BiblioNews Session Notes

We identified obstacles that included the following ideas:

Librarians value privacy but journalists value transparency and openness

We have different terminology and language that can affect how we listen to and understand each other

The fields of journalism and librarianship are on different evolutionary cycles, with different career trajectories within the disciplines

Journalists and librarians are experiencing identity crises due to rapid cultural and technological change. As a result we may be guilty of professional pride where we overvalue our own principles and devalue others

Some opportunities were identified:

Web publishing and the need for digital preservation can promote fruitful collaboration and respectful listening

Libraries are seen as neutral space that support public dialogue and discussion

Develop exchange programs between journalists and librarians

We have common ends: both journalists and librarians need citizens who have the skills they need to access and identify quality information, analyze and ask questions, compose and create messages, reflect on the social consequences of information and knowledge, and work individually and collaboratively to take action in the world.

Moderated by Colin Rhinesmith

• questions – is this a good idea?
• What roles can librarian and journos play? Challenges and concerns
• what are the standards, and who sets them. Possible downside

Training issues, literacy about consuming online information. Helpful if org that manages cit-j clearly labels opinion vs editorial. Good for libraries that offer this type of service to make it clear that this is different from what is offered in local newspapers.

Colin – skokienet.org is an example of public library that has embraced tech to allow people to report on issues relative to their own community. Unsure of specifics on how they manage that site. Citj is a contested term these days. Is it journalism? Maybe it’s the wrong name, but it brings people together to get info that doesn’t get out in any other way. Can we make baseline of what it would take to prepare people to be cit-j?

Jessica – Scranton public access channel used to be in public library. Natural thing to house public media in library.

Colin – Allentown also runs public tv out of library. Interesting discussion about archiving of content, and larger cultural questions about preserving community memory.

Jessica – lady of Scranton asked library to archive all public meeting coverage. Seems no-brainer.

Big responsibility to archive public records. If library is going to be responsible, that’s big and expensive. Real concerns if it becomes official legal documentation. Maybe a copy, but responsibility if it is the record.

Colin – is there an interest among librarians in local generated content, and is there an interest in preserving the work that comes out of public channel.

Jacqueline. If not talking about funding issues, absolutely.

Very specific legal requirements set by state archivist that are town clerk responsibility. Library is required to keep copies of that stuff, but it’s a huge amount. And if trying to give legit access, there’s work involved. Libraries have wonderful opportunity to create and document local history. Public record of government is a separate thing.

Librarian in small Washington town has become ad hoc journalist in local town. She said only parttime, can’t keep doing it. Want people to do it themselves.
Michael – big difference between training and hosting. Should it be the same organization? How does it work?

Colin – SkokieNet is social network site for uploading and sharing stories and photos. Make use of public computing facilities.

Jacqueline – model of senior center where seniors were writing a newspaper. Wonderful. Giving people opportunity for meaningful work.

Bill D. – RyeReflections, created by Jack Driscoll used to be with Boston Globe. How do you delineate editorial function and decide how much of that library can do? I think it is possible to provide community information without having to make serious editorial judgments. WilliamstownBeat is an aggregation site for local ngo’s. Sexton for local church is curating most interesting item to the front page. Don’t envision money to hire reporters, just want to say here’s a place where community can find information that is produced by legitimate sources of information. Would like to be able to add social networking skills. Who makes judgments about what ngo and what local business gets a channel? Do we take their money? Could a library run something akin to that and where would you go with it?

Ruth – we do something like that in our bulletin boards. One for library events, and the other for community. Don’t seem to have trouble with having to choose between postings.

Isn’t the challenge how we look at the screen? Like newspaper front page.

What happens if there is misleading information? Who makes the judgments?

Colin – Rapidian.org Pretty rigorous training in terms of who can have story promoted to the front page. Everyone else has a chance to participate. Helps readers understand what they are accessing, but also creates healthy inspiration to engage more, because they want stuff on front page. They understand there is a structure. You can be promoted up a ladder in terms of your role.

Bill D. Newstrust.net has organized system to let you post comments or analysis of news stories. Should we create a manual of best practices? Depending on level of engagement each community wants. Could present in structured wiki format a manual of best practices.

David – would prefer to see recommendations

Colin – if we could frame it in such a way that libraries could participate.

Helen – Pawling. Group e-mail discussion hosted by Dems. One person crosses the line. One person got on to talk about civility.

Donna – Rapidian has code of conduct.

Flag content? Crowdsourced thumbs-up, down? People who control forum reserve right to bar the user?

Jessica – blackhills knowledge network. Out of public library. To create local news knowledge.

Bill D. – programmer has put in hundreds of volunteer hours. Won’t launch until we’re sure we have sustainability model. Citizen media inc. is owner of site (501c3). But haven’t raised money in community because want to make sure it has longevity. Wife and I used to own the weekly paper in town. Question is whether website is a public service that can keep going. Economics have disappeared because of big box stores have eliminated local merchants and advertisers have disappeared. That’s what’s hurting community journalism around America. An effort to think through challenge of what community does when doesn’t have a local news source anymore.

Jessica. Texas township in PA. city council refused to have a website. Too expensive. One person took it upon herself to have a website. What if something happens to her? I’m a former reporter and going to library school. Interested in cit-j because if for-profit disappear. Who’s going to pick up the slack? Bill D. is the local steward. Who else?

Colin – getting back to question of collaboration, couple of things: (1) in some cases there are professional journos involved in cit-j efforts to fill gap. Would propose: are there other resources in the community that might work together. In Cambridge, found cit-j project filled the void because non-profits had no place to send press releases. Created a community calendar. It’s a form of cit-j, and could exist on public libraries. (2) maybe idea of creating a baseline of standards for cit-j who may get involved with public library sponsored cit-j project.

Bill D. – assign levels of editorial intervention that would be willing to accept? Would depend on the community and their level of acceptance of library intervention. Notion of community curation guidelines. Could be run by individuals or other community non-profits.

Journos could help find that line, give workshops.

Michael – local journalists in Boston are offering workshops focused on citizen journalists. How to do things, how to ask questions. Standards and techniques. Libraries could be facilitators of that process.

Helen – could libraries convene weekly workshop to write stories for the local news site.

Colin – boston has rolled out yourtown sites. A number of commercial journo orgs that are interested in user-generated content. Partnerships.

Libraries could help in research world. Add expertise in finding information.
Add journalist in mix to remove burden of responsibility from library. Engage local students through journo training, have them report and produce news content while they’re learning. Given huge cutbacks in school journo programs, libraries can fill in.

Ruth – did project in reading with mit education lab, high school seniors, came with parents. Bonus was mit was going to help with video equipment. Produce a piece of journalism that would have a national edge and local connection. Mit wanted to study how kids produced information and worked together. Almost all of them chose to do video. Project took one month. Every week, one evening, journos at library to consult with students on project. Parents and students loved the project. Winning project would be viewed by abc news and kids would go to new york with chaperone.

Exhibition value of citj and creating documents about our community through video and other forms of documentation. E.g. artists in Brooklyn could be brought in to mentor students.

Librarians are database mavens. Newsrooms not so good at that.

Resources would be most beneficial if included perspectives from librarians and journalists.

In resource document could provide background information on digital platforms available. Guide would have tech info, examples of community guidelines. Case studies. Colin – start wiki? Librarystream.

Can we localize spot.us solution?

Here are some notes from our session on sustainable economic models, convened by Donna Liu.

Liu discussed a hyperlocal, community-generated news site that she started, allprinceton.com. It began with a grant from the Knight Foundation but, going forward, will need to find new sources of funding. Right now the site is hybrid, with some paid contributions. It includes stories, a feed aggregator, and a blog and it gets about 200 visitors per day.

Tom Stites described the Banyan Project, which advocates for a co-op model in journalism. The premise is that we need, but are currently lacking, models that are both replicable and sustainable. While some models are sustainable and seem to be thriving, they are not replicable in all communities. The co-op model stands to leverage affinities and institutions in the pursuit of greater efficiency, i.e., dispensing with costs related to subscriptions, advertising, etc. The readers would be the owners and would have voting power in electing the editorial (i think?) board.

People asked a lot of good questions about Banyan, including:

• can you interlink the co-ops? in the digital environment, people like to move within and outside of their affinity groups (Tom said yes)
• is it true that co-ops only arise out of economic need or market failure? aren’t there other cases of successful co-ops?

We had a very interesting discussion about affinities and someone (I’m sorry I didn’t get all the names!) made a great point that, re affinities, tech and sports are the candy and municipal budgets are the broccoli.

We discussed ways that the co-op model is similar and different to listener-supported radio. Readers, according to Stites, would have a greater stake in the content and a greater sense of ownership.

People provided examples of cases where readers/listeners/users were also creators. There was a town in Canada with a radio station that anyone could call into and report news. Doctoral students in communications at the University of Illinois all had keys to the library.

Stites clarified that Banyan is intended to serve a population that is neither affluent nor poverty-striken. Mainstream news covers personal finance and health largely for the affluent.

A librarian from Massachusetts issued a reminder that we can’t assume universal access to the internet. Research into broadband penetration has found that we’re at saturation in households with incomes of $50,000+.

Janet Jay, who has written a book on saving public libraries, said that we need to weave in the candy with the broccoli and pointed to Jon Stewart as an example of someone who has done this well. She also stressed the point that marketing is not a bad thing and public libraries need to embrace it. They can do things like invite sports people in to talk to kids.

People pointed out that libraries are taxpayer funded while newspapers are not and this led to a brief reflection on the NYTimes paywall and the acknowledgement (by the Times) that not everyone would pay. If some people pay and others get in free, is it a model of the rich subsidizing the poor or the unwilling? Is that okay and is it a viable alternative to a co-op model?

We transitioned into a discussion of revenue streams. Maybe the Banyan model is one way, but a news organization might need several. Libraries also need multiple revenue streams and need them to be reliable.

It was pointed out that there is a disconnect in many communities among those who value education and are willing to fund it, but don’t translate that into funding for libraries.

Someone pointed out that people have never wanted to pay for news and we see that better now, in the online environment. This led to discussion of bubbles and whether there is an advertising bubble (Doc Searls says this) or if it’s a newspaper bubble (Clay Shirky). David Weinberger explained the argument that it’s a newspaper bubble, such that ad rates were always inflated for print newspapers and we know that now. In the online environment, where people pay per click, the rates are more accurate. And as it turns out, cheaper than we thought.

Donna Liu asked where the search industry is in this conversation and expressed the need to bring capitalist engagement to civil society. We discussed whether Google has a responsibility to contribute to the organization and intelligent display of information. Someone brought up Google’s recent decision to give content farms lower rankings. Is that the right thing to do? Is it censorship? What is the difference between censorship and curation?

We talked about what we would say to the capitalist enclave, i.e., what would be the elevator speech to the Google executives? Weinberger suggested that if all news sites go the way of the Times, Google will have no news to index. When it was confronted with a similar situation w/books, it just went ahead and scanned them. Maybe just invest now in making sure news content is accessible?

Are we suggesting that Google fund local communities’ engagement and are we okay with that?

Do we need to get away from describing libraries and news outlets as charities?

What is the role of government? Should we own our information in a manner that is similar to that with which we think we should own our education and health care?

Someone described the co-op model within ethnic media, where engagement is thriving and described New California Media’s work to educate sponsors and its growth to a large-scale project, New American Media.

This is an incomplete list and I’m sorry for anyone’s name that I spell incorrectly, but some participants included:

Karen Gill
Anne Raci
Celeste Bruno
Alexa Pearce
Aimee Picchi
Saul Tannenbaum
Irene Van
Troy Espe
Andrew Ott
Ruth Urell
David Bollier
Alpha Delap
Caroline Nappo
Evelyn Messinger
David Weinberger
Christine Saed

Title: Credibility, journalism, and libraries — ideas of trust and responsibility
Host/Reporter: Jeanine Finn
Participants:
Andrew Ott
Saul Tannenbaum
Suzanne Sullivan
Khara Whitney-Marsh
Katie Ingersoll
Ruth Urell
Dietmar Wolfram
Meredith McCulloch
Alexa Pearce
Marla Crockett
Mike Kettross
Jamie Helgun
Troy Espe
Mike LaBonte
Stephen Lippman
Debbie Holmes

Discussion: We had a wide-ranging discussion highlighting several themes related to credibility that are concerns for both journalists and librarians. As we work to broaden civic conversations and make room for the public to “report” on news and information, we may not be able to rely on traditional methods to evaluate source credibility. However, the ideas of critical thinking and contextual evaluation of sources remain important — whether the environment is analog or digital.

Our themes included:

Wikipedia-style collaborations. While the “anybody can edit it” model circumvents traditional models of authority, “many eyeballs” and a social contract and work to provide an ultimately fairly reliable resource.

Accountability is important. Is there a sense that misinformation has consequences within the community?

Local news is often under-reported, but offers real opportunities for citizen journalism engagement. Local reporters need to be on seen to be credible witnesses to local government activity (which is admittedly, often not terribly exciting) and be part of holding government accountable. We talked about projects like ProPublica and Knight Foundation efforts.

Participants:
Jack Brighton (convener)
Suzanne Searle
Dorothy Carner
Joy Mayer
Tom Flanagan
Jordan Eschler
Jacqueline Rafferty
Karen Perry

Initial questions:
What do we mean by everyone?
What do we mean by the room?
It’s about democracy, and engagement.

A lot of birds of a feather at this convening. Similarly, there’s a set of people — the usual suspects — who show up for a lot of community events. And there are a lot of people who don’t show up. How do we find divergent voices — people who might make us angry if we talked to them? And if we did, what kind of dialogue would we have? What kind of social contract or ground rules could we adopt that allows us to engage in useful dialogue?

Find common ground.

Where’s the room? Digital sometimes? But what about the have-nots? Media literacy problems get magnified. A lot of people are comfortable letting others speak for them.

Getting tired of the word civility. It’s coming to mean nonimpassioned. Passion works best when it comes with responsibility, and with a commitment to stay in the conversation. Don’t disconnect from each other when people get passionate. Be civil enough to hear someone else’s speech.

Individuals have bandwidths. How do you make your event or conversation worth the investment of time?

Can there be a win-win? How do you construct consensus. Media thrives not on consensus but on drama. Is there any drama in consensus? What’s the story?

Jack Brighton told a story about a community cinema series in Champaign IL. Watch a film once a month, then discuss it. Jack is the host. One movie was about the troubled past and tragic life story of a young woman in Nashville. The discussion was based on the question of how many of these scenarios are playing out in our community because no one’s paying attention to what’s happening to kids from a really young age. People came who were all doing various things about this same issue. They’d never been in the same room before. No one had convened them. How can we build those connections? Whose job is it? The next month, the film series showed a movie about the war in the Congo. 240 refugees from the Congo who live in the community showed up. Who even knew they were there? And how did they find out about it?

Make the invisible visible. Make the unfamiliar familiar. Make the disagreements converge.

The Harwood Institute is a great resource for processes around community engagement and conversation.

How do you make it worth someone’s time to participate? Promise that if people come with something to say, they’ll get to talk about it. PROMISE that all voices will be heard. Avoid the kind of hierarchy that too often develops, with assumed royalty and supplicants. That’s not conversation-based. Can’t have the hierarchy if the point is dialogue.

Another question: Do you actually want everybody in the room? Or just the people who care?

One of the rooms is the school room. There, you want everybody. Elsewhere, maybe not. Maybe it’s okay to not want everybody.

Know what do you want from the group. Information sharing? Multiple perspectives? A decision or action?

Does “everyone” mean literally every body? Or every perspective? How do these things scale? How does democracy scale?

We want to get more people sharing their stories because we don’t understand each other.

Karen Perry shared a story about working on a controversial issue (national broadband). She worked in group designed to bring divergent views to consensus. Agree first on a statement. Then break it down into working groups, with opposite viewpoints as co-chairs. Then work it out. Deep, civil conversations and listening. Targeted participation. Have a clear goal. If the goal is to bring diverse voices together, ask people to participate. Issue the personal invitation.

She also talked about the documentary Freedom Writers: Stories of an Undeclared War. Teacher went to teach at Wilson High in LA after Rodney King. The only thing the kinds agreed on was that they really hated the teacher. But she managed to keep them for four years. Every one of them graduated. They all wrote their stories. Powerful stuff. Find a way to connect, then create a community where they support each other.

Invite people to help plan the library services. All stakeholders, very egalitarian. Less prescription, more collaboration.

Be trustworthy — keep your word once they’re there. Let people talk if that’s what you promise. And if you say you’ll report back, or follow up, do it. Keep your contract.

Jacqueline Rafferty from the Paul Pratt Memorial Library offered these wise, eloquent words:
The role always is to empower people to be informed, engaged citizens. Be more yang than yin. Instead of being passive receptacles and places where people use facilities, think about the ALA model of deliberative forums. Bring people together, and through skilled facilitation, help people to come to consensus. People need and are using libraries more than ever. But funding is getting cut. Accessibility is a bigger problem than ever. Information gaps are widening. But empowered, engaged citizens make a strong democracy. The democracy is in danger of eroding. It’s an economic issue, and a sociological one.

It’s easy for those of us in this room to forget that we’re an island of education and perspectives that big chunks of the community don’t share. We need to be guided experts in a crowded information world.

One story from earlier in the day: A participant shared how she was empowering youth participants to take responsibility for planning a project, implementing it, reporting back on it, engaging others in the outcomes. When she found out young people were often abusive to homeless people, she took kids into homeless shelters, had them conduct interviews, then publish and report back about what they learned. The key is making the participants feel like change agents, not just objects.

Teach listening. Sometimes we think we’re aiming for consensus. But civil dialogue — a recognition of diverging perspectives — can be just as good. Build consensus around what the two viewpoints are. That’s worth something. Consensus isn’t about unanimity. It’s about declaring what you can agree on. Is total agreement even a good goal?

Maybe it’s about the quality of the dialogue.