Offices, classrooms and civic groups around the country are gearing up for their annual canned food drives. From now until the new year people will pile prepackaged, non-perishable food items in cardboard boxes and promptly forget about hunger and homelessness for the rest of the year.

Obviously, this is a generalization, and likely a bit unfair. But as the season of the can drive bears down on us, I have to wonder – is it time to can the can?

We need a new kind of food drive. One that helps build a sustainable infrastructure for healthy local food for everyone. One that is premised on valuing the land and the people in our community. One that is rooted in justice, not charity.

Can drives remind me a bit of the days after 9/11 when people asked what they could do to help heal our country, and George Bush told them to go shopping. Trying to address hunger by buying cheap food, often times heavily processed and full of preservatives (hence non-perishable), seems like a misguided solution that creates new kinds of problems. The cans, and the transportation it took to get them on store shelves as well as from boxes to shelters, amount to significant waste. And, in most cases the money spent on those non-perishables doesn’t stay in the local economy. It’s a consumer solution for a structural problem.

So what would a different kind of food drive look like? Chances are, it would look different for different people, which would be one of its strengths. Instead of the uniformity of collecting cans, the food drive could encompass a range of actions that leverages communities’ diverse strengths, and meets a diverse set of needs. It would engage people based on their unique interests, passions, and availability. And, it would require engagement in every season, not just around the holidays.

Some actions might include:

• Organizing a community root cellar.
• Teaching free classes on putting food by.
• Helping set up a community garden in an unused lot.
• Buying seeds for local farmers.
• Helping a local farmer or CSA plant in the spring or harvest in the summer and fall.
• Donate a CSA share to a local family or shelter.
• Host an Oxfam hunger banquet.
• Fighting for smart and sustainable development policy in your town.
• Support Food not Bombs and other similar organizations.
• Volunteering with your local land trust.
• Advocating for healthier, local school lunches.
• Educate your neighbors about local food.
• Start a community fund for the local shelter at your food coop.
• Help build connections between farmers and shelters.
• Create a restaurant network to support shelters.
• Organize a gleaning party.

There are innumerable examples. The key is that they are rooted in a community’s concrete needs and designed to give people access to healthy local foods and foster people’s capacity to sustain themselves. This new kind of food drive should be a drive to end hunger, not just satiate it.

That said, one piece of this effort will no doubt also include short term steps to provide food to those in need. None of this is meant to discount the vital work shelters are doing in our communities everyday. With the state of the economy and unemployment, the need to get food in the hands of people has never been so great. When you stock up for the office food drive, think about what you are buying. As best as possible, seek out high quality, healthy foods, and support local farmers and producers.

But don’t let it end there. Don’t dump you cans and never look back. For every can you donate this year, identify one longer term action you can take throughout the rest of the year to fight the causes of hunger in your community. Let this year’s food drive be the start of something, not the end.

Make your food drive a food fight. A fight for a healthy, just and sustainable future.

I just returned from the Future of News conference in St. Paul, Minn. Although the conference inspired Richard Gingras to cheekily tweet, “The future of news is a future of conferences about the future of news,” there were some interesting threads worth noting.

One presenter who stood out to me was Tom Rosenstiel, from the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism, who proposed eight values he believed were core to the future of news. Some, he noted, were long-held values of legacy media organizations that we should carry over to new models. Others were values rooted in the changing media system and people’s responses to it.

Rosenstiel said we need the press to:

1. authenticate the news
2. be a sense-maker
3. be a watchdog
4. bear witness
5. be a forum
6. be a smart aggregator
7. empower the audience
8. be a role model

A few things struck me about this list. The first was Rosenstiel’s choice to frame it in terms of what we need from the press. Often at conferences like this, people lament that we don’t hear enough from citizens and consumers (which is exactly why we held our Denver event with 200 local citizens and journalists). While Rosenstiel is no average Joe, it was refreshing to see how he based this list on a community-oriented approach, rooted, no doubt, in the public surveys conducted by the Pew Center.

As I have written before, it is vital that we begin to shift our focus in these debates away from the cost of journalism and toward a fuller consideration of the value of journalism. In this way, Rosenstiel’s list helps us focus not on what it’ll take to save the news, but rather on just what kind of news we should be saving — or creating, as the case may be.

The list is also important for its potential use as a tool for measuring the quality of news in a community, as an assessment of a particular news organization, and as a guide for developing new models. There are no doubt any number of sub-lists under each of these enumerated values, and a number of ways to achieve them, but this is a good first step.

If there’s one value missing from Rosenstiel’s list, I’ll add this: We need the press to reflect the diversity of our nation. What would you add to the list?

(Originally posted at www.SaveTheNews.org/blog)

Ground Truthing: The use of a ground survey to confirm findings of aerial image or to calibrate quantitative aerial observations; validation and verification techniques used on the ground to support maps; walking the ground to see for oneself if what has been told is true; near-surface discoveries. ~From Terry Tempest Williams, Orion Magazine, MayJue 2003

The convergence of print, video, and audio online is just one function of a larger shift in the technology of our daily lives from analog to digital. Just glancing around my house there are a range of ways that digital technology has replaced analog: my watch, my stereo, my thermostat, my phone, my camera, etc… These changes are more than the simple march of progress. They represent a fundamental shift in our epistemology. Yochi Benkler has written that “Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done.” Changes in technology necessitate changes in how we respond to the world around us

Whether you blame or celebrate the role of the Internet in journalism, it is impossible to deny how the web has changed – and is changing – the role of the journalist. News and information – and they way we consume it – has undergone a radical shift in just the last twenty years. We went from watching the evening newscast, to 24 hour cable news, to always-on internet news, to always-on and always-accessible mobile news on cell phones. With these shifts have come changes in pace and delivery, as well as the content and character of the news.

The amount of information we have access to is growing exponentially, and as it does we are increasingly looking for ways to better search, sort, process, understand and make use of it all. As the stream of information swells – threatening to spill over its banks – many people long for a new kind of authority to help navigate the flood. Clay Shirky has written that “one of the things up for grabs in the current news environment is the nature of authority.” Google has their search algorithm. People rely on their Twitter and Facebook networks to find news. Others have trusted listservs. Still others rely on the editors of news sites and newspapers. However, most agree, there is no perfect solution yet.

Journalists obviously have a unique opportunity here. They are well positioned to help aggregate, organize, analyze and clarify the vast amount of information around us. I’m not the first to suggest this kind of role – but I want try out a new metaphor that could help define what this role might look like and why it is so important.

As I noted above, the shift from analog to digital has transformed both everyday objects and people’s careers in an array of fields. Journalism is not the only profession that traffics in specialized information, obtained through rigorous investigation, traditionally printed on paper and distributed to consumers. The internet and digital technology has revolutionized cartography perhaps more than any other industry. When was the last time you bought an atlas?

However, an interesting thing happened as map making shifted to satellite imagery and geographical informational systems (GIS) – cartographers found they needed some sort of verification. “Ground truthing” is the practice of getting out and walking the land to confirm the information and images received through new technologies.

Now more than ever we need journalists to survey the information landscape and help ground our understanding of the issues facing our society. This doesn’t mean we need to bow our heads to the myth of objectivity and place journalists up on a pedestal, bestowing on them some unearned credibility and authority. But it does mean that we need a new kind of journalist who can work with communities and readers to help collaborate around the act of making meaning, and defining the terms of the debate.

At a recent conference on the future of local and regional news Tom Rosenstiel of the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism outlined what he saw as the eight roles of journalists in the future. He said we need the press to: 1. authenticate the news, 2. be a sense-maker, 3. be a watchdog, 4. bear witness, 5. be a forum, 6. be a smart aggregator, 7. empower the audience and 8. be a role model.

In my mind, the act of ground truthing is made up of some combination of numbers 1, 2 and 6. We increasingly need journalists to help sort the facts from the fiction – doing the fact checking and holding leaders and public figures accountable for the truth. We need them to pull together the diverse threads of information, making connections, and help make something larger than the sum of its parts. And finally, we need help finding the best of what others are doing online. We need journalists who can bring context to their work by leveraging the best of other people’s work.

In the end, our communities need quality news and information to help us find our way. As such, we need journalists who can be the cartographers of this digital age.

Journalism students may be short on jobs, but they certainly aren’t lacking reading material about their industry. In the last twelve months, there have been a number of landmark essays on journalism written by academics and journalists. In addition, at least six major textbook-sized reports on the future of American media have been released, as well as innumerable lectures, conferences and roundtables on the topic.

The list of materials produced this year could easily make up a respectable “open-source” syllabus for the aspiring journalism innovator. But until a week or two ago, this makeshift seminar wouldn’t have been complete. Just when I thought little else could be written about the future of news, a coalition of independent media outlets – The Media Consortium – has released a remarkable new report that deserves a slot in your reading list.

The Big Thaw: Charting a New Course for Journalism is refreshingly different from every other report published this year (including our own). Whereas most reports focus on what went wrong with journalism in America and consider new models and experiments currently under way, The Big Thaw delves into the future. Rather than center on how we arrived at our media juncture, it looks to where we are headed. It reads less like a report and more like a travel guide of what’s to come, giving the reader a glimpse at an exciting new landscape. Indeed, the authors themselves describe it as a toolbox, and open the report with a “how-to” guide for using the information it contains.

The report’s pragmatic nature means that there are no revelatory moments, no shocking new information. Instead, the report’s strength rests on the authors’ ability to bring remarkable clarity to the complex transitions taking place in our media, and to outline clear and achievable next steps for independent media to survive, thrive and recreate themselves for the future.

The Big Thaw is also refreshing in its optimism. At a time when so many people view the state of journalism as a drought – with advertising, newsrooms and jobs drying up – the authors celebrate the impending flood of new media, new ideas and new opportunities, while recognizing that floods can drown us or carry us along.

They write:

While changes to the news industry advanced at a glacial pace for many years, [...] transition can come as quickly as the levees that broke in New Orleans. Trigger events cause sudden floods before a new system is in place to prevent it. News organizations are facing flash floods and many are in a mode akin to sudden-death, wilderness survival. Laurence Gonzalez, in his book, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, explained that those people who most quickly surrender to their new circumstances, take decisive action, and believe anything is possible are the ones most likely to survive. Each independent media organization must answer two questions in order to survive, ‘What will you be standing on when the flood reaches you?’ and ‘How will you boldly move to higher ground?’

This emphasis on action pervades the entire report, and it is a welcome change of tone. It argues that it’s time to stop predicting the future of news and start creating it. This is a report that seems almost uncomfortable with its own static nature on the page. Indeed, it is best read on the screen. The authors offered the report in an Adobe format that allows readers to jump around throughout the text, following a line of thought instead of just turning pages, as though it seeks to embody the lessons it teaches.

The report’s key recommendations are:

1. Change internally : We must rethink the fundamental structure of news organizations, and rely on “technologists, entrepreneurs and individual media-makers” to help shape or reshape our organizations and “cultivate new competencies and strategies to change the journalism field.”
2. Increase experimentation: We need experimentation inside and outside current media organizations. The authors suggest that “rapid, low-cost innovation” must be paired with emerging technology across multiple platforms.
3. Leverage the unique role of consortiums: The future of independent media demands a new era of partnership and creative collaboration. While competition is vital to fostering a diverse media ecosystem, sustainable journalism will require us to balance competition and cooperation for the public good.
4. Build audiences as communities: “The product of journalism is no longer content, but community,” the report argues, adding, “Decentralized communities will have the greatest impact.”

At first glance, these recommendations – change, experimentation, collaboration and community – may not seem so different from recommendations made in other reports. But The Big Thaw excels in its ability to get beyond recommendations and actually begin to chart a course for meeting the challenges ahead. It has a decidedly tech-friendly focus that embraces the new roles geeks and gadgets can play in the news..

Unlike so many other reports, it’s not focused on how to pay for the news. While it touches on this very real issue, The Big Thaw is premised on finding strategies to do better journalism, to make journalism more relevant to people’s lives, and to foster journalism that builds community, provides accountability and empowers citizens.

If the nearly 100-page report intimidates you, the Media Consortium is blogging the report in small pieces here, and they have released a slideshow of the report’s major findings, recommendations and key illustrations. But I recommend reading the entire thing – it’s worth it.

The editors of the Columbia Journalism Review published an important editorial this week outlining why they feel public policy must be a central part of the discussion about the future of news in America.

They wrote: “The idea that a purely commercial media alone can continue to deliver the journalism we need is becoming difficult to swallow. If we don’t get beyond the rational but outdated fear of government help for accountability journalism—if we just let the market sort it out—this vital public good will continue to decline.”

And last month, CJR hosted a heated debate about the role of public policy in the future of journalism. The debate was sparked by The Reconstruction of American Journalism, a report by Len Downie and Michael Schudson that calls for a range of creative government initiatives to help support accountability journalism. The report is the third this year to make this case.

And yet, each time the idea of public policy and journalism is broached, there is a flurry of protest from the crowded field of journalism commentators. To be clear, there are important issues and concerns raised by some of these writers, but too much of the criticism leveled against the prospect of government action is knee-jerk and overwrought. Over and over again, I see people who are all too eager to attack, and unwilling to engage and consider new ideas.

The CJR editorial is a welcome validation that we need a critical national discussion about the role of government in journalism. Government has always had a hand in shaping our media, and there are debates underway right now in the House, Senate, FCC and FTC about the future of journalism. It’s important that journalists and the public get involved in these debates so that they don’t happen behind closed doors on Capitol Hill.

The editors at CJR don’t offer or endorse any specific recommendations. But if we look back at the various reports written this year, we see some key points of agreement:

• No one is advocating for a bailout for the newspaper business;
• No one supports subsidies that will reward the self-inflicted wounds of media conglomerates, or prop up failing business models;
• No one thinks government subsidies are simple and unproblematic;
• Each of the reports argues for strong firewalls between news and opinion and their sources of funding. Each calls for clear protections for free speech and a free press;
• In general, all the policies are designed to support accountability journalism, which includes vital investigative reporting, local beat reporting and watchdog journalism; and,
• Most of all – each of the reports calls for an open process of national debate that involves all stakeholders to help shape enlightened public policies to support the news as a public good.

Here at Free Press and SaveTheNews.org, we have outlined our own litmus test for public policies relating to the future of journalism, because we understand that we need clear guidelines as we consider government action. Any policy should:

• Protect the First Amendment. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are essential to a free society and a functioning democracy.
• Produce Quality News Coverage. To self-govern in a democratic society, the public needs in-depth reporting on local issues as well as national and international affairs that is accurate, credible and verifiable. Journalism should be animated by a multitude of voices and viewpoints.
• Provide Adversarial Perspectives. Reporting should hold the powerful accountable by scrutinizing the actions of government and corporations. Journalism should foster genuine debate about important issues.
• Promote Public Accountability. Newsrooms should serve the public interest, not private or government aims, and should be treated as a public service, not a commodity. Journalism should be responsive to communities’ changing needs.
• Prioritize Innovation. Journalists should utilize new tools and technology to report and deliver the news. The public needs journalism that crosses traditional boundaries and is accessible to the broadest range of people across platforms.

We are working to promote a much needed dialogue locally and nationally and would love to hear your thoughts. Add your voice in the comments section below and let us know what you think about these issues, these guidelines and the role of public policy in the future of the news.

Today I gave a presentation at the National College Media Convention here in Austin, Texas. I had a great crowd, some challenging questions, and overall a good discussion. All in all, a short one hour conference session is a tough venue to have an in-depth discussion about an issue as complex as the future of journalism.

I’m embedding my presentation here in hopes of continuing the conversation in the comment section of this blog blog. The presentation is below (sorry the videos don’t work at this point, still tweaking those).

This was originally posted on Nov. 30th at SaveTheNews.org

Today’s Washington Post op-ed by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols recovers a past too many Americans have forgotten and sets the record straight on the government’s role in protecting journalism.

“We seek to renew a rich if largely forgotten legacy of the American free-press tradition, one that speaks directly to today’s crisis,” they write. “The First Amendment necessarily prohibits state censorship, but it does not prevent citizens from using their government to subsidize and spawn independent media.”

McChesney and Nichols, two of the co-founders of Free Press, are responding to a common misconception about government involvement in journalism is antithetical to freedom of the press. Policy has always shaped journalism, and for a long time it was policy that helped ensure freedom of the press.

They write:

The post-colonial press system was built on massive postal and printing subsidies. The first generations of Americans never imagined that the market would provide sound or sufficient journalism. The notion was unthinkable. They established enlightened subsidies, which broadened the marketplace of ideas and enhanced and protected core freedoms.

Some may read their essay and wrongly assume that they are calling for a Big Media bailout, or for some kind of “state-run media.” These are the same knee-jerk reactions levied against Len Downie and Michael Schudson after their report last week called for government action to support the future of journalism. But freedom of the press and smart media policies are not mutually exclusive.

McChesney and Nichols anticipate this critique, and make clear that ”bailing out existing media conglomerates would be morally and politically absurd.” Instead, they call for expanding the role of public and community media and developing enlightened policies that foster “post-corporate low-profit news operations that realize the potential of the Internet.”

Critics will certainly pose other questions: What about the free market? Why not wait for new paywall software? Why not let all this uncertainty shake out before getting the government involved?

The authors point out that currently, “the marketplace now eliminates journalism jobs at a rate in excess of 1,000 a month.” If we believe, as the Supreme Court does, that our Constitution is “predicated on the assumption of an informed and participating citizenry” then we can’t just sit back and wait to see what happens.

We have a long history of government involvement in our media. We ought to be proud that America’s founders saw such a central role for journalism and were committed to supporting it with public interest policies and strong First Amendment protections.

Let’s reclaim that history and put policy back on the drawing board. With input from citizens and journalists, not just corporate execs and lobbyists, we can write policies that can save the news.

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What happens when the institutions we depend on – the ones supposedly “too big to fail” – begin to fail us? The unsustainable drive toward ever greater profits has undermined our society’s’ core institutions: health care, banks and now, journalism.

In response to this string of failures, it is no surprise to see small groups of people coming together locally to find ways of obtaining the information, health care and financial assistance they need in their communities.

One of these responses has been the formation of co-ops, or local cooperatives. Local cooperative banks and health care co-ops are now being held up as important social and economic models.

Last week, a new journalism co-op was announced: the Chicago News Cooperative, which already has partnerships lined up with the New York Times and the local public television station. The Chicago News Cooperative is the brainchild of James O’Shea, former editor of the Chicago Tribute and Los Angeles Times, who was forced from his post at the Times after he refused to cut newsroom staff.

O’Shea was driven to start CNC because major media companies have been disinvesting in quality journalism. “This is something all papers are struggling with in their cutting back,” O’Shea said on a Chicago Tribune blog.

“My view has always been that what matters is public service journalism. So I started thinking about how there are holes being created simply by people not having as many resources as they used to.”

Public service is at the heart of the co-op model. As we wrote in our report, Saving The News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy:

Longstanding models for cooperatively owned businesses include credit unions and farm distribution and processing co-ops. However, the popularity of newer models like grocery store co-ops has introduced the idea of cooperative ownership to a broader population. Co-ops are democratically controlled by their member/owners, and surplus revenues are returned to those members. Like the L3C model discussed above, the co-op structure shifts the mission of the organization away from profit-making toward providing quality goods or services to its members. Four out of 10 Americans are already members of co-ops.

As applied to the news, this alternative ownership structure can liberate news production from the predatory commercial pressures that have contributed to journalism’s current predicament.

Interestingly, when we released our report back in May, we predicted that the cooperative model would be a great fit with the emerging idea of Low Profit Limited Liability Corporations (L3Cs). “Combined with a low-profit or nonprofit status,” we wrote, “these alternatives to absentee commercial ownership may offer a way to provide quality journalism to diverse local communities.”

As it turns out, this is exactly what CNC has in mind. Just this year, Illinois passed a law allowing for the creation of L3Cs. If it succeeds, CNC could become the nation’s first L3C focused on journalism.

To read more about cooperatives or the L3C model, visit our “New Models” pages at SaveTheNews.org.

(Hint: it has nothing to do with money)

People like to complain about pledge drives on NPR and PBS, but I was recently talking with a journalist at a local public radio station who said “One of the problems facing newspapers is that they don’t have fund drives.”

She went on to explain that, while fund drives are an absolute financial necessity for NPR and PBS, the donations they receive are only part of the benefits. “Two or thee times a year we get to spend a couple hours a day telling our community how important they are to us, and reminding them how important we are to them,” she said.

Newspapers have never had to focus on building community in this way, and have never spent much time talking with their readers about the role they play in each other’s lives. Newspapers have focused more on serving advertisers, and selling subscriptions, than building affinity and engagement with local people. Newspapers – some newspapers – are just now beginning to consider these issues. However, too often newspapers confuse real community engagement with posting a Facebook page and starting a Twitter account. Papers need to find new ways to participate and leverage new digital technologies, but this is a separate issue from building community support.

Indeed, the most common responses to the struggles facing the news industry highlight how disconnected news executives are from the communities they serve. At a time when newspapers need local communities more than ever, they are responding by putting up paywalls and threatening to sue the people who like their product enough that they want to share it with others. Newspaper companies’ focus on new payment models and threatening copyright lawsuits amount to an attack on just the people they ought to be organizing.

Many of these new nonprofit journalism websites get it. They have focused on outreach into the local community, they talk about giving people a stake in the news, and discuss with people what they need from the news. In doing so, they are talking about the role of journalism at large, and reminding people of why they should support this work.

Newspapers could learn a lot from these examples.

For almost ten years my wife and I have held regular potlucks at our home. These dinner have been one of the most consistent parts of our life together. We have moved more than five times, changed jobs at least six times, got married, had a child, and through it all we have hosted these dinners. What began as a weekly gathering of some close friends and coworkers in Providence quickly spread until we had strangers showing up at our doorstep, and were meeting people at parties who would say “oh you’re the people who hold those potlucks…”.

I wish I could take credit for the idea. When I was growing up all my friends parents would gather every Wednesday night in the summer down at the local State Park for a “dish-to-pass.” They called it a sharing supper, and I stole that name for our first gatherings. Over time, the community changed, as did the location and name, but it always maintained a certain spirit.
We began the potlucks in Providence in the tumultuous months between September 11th, 2001 and the start of the Iraq War. It became a gathering place for a number of young organizers around Providence, and served as a place to share our concerns, plan actions around the city, and connect at time when many of us felt isolated by our countries response to 9/11. Later, in Amherst and Northampton Massachusetts the potlucks were a hub for poets, English grad students and union organizers working at the intersection of politics and academics.

It is this long history hosting and organizing these potlucks that has inspired a lot of my writing and thinking about the intersection of building community, food politics, and activism. So I was particularly interested when I recently received an email from the New Organizing Institute (NOI) that said “Just think: Oprah’s Book Club meets Potluck Dinner meets Crossfire.” The email was about a pilot project they are calling “The Dining Organizers” which they describe as “A new spin on traditional book clubs, the Dining Organizers will pull in progressives looking to meet new people, read engaging work about organizing, and participate in discussions with fellow organizers in small groups to foster new ideas.”

Besides a clunky name, the idea seems exciting, and DC is obviously a prime place to launch such a project. NOI is a great group, and I think they are on to something. They describe themselves as “dedicated to developing the practice of citizenship — voting, civic engagement, and training organizers as practitioners of democracy,” and root their theory of change in “engaging and empowering people around us, and by cultivating our own learning. We think organizers should have a fun, social outlet to discuss organizing and share best practices.”

Giving young organizers a social place to connect and learn seems all the more important now, in the wake of the election. Election years have a way of pulling people together – campaigns have a gravitational force that draws incredible people together. But now, as so many smart young organizers have spread to the far researches the country, gone off to work on a range of progressive issues, there is a clear need to gather and connect. It’s a good reminder that we are all still working towards common goals.

Our potlucks never had as much structure as the series of events NOI has planned, but I think the spirit was similar. I’ll be interested to see what comes from this initial pilot project. If there are people locally who want to try to get something like this off the ground in Western Massachusetts, let me know.