Paul's Web Space 2.1

The Future of News & the Knight Commission

I've been working on this post for a couple months, and it keeps getting longer and longer, so here goes - the Future of News:

In February, Walter Isaacson kicked off a flurry of commentary on the state of the news business with a provocative article in Time Magazine – How to Save Your Newspaper – which asserts that news media must start to charge for content to survive, and that micropayments a-la Apple's iTunes store offer significant promise. That month I saw David Bollier speak about his book Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. As he discussed the sharing economy of the Internet, he spent some time looking at the difficulties that the news business is having dealing with these new realities. Bollier also mentioned micropayments as a possible tool, but was more excited by a public model for funding that wouldn't threaten journalistic independence, but rather could be modeled on the early days of newspaper home delivery, which was subsidized by the Post Office.

Bollier referred to a recent article by Eric Alterman in the Nation "Save the News, Not the Newspapers," the writing of NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, and the local citizen journalism project Spot.Us. The concept of micropayments also came up in an interesting Yi-Tan conference call I listened to that week on the Future of News — featuring Mitch Ratcliffe, Dan Gillmor, and Liza Boyd, whose blog is also titled The Future of News. Spot.Us founder David Cohn also stopped by for part of the call.

These were followed by the March release of the annual report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2009. It outlines economic trends that are rapidly worsening for traditional news media, while the adoption of online news offered by both traditional news operations as well as a growing variety of alternative sources continues to accelerate. This offers both challenges and opportunities for traditional journalistic entities to move as quickly as possible to migrate to the web and embrace new possibilities offered by interactive multimedia and participatory interfaces.

Later that month came two eye-opening pieces. Clay Shirky wrote "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," which pretty much shredded the business-as-usual, digital version of what we were doing before solutions tried by newspapers to date. Dan Conover on the blog Xark wrote 2020 vision: What's next for news, which contained numerous provocative ideas for what's in store for journalism over the next several years. Along the same lines this month, CPSR colleague Andy Oram blogged about how we might obtain the important contributions we receive from journalism – expertise, diversity, and debate – without relying on the institutions that provide it today. A fascinating (and long) article in Vanity Fair details how the current publisher of the New York Times has made several strategic blunders recently, and thus the Times finds itself in more financial trouble than it might — in spite of publishing one of the best newspapers, with one of the best web sites, in the world.

At the April meeting of the Newspaper Association of America in San Diego, AP Chairman Dean Singleton declared war on news aggregators and search engines. Responses were fast and furious, from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Danny Sullivan. Taking the side of the newspapers, Michael Moran wrote No Such Thing as Free News in the Nation. I saw a Tweet from Jay Rosen at the conference, asking what readers thought of a proposal that Google favor articles of "real newspapers" in search results. I say newspapers should liberally link to each other to boost their SEO, rather than Google favoring any content over any other.

Given the level of the crisis in the newspaper industry, and various proposals for government policy to assist newspapers, it was inevitable that Congress would get involved, first with House hearings in April, then with Senate hearings this week. Forbes has a nice summary of six proposals offered to the Senate explaining how they might save the newspaper business.

In my previous post, I explained how the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy seeks comment through today on the draft introduction to its report. I'm an informal adviser to the commission staff, and in my comments I say that I like a lot of what they see as possibilities for new funding models (public and/or nonprofit) and organizational structures, but there is too little about embracing alternatives to traditional journalism, about enabling citizens to take advantage of access to tools and data transparency, and of new forms of civic discourse springing up, enabled by new technologies. I believe that we need to figure out ways to help some version of the existing journalistic enterprise survive and adapt, but also encourage the development of these alternatives — only by pursuing both tracks to we hope to deliver the most information possible to enable communities to effectively govern themselves and prosper into the future.

Labels: community, democracy, future, journalism

   Link: http://future-of-news.blogspot.com/

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Knight Commission Invites Public Input on Community Information Needs

(I'm part of an informal advisory committee helping the staff of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy by providing ideas and feedback, and spreading the word about this public input period. I'll be blogging about this report and the future of news in general later this week, but please check out the draft introduction and provide your input as well. -PH)

What information do Americans need to accomplish the personal goals and to be effective citizens in our democracy? How are they getting their news and information? And what would they do to improve the quality of news and information available to them?

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (www.knightcomm.org) has been conducting the first major study in the digital age to identify the information needs of communities in a democracy, assess how and whether those needs are being met, and recommend steps to improve the fulfillment of those needs.

Now the Commission, in partnership with PBS Engage, is seeking public input from citizens across the nation from Tuesday April 21 – Friday May 8, 2009 at www.pbs.org/publicinput. The site offers an interactive experience and includes a preliminary draft of the introduction to the Commission’s report, survey questions for the public to answer, highlight videos from some of the public forums and meetings held by the Commission, blogs about the Commission’s work, and a forum for citizens to express their thoughts and opinions.

During the public input period, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Co-Chair of the Commission, will answer citizens’ questions about the Commission’s work via Google Moderator, which enables participants to both submit and vote on questions they think should be answered

The Commission’s upcoming final report will include recommendations for achieving the news and information environment that democratic communities need in order to thrive. The Commission launched in June 2008 with an aggressive agenda to assess the information needs of citizens from a variety of different types of communities in order to make concrete recommendations to public policy makers about improving local information flow. The free flow of news and information in communities is essential to effective democracy. With the digital age transforming media worldwide, reducing traditional journalism in a number of communities, the Commission is focused on how Americans will get the news and information they need to make informed decisions for themselves and for their communities.

Over the past year the Commission held seven public forums and meetings in communities across the nation and heard from more than 100 speakers, including community organizers, educators, journalists from old and new media, labor leaders, technology engineers and strategists, entrepreneurs, futurists, public officials, policy analysts, economic consultants and community foundation representatives. The Commission has also received significant input from an informal advisory network of journalists, academics, and people involved in policy and community work.

The Knight Commission, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, operates out of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program in Washington, D.C. It includes seventeen respected representatives of journalism, communities and public policy with diverse perspectives, including Co-Chairs Mayer and Theodore B. Olson, Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and former U.S. Solicitor General, and ex-officio members Alberto Ibargüen and Walter Isaacson, presidents respectively of Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute. The Commission’s executive director is Peter Shane, a law professor at The Ohio State University, who is advised by a committee of journalists, policymakers and academic experts from a variety of fields. For more information on the Knight Commission, visit www.knightcomm.org.

A project of the Aspen Institute and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Labels: community, democracy, journalism, open government, politics

   Link: http://www.pbs.org/publicinput

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Steve Cisler RIP

Steve Cisler passed away this week. He was an early pioneer in the community networking movement, and our paths crossed in the early 1990s, while he was working at Apple Computer and collaborating with CPSR on its Local Civic Networks initiative, and I was on the CPSR Board of Directors, contributing what I could to the movement.

I found this page from our old web site, which contains pieces he wrote for CPSR. It was funny to see a grad school paper of mine appear beside two that Steve wrote for CPSR; may a small bit of his genius have rubbed off on me. Actually, the first is a very good overview of the space as of 1993, and the second is his report from a 1992 CPSR roundtable meeting. Reading that report really brought back memories - I was lucky enough to have been at the meeting Steve described and hung out with many of the people who's work he chronicled.

A true leading light has rambled on.

Paul Jones from ibiblio broke the news on Twitter, and posted a thoughtful tribute on his blog. Andy Carvin tweeted confirmation, and later posted a link to a condolences blog set up to commemorate Steve's life. I'm still trying to figure out the significance of the fact that I learned of this loss via my new community of social media geeks on Twitter, where Andy Carvin's tweets provided a vivid, real-time commentary on the unfolding story (and are the extent of his public posting on the topic that I've seen). Then, digging deeper, I found other fellow travelers using the Tweetscan search engine.

Community networking meets Web 2.0? The light burns on.

Labels: apple, community, community networking, cpsr, internet

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Job: Online Community Intern at edweek.org

Do you use multiple social networking services, write for a blog, or lead discussions on web forums? How would you like to apply those skills as an intern for an online journalism operation, and gain valuable job experience at the same time?

Edweek.org, a national non-profit news Web site covering K-12 education, seeks an online community intern to help manage our online community and contribute to viral marketing and social networking campaigns on behalf of the organization.

Responsibilities include:

• monitoring comments and forum posts for inappropriate content;
• managing one or more social network profiles or channels;
• performing outreach to bloggers and social bookmarking sites;
• promoting a sense of community through participation and feedback;
• occasional web design or production tasks in support of these activities.

Qualifications: The position requires experience engaging with several social media applications and web communities, good writing and editing ability, basic HTML skill, a strong work ethic, and a highly developed sense of humor. Must be able to meet deadlines and work under pressure. Experience with CSS, graphic or multimedia editing, or blogging or content management system software a plus.

We welcome interns with an interest in social media, journalism/communications, education news and policy, and/or multimedia production. We are metro-accessible, a short walk from the red line in downtown Bethesda.

Please send resume, cover letter and samples/links via e-mail to: WebIntern@epe.org, and tell us where you saw the ad.

Labels: community, edweek, socialmedia, socialnetworks

   Link: http://www.edweek.org/

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Dennis McDonald - Personal Online Networking Strategy

I just stumbled upon a really cool-looking blog, called Dennis McDonald's Blog. Michael Stein (DC), a Facebook friend who's also interested in this stuff, linked to an interesting article Dennis wrote last month called "On Developing a Personal Online Networking Strategy" - his blog publishes notes in his Facebook profile (like mine does), Michael shared it in his profile, and it showed up in my feed. (After I finish this post it will appear in MY profile, and maybe spread a little further...cool.)

So anyway, Dennis McDonald's Blog has daily notes, links, tags, and a list of his recent longer thought pieces, on things like social networking make or buy decisions, adoption models, and use in emergency response, associations, and the intelligence community. I need to talk to this guy!

Labels: community, facebook, socialnetworks

   Link: http://www.ddmcd.com/managing-technology/on-developing-a-personal-online-networking-strategy.html

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Social Media Proliferation

I'm going a little crazy with all the different social media systems, accounts, applications, etc., which often seem to overlap with each other. I think this really became obvious when I started using Facebook more, where you can increasingly integrate all kinds of applications (including social media ones).

You post your status on Facebook, but you can also update your Twitter status via a facebook app, and both status statement (can) appear on your Facebook profile. One popular application on Facebook is called Causes, but you can also integrate your Change.org profile (which includes changes, organizations, politicians, etc., all things you can support via separate Facebook applications (Causes or US Politics).

On top of all that, Change.org and Facebook are two of many social networks. I probably don't even remember all of the social networks that I have joined, but of course this includes MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as Tribe, Care2, and the Omidyar Network. Managing all of these is a large time sink, and never really accomplished, and of course managing identity in general becomes ever more challenging base upon all of the aforementioned services and hundreds of others. Is OpenID the answer? I plan to start trying to figure that out soon. A speaker at Digial Media Conference I attended a few weeks ago predicted that one of the major coming trends in new media will be a merger or consolidation of social networks, and I don't know if this means actual combination of operations, or more likely, some networking solution that makes integration even more seamless than that afforded by Facebook apps - which is a very cool major step along the way, and I'm sure is poised to take it even further.

Facebook is the new LinkedIn, and Change.org, and Twitter, and Flixter, and Flickr, and....

Blogged with Flock

Labels: community, facebook, openid, socialmedia, socialnetworks

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