Groundswell

Co-authored by Josh Stearns and Tracy VanSlyke

If 2009 was a year of study and debate about the future of journalism, 2010 must be a year of action. We must come together around a core set of ideas to create a better ecosystem for sustainable and high-impact journalism. Based on the various reports and conferences from the past year, we’ve compiled the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and suggest some initial steps to begin moving forward. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a great blog post from Chris O’Brien over at Next Newsroom on the role of passion and community in the future of news.

In his post “How Passion For Newspapers Points To A Way Forward” O’Brien taps into a vital aspect of the work we are all doing in media reform and the future of journalism. Like so many current social movements we get bogged down in the stats, figures, and data and lose sight of the role of emotion in the fights we wage. It doesn’t just matter how people read the news or where advertisers spend their money – we also need to be concerned with how people feel about news organizations and why people read the news.

“Too often, we boil a newspaper down to the idea that it’s just about journalism. In fact, at their peak, a printed newspaper provided about 50 different services to readers, one of which was journalism. Taken together, these things created not just a product, but also an experience. This is where the emotional component kicks in.”

While it is easy to talk about the vital role of journalism in democracy, and we have to keep doing so. By focusing on such huge abstract issues, we risking missing the more local direct way that people experience the news and the immediate role journalism plays in our lives. As O’Brien notes, this role is not just about providing news and information. And its not just about creating a local marketplace. The sum is greater than its parts here. News orgs are vital civic orgs – they organize information (or help people organize information) and in so doing they help organize people themselves. This is the community building power of the media – that has for the most part been forgotten (or abandoned). This is what the best community newspapers, community radio stations, and community access TV still do. Read the rest of this entry »

Free Press created SaveTheNews.org to argue for the importance of public policy in discussions about the future of journalism. Last week, however, policy took center stage with three articles examining our government’s possible role in fostering a robust and diverse free press in America. The articles came from an array of sources – a scholar, a journalist and a pair of advocates – and appeared in newspapers across the country, from Washington, D.C., to Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »

A Report Out from the Free Press Summit: Changing Media (www.freepress.net/summit)

The mid-day panel at the Free Press Summit: Changing Media, raised vital questions about the future of American media: Will our new media system be a resource for all Americans, an engine for economic growth, and a platform for new forms of art, entertainment, education and information? Or will we let the digital divide grow, expanding the information gap and cutting more people off from the benefits of the Web?

Moderated by Ray Suarez, of PBS’ The NewsHour, the panel included two former FCC chairmen, Reed Hundt and Michael Powell, as well as Jessica Rosenworcel from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, venture capitalist Ram Shriram and Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott.

Together, the panel took a hard look at the role of government in shaping the media in America. Since our nation’s founding, government – recognizing the vital role of a robust media system – has developed policies that have had an impact on everything we see, read and hear. If we are at a turning point for the media in America – what role will the government play? Read the rest of this entry »

Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.

Rainer Maria Rilke

As usual I am about a month behind in my reading, and so am just now getting through the December edition of Orion Magazine. There are a few fantastic articles in it (as usual) but one focuses on an art exhibit called Human/Nature and has some great quotes. Read the whole areticle here: Human/Nature. And subscribe to Orion here.

“The only thing we have to protect nature with is culture,” Wendell Berry has observed. And yet, nature is a particularly human idea. Culture is how we come to it.

In 1944, Richard Wright wrote in American Hunger, “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” So it is, perhaps, with art-making, with the work of conservation, with the act of simply getting by—consciously and with integrity—in this uneven world that is our heritage. We hope for echoes. We hunger for recognition and response. This is what the artists of Human/Nature have done in concert. They have made soundings in eight different places in eight wildly different ways, and they are tracing them home. The best we can do is listen.

Here is another nugget from one of my current favorite Dad-blogs – Fathers who Feel:

We’re all addicts for happiness, and for formulas to attain more of it. Sometimes being a parent looks like a big board game designed to demonstrate what a silly quest that is. The point here isn’t that there isn’t a lot of crazy joy on the journey. It’s just that nailing it down and making it repeatable is beyond elusive. Not that my little brain actually registers that and gives up trying.

Do be sure to wander over to his blog and check out the rest of this post, and some of his other writing…

“People live in a community by virtue of the things they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common.”

John Dewey, Democracy and Education

I just stumbled upon a great post over at Grist.org reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr. in terms of our food culture and food system. In many ways the post reminded me of some of the work I had done a few years ago, exploring the overlaps between Dr. King and conservation and community service for the Student Conservation Association (see those here and here). I agree with Tom Philpot, the author of the post, that a community garden is a great place to celebrate MLK day.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

“[There is an] emerging backlash against industrial food — a movement toward farmers markets, natural-foods supermarkets like Whole Foods, and other sources of fresh, unprocessed fare. But here, too, African Americans were largely marginalized. In cities across the country, “food deserts” persist: areas where almost no fresh food (much less local or organic fare) is available, forcing residents to either travel great distances to supermarkets or rely on overpriced processed fare from corner stores. Read the rest of this entry »

“People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”

~Veteran photographer, George Guthrie, a character in the Tom Stoppard play Night and Day (thanks to James Warren’s recent article in the Atlantic for pointing me to this quote.)