Model 3. Community News and Commentary
Model 3.
Community News and Commentary
Efforts to further expand the local community hub concept to include local blogs or local media will be even more controversial if the hubs are government-owned and subsidized. Yet, the final sentence of Recommendation 15 from the Informing Communities report suggests that the contributors believed such a move might be necessary. “Where private initiative is not creating community online hubs, a locally trusted anchor institution might undertake such a project with the assistance of government or foundation funding, or support from those who also support public media,” the report states. Of course, all the same concerns and caveats discussed above regarding Model 2 apply here as well for Model 3. Government’s role in assisting more expansive hubs will likely need to be more limited and targeted for a variety of reasons.
Moreover, as was the case with community forums and listservs discussed above, other private community online hubs might already offer these services, meaning there is less need for the local government to do so. Consider the situation in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a community of roughly 250,000 people. The privately-owned FortWayne.com web portal is a project of two competing local newspapers, a local broadcast station, the local Chamber of Commerce, the local Convention and Visitors Bureau, and two local sports teams. It provides a great deal of local news and information. The government of Fort Wayne also has its own local portal (http://CityofFortWayne.org), but it focuses on the core Model 1 functions described above. The two Fort Wayne sites complement each other very nicely and serve as an example of how many communities will likely have at least two major portals—one public, one private or community-run—in the future.
Instead of attempting to create new media portals on their own, a more practical and cost-effective strategy would be for local governments to work with foundations and other organizations to provide a small amount of seed money and basic informational inputs to community portals and wikis. For example, in announcing the winners of its 2010 Knight News Challenge, the John S. and James
L. Knight Foundation awarded $350,000 to the Local Wiki project (http://localwiki.org), which aims to “create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities.” The Knight Foundation, in its June 16, 2010 news release, expressed its hope that this grant will help Local Wiki:
…create enhanced tools for local wikis, a new form of media that makes it easy for people to learn—and share—their own unique community knowledge. Members will be able to post articles about anything they like, edit others and upload photos and files. This grant will help create the specialized open-source software that makes the wiki possible and help communities develop, launch and sustain local wiki projects.
The Local Wiki team already has a model in place in Davis, California, called the Davis Wiki (http://daviswiki.org), which, as the name implies, is essentially Wikipedia for the city of Davis. It is an amazing compendium of useful, user-generated information about the community’s history, culture, government, schools, activities and much more. The Davis Wiki site offers almost everything the authors of the Informing Communities report hoped for when they drew up the seven key ingredients for any local online hub listed in Recommendation 15. As Davis Wiki co-founder Philip Neustrom told the Government Technology Digital Communities website:
We’re trying to create a new type of local media built around the idea of mass collaboration…. The way local blogs entered the mainstream a few years ago was a novel concept, and this is kind of the next logical step—having everyone in the community add to one cohesive resource about the community (Wilkinson, 2010).
The Davis Wiki’s page for the 2010 City Council elections offered a taste of how exciting this model can be. Thanks to extensive community collaboration, the page offered details about the candidates running for office, their campaign platforms, local ballot measures and statewide propositions, the vote breakdown for candidates and ballot measures, and community commentary on the races. Importantly, the page also linked out to local and regional “professional” media outlets that reported on the local races or endorsed candidates.
In a personal interview, Neustrom told me that partnering with local institutions (libraries, media outlets, universities) can really facilitate this process. However, when the sites are new and unproven, a certain initial distrust is possible, he says. It takes time for some local institutions to warm up to sites and begin using or assisting them. But Neustrom is confident that will improve over time as more and more hubs are developed and show proof of concept.
The other Knight News Challenge awardees are creating equally innovative programs and services for local communities. As part of its News Challenge, the Knight Foundation awarded $2.74 million to 12 grantees who will impact the future of news in local communities.
Other local portal models are developing rapidly. For example, the growing Gothamist empire might be a model for local community portals. The popular New York City portal includes community news, blogging, video, culture and nightlife, and much more. The “-ist” portal model is now also being used to offer comparable information services to nine other big cities in the United States (Austinist.com, Bostonist.com, Chicagoist.com, DCist.com, Houstonist.com, LAist.com, Seattlest.com, Phillyist.com, and SFist.com). Alltop.com also offers useful aggregation sites for local news and information for some cities. AOL’s “Patch” network (http://patch.com) of hyper-local portals is also generating a great deal of interest, and 500 more of local Patch sites are apparently on the way (Saba, 2010). Thus, while many of these portals serve only larger markets today, that could be changing.
Similarly, TBD.com is a portal that serves the Washington, D.C. area and features the best of local professional media alongside an extensive network of community blogs and citizen-journalist reports. According to Broadcasting & Cable, “TBD.com [has] about 50 staffers, including waves of one-man-band reporters, who will cover the market with a mix of original reporting and aggregated content” (Malone, 2010). TBD.com is funded by Allbritton Communications and is led by a team of experienced journalists. It faces stiff competition from existing portals such as DCist.com and WeLoveDC.com. And there are many other new forms of networked journalism and “community-powered reporting” taking place today. However, these case studies serve as prime examples of what the authors of the Informing Communities report were referring to when they spoke of networked journalism and noted that “a next stage is emerging with new forms of collaboration between full-time journalists and the general citizenry.” It should be noted that networked journalism is just one part—not the totality—of the sort of local online hub the Knight Commission report called for.
Again, the future is already upon us, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Currently, most of these portals only cover the largest U.S. cities, but they serve as potential models for mid-size and small city portals in other cities and communities in that they (a) include the basic ingredients of a community hub that the Knight Commission report was shooting for, and (b) offer a variety of useful templates that other communities could use as a starting point for their own efforts.
Of course, community wikis should not be thought of as a complete substitute for local government websites. Nor is it likely that these community wikis and portals could act as a complete substitute for “professional” local media outlets, which employ full-time staff to cover local affairs of importance. At their best, however, these emerging community hubs can help aggregate the best of government, civic, community, and private media websites. We should encourage continued experimentation of this sort to see what new models arise since, as Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson rightly note, “There is unlikely to be any single new economic model for supporting news reporting,” in our new mediasphere (Downie and Schudson, 2009).
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