It just so happens, that this new focus on private equity also comes as the Federal Communications Commission launches its next review of media ownership rules. In January of 2008 I wrote about the role of private equity firms in the debate around media consolidation. At the time, the FCC had just voted through troubling changes in its media ownership rules (which were later overturned in the courts) and they had just approved the sale of Clear Channel to two private equity firms. One of those firms was Romney’s Bain Capital, which has a stake in a number of media properties.

At the time, the Broadcast Law Blog wrote “Private equity should be aware that, in a future FCC, an investigation of the economics of their operations should be expected.” That has yet to happen.

A year later, Matt Crain conducted an in-depth study of the regulatory challenges raised by a media system so intertwined with private equity. He wrote:

“Private equity’s entrance into media ownership  compounds the already convoluted networks of attribution that characterize the  U.S. media landscape. Clear Channel’s takeover by Bain Capital and Thomas  H.  Lee  Partners  illustrates  this  dynamic.  Both  private  equity  firms  own  stakes  in  Cumulus  Media, one of Clear Channel’s main radio competitors, and both firms are heavily invested in Warner Music, a  major music supplier to the radio industry. Thomas H. Lee Partners holds stakes in Univision, also an active radio broadcaster.”

In his final assessment, he writes, “The evidence presented in this analysis strongly indicates that private equity, in its perpetual search for profit maximization, is, at a foundational level, antithetical to the public interest obligations of the media sector.”

Below is the post I wrote in 2008, much of which is more relevant now than ever.

Privatization and Consolidation: A New Era in Big Media

It is hard to talk about the media without someone claiming that “traditional media” is on its deathbed. Every time we turn around, there is another pundit warning Americans about the dire situation facing our broadcast stations and newspapers. Pundits wring their hands about the surge in “citizen journalism” on blogs, and Big Media flacks point to YouTube videos as evidence of a new era in media competition. We want to believe this alluring argument because we want to believe in the democratic promise of new media outlets.

While the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities for individuals to make their voice heard, 70 percent of Americans still get the majority of their news from local stations. Even when they use the Internet, they tend to go to the Web sites of local stations and newspapers for their news. These statistics — along with news that the Federal Communications Commission just approved the massive $19.5 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications, the country’s largest radio conglomerate, by a private equity group led by Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital Partners — are stark reminders of the vibrancy and vitality of traditional media sources. While profits from traditional media sources may have slowed, they are still highly valuable properties.

Just last month, the FCC also approved the sale of Clear Channel’s television division to another equity firm, Providence Equity Partners. But Clear Channel is far from unique. These deals are just the latest in a growing trend of private equity firms snatching up broadcast media companies and privatizing the conglomerates. New York Times journalists Andrew Ross Sorkin and Peter Edmonston report:

“Some of the largest broadcasters and publishers are being swept into the arms of private equity firms, which are drawn to the rich cash flows these businesses generate and undaunted by their slowing growth. The trend could raise new regulatory concerns as some of the big private equity firms start to weave a complex web of cross-ownerships in the industry.”

In fact, such regulatory concerns have been raised before. Last year, private equity firms were trying to out bid each other to buy Univision Communications, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the United States. At that time, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps called on the FCC to carefully study “the impact of private equity on our ability to ensure that licensees protect, serve and sustain the public interest.” But since he made this statement, the only response from the FCC has been to approve one deal after another. The impact of this private equity feeding frenzy is still unclear.

Private equity’s reach has not been limited to broadcast and newspapers alone. Back in 2006 at the Reuters Media Summit in New York, Time Warner chief Richard Parsons described the attention his company has received from these groups. “Probably every private equity firm has approached us about every conceivable idea.”

Providence Equity Partners, which bought Clear Channel’s TV stations this winter, has also invested heavily in the new online joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corporation. According to the New York Times, Providence Equity Partners and its chief executive Jonathan Nelson have “a long history of investing in media properties like local newspapers, television stations and cable networks.” Between their diverse investments and Nelson’s position on the boards of MGM, Warner Music Group and the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network, Providence Equity Partners symbolizes a new kind of media consolidation.

In his dissenting statement regarding the Clear Channel-Providence vote, Copps argues that:

“No one should be under any illusion that Clear Channel’s sale of its 35 full-power television stations strikes a blow for de-consolidation. After this transaction closes and all divestitures have occurred, Providence Equity Partners will have attributable interests in a whopping 86 television stations and 99 radio stations in the United States, as well as interests in media companies around the world such as MGM studios (largest shareholder), Yes Network, Hallmark Channel, and Warner Music Group. You will search this Order in vain, however, for any mention of the scope of Providence’s holdings or how they potentially affect our public interest analysis.”

Copps is not alone in his concern about private equity’s impact on America’s media. On July 12, 2007, Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to warn the agency about the potential dangers of private equity firms: “History also suggests that private equity ownership is marked by a management structure that is not overly transparent and by fluid asset management where actual holdings and control may vary significantly, as properties are bought and sold. These historical styles may not be consistent with many of the core public interest and localism values that Congress has assigned to local media and may implicitly undermine the Commission’s media ownership rules.”

As Big Media companies and local stations are bought and sold, changing hands and changing owners, our most important sources of information are increasingly seen as mere investments. “The more people disparage ‘old media,’ the happier I am,” said one private equity manager. “These companies don’t require a lot of capital investment. They sell subscriptions, so you get the money up front and deliver the product over time. They generate a lot of cash, so they make great buyout candidates, and you can get them at reasonable prices, because everyone else is focused on buying shares of Google.”

But our media is not just another product; it is a vital component of our democracy. For too long, our media policies have been made by big media lobbyists and big business investors without our consent. As we enter this new era of private consolidation, we should be vigilant and demand a seat at the table and a voice in shaping the media policies that so impact our daily lives

“I’ve long said that those of us in the media have provided too many autopsies of what went wrong and not enough biopsies. It’s a belief that goes hand-in-hand with HuffPost Good News’ editorial mission to turn our attention to what is working.”

Trying to emphasize positive news rooted in “what is working” is good, but Huffington missed an opportunity to do something deeper and more impactful with “Good News.” In her short introductory post Huffington uses the word inspiring (or some variation of it) nine times, and provides examples like a man who rescued puppies in Afghanistan. Granted there are also examples of activists and leaders writing on social change, but it all seems retrospective, not forward looking. At first glance, “Good News” looks less like a biopsy, and more like a Hallmark card you send after someone gets terminally ill.

When I first saw a reference to “Good News” on Twitter, I hoped it was a sign that the Huffington Post was going to take on an in-depth effort to provide more “solutions journalism.” Solutions journalism is not so much about writing about “what is working” but rather about “what might work.” In a recent New York Times editorial David Bornstein seemed to predict HuffPost’s announcement when he wrote:

“Journalism is a feedback mechanism to help society self-correct. We know from behavioral science that information about a problem alone is rarely sufficient to generate corrective action. People need to know what they can do ― and how. That doesn’t mean including a little “good news” now and them, but regularly presenting people with innovative ideas and realistic pathways and possibilities that remain outside their view frame. In this sense, solutions journalism needs to be interwoven with traditional journalism ― it rounds out the story, so to speak.”

Jonathan Stray referred to something similar in his post on “Journalism for Makers:”

“Where is the journalism for the idealist doer with a burning curiosity? I don’t think we have much right now, but we can imagine what it could be. The journalism of makers aligns itself with the tiny hotbeds of knowledge and practice where great things emerge, the nascent communities of change. Its aim is a deep understanding of the complex systems of the real world, so that plans for a better world may constructed one piece at a time by people who really know what they’re talking about.”

It isn’t that the Huffington Post can’t or doesn’t already do some of this. There are expert journalists working at Huffington Post, who are digging deeply into issues and systems (see for example Michael Calderone) and some of the new partners who Huffington lists could help. But I had hoped that this new “Good News” section would indicate a new emphasis and dedication to that work, and a central hub for pulling it all together from across the web.

There is a great debate emerging about solutions journalism and I think we’ll see more and more of it in the year ahead, but I’m not sure how much we’ll see on Huffington Post’s “Good News” page, unfortunately.

…….

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links

On Twitter Holly Epstein of the New York Times reminds me that NYT has a blog “Fixes” dedicated to solutions journalism. In the spirit of reporting on what is working, I should have included that in my post. GOOD magazine, which is one of the partners listed by Huffington, also does some interesting work in this space.

Jay Rosen summed it up pretty well on Twitter:

A new vertical devoted to Good News is easy huffingtonpost.com/good-news/ The journalistically challenging thing is a section about problem solving.—
Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) January 12, 2012

 ”I know from talking to folks in the newsroom that all the change may be exhausting the staff, too. Many of these innovations require considerable staff time, as well as more time from editors and reporters to monitor them… Staffers say that sometimes they feel as if the innovations are just tossed against a wall to see what sticks, without careful thought as to which of them will enhance and shore up The Post’s reputation and brand… I want The Post to continue to innovate. It’s important for the publication’s survival. Many of these changes are working… But there’s a time to press on the accelerator, and a time to ease off. Substance, clarity and direction will be more important in the long run than buzz. Take a breather lap, Post.”

I don’t know Pexton and I don’t know the inner-workings of the WaPo newsroom, but most of the people in my Twitter stream viewed Pexton’s post as at best bizarre and at worst a troubling sign for the Post’s long term relevance. However, it’s worth noting, Pexton does root his analysis in the concerns he is hearing from readers, and a news organization – whether it is innovating or stagnating – should listen to its readers.

But in this case, I don’t think the diagnosis, nor how it was delivered, fit the symptoms.

In the end, I don’t think the ombudsman’s comments show a stubborn resistance to innovation as much as a misunderstanding of how innovation works, and a rigid unwillingness to allow for failure (and the learning that goes along with it). This fear of failure is antithetical to the start-up and maker culture that is emerging amidst digital journalists in and outside of newsrooms, and is evident even in the metaphor Pexton chooses.

When he looks at innovation he doesn’t see a potential network of roads forward, he sees a potential car crash. Thus, for Pexton it is better to “ease off” the accelerator. In this scenario, innovating too fast is a threat – in this case it is a threat to the basics, the fundamentals of journalism.

If innovation is in part about exploring the path less taken, then we should not expect clear road signs.  Pexton’s post never discusses what might be the appropriate speed for innovation, or how a newsroom, an audience, or an ombudsman might measure that speed.

This isn’t so much a critique of Pexton, as much as a critique of a point of view that I see repeated over and over again in discussions about the future of journalism. It is a point of view that resides in unhelpful dichotomies like new vs. old, online vs. print, innovation vs. fundamentals. Thinking in dichotomies like this suggests that these things cannot co-exist, or even perhaps strengthen each other (and it is not just “the print guys” who reinforce these dichotomies at times).

An ombudsman has a unique opportunity at a time of radical transformation in the media landscape, to help news organizations navigate new changes and challenges while fostering new connections and collaborations with their community. If Pexton believes, as he says briefly in his post, that when trying new things, “some will be successful, some won’t,” then his response should not be to tell The Post to hit the brakes, but rather to look at what’s working, what’s not, and what’s there to be learned.

Instead of suggesting journalists stop innovating, help make that innovation more effective. Help journalists and technologists ensure that innovation serves the public and you will help foster the “substance, clarity and direction” you seek.

…………

Note: The day after I published this post, Jay Rosen posted a very good interview with Pexton about his views on innovation which digs much deeper into these issues and helps clarify some of Pexton’s points. I’ll add some follow-up to my post in light of Jay’s discussion with Pexton soon, but for now go read the interview here.

Below I have collected some of the responses to the Pexton’s post (the embedding feature is adding all connected tweets to the one I featured, working on making this more readable):

I think the last thing a newspaper needs to worry about at this point is whether it is "innovating too fast" is.gd/MQZy2X—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) January 07, 2012

@ianhillmedia @webjournalist Sense I get in my research (early stages) is this: It's not the innovation that reporters don't like (more)—
Brian Moritz (@bpmoritz) January 09, 2012

@ianhillmedia @webjournalist It's that ownership treats digital/online/social as a fad or an add-on instead of a new way of life—
Brian Moritz (@bpmoritz) January 09, 2012

@ianhillmedia @bpmoritz I do think it's on the 'new school' to explain/education the 'old school.' Not ask for permission, but not assume.—
Robert Hernandez (@webjournalist) January 08, 2012

@ianhillmedia @bpmoritz Do things with purpose. Experiment with purpose. And tell people about your successes and failures. W/o bragging.—
Robert Hernandez (@webjournalist) January 08, 2012

'Our newsroom needs to be in a relatively permanent “beta” mode,' says @washingtonpost ME: journ.us/wLSIya Ombud raises innovation ?s—
  (@Poynter) January 08, 2012

@LyraMcKee @jcstearns innovation needs a schedule too – not least to give each one air and attention, add explanation and gather feedback—
emily bell (@emilybell) January 09, 2012

@LyraMcKee @jcstearns ….but for the solution to be 'stop' is utterly ridiculous—
emily bell (@emilybell) January 09, 2012

@jcstearns @emilybell I think the actual issues here are a) Bad user experience/design and UX & b) Confusing progress w innovation—
Lyra McKee (@LyraMcKee) January 09, 2012

@emilybell @jcstearns Exactly. What worries me is that, due to their size, most trad news orgs have too many liabilities to innovate—
Lyra McKee (@LyraMcKee) January 09, 2012

Be sure to check out Andrew’s tumblr blog for a wonderfully curated collection of poems, his and others.

Table Legs

Running your hand over the grain, you said you regretted the wood. So tonight we ate dinner off of you.

As you knelt on all fours, I spread our best linens over your back, smoothing them over your shoulder blades, those remnants of wings.

You were too short for chairs so we sat around you on telephone books and dictionaries. You preferred it that way, sitting on top of stacks of words.

Our plates sloped towards us, leaning away from your spine. We built walls of potatoes to stop the peas from rolling away.

And your heart beat sent ripples across the surface of our wine. I pulled myself in close, bumping my knees against your ribs, and felt the heat of your body on my thighs.

We ate in silence, looking only occasionally at the old oak table, its underside, unvarnished and still rough.
When the others weren’t looking I fed you my radishes and you kissed my fingers.

T’was AT&T’s Night Before Christmas

T’was the night before Christmas, and all through DC
Not a lobbyist was stirring, for old AT&T.
They thought that their merger would be wrapped up with a bow
But that just goes to show how little they know.

It all started so smooth, with Jim Cicconi in the lead,
Supporters lined up with remarkable speed,
Filing letters, making statements, it was going so well,
Until people remembered the long history of Ma Bell.

Then the public began to see that something was the matter
And together they made such a wonderful clatter.
They uncovered AT&T’s astroturf scam,
In which they bought support from as many groups as they can.

AT&T promised that they’d bridge the digital divide,
A little white lie to get more support for their side.
But then a memo was leaked that revealed the facts,
Forcing them to scramble to cover their tracks.

Their plan to “mobilize everything” hit a bump in the road
But they weren’t afraid because they had spent a load,
$16 million on lobbyists and $2 million more on campaigns.
But it turns out all that money might have gone down the drain.

Because at the end of summer the DOJ took a stand
And told AT&T to “talk to the hand.”
They asserted this merger just had to be stopped.
Rumor has it Cicconi just about blew his top.

Now public interest groups quickly swung into high gear
Through research, organizing, and education they made clear
That this deal was bad news from the very start
And demanded that the FCC do their part.

AT&T warned us that they’d fight for T-Mo,
All fall you could see their ads wherever you go
They promised more jobs, better service and more,
They’d fix the economy by Christmas they swore.

But when Thanksgiving came, their goose was cooked.
The FCC agreed with Justice that this takeover looked
Too big and too bad to let move ahead,
And many declared that the deal was dead.

AT&T couldn’t believe what had just gone down,
They are used to getting their way in this town.
So they tried to pull out of the FCC’s review
To hide the facts that the agency knew.

But this didn’t stop the FCC from publishing their report,
To which AT&T had little retort,
They sputtered and stuttered and sulked away,
Ending their bid just before Christmas day.

And as the news spread across the tech blogosphere,
The public shouted out with great joy and cheer.
And if you listen close you might hear Copps say,
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good day.

…….

Here is that donation link again. We don’t take any money from businesses, political parties or government agencies – we depend on you.

“Journalism is a feedback mechanism to help society self-correct. We know from behavioral science that information about a problem alone is rarely sufficient to generate corrective action. People need to know what they can do ― and how. That doesn’t mean including a little “good news” now and them, but regularly presenting people with innovative ideas and realistic pathways and possibilities that remain outside their view frame. In this sense, solutions journalism needs to be interwoven with traditional journalism ― it rounds out the story, so to speak.”

There are a lot of reasons I think this idea is important, which I get into more below, but in general I think it’s vital that those of us who are working to remake journalism are able to describe the kind of diverse news ecosystem we want to create. As Bornstein points out, it is not enough to simply describe the challenges and problems facing journalism, we need to also be exploring and experimenting with the solutions.

A few years back Jay Rosen published a “flying seminar on the future of news,” a short round-up of one conversation from one month in March 2009. Today, I want to offer my own flying seminar on “Solutions Journalism.” Consider it a reading list for those who want to dive deep into this idea and continue the conversation in the new year. There are quotes from each post below, but be sure to read each post in full and add your voice to the conversation.

Journalism for makers (By Jonathan Stray)

“The modern world is built on a series of vast systems, intricate combinations of people and machines, but our journalism isn’t really built to help us understand them. It’s not a journalism for the people who will put together the next generation of civic institutions… There is a journalism to be done here, but it’s not the journalism of making people money, penning morality tales, or interesting articles in the Sunday paper. It’s a techno-social investigative journalism for those who have chosen to use their specialized knowledge in the interests of the rest of us.”

The Next Iteration of Journalism: Shifting From a “Problem Frame” To A “Solution Frame” (by Blair Hickman)

“To really help society re-route, the press also has to investigate solution strategies that are already in play. Right now, that’s not happening with consistent quality… Solution journalism is simply the yin to muckraking’s yang. For people and systems to change, people have to know both what’s broken and what’s working. Doing anything less stunts growth.”

A Systems Approach to Remaking Journalism (by me)

“A shift towards systems thinking in journalism may inspire more of the kind of journalism that Stray advocates for in his piece, but it may have another unintended consequence. I agree with Stray that as a society we need journalism that better understands, reports on and responds to social, political, economic, ecological and other systems. But for those of us concerned with the future of journalism, we have to also understand that the media is also just one such system. And in fact, even a single news organization is a complex system itself.”

Beware of Journalists Bearing Solutions? (by C.W. Anderson)

“The challenge: By what right, and on what grounds, do journalists claim the authority to offer solutions to any particularly difficult problem? Journalists are neither elected, nor particularly accountable, nor all that expert in anything in particular.”

What newsrooms can learn from open-source and maker culture (by Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis)

“So if we think about the story as code, what happens? It might seem radical, but try to imagine it: Journalists writing code as the building blocks for the story. And while they write this code, it can be commented on, shared, fact-checked, or augmented with additional information such as photos, tweets, and the like. This doesn’t have to mean that a journalist loses control over the story. But it opens up the story, and puts it on a platform where all kinds of communities can actively participating as co-makers.”

And then I would book-end this short seminar with Jonathan Stray’s more recent piece which I think also gets at what a concrete vision of the media we want to see might look like: What should the digital public sphere do?

“I began writing this essay because I wanted to say something very simple: all of these things — journalism, search engines, Wikipedia, social media and the lot — have to work together to common ends. There is today no one profession which encompasses the entirety of the public sphere. Journalism used to be the primary bearer of these responsibilities — or perhaps that was a well-meaning illusion sprung from near monopolies on mass information distribution channels. Either way, that era is now approaching two decades gone. Now what we have is an ecosystem, and in true networked fashion there may not ever again be a central authority. From algorithm designers to dedicated curators to, yes, traditional on-the-scene pro journalists, a great many people in different fields now have a part in shaping the digital public sphere. I wanted try to understand what all of us are working toward.”

This conversation is in process, so consider this seminar a starting place, not the last word. As Rosen says in his seminar from 2009 “The ‘flying’ part is simple: go ahead, steal these links. Spread the seminar. Get your people up to speed.” Please add your voice here in the comments or on your own blog and let me know. I’ll add responses below.

*Notes and responses:

1) Blair Hickman offers a few more resources for this discussion including a list of books that informed solutions journalism and an actual syllabus on solutions journalism for those of you who want more than a “flying seminar.”

The people arrested were all aligned with the Occupy movement, with some serving on the Occupy Wall Street media team, but based on videos and first-hand accounts they were primarily there to bear witness and cover the events. In fact, over the course of the Occupy movement, in many cases when police kept other journalists at arm’s length, the only video and reports coming out of Occupy raids were coming from these kinds of citizen journalists.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

The question “who is a journalist” has been raised often over the past two months as reports of press suppression and journalist arrests have spread from city to city. See, for example, the debates here, here and here. I’ve already described my views on this in relation to my own work monitoring journalist arrests at Occupy events: “I decided early on that I wasn’t going to quibble about who is a journalist, and who isn’t. My goal was to account for anyone who was clearly committing acts of journalism when they were arrested.”

But, tangled up in the debates over who is a journalist are very real legal debates about who is given press credentials and what protections those press credentials provide. In general, the press credentialing system is broken — a poor fit for the media landscape we find ourselves in. The courts have already ruled that, as more people gain access to the tools of reporting, “news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.” If the question is not who is a journalist, but rather, what are the acts of journalism that should be protected, then we need to rethink what a “press credential” actually is.

I think your actions should be your press credentials. In his 2010 book Mediactive Dan Gillmor outlines five key principles of “trustworthy media creation” including: Thoroughness, Accuracy, Fairness, Independence, and Transparency. “These are universal principles,” Gillmor writes, “not just for people who call themselves journalists but for anyone who wants to be trusted for what they say or write.” As I have studied the more than 30 cases of journalist arrests at Occupy protests, while the majority of people on my list have had some affiliation with a news organization, I have used these principles as a guide to help identify acts of journalism.

I recognize that this is not as simple as it sounds, and that the lines are blurry, but that complexity doesn’t make it wrong. This isn’t an argument that everyone is a journalist or that all reporting is of equal quality or value. This also isn’t an argument that journalists are somehow “above the law” or that anyone with a camera should be untouchable. We only need look at the News of the World scandal in the UK to know that a journalist’s notebook is not a get out of jail free card. The point is, this debate should not hinge on what you call yourself, it should focus on what you do.

Blurring the Lines

To that end, I thought it was fascinating that when TIME Magazine announced that its Person of the Year was “protesters,” it included a number of journalists in its pictures and profiles. This is a prime example of the blurring boundaries between journalists and activists and a recognition that in a networked news environment we are all getting our information from an array of sources.

“Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history,” writes Kurt Andersen in TIME. After many decades when it seemed like protests had little real impact on the world, Anderson argues, “starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.” However, instead of this history being made by protesters and communicated by professionals, it is being chronicled live across the web by a diverse array of media makers.

In a long video on its site, TIME profiles one of the most famous live-streamers of the Occupy movement, Tim Pool, who it dubs “an activist/journalist.” Pool doesn’t have a press pass, but he speaks thoughtfully about the values and principles that drive his work – and his actions bear out those ideas. Jay Rosen, of NYU and PressThink, also discussed Pool in a long post that touches these issues:

This might be a good time to mention that Tim Pool is clearly an activist and supporter of Occupy Wall Street as well as a reporter of it. If you believe those things can’t possibly go together, fine, I know where you’re coming from. But don’t expect me to freak out or even care that you wouldn’t call Pool a journalist. As I’ve said before, we should focus less on “who’s a journalist” and more on valid acts of journalism. When we can recognize the act, the ‘who’ becomes easier: anyone committing the act!

If credentials are meant to establish one’s qualifications, I would argue that Pool’s actions are his press credentials. Actions, after all, often speak louder than words. The fact that the NYPD continues to block and arrest journalists, even after a formal order from the police commissioner not to interfere with the press, is a stark reminder of this.

Action, Intention, and Impact

We can debate what these acts of journalism look like, but over at The Atlantic Rebecca Rosen suggests that a better question might be what focus on what acts of journalism actually produce. “Does this information aid us as citizens? Does it help us understand government, or help to right some wrong?” she writes. “It’s the quality and content of the information that matters to press freedom, not the people spreading it.” She continues:

The ‘who’ proxy will work nine times out of 10, but for the sake of that tenth time, we should try to ask the more central question of ‘what’ the information is that’s at stake…. Journalists who work for big institutions will continue to have better protections — not because of laws that protect them but because of the legal power their companies can buy. For everyone else, we should hope that we haven’t legislated non-journalists out of the protections the First Amendment seeks.

As for the citizen journalists who were arrested earlier this week while documenting the protests in New York: They were released last night after more than 30 hours behind bars and face a variety of charges from criminal trespassing to resisting arrest. Hours later many of them were back in the streets reporting again and thousands of people were tuning in.

Just a day after a series of violent arrests of citizen journalists covering Occupy Wall Street, and reports of NYPD blocking and harassing a New York Times photographer, the Big Apple’s police force released a statement saying it would no longer ticket the costumed cartoon characters that frequent Times Square.

The NY Daily News reports that “It’s the end of Ticket me, Elmo.” 

“The NYPD issued a lengthy directive last month,” the article notes, “making it clear that the characters were okay if they didn’t block traffic or sell products and photos.” People interviewed for the piece mostly supported Elmo’s right to assembly.

Meanwhile, the total number of journalists arrested at Occupy events around the country today rose to 34, spanning 10 cities. And while press suppression has occurred around the country, New York City is by far the worst offender.

Elmo’s newfound freedom is most galling in light of an eerily similar directive issued by NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly in which he ordered officers to stop interfering with the press during Occupy events. Since Kelly issued that order, two journalists have been arrested and numerous others have been blocked from reporting. The video below, featuring a credentialed New York Times photographer, is a stunning example of the challenges journalists are facing as they try to report on Occupy protests.

In response to the news that Elmo would be allowed to freely roam the streets of New York, newsroom staff across the city have rushed out to buy Sesame Street costumes. Who needs press credentials when you have red fur?

Stay up to date on news about journalist arrests here.

Like many journalism reports released in the last five years, her report begins by asserting that journalism is a “public good.” However, where other authors have used that frame to explore business models or argue for new funding streams (including my own 2009 report), Sill is more interested in how the journalism itself needs to change.

“We need a new orienting idea for journalism,” she writes. If journalism is a public good, she asks, how must it change and adapt to the new digital public sphere and the demands of newly connected (and disconnected) communities. “To bring real change,” Sill argues, “we must reorder the fundamental processes of journalism toward the goal of serving communities.”

Sill sums up this shift under the idea of “open journalism,” a term that doesn’t immediately explain itself. Here is Sill’s definition:

“Open journalism’s core principles are transparency, responsiveness, participation, collaboration and connection. … It’s an idea for making quality journalism a collective endeavor and transforming it from a product driven by factory processes to a service driven by audience needs.”

In this way, open journalism brings together the democratic needs of communities with the increasingly networked technological shifts in media and information. Part argument, part case study, and part handbook for newsrooms, her paper offers a wide range of concrete examples drawn from a diverse set of journalism organizations across the country. As such the paper reads as a study of an emerging movement, one which is gaining steam but still facing very real challenges.

Journalism as a Service, Not a Product

The paper covers a lot of ground, but I want to focus on one thread that is woven throughout the paper: the ways that  open journalism calls us to understand journalism as a service, not a product. This isn’t a new idea, but one I think Sill engages productively and helps add some vital new context related to the implications of this idea. As early as 2006 Jeff Jarvis was describing networked journalism as a process, but building on the open source software ethos that undergirds Sills paper, her focus on journalism as a service felt like a helpful extension of this idea. Like Alexis Madrigal’s exploration of Occupy Wall Street as an API, journalism as a service opens up some useful new possibilities and help reframe how we understand old problems.

It is the focus on service, that fuels much of the user- or community-focused emphasis in the paper. According to Sill, open journalism is “based not on the idea that information is scarce but on the recognition that it is abundant, and sees journalism as service that taps that abundance in ways that empower citizens.” Sill describes this as a shift from “we own the story” to “we provide valuable service.”

1) Open Journalism and Building Trust: This shift could benefit journalists, communities and the bottom line. At a time when trust in journalism is still at historic lows, a shift to a more service oriented model may be a key component to rebuilding trusting relationships between newsrooms and communities. “Perhaps,” writes Sill, “as the web matures, newspeople and others can make a conceptual leap that puts journalism fully in service to citizens and consumers and returns respect and value to the work and those who do it.”

2) Open Journalism, Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism: A service frame also helps recast citizen-journalism and the broader trend of personal media making in a useful new light. Sill nicely situates blogging and citizen journalism within the long history of American volunteerism and civic-engagement. A number of projects, not featured in Sill’s report, exemplify this intersection of open journalism and volunteerism: Public Media Corps, Report for America, and the now shuttered Digital Arts Service Corps are a few examples. A quote in the paper from Ted Han, the lead developer of DocumentCloud, perhaps best illustrates this intersection: “People are trying to help people as part of a broader civic impulse,” Han said. “Journalism doesn’t seem like a huge leap.” And, Sill notes, “Han sees both civic and commercial value in such connections.”

3) Open Journalism and the Bottom Line: Michele McLellan points out in the paper that “If news organizations could just reinvent themselves as a service,” it opens up new possibilities not only for how we do journalism but also for how we pay for it. While there is still a lot of truth in the notion that “information wants to be free,” consumers are becoming more and more accustomed to paying for information services. Consider Cable TV, Internet, mobile phones, and innumerable apps that provide unique services as just a few examples. “I think people pay for service,” McLellan is quoted in the paper, and I agree that the people who can, very well might.

However, I think the “public good” and “public service” frame raise important questions about people’s ability to access information. Traditionally, in cases of market failure, our nation has subsidized a wide range of public goods. In the early days of our nation this took the form of postal subsidies for newspapers, but we can think of other sectors such as roads, schools, electricity where this has been true. As Dan Gillmor has pointed out, the modern equivalent might be ensuring universal access to broadband. However, I would argue that embracing an open journalism model should also call on us to look at other media policy questions such as funding for public media innovation, media and news literacy, and more.

Open Journalism Contains Multitudes

While Sill’s paper offers a range of straightforward and pragmatic advice for helping move journalism to a more open ethos, the paper succeeds because it offers that clarity without downplaying the very real complexity of the subject. For example, her paper ends with five concrete action steps for journalists and newsrooms to begin building a culture of openness; however she also provides a list of “100 Ideas, Arguments and Illustrations for Open Journalism.”

Reading Sill’s report I was reminded of a line of poetry from Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The paper is animated by these seemingly contradictory tensions. Open journalism calls on us to focus inside and outside the newsroom, demands “investing trust as well as asking for trust,” recognizing a “cultural shift as well as digital shift,” and on and on. However, Sill argues convincingly that these tensions create new possibilities and “journalism needs more of both, vision and structure, to go deeper on two-way communication.”

In her report, Sill weaves together a fantastic array of voices and models, and in the end produces a blueprint for a changing journalism landscape that feel greater than the sum if its parts. It is an important acknowledgement of the emerging openness movement across journalism, and a framework for others to build on.

Full Disclosure: Melanie Sill consulted with me early in her research for this project and includes one of my blog posts on her “100 Ideas” list.

Image via Rupert Ganzer on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license.

Updated to corrected Ted Han’s title.

I started many of those trips in Keene Valley, hiking in on a trail that runs parallel to Johns Brook. One week we hiked in and demolished an old lean-to at “Slant Rock” that had grown unsafe. We blazed a new trail and built a new shelter from scratch. I spent another week repairing the Johns Brook interior ranger station, a backcountry base station for park rangers.

Johns Brook wound its way through my summer that year, and has since wound its way through my memory. I listened to it as I slept, swam in it, drank from it, scrambled down its banks. A year after working on that project at the ranger’s cabin, one of my friends who I had worked alongside, died suddenly. The weekend of his funeral I hiked back up there and sat on a rock in the middle of Johns Brook feeling the mighty stream roll over me. This past summer marked ten years since that summer, and I returned to Keene Valley with my wife and son, and we spent long afternoons swimming in Johns Brook and the neighboring Ausable River.

And so, when I received the note below from a longtime family friend who lives in Keene Valley, I was struck by how quickly the landscape of our memories can change, and how profoundly I could feel the loss of a river. Read on to see what I mean.

 A Report from Johns Brook

by Henrietta Jordan, September 26, 2011

 Fifty years ago, a friend and I spent a splendid August afternoon boulder-hopping down Johns Brook. We started just beyond the old trestle bridge about a mile from the brook’s confluence with the Ausable River, and carefully worked our way over the great grey rocks and the small pools and eddies, daring each other to cross the rushing waters of the main stem of the stream. Although I was a lot more agile then than now, this was hard work for a pudgy nine-year-old in tread-worn red sneakers, and it was with a great sense of accomplishment that we climbed out of the brook bed at the Rte. 73 bridge in Keene Valley.

(photo by Naj Wikoff)

That brook is no more.

Most of the section of Johns Brook we clambered down that day has been dredged and diked into an unrecognizable flat-bottomed stream, riffling over a bed eerily stripped of the large boulders that once filled this iconic Adirondack mountain brook. They have been piled up in huge mounds lining the banks recently scoured by Hurricane Irene’s torrential floodwaters—in a couple of places, steering the brook away from  its meanders into a straighter, more uniform channel. As my dogs and I splashed down the channel through the shallow, strangely warm waters this afternoon, I had the feeling I was walking in a drainage ditch. It reminded me of the stony, lifeless rivers in the Yukon and California, that still, more than a century after the Gold Rush, bear the scars of heedless miners who took the ore and left the sludge.

Thus was Johns Brook punished—for the crime of responding to Irene’s wrath as mountain streams do when 10 inches of rain are dumped on them in 18 hours.  Already saturated from a wet summer, the soils of the Johns Brook Valley could hold no more, and the rainwaters turned the brook into a leaping, roiling brown torrent that tore at its banks, uprooted trees, and spread up into the woods. From my porch, about 100 yards away from the rocketing waters, the boulders and tree trunks crashing down during the storm sounded like artillery fire.

After Irene passed, the brook was a mess—huge chunks of its banks had been gouged away, tree trunks and debris were piled up, and cobbles were strewn everywhere. But it was still a brook. And if you walked the banks of it, you could see that this had happened before, that violent storms had caused pileups of boulders now covered by forest duff and trees, as the brook shifted in its valley over millennia as brooks are wont to do. Unlike drainage ditches, brooks are complex and dynamic hydraulic and geomorphic systems that, like all systems, strive to reach equilibrium when they are destabilized. River scientists have learned how to help speed up the stabilization process by reforesting banks and recreating step pools, chutes, side channels, backswamps and other natural features of healthy streams.

(photo by Naj Wikoff)

Unfortunately, this did not happen in Johns Brook.  Local and state officials took advantage of the Governor’s temporary suspension of permit regulations and Adirondack Park Agency rules to “fix” the book by drastically altering its flow and transport of sediment into the Ausable using methods that have largely been discredited.  Giant bulldozers ripped up the lower reaches of one of the most beautiful streams in the High Peaks, an ecologically rich habitat for brook trout and the invertebrates they feed on, and transformed it into a rock-lined half-pipe that will make floodwaters flow even faster and more violently into the Ausable.  As a citizen and taxpayer, it makes me inexpressibly sad to know that the destruction of Johns Brook was done in my name and with my money.

Can Johns Brook be restored? Yes—if we are willing to admit that we got it wrong the first time and work with the forces of nature to help the stream heal and better withstand the impacts of high water flows. This can’t be done overnight and it won’t be cheap, but the consequences of not trying will be far more costly, especially when the next big weather event sends floodwaters racing down the straightened and channelized streambed into the settled area of the hamlet even faster than they did during Irene.

I’d like to think that someday, not too long from now, my grandchildren will boulder-hop Johns Brook between shaded, deep green pools filled with brook trout, shrieking with delight as they dip their toes into the clear, cold waters of one of the most beautiful mountain streams in the Adirondacks.

Gov. Cuomo has not yet halted the continuing well-meaning but incredibly destructive efforts to “fix” the Ausable River and its tributary brooks. Now is the time to speak out to save our rivers and streams.

Henrietta Jordan is Principal Consultant at Trailmarker Associates. Find out more about her work at www.trailmarker.org and www.helpwithaccreditation.org.

UPDATE:

Not long after writing this post an article appeared in my local paper with a photograph that was strikingly similar to the one above. The article recounted a local river here in Western Massachusetts that suffered the same fate as Johns Brook. However, the state is ensuring that the “restoration” damage is repaired. One can only hope the same will be true with Johns Brook.

How many rivers in the northeast were destroyed being "restored" after Hurricane Irene? stearns.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/on-… Pic: http://t.co/rqJQep6w—
Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) December 10, 2011