A team of experienced journalists will lead management operations and programming for the new station. Beyond the valuable locally focused and produced news and information, the new broadcaster is expected to bring a variety of benefits to the local communities it serves.  Delaware First Media President Micheline Boudreau has said that the station will bring new jobs to the Dover area, provide another outlet for Delaware businesses to distribute messages through underwriting opportunities with WDDE, and export information from and about Delaware to a national audience in association with NPR.

The collaboration of the nonprofit and the two universities is an example of the type of initiatives needed to expand the availability of quality, locally produced journalism and enrich local  information ecosystems. In announcing the partnership, Delaware First Media said: “The cooperative effort responds to the recommendation of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Democracy to ‘increase the role of higher education, community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity.’”

Read more about the WDDE-FM 91.3 partnership here.

Related posts:

1. Corporation for Public Broadcasting Launches Local Journalism Initiative
2. Assessing Community Info Ecosystem and Needs in Southern Vermont
3. Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism

Adam Thierer

By Adam Thierer, “Thinking about the Future of Informed Communities and Journalism,” Forbes.com, December 4, 2011

When it comes to the state of our deliberative democracy, here’s one thing we do know: There’s never been a time when citizens have had more informational inputs at their disposal. But here’s something we don’t know: Whether citizens have access to the right sort of information — or know how to take action based upon that information — to make informed decisions about their communities and society. What steps can be taken to make sure they do?

That was the audacious mission undertaken by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, a blue-ribbon panel formed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the nonpartisan Aspen Institute. In 2009, the Knight Commission released a report “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age” that included 15 recommendations to better meet community information needs.

Following the release of the report…

Read the full op-ed at Forbes.com.

Related posts:

1. Thierer: Thinking about the Future of Informed Communities and Journalism
2. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities
3. New Initiative to Foster Informed, Engaged Communities

By Mike Fancher, “A Tipping Point for Journalism,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 15, 2011

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…

Read the full article at the Stltoday.com website.

Related posts:

1. Fancher: “American journalism is at a tipping point”
2. Mike Fancher: Contemplating the Future of Local Journalism
3. Of the Press: Models for Transforming American Journalism

Nicol Turner-Lee

By Nicol Turner-Lee, “Mayor Emanuel Must Shed Old Paradigms for True Transparency Reform,” The Huffington Post, December 22, 2011

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is under fire for his office’s denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, with critics in the local and national press and blogs taking the mayor to task for shielding public records from public view. Underscoring this lapse in transparency is Emanuel’s vow to foster “the most open, accountable and transparent government that the City of Chicago has ever seen.” Cities like Boston, Phoenix, and Seattle all routinely release such information, according to reporting by the Chicago Tribune’s David Kidwell, implying that they do transparency better.

This is not to suggest there has been no progress on transparency under Mayor Emanuel. Indeed, he has backed the release of large amounts of government data, including the June release of salary information for all city employees. The city’s September release of city-wide crime statistics for the past decade not only helps crime-fighting agencies, but also journalists, advocates and businesses create more targeted programs to address local concerns.

Chicago, like its big city peers, just needs to decide if government transparency is a core attribute of its government. For the Emanuel Administration, releasing some data and not others does little to shed the old paradigms of closed door politics where waste, government fraud and abuse were the norm…

Read the full article at The Huffington Post.

Related posts:

1. Roundtable to Discuss Public Media Reform
2. The Future of Democracy, According to Knight Reports
3. Community Journalism Builds in Chicago

Peter Levine

By Peter Levine, “Creating Good Citizens,” Huffington Post, June 10, 2011

Today, educators and young people from around the country are meeting in Chicago for the first National Action Civics Conference. These are people who know that teenagers become good citizens — and improve their schools and communities — when they are given the chance to contribute.

Chicago is a natural site for the conference because it is a hotbed of constructive youth engagement. Consider the Gage Park High School students who successfully lobbied for a digital memorial — a public touch-screen kiosk — to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1966 march through their neighborhood. Those students were participants in the Mikva Challenge, a Chicago nonprofit that Education Secretary Arne Duncan cites as a leading example of “cutting-edge civics.”

Similarly, as a result of a grant from my organization, CIRCLE, teenagers in the Cabrini-Green area documented their neighborhood in public videos through a grassroots organization called Cabrini Connections.

Neutral Ground is a multimedia center in Humboldt Park, operated by yet another nationally recognized nonprofit, Street-Level Media. Young people between 8 and 22 meet at Neutral Ground to create journalism, music, animation, and photography for their communities.

These programs and many like them take advantage of young people’s creativity, media savvy, and knowledge of their own communities. They help the kids by giving them creative outlets, skills, and networks. These are important at any time, but…

Read the full article at Huffington Post.

Related posts:

1. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs
2. Norm Ornstein on Creating a New Public Square
3. Close-up on Seattle: Local Blogs and Community Collaboration

Barbara Cochran

By Barbara Cochran, “Why Federal Support for Public Broadcasting is the Right Decision,” The Huffington Post, December 1, 2011.

When Gary Knell officially takes over today as NPR’s new president, he’ll find no shortage of ideas about what he should do with an organization that has recently survived bad headlines, turmoil at the top and a near-death experience with federal funding cuts.

But he would be well advised to ignore some of those recommendations.

Some say that NPR should simply forgo federal funding, which accounts for 2 percent of its annual budget. Receiving even that small amount, they say, leaves NPR vulnerable to accusations of political bias in its news coverage. How much easier it would be, they argue, to give up the federal dollars and ignore the occasional outbreaks of criticism from Capitol Hill.

Such a move might not affect NPR directly, but it would certainly have an impact on the 400 local station organizations that receive the bulk of the $100 million that goes to public radio.

To cut federal funding would do tremendous damage to local stations. While stations on average receive 10 percent of their funding in CPB grants, the percentage varies dramatically among stations, with some in smaller markets and underserved areas relying almost entirely on federal and state funding.

Would that matter? Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at City University of New York, says no. “The bottom line on the stations is that they are as doomed as newspapers,” he told Politico shortly after Knell’s appointment was announced.

But local public radio stations are an important part of the nation’s journalism ecosystem and…

Read the full article at The Huffington Post.

Related posts:

1. Gary Knell Takes Helm at NPR, Cochran Advises: Fight for Federal Funding
2. Cochran: Local Public Broadcasters Shouldn’t Lose Funding Because of Problems at NPR
3. (De)funding Public Broadcasting in New Jersey

Richard C. Harwood

By Richard C. Harwood, “Beyond the Outrage: Turning Protest Into Positive Force for Change,” The Huffington Post, December 22, 2011.

What happens after all the outrage?

In many ways the rapid spread of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements is a healthy sign that people are not mere spectators in the public square. Instead, they are stepping forward to express what matters most to them.

But outrage alone will never be enough to create the kind of society people want. It will not, by itself, create more jobs, improve health care, or make us safer. Nor does it build trust across fault lines in society. It ultimately leaves people and the country at loggerheads.

In my travels across the nation, what’s clear is that Americans are yearning to come back into the public square. They want to re-engage and re-connect with one another, join together to make a difference, and become a part of something larger than themselves.

The question is how to break down the silos…

Read the full article at The Huffington Post.

Related posts:

1. Magid: Digital Citizenship Includes Rights as Well as Responsibilities
2. Nicol Turner-Lee: Mayor Emanuel Must Shed Old Paradigms for True Transparency Reform

Sunshine Week logo

EDITOR’S NOTE:  In recognition of Sunshine Week, KnightComm blog presented this special guest article by Matt Rosenberg, an experienced editor, writer and open government strategist based in Seattle. Rosenberg reflects on the changing understanding of what constitutes “open government” at a time when technology is revolutionizing the availability of public data and information. He raises thought-provoking questions about what it will look like in the future and offers real world examples of how the concepts at the nexus of open government, government transparency and local journalism apply in a particular local context, i.e. Seattle.  Rosenberg founded the government transparency project Public Data Ferret covering the Seattle area and Pacific Northwest, and oversees a companion blog, Social Capital Review, where this article was originally posted on March 10th, 2012.

Open government and freedom of information are two of the core values identified by the Knight Commission as central to any healthy democratic community. They are key concepts surrounding the Commission’s recommendations to maximize the availability of relevant and credible information that people need to make informed decisions for themselves, their families, their communities and the nation. Recommendation 4 calls on “government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low cost-access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.”

Amplify Accountability, Technology to Boost Open Government

by Matt Rosenberg, Social Capital Review, March 10, 2012

Don’t confuse government “open data” with open government, warn two graduate students from Princeton and Yale in a new paper. Harlan Yu and David Robinson say open data may actually improve government transparency but it also:

…might equally well refer to politically neutral public sector disclosures that are easy to reuse, (and) have nothing to do with public accountability. Today a regime can call itself “open” if it builds the right kind of web site — even if it does not become more accountable or transparent….Technology can make public information more adaptable, empowering third parties to contribute in exciting new ways across many aspects of civic life. But technological enhancements will not resolve debates about the best priorities for civic life, and enhancements to government services are no substitute for public accountability.

What open government needs to look like in the coming decade and beyond involves at least three core considerations: 1) inclusive dialog around potential changes to laws on open records and open meetings; 2) the melding of Internet and mobile technologies with ideals of government accountability; and 3) nourishment for a reformulated news and information ecosystem to fulfill the public interest with robust accountability-driven reporting, teaching and collaboration. We’re going to focus here mainly on 2), and a bit on 3).

Voluntary government disclosure is growing
Baseline voluntary government transparency utilizing the Internet has grown impressively. A wide array of meeting documents, special reports and data are routinely posted online by governments at all levels, in the U.S.

Without the filing of any public records requests it is possible to report – using original and recent government documents “picked from the trees at the edge of the orchard” – on stories such as:

• the $1 billion gap between the market value and 30-year payout obligations of the City of Seattle’s public employee pension system;
• the particulars of the $75 million paid over four years by Seattle for legal and liability claims;
• the difficulties Seattle Police see in implementing on-body cameras;
• the fiscal challenges surrounding Auburn’s traffic safety camera program;
• and recent other-than-Boeing U.S. military contracts awarded to firms in King County, Seattle, and elsewhere in Washington state.

Through voluntary government disclosure online we can also learn about:

• the $21 million paid over four years by the State of Washington tied to employee car crashes;
• the $400 million paid by the state in tort claims over eight years;
• and the $29.3 billion Washington state currently dispenses in assorted tax breaks.

The accountability potential of freely released government information is also gleaned from so-called “open access” scientific journals in articles authored by government researchers. Here we see, for instance, that:

• another study confirms King County’s mandate for prominent nutritional disclosure in major fast food chains doesn’t improve consumer choices, as hoped;
• the Seattle region scores poorly on HIV risk behaviors;
• Seattle urban stream restoration hasn’t kept adult coho salmon from perishing before spawning in alarming proportions;
• and electronic highway tolling is fair to lower-income households, especially compared to increasing sales taxes to pay for transportation upgrades.

Robots, aggregators, broccoli and cheese sauce
Robots now write articles from baseball box scores, and aggregation pays while original content creation has a dicey economic future. But the aggregators and the public do want broccoli to go with their cheese sauce. Rendering comprehensible these valuable yet often oblique government source materials requires professional research and journalism skills that in turn require funding. (We’ll go down this rabbit hole another time).

Does open data open doors?
In theory, utilization of government data in its raw form offers a seemingly simpler “do it yourself approach” and so government “data sites” are increasingly in vogue. The City of Seattle has one, as does King County, Washington State, Oregon, and even the government of Kenya. Many other major U.S. cities and states, and nations do, too. One prominent designer of government open data sites is a Seattle-based company named Socrata, which deserves credit for its work to help public servants “liberate” their data for the public good.

But the intermediary role of civic-minded application developers is key, and unassured. They must translate data sets into mobile and Web apps, and data visualizations we can all use. Even then, meaning isn’t always evident, accenting the need for more actual reporting which draws on public data and public records at a time when legacy media resources continue to contract.

It’s useful to apply the core open government principles of performance measurement and accountability to open data. How many government data sets give rise to useful visualizations and where can these be consolidated and cataloged? How many “open data” packages inform public service reporting? How many Web-posted government data sets actually result in creation of apps? How useful are those apps? Are they kept current, and built out to a reasonable degree? Do they even survive?

Last year, a promising Google Maps-based open data app for mobile and the Web was launched, called Dinegerous, conveying restaurant inspection data from Public Health Seattle-King County. It provides a quick overview of the health inspection record of each establishment in the department’s own online database which lacks the graphical user interface. Dinegerous is a powerful example of how government data can be transformed into a consumer tool. Who doesn’t want to do their best to avoid food poisoning when eating out?

Knight plans “editable catalog” of civic apps, including reviews
To gauge the utility of civic apps, taking inventory of what’s out there is a good place to start. The Knight Foundation has announced it will unveil this spring the Engagement Commons, a “dynamic wiki, an editable catalog of applications that foster civic engagement” including for each: app reviews, tech specs, and locations where in use.

Needles in the haystack
In some cases, government data or records are only grudgingly daylighted online, in ways that beg greater ease of use and support the open data imperative. Consider the online compendium of state disciplinary actions against public school teachers provided by the Washington state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. These include cases of sexual relationships between teachers and students and other forms of professional misconduct. There’s a clear public interest in having the documents be accessible as possible. But curiously, the only way to approach this documents database is alphabetically, by teacher. No descending date view, no by-school-district view – thus mandating a “needle in the haystack” approach if currency and locale are a concern. An inquiry from a reporter about this prompted the ineffable reply, “no one’s ever asked about that before.” What to do? Allow qualified developers full access to the kept-current holdings so they can apply tagging protocols and build tools which extract the reports and order them by specified criteria, such as month, year, and location.

Beyond open data as typically conceived, several other promising technology strategies are surfacing in the U.S. Congress and provide fodder for state legislatures and stakeholders interested in making government more open and accountable. The Congressional Facebook Hackathon late last year was less about Facebook and hacking per say than, as one observer put it, “government getting more geeky.” The session involving developers, legislative staff and transparency stakeholders resulted in a meaty final report which included first-stage proposals for:

• Greater legislative transparency through online real-time bill mark-up;
• Online disclosure of exact timing and authorship of legislative amendments;
• Committee hearings that are crowd-sourced online;
• Secure online handling of constituent casework; and
• Integration of legislator social media accounts with their constituent email processes.

TVW steps up, with Scout
In Washington, state government is already getting geekier, but accessibly so. The non-profit news channel TVW has unveiled Scout, an interactive tool which permits users to have delivered to them video of legislative or committee proceedings on selected bills and topic areas. In addition, TVW video of bill hearings in committee were recently added as a built-in extra to all bill information pages at the legislature’s site. Thanks to special and simple user features, videos of full committee hearings which are appended to the online bill pages can be quickly searched and viewed, and then re-posted to blog or social media accounts with time settings narrowed to hone in on testimony regarding just one measure. No more lamely adding, “Go to 1:09:29 to find the testimony on HB 2213.”

Wanted: accountability-focused, records-driven reporting
Meanwhile, the more traditional open government accountability agenda necessitates a ramp-up in outcomes-based reporting on vertical topics (education, transportation, government finance, public health, social services, ethics, and more) that’s girded by government documents and data typically not put online at present. Office of Internal Audit investigative reports at the University of Washington are not posted online but can be had through requests filed under the Washington Public Records Act. Resulting stories might disclose:

• the discharge of an assistant dean in UW’s School of Social Work who faked credits for 139 students;
• or the pilfering of more than $17,000 under the nose of inattentive supervisors in a unit of a hospital managed by the university.

Another type of open government accountability reporting starts with a germ or two of data online but requires more digging. A UW police crime log provides a one-line tipoff and with some enterprise a story develops about a hate crime reported in a campus dorm. A state appeals court ruling posted online prompts a deeper look at how a well-connected City of Seattle employee managed to stay on the public payroll even after a felony conviction for first-degree perjury.

More sunshine needed on government contracting
Topic-wise, a core focus for more open and accountable government should be the daylighting of contracting-related government source documents online. Not so much janitorial and motor pool supplies; more the consultants working to devise a cost-efficient employee pension plan, or evaluate police staffing levels, and transportation plans. What do they actually produce, how is their work evaluated by city managers, and is their advice actually followed? In a periodiocally-updated .pdf file found under the heading “Consultant Contract Search” at the Web page of the City of Seattle purchasing division, you can scan summary descriptions of current and recently-closed consulting contracts. It’s a step in the right direction and provides the basis for selective public records requests.

Over time, great benefits in contractor performance and public trust would accrue from taking it a big step further, to a public-facing database which links actual consultant contract documents, written deliverables and city performance evaluations – and includes built in shortcuts to the city’s existing campaign contributions database kept by the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, so that users can quickly see if consultant company principals are also helping fund campaigns of city officeholders or ballot measures.

Machine readable documents
Part of the build would require adoption of machine readable document forms so that, for instance, the consultant contract performance evaluations which according to city sources often sit uncompleted in a manager’s drawer and then hide away from public view unless requested under open records laws, would instead be Web-ready after completion on a computer. No more printing out and scanning documents into .pdfs.

Common standards for site architecture, IT back end
User experience is another issue. Across a public-facing city government Web enterprise or that of a county or state government, a common information architecture should be employed so we can find the same kinds of things in the same places and save time. Related concerns include the continued use of outdated, inflexible legacy IT architectures, some dating to the 70s, and stove-piping of IT solutions, department by department.

From 90-9-1 to 75-15-10
Combine these and other suggestions and a plan begins to emerge for breathing new life into open government. But at a time of continuing limits on public resources, we’ll all have to be part of the solution. So the “90-9-1″ rule will have to change. That’s the common seat-of-the-pants measure of engagement in the civic square, especially at online community news sites. Ninety percent of the participants are quiet viewers, or “lurkers” only; nine percent contribute occasionally, but only one percent are frequent contributors.

As regions struggle to replace the declining legacy news media resources which used to help ensure healthy government accountability, 90-9-1 needs to shift closer to 75-15-10. One piece of that is well articulated by USC communications and journalism prof Henry Jenkins, who argues topical experts including scientists and engineers and artists motivated by societal and policy concerns have to learn to stand and deliver their own priority news and analysis in Plain English and in popular forums precisely because the specialized topic reporters of yore on whom they previously depended for this function are going largely the way of the Dodo.

The open government-civic engagement renaissance best begins at the local level, with training the trainers and cataloging how to make a difference. Making the business case to government for greater voluntary transparency will be key. So will teaching citizen activists and interested professionals – sometimes one and the same – what to do with timely news and insights, and important findings gained through public records requests. Self-publishing, and basic audio and video production are the new political currency.

In the end, transparency is only a means to an end. It’s what we actually do with it – and how often and how effectively – that matters most.

Related posts:

1. Stimulus Leading to More Open Government
2. Stimulus Leading to More Open Government
3. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs

The Six Strategies include:

1. Convene a working group of chief information and technology leaders to determine more effective technical and operational procedures that mitigate change environments for open government;
2. Create opportunities for developing public goods applications that are sustainable through public-private partnerships or philanthropic investments;
3. Establish more flexible procurement procedures, off-the-shelf purchasing and easier contracting for the technologies used to disseminate government information;
4. Improve broadband access to community anchor institutions;
5. Create government content that is relevant and accessible to all populations regardless of ability, language or literacy level; and
6. Promote public-private partnerships for professional development to enhance skill-building, technical expertise and forward-thinking processes within government.

“The purpose of these strategies is to provide a framework for facilitating these activities and placing government entities on the proper pathway toward the full realization of the benefits of information transparency,” note the authors in the paper. Adopting these strategies will enable state and local governments to tap into the expertise and innovative spirit of the public to create new “public goods” apps and community information resources. The authors further observe that “to focus exclusively on the one-way push of information by government to the public is to miss the promise of innovative e-government techniques designed to transform this dynamic into a mutually beneficial, two-way collaboration.”

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government explores the evolution of transparency and open government policies and the important role that broadband technologies play in moving beyond analog-era notions of transparency. It also addresses the practical barriers that stand in the way of realizing the full value of open government, including design flaws in open government tools, inadequate broadband access and adoption among the public, misunderstanding public demands for information, and legal constraints.

Dr. Jon Gant is a Fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a leading scholar in the field of information systems and public administration, and has advised governments in the U.S. and developing countries on building geographic information systems.

Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee is Vice President and Director of the Media and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. She has produced path breaking research on broadband adoption among minority and disadvantaged populations and regularly engages city, state and federal legislators on issues in telecommunications, open government and the emerging technology innovation sectors.

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government is the fourth policy paper released by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation aimed at implementing the 15 recommendations by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. (See other published papers on Rethinking Public Media, Digital and Media Literacy, Universal Broadband and Creating Local Online Hubs). The Commission released its landmark report, Informing Communities, in October 2009 to help promote healthy informed communities across the country.

Government Transparency
Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

A White Paper by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee

Download | View on Scribd

Table of Contents
From Report to Action
Executive Summary

The Knight Commission Recommendation
Open Government and Transparency in the Broadband Age
Beyond Mere Transparency: How Broadband Technologies Impact Openness and E-Governance at the Local, State and Federal Levels
Barriers to Realizing the Full Value of Open Government
Call to Governments: Six Strategies for Enhancing Transparency and Community Information
Who Should Do What
Conclusion
References

Appendix
Websites promoting Government Transparency
About the Authors
The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program

Related posts:

1. Sensible Strategies for Open Government and Online Hubs
2. Stimulus Leading to More Open Government
3. Report Cites Need for More Public Engagement in Open Government Proposals

Highlights of this years MLS include:

• Thought leaders Dan Gillmor, founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship (10:15 a.m. EST) and Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. (7:15 p.m. EST);
• Foundation leaders talking about their successful news and information projects (11:45 a.m. EST);
• A look at emerging technologies with Knight VPs Michael Maness and Paula Ellis and Amy Webb of WebbMedia (3:45 p.m. EST).

You can also follow the conference on Twitter via @knightfdn and #infoneeds.

Related posts:

1. Media Literacy Starts with Everyone, Report Says
2. New Round of Knight Community Information Challenge Now Open
3. National Contest to Fund Local Information Experiments

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. Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?
2. New Round of Knight Community Information Challenge Now Open
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. Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?
2. Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World
3. Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism