JTM Denver, Wednesday: Harvesting ideas about what constitutes a healthy news ecology
Tony Shawcrosse – shift from media to civic.
Laura Frank: Interesting how we went from the ideal to focusing in on engagement as a key measure of an ideal news ecology. If we have that, we have diversity, relevance, transparency civil health. How do we get there? You get there through experimentation, collaboration and more engagement.
Ted Anthony: This touches on the idea that a healthy ecosystem is always experimental, it has to be a constantly evolving beats.
Rob Williams: Let’s push that idea of what we mean by engagement.
Josh Wolf: As for engagement, there is public funding that we are losing such as legal advertisements. That is public funding for journalism that we are losing. It should continue to be spent on journalism.
Dan Moulthrop — Upstairs right now they tweeted, consumers don’t want to be passive, engagement needs to be part of the future. RE money and business models and what we pay for what we do. I was struck, that we seem to be worried about it, but we don’t always seem to be ready for a new way to pay for what we do. Business people supported it by advertising. That’s not the future. I hope in the next 24 hours we can do a bit of that work. Tom Stites has a great idea with Banyan, but we need 100 ideas.
Michelle Ferrier: Two thoughts came out: We are talking about engagement and that feels a lot like privilege – there are people who are not here because they don’t have the time, money or resources to “engage.” Journalism that is by, for and of all the paper and is inclusive so everyone can participate in the practices of their community.
We need new language to describe the work that we do – communicators, advertisers, audience members. We need to be careful with the langage when we borrow from the old models because they already mean something
Susan Abbott: What about the training that is necessary to practice journalism?
Mike Fancher: How can you get trust at the front end. We have to recognize whe are in a co-dependent reality. WE all have a stake here, we all have a common ground here. That might have a more positive approach to how we treat each other and treat information, rather than so much of journalism’s past which is let’s find the points of disagreement. We have to find the points of commonality.
Peggy Holman: Dissonacne can be the opening to new possibilities. It is just how we treat it. Given that conflict, what’s possible in the situation. Who needs to be in that conflict, and how can we create that opening, that doorway?
Marla Crockett: Concerning trust in the relationship between communicators and the public. The lines may be blurring, but thre are still a lot of professional communicators here. Are we treating our adinece as consumers or citizens. Do we want them to buy something? Rich Harwood talks about three A’s of public life: Authenticity, accountability and authority. With what authority are we speaking to people and are we holding ourselves accountable for the conversation?
Bill Densmore: At lunch, our group talked about the lack of good data and metrics on how journalism matters, how it effects communities. If a community has great media and great indicators of community health or little or no media and poor indicators of community health is that a cause-effect? We don’t really know and we need to.
Patrick Kitano: Runs a network of 40 cities similar to Patch. It is a non-commercial service, designed to promote whatever people want promoted. If you want to gain local presence, I’d like to talk about that.
Susan Abbott – Is their a national non-profit or association of nonprofit media, a place you can go to to look at emergent models.
Laura Frank: There is something called the Investigative News Network. It has 70 members, a consortium of non-profits. The website has some best practices. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel. We work together editorial and on backoffice things.
Mike Fancher: This is something that JTM and others have strugged out there. There is so much information out there about all the experiments going on but little analysis or intelligence. One thing JTM sees in its future is documenting the stories of success. There is something called the Journalism Accelerator. Nobody has found the magic bullet, we just have to stay in the conversation.
Peggy: I do think it is an idea whose time has come – highlighting what is going on out there.