Introducing the Commission

With the Commission's inaugural meeting now behind us, I'd like to open this forum as an additional channel for input and deliberation on the questions facing the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. If you look at the materials for the June 24 meeting, you will soon be able to find videos of the whole day and a complete text of my opening remarks. In those remarks, I explained two ways in which the Commission is unique as compared to earlier commissions focusing on media: The first is its focus not on journalism or even on media per se, but on community information needs in the broadest sense. Communities need information for problem-solving, for the coordination of civic activity, for maintaining public accountability, and for fostering the human connectedness that is the backbone of both community and democracy. The institutions of journalism and of what we think of more generally as 'the media' are key to addressing these needs, but they do not exhaust the universe of institutions and processes we need to consider. [Knight] President [Alberto] Ibargüen, Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, and Charlie Firestone, the head of the Communications and Society Program, have all emphasized the importance of focusing on information needs from the public’s perspective, and that will require us to take a genuinely comprehensive view.

The second point of uniqueness is the focus on communities, by which we mean geographically defined clusters of human beings who live in relative proximity to one another, and who share, depend upon, and maintain governance over some identifiable domain of common resources. There are at least three reasons for this focus. First, despite the proliferation of virtual networks, people live in real space. The quality of the geographical locale in which individual citizens live is centrally connected to their life opportunities and their health and welfare. Second, the representative institutions of our democratic governance are organized geographically. Born on Long Island, I may identify always with my fellow New Yorkers, but I live in Ohio, and the county Commissioners for whom I vote work in Columbus, and not Mineola.

Third, the advantages the internet has brought to Americans in connecting with issues and organizations on a national and even global scale have outpaced developments in promoting local information flow. Many Americans may find it easier to track developments in the USEPA than in their own city council, and key trends in traditional media raise the question whether local news organizations are filling the local information vacuum.

The emphasis on local community should not obscure two points, however. One is that we are mindful that, as individuals, all of us identify with and participate in multiple communities, some geographic, some not. This is itself an important factor to consider in understanding the nature of local information flow. The second is that, in order to thrive as local communities in a democracy, local communities need more than geographically local information. The contextual search for truth frequently requires that we see local facts against a background larger than our neighborhood, town or city. So, this, too, is an element of the Commission’s inquiry.

We welcome everyone's reflections on what are a community's needs for information, whether those needs are being met today (and how), and, if needs are going unmet, how the situation can be improved.