Who Should Do What
Who Should Do What
This paper recommends a number of different strategies and ideas for action. The following section summarizes what each of the different stakeholders should do to further the goal.
Local communities
Local communities might help themselves best by embracing the idea that their information health is as important as good schools, safe streets, environmental quality and economic vitality. Healthy information flows help enable all of those other qualities.
A critical step after that is to develop their own “Community Information Scorecard” project to help local leaders take action to improve information health. Such an assessment can help citizens and media identify information needs and opportunities.
Content creators and technology service providers
Content creators and technology services providers have a mutual interest in convening an open, voluntary and collaborative process to help rationalize the online content economy. This process would identify principles to protect content distributed on the Internet from misuse and to appropriately compensate creators for the value of their work.
Local and national foundations
By many accounts, local and national foundations are showing new interest in funding journalism. A 2010 Knight Foundation survey found that “locally focused foundations are making news and information projects a funding priority. Of the 135 responding to the survey, half reported investing in the area, for a total of $165 million…. Thirty-four percent said their funding in news and information increased in the past 3 years—and that they expected it to increase in the future.”129
But foundations will never be able to fully fund even the very best ideas. Funding decision makers should place a premium on ideas that specifically re-imagine journalism for an interactive world. They should build capacity by funding networks, collaboratives, infrastructure and technology. This will create the greatest leverage for their dollars and will stimulate the creation of journalistic endeavors in non-traditional institutions.
They should support efforts to measure the information health of communities, as well as the social benefit of investments in local journalism.
Legacy news media companies
Legacy news organizations have more to lose than anyone else if they fail to transform themselves for a networked world. They should “be digital first,” to fully seize the opportunities in a digital, interactive media environment. They should invest to develop the digital capacity of their newsroom staffs. They should create regional and local news networks to share costs of coverage whenever possible. They should collaborate with emerging and non-traditional media startups to help replenish lost journalistic resources. They should explore new ways of achieving long-held diversity goals, including partnering with ethnic media to share and cocreate content that connects communities.
Emerging news media
Beyond creating content, emerging media should focus on building community and achieving sustainability. They should target unmet needs in the news and information ecosystem to increase the social benefit and market value of their work. Whenever possible, they should collaborate to share technology and infrastructure.
Professional and educational journalism associations
Professional associations such as American Society of News Editors, Radio and Television Digital News Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication must develop a greater sense of urgency about helping their members survive and thrive in the digital media age. This should start with greater efforts to find synergy and better efficiency among the associations themselves. It should extend to ethnic and minority media groups, as well as media reform organizations. It should encompass for-profit, public and non-profit entities.
In addition to emphasizing training and capacity building for their members, these associations can foster a spirit of collaboration across industry segments and academic disciplines. They can be bridges between practitioners and academicians. They can be catalysts for inviting the public to participate meaningfully in rethinking the future of local journalism that serves communities.
Newspaper Association of America, Audit Bureau of Circulations and Interactive Advertising Bureau
The Newspaper Association of America (NAA), the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) should continue to collectively develop a unified metric system to measure print and online audiences. This would promote greater trust, which could lead to increased revenues.
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) should pursue foundation support for an organized, field-wide review of journalism education, curriculum and accreditation standards to connect new knowledge and technological change. This would be a concerted effort to re-imagine journalism education for a networked world. It would examine everything from journalism ethics to communication theory.
In addition to bringing its own strategic plan to reality, AEJMC could offer its services and expertise to other journalism organizations in developing similar plans. It could create an online model and database for strategic thinking about local journalism endeavors.
AEJMC has an opportunity, perhaps unlike anything since the instigation of journalism schools a century ago, to be the connective tissue between the study of journalism, the practice of journalism and the purpose of journalism.
Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency that advises the President and Congress and is the primary source of federal support to libraries and museums. Among its national initiatives are “Museums, Libraries and 21st Century Skills,” which helps citizens build capacity in areas such as information and technology. As an agency administering discretionary federal programs, the IMLS should initiate a grant competition to solicit proposals for how libraries and journalists can work together to improve local news and information.
Congress
Given the precarious condition of many for-profit journalism companies, Congress should make it easier for private news companies to transition to nonprofit ownership. This could be done specifically by the following:
- Removing the deduction limitation for the contribution of ownership interests in newspapers to not-for-profit organizations
- Deferring taxable gain on the sale of news organizations to not-for-profit organizations
- Ensuring that tax-exempt bond financing is available to not-for-profit purchasers
Internal Revenue Service
The IRS should clarify tax policies to encourage the formulation of non-profit and hybrid journalistic entities and collaboration among non-profit and for-profit entities. The policies should reflect the social benefit of accountability or watchdog journalism.
National Conference on Citizenship
The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) is chartered by Congress to measure, track and promote civic participation in the U.S. It seeks research/academic institutions, non-profits, and funders to serve as local partners to cooperatively produce and release Civic Health Index reports in all 50 states and 100 communities in the next few years. The NCoC also calls for more metrics to assess how technology affects social connection. This is a laudable undertaking that could add greatly to our understanding of the role local journalism plays, provided news is identified as a variable to be studied.130
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation should solicit proposals for measuring Social Return on Investment (SROI) in local journalism. This work would not be for the marketing of commercial products, but to enhance the social value and lasting impact of journalism in service to local communities. The resulting research could have broad application to other areas of SROI methodology.
White House Council for Community Solutions
In December 2010, President Obama created the White House Council for Community Solutions. The council is to provide advice to the President on the “best ways to mobilize citizens, non-profits, businesses and government to work more effectively together to solve specific community needs.” The council should include the issue of local news and information as part of its deliberations and should initiate a national dialogue about how communities can measure and improve their information health, including local news.
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