Rockville, Maryland.

Related posts:

1. Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action
2. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs
3. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs

The Toolkit derives from the checklist appearing in Appendix I of Informing Communities, and has been developed under the leadership of Mayur Patel of the Knight Foundation in partnership with the Monitor Institute and the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The unveiling of the Community Information Toolkit is a major breakthrough in the implementation of the recommendations of the Knight Commission, as it provides a competent means to assess a community based on one of the Commission’s core premises–that information is as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets and good schools. Of course, this is only Version 1.0, and the Knight Foundation is encouraging communities to share their experiences to help innovate a future version 2.0. To begin, go to www.infotoolkit.org. Or you can download the toolkit as a PDF here.

Mayur Patel introduces the Community Information Toolkit at the Media Learning Seminar:

Community Information Toolkit from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, also discusses it:

Lee Rainie, of Pew, on Community Information Toolkit from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. Free Webinar: Knight Foundation’s New Community Information Toolkit
2. Assessing the Flow of Local News and Information
3. Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide