Measuring Informed Communities at the Free Press Summit

Following the Free Press Summit: Ideas to Action, Josh Stearns summarized a summit session on measuring media’s impact on local communities that featured opening remarks by Jessica Clark, Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation and a researcher/activist at American University’s Center for Social Media where she directs the Future of Public Media project. His post cites the Knight Commission’s work to define the elements of informed communities. This post appears in full at SavetheNews.

by Josh Stearns, SavetheNews.org

We talk a lot about the digital divide, the lack of local news coverage in communities across the country, and how this absence of information affects civic participation, quality of life and ultimately our democracy. We are facing a growing information divide that is leaving more and more people with less and less access to the basic information that helps them make choices about their jobs, families and communities. We have to have a national approach to the challenge of meeting these information needs.

But first we have to answer a few core questions: How do we define the information needs of communities, and how do we measure them? What metrics should we use and what tools do we need? Are communities receiving quality news and information? A panel at the Free Press Summit delved into these questions because understanding our communities information needs is essential in shaping the policies and solutions we fight for in our quest for a better media system.

We have a good foundation to build upon. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy developed some overarching categories for defining an informed community, but they admit, “No one has developed a system for measuring the quality of a local community’s information environment.”

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