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

As the Harrington School’s founding director, Hobbs says her goal is to create “a school of national distinction” that emphasizes digital and media literacy, a global perspective on media and communication, and innovative teaching and learning. The school brings together previously separate programs in communication, journalism, public relations, and film/media with writing and rhetoric and library and information studies.

The Providence Journal published an op-ed by Hobbs the day before she formally assumed her new position, (“Folks need help with information overload,” December 31, 2011 print edition, B7; searchable in ProJo’s eEdition Back Issues). The article raises several key issues relative to digital media and education that suggest the need to think differently, and more broadly, about the interplay of technical, analytical and social skills that are at the core of digital literacy. Citing the findings of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, Hobbs makes a strong case for prioritizing investments in community-based programs and educational curricula that teach the digital and media literacy skills required to thrive in the digital age.

“The Internet is quickly becoming the critical gateway for accessing jobs, education, healthcare, government services and civic participation, yet a disturbing number of Americans lack broadband access or the basic skills in how to use it,” noted Hobbs. “But digital literacy is not as simple as giving people access to a broadband hookup. As the nonpartisan Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy found, digital literacy is actually a constellation of life skills that are necessary for full participation in our media-saturated, information-rich society.”

What are these life skills that are encompassed by digital literacy? They include the abilities to access, analyze and evaluate, create, reflect and act. In her ProJo op-ed, Hobbs lists the following capabilities:

• the ability to analyze messages in a variety of forms, including identification of the author, purpose and point of view of the message;
• the ability to evaluate the quality and credibility of content in a message (e.g., distinguishing between “a marketing ploy for nutritional supplements and solid information based on scientific evidence” or quality content and junk journalism);
• the knowledge of and ability to use powerful search strategies;
• the development of multimedia creation skills;
• the ability to use the Internet to connect with others with shared interests;the ability to reflect on one’s own online conduct and one’s online social responsibilities;
• the ability to use the power of communication as a tool for advocacy;
• an understanding of copyright;
• the ability to apply social responsibility and ethical principles to communication behavior;
• the ability to work collaboratively to solve problems in the civic sphere, which will require many of the other capabilities listed above.

Hobbs envisions a “community education movement” that is embraced by all stakeholders in the community:

What is needed now is a clear and compelling vision of the specific types of instructional practices that can best support the development of these new competencies among all Americans. We need programs to help bring these new forms of learning to educators at all levels. We all have skin in the game when it comes to the vitality of our communities, which is why digital and media literacy needs to be a community education movement, embraced by all stakeholders.

To learn more about the essential competencies of digital and media literacy, and steps that communities can take to strengthen digital citizenship and make digital and media education part of mainstream education in the United States, see Hobbs’ white paper, Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, published by The Aspen Institute Communication and Society Program.

Related posts:

1. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action
2. It’s Time for a National Commitment to Digital Literacy
3. Media Literacy Starts with Everyone, Report Says

The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri is seeking applications for its 2012-2013 class of Reynolds fellows. RJI is seeking proposals for eight-month fellowships that would leverage the university’s technology, research and experimentation to advance innovative ideas in journalism. Thye application deadline is January 15, 2012. More information on the Reynolds Fellowship can be found here on RJI’s website.  Previous RJI fellows have included Spot.us founder David Cohn, NPR’s Matt Thompson, former Seattle Times executive editor Michael Fancher, Block by Block Community Journalism Summit co-founder Michele McLellan, and CircLabs partner and Media Giraffe Project director Bill Densmore.

Credit: meedanphotos on Flickr, CC by 2.0

The Nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism Innovation brings together two Harvard University programs with considerable expertise in all things journalism and digital media-related. This new fellowship will support one really smart and talented individual to work at Harvard University for the 2012-13 academic year “on a specific course of research or a specific project relating to journalism innovation.” The Nieman-Berkman fellow is a joint appointment and will be both a Nieman fellow and a Berkman fellow for the academic year. Application deadline is February 15, 2012.

Related posts:

1. New Round of Knight Community Information Challenge Now Open
2. Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?
3. Technology & Innovation Roundtable: danah boyd by Kristie Wells

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.

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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

Barbara Cochran

Barbara Cochran, the author of “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive,” has a featured blog post on the Huffington Post front page today making the case for the continuation of modest federal funding for public media. The op-ed, “Why Federal Funds for Public Broadcasting is the Right Decision,” is especially timely as today marks the start of new leadership at NPR with Gary Knell taking the helm of the national news organization after a successful tenure at Sesame Workshop.

By any objective measure, under Knell’s leadership Sesame Workshop was remarkable successful in becoming more local, more inclusive and more interactive. Sesame Workshop and its signature program, Sesame Street, expanded to deliver locally, culturally relevant educational programming to children in over 20 countries around the world. Sesame Street’s diverse characters and storylines have been praised for a strong ethic of inclusion, with ethnic, gender, disability and economic diversity and equity dealt with in straightforward, sensitive and nonthreatening ways. In digital media, Sesame Workshop is a leader in developing games and educational content that take advantage of the array of digital technologies and mobile platforms that are available.

More local, more inclusive, more mobile — now it’s time to see if Gary Knell can do for Main Street what he did on Sesame Street. I wish him well.

Note: NPR’s new CEO Gary Knell is hosting a Twitter chat today, December 1, at 3:00 p.m. ET to respond to listener questions. You may tweet your questions to @NPRgaryknell with #nprCEO.

Related posts:

1. Cochran: Local Public Broadcasters Shouldn’t Lose Funding Because of Problems at NPR
2. (De)funding Public Broadcasting in New Jersey
3. FCC Announces 2nd Future of Media Workshop

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

The New York Times has an article on today’s announcement with more details here.

The event will be live streamed at 10:00 Eastern (link here).

Related posts:

1. Digital Literacy Skills Essential to Closing Broadband Gap
2. One Economy’s National Digital Literacy Initiative
3. Personal Stories of Broadband Highlight Digital Inclusion Summit

The fruits of this ongoing conversation were on display in Phoenix, Arizona this week, where a broad range of stakeholders representing journalism, business, academia, government, nonprofits, philanthropy and the public gathered to discuss the recommendations in the Federal Communications Commission’s staff-level report, Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age, and to announce consensus and progress on key recommendations in the FCC report.

The FCC report, released in June 2011, examines the current state of the media landscape and found that, while new technologies and other innovations have created an expansive and rich media environment, there are important gaps in the areas of local accountability reporting and universal access to broadband opportunities that must be addressed.

Monday’s field event at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication provided a platform for showcasing a wide range of sensible policies and innovative new initiatives designed to strengthen news and information gathering that meets the needs of citizens, communities and democracy. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Commissioner Michael Copps participated in the event. Their remarks and the statements of other participants are available here.

Highlights of the event announced by the FCC include:

Consensus on basic framework for broadcaster transparency:

• Jonathan Blake, representing six major local television station groups, said that while some details remain to be worked out, in general the FCC report’s recommendations on disclosure and transparency “will serve the public interest.”
• Coriel Wright of Free Press said that the disclosure recommendations are “both important and necessary.”

Journalism School initiative:

• Chris Callahan, dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University announced a new initiative from the nation’s leading journalism schools, funded by the Knight Foundation, to move forward on recommendations of the Report. Journalism schools will hold events and produce detailed research papers to advance various recommendations.

Targeting federal ad spending at local media:

• Jason Klein, President and CEO, Newspaper National Network representing more than 9,000 print and online publications, expressed support for a proposal made by local television stations that existing federal advertising spending be targeted a local media, saying, “The federal government spends advertising dollars for necessary public purposes, and can better obtain value by shifting some ad spending to local media. It’s a smart strategy on a number of levels…and a development that should be encouraged.”

• Representatives from 34 local online news organizations in a letter presented at the event said, “[G]overnment spending on local online news enterprises could be, in a relative sense, far more beneficial than legacy spends. Even modest advertising revenue will permit us to expand news coverage, create new journalism jobs and better serve our local communities.”

The Knight Foundation announced other initiatives it will fund to advance the recommendations in the FCC report, including:

• A Knight-funded effort that will support the FCC report’s author Steven Waldman to study emerging media issues and explore implementation strategies for the report’s recommendations as a visiting senior media policy scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
• A Knight Foundation grant to encourage debate and action around the report’s major recommendations, through a series of events and research papers hosted by at least 10 leading universities. The series is in partnership with Carnegie Corporation of New York.
• Help in planning for the creation of “state C-Spans” in all 50 states – as recommended in the FCC’s report – through a meeting of the National Association of State Public Affairs Networks at the Newseum.
• A task force headed by the Council on Foundations to make recommendations to the IRS about potential tax changes to remove obstacles to non-profit media innovation.
• A partnership with GuideStar, Grantmakers for Film and Electronic Media (GFEM), Ford Foundation and the Foundation Center to develop reliable metrics on media philanthropy, so that people can know what’s funded in their communities and foundations can evaluate the field and level of funding.

Read the Knight Foundation press release here.

Michael Fancher identified additional roles that for-profit enterprises, nonprofits, universities, businesses, government, foundations and others can play in strengthening local journalism in his June 2011 white paper, Re-imagining Local Journalism, in which he identified five key areas of strategic importance for local journalism:

• For-profit media organizations must re-invent themselves to extend the role and values of journalism in interactive ways.
• Not-for-profit and non-traditional media must be important sources of local journalism.
• Higher education, community and non-profit institutions can be hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.
• Greater urgency must be placed on relevance, research and revenues to support local journalism.
• Government at all levels should support policies that create an environment for sustainable, quality local journalism.

As the Knight Commission report notes, “The bottom line for local communities is that people need relevant and credible information to be free and self-governing.” The participants in the Arizona field event recognize this essential fact and are working to make it happen.

Related posts:

1. 2011 Knight News Challenge Winners Announced
2. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities
3. How Will Comcast Ruling Affect the Information Health of Communities?

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

A Tipping Point for Journalism

by Michael Fancher

The long-awaited Federal Communications Commission report on the state of America’s news media landed with a big thud, sort of like the Sunday newspaper of old hitting your front porch.

Initial reactions to the recent FCC report have uniformly praised its exhaustive diagnosis of the problems facing local news reporting. But there also has been disappointment that the report didn’t offer remedies.

Can that really be a surprise?

American journalism is at a tipping point. The Internet has disrupted the business model that underwrote local news for more than 100 years. The Great Recession made matters worse, resulting in local newspaper and television newsrooms dramatically cutting staffs and other news resources. Another economic shock would hit the media like the tornado that devastated Joplin. Little would be left that we could recognize as local news coverage. If remedies to this were obvious, they would be working by now.

So, I sympathize with the FCC working group that produced the report, “Information Needs of Communities.” I was on the writing team for the 2009 Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, which was an impetus for the FCC work. The Knight Commission also offered no easy answers for local news, but it did make a counter-intuitive assertion:

Journalistic institutions do not need saving; they need creating.

click here to continue reading.

Related posts:

1. Mike Fancher: Contemplating the Future of Local Journalism
2. Of the Press: Models for Transforming American Journalism
3. Time to Rethink Education? Think Journalism

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!