These are Bill Densmore’s notes of a Friday 4 p.m.-5:15 p.m. session in St. Louis at which we listed specific project ideas and summarized (after four, four-person breakout groups) what we have learned so far.
PARTICIPANTS: Chris Peck, Cecily Burt, Richard Anderson, Bill Densmore, Scott Hall, Christine Saed, Jim Shaffer, Mike Van Buren, Matlho Kjosi, Dave Johnson, Martin Reynolds, Linda Jue, Peggy Kuhr, Brian Beveridge, Stephen Silha.
Richard Anderson, who has to catch a plane, apologizes about going back to Maine to chair a Saturday meeting of a board that he heads which has had the meeting scheduled for more than a year. He says:
“If this group wanted to promote the idea of some experiments. I would like to explore how the VS platform could be made available to the ‘commons’ here and if somebody wants to try an experiment in Minnesota or California or whatever, if access to that platform would make getting something going quickly.”
“The idea is that the group would own the software. Treat the software as a membership owned platform that would help facilitate growth of community networks throughout the world.”
“In that same session, he also said if something like that got started, look at the Media Giraffe Project as a group website that has already a wealth of research done in identifying sites as exemplars, and analysis of lots of things, could be a thing within the site which deals with deliberations or discussions. There is already a site there, why invent something new.”
Peggy: The entire focus of tomorrow is what’s next. Imaging doing that in two stages. For starters, let’s see what is already bubbling? What is the learning that we will take back?
A whiteboard list of practical project ideas:
Have you come up with values that underpin what the next newsroom ecology will be. What is going to make these things fly?
· Media Giraffe Project website
· Mobile newsroom
· Create the Village Soup commons/nodes around the country
· Village Soup classroom
· Atwater Soup
· Independent Press Association as home for greenhousing around venture capital and new media ecologies.
· Continue JTM at Media Giraffe Project June 28-July 1
· Community Journalism Centers
· Teaching course: “Hard News with an Appreciative Eye”
· Grow radio into community network (KAXE Soup)
· Magazines as community media
· “Inner Journalist” retreat
· Look into transforming news organizations from within – Ghandian
· Journalist-citizen retreats
· Youth mentors for journalists
· Journalist as social servant classes
Moving around into groups. We are looking for the underlying drivers of why the idea has occurred. What about transferring our thinking from the idea of a newsroom to the idea of a news ecology.
Conductor, weaver, navigator, facilitator, etc.
Scott Hall: We talked about what makes an event news and why should people care and zeroing in on the process of how it is presented.
Cecily Burt: One group started on the question of how the community gets news and the insight that the website is not enough and it has got to be much more and it creates a vast amount of outreach on the front end. From that it evolved into needing to have a transparency project and bringing members of the community in to critique coverage and have a dialog. Go out into the community and knock on doors and have reporters write an interesting story based on that. Find out what news matters to the community.
Christine Saed: In West Oakland, many people do not have a website, and a lot who can’t read. They haven’t learned that decoding yet. Talked about having town criers. Considered use of low-power radio.
Linda Jue: Group discussed about what it means to get back to that inner journalist – who we were when we started out in the business – passion, open-mindedness, desire to change the world which has been corrupted by being in the business. And there is a need to develop a renewed relationship with our audience. How does what we do inspire our audience and given them the tools they need to act. Her break-out talked about the buzz around “citizen journalist” is just another stage in the process where alternative media came out started by ordinary citizens who didn’t see what they cared about being reflected in MSM. That was corrupted and was replaced by Zines and now by new media. This process is not a new phenomenon but a normal evolution of a response people are having – a continue sense that the media is not serving them.
Steve Silha: Thinking about co-creating the next forms of media with young people. They are the audience, they are the people bringing fresh ideas. It is happening online, but maybe we are not paying attention to it.
Cecily Burt: We are now trying to make a bridge to invite youth and others into our house.
Peggy Holman: Used to manage software projects. The trend in software has been more and more for people to be empowered to do it themselves. It is evolutionary, we grew into a model where everyone was a specialist and had their niche, but now we are coming back to a community village model where everybody has the capacity to do it themselves, but at a higher level of sophistication and in a more differentiated way. There is a passionate commitment to this.
Mike Skoler: All of these citizen efforts have grown to the point of being institutionalized. People start to think they want to do it more of their time, and have an ecnomomic basis for doing it. OhmyNews started out 90% citizen generated; now they are about 50% citizen generated? Why? Because the stars were getting really good and Ohmy didn’t want to lose them and started to bring them on staff.
Peggy Holman: That’s a great example. They may be able to sustain a “both/and.”
Brian Beveredge: It feels like a proper balance is to not completely turn it upside down into something else, but to expand it on some side with tools that allow more voices. That doesn’t shove what is done now off the table, but expands it more to open an arena for public input which could then inform the professional side of the paper in a whole new way.
Peggy Kuhr: You could say what Peggy Holman was talking about was a “both/and” journalism.
Mike Skoler: Need to have open sharing.
Mike Van Buren: Need to have education around citizenship.
Jim Shaffer: The education challenge is two fold. First is creating smart education consumers and creators. But also finding models of how to teacher future journalists. Seeing the demonstration of theUniversity of Missouri websites, he was impressed how they took ownership of operating websites, it was experiential, relevant and service oriented, adaptive.
Bill Densmore describes the hourglass vs. the cylinder metaphor:
http://www.newshare.com/News/infochrt.html
Jim Shaffer: We need a new set of words and metaphors. Our language doesn’t really adequately describe what we are talking about.