The next step, almost no matter what stage anyone is at in an information-based operation is: Collaborate! The Citizen-Times LINC project aims to do that. And Mountain Xpress needs to collaborate. Having our roots in “grassroots journalism,” collaboration should emerge naturally from our core.

There are lots of local blogsites, websites and twitter-based contributors promoting the civic and public dialogue. Xpress should be thinking how it can help those sites and people do what they do better. Of course, we need to retain our journalistic arm (reporters and editors), but that now has to be just part of our work. Part of the new task is aggregating and curating. But more than that, it needs to include helping others contribute to the civic debate.

Our mission is stated as: to build community and strengthen democracy by serving an active, thoughtful readership at the local level — where the impact of citizen action is greatest.

I’d argue that means we need to promote local civic dialogue, whether that’s gathering and publishing news ourselves — or helping others do their own publishing — or promoting networks.

In addition to reporters and editors, we need a collaboration experts, as well as a budget to promote collaborative projects.

I could maybe be persuaded to contribute to said budget, given certain benefits came with such a contribution. Maybe, like, a yearly fee?

Jeff Fobes - 07 October 2009 02:07 PM

The next step, almost no matter what stage anyone is at in an information-based operation is: Collaborate! The Citizen-Times LINC project aims to do that. And Mountain Xpress needs to collaborate. Having our roots in “grassroots journalism,” collaboration should emerge naturally from our core.

There are lots of local blogsites, websites and twitter-based contributors promoting the civic and public dialogue. Xpress should be thinking how it can help those sites and people do what they do better. Of course, we need to retain our journalistic arm (reporters and editors), but that now has to be just part of our work. Part of the new task is aggregating and curating. But more than that, it needs to include helping others contribute to the civic debate.

Our mission is stated as: to build community and strengthen democracy by serving an active, thoughtful readership at the local level — where the impact of citizen action is greatest.

I’d argue that means we need to promote local civic dialogue, whether that’s gathering and publishing news ourselves — or helping others do their own publishing — or promoting networks.

In addition to reporters and editors, we need a collaboration experts, as well as a budget to promote collaborative projects.

Maybe you could hire someone who knows what they are talking about for the music section also?

My short answer, Jeff, is hmmmm, as I’m in the midst of earning my keep as part of that journalistic arm.

Exciting news on the Twitter collaboration front!
The MX hashtags are being dropped in favor of AVL-prefixed hashtags.

Below is the new set of tags ... With others possible.

THE NEW TAGS:
Avlnews = old mxnow
Avlent = old mxae
Avlout = old mxout
avlag
avlenv
avleat
avlcal
avlgb
Streetstyle (stays the same)
Fon   (stays the same; this one is “future of news”)

For now, here what these tags are used for:
Any Twitter message with one of these hashtags goes into a moderation queue; if a moderator retweets the message, it goes onto mountainx.com’s twitter-news feed.

However, any website can grab hashtagged tweets and use them as they choose, and some are already doing so, I believe.

The reason for the change away from the MX-based tags is that I believe Asheville bloggers, media outlets and Twitter-based “publishers” will naturally be more motivated to help build a city-based information network, rather than help an individual operation, such as Xpress or any other outlet.

The way I see it is almost everyone can get into feeding their tweets and information into a collaborative Asheville pipeline that helps everyone gather and disseminate local news and information—and ultimately will promote traffic to ALL internet outlets. Individual bloggers or websites should be able to pick and choose from the pipeline and display whatever info that’s useful to them.

The old MX-based tags will be honored for a while, but turned off soon.

Margaret Williams - 07 October 2009 03:39 PM

My short answer, Jeff, is hmmmm, as I’m in the midst of earning my keep as part of that journalistic arm.

Know, i’m just a lowly contributor, but are the two ‘sides’ of the operation really in conflict?

Facing South (part of the progressively-oriented institute for Southern Studies) announced an initiative to train bloggers to do investigative reporting. Here’s part of the text from the oct 6 announcement:

“...thank you! Last week we called on Facing South readers like you to help launch the Freedom Journalism School - an exciting new project to train 50 bloggers across the South to do hard-hitting investigative reporting.
“You delivered: In just a few days, you raised nearly $2,000 for the school - a big first step towards the $10,000 we need from donors to launch the school this fall.
If you haven’t chipped in yet, can you make a tax-deductible donation of $25, $50 or more today to keep us on track to meet our goal - and make the Freedom Journalism School a reality?
http://www.southernstudies.org/donation-freedom-j-school.html ”

To Pfff:
Contributions are always welcomed! :)

And maybe we need to set up a special account for contributions that help build a city-wide collaborative network.

As to your wondering if Margaret Williams’ journalistic efforts conflict with the online/collab/network stuff: I think the reality is that in a 40-hour workweek, one can only do so much; inevitably, some tasks get pushed aside. I think that was her feeling at the time. Otherwise, I know she’s excited about building online networks and doing the work associated with it.

low-profit, limited-liability corporation Is it a solution for newspapers?

This post, attempts to explain the emerging legal concept (now recognized in seven states), and what it may do for newspapers in terms of helping them raise capital like a nonprofit, but provide some incentive to investors:

http://newshare.typepad.com/mgpaudio/2009/09/audio-the-l3c——a-new-lease-for-newspapers.html

Thanks to Wally Bowen, at MAIN, for spreading the word about this post.

I’ve actually looked into L3Cs, but they’re not recognized in S.C.

As to your wondering if Margaret Williams’ journalistic efforts conflict with the online/collab/network stuff: I think the reality is that in a 40-hour workweek, one can only do so much; inevitably, some tasks get pushed aside. I think that was her feeling at the time. Otherwise, I know she’s excited about building online networks and doing the work associated with it.

and

are the two ‘sides’ of the operation really in conflict?

I imagine there aren’t, really, TWO sides, ultimately. Some of us are trying to make a living at it,
which tweaks the equation, perhaps.  I know it is true for me that the 40-hr work week (and beyond, many weeks) leave less time for the online/collab/network stuff. And it’s challenging to work the OCN stuff into the daily, weekly routines.

That said, I’m looking for ways to put all these ideas into action and benefit us all.

Jeff Fobes - 07 October 2009 05:53 PM

Facing South (part of the progressively-oriented institute for Southern Studies) announced an initiative to train bloggers to do investigative reporting… “

Here’s more from Facing South on the Freedom Journalism School:
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/10/stayed-on-freedom-why-were-starting-freedom-journalism-schools.html

EXCERPTS BELOW:
Since Facing South and the Institute put out the call last week to launch the Freedom Journalism School, hundreds of you have responded with messages of support, generous donations and offers to help out. ...

Our inboxes have also been filled with questions: What will the Freedom Journalism Schools look like? How do I apply? What’s this project all about?

Let’s start with the basics: Why are we launching the Freedom Journalism Schools? The idea has been gestating for over a year, in response to three critical problems our country faces today:

1) The Demise of Old Media: It’s no secret that our media culture is in a state of dramatic and irreversible change. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rapidly declining fortunes of newspapers, which—despite all their faults—have historically been the public’s leading source of in-depth and investigative reporting. Yet newspapers—and newspaper reporters—continue to vanish at an alarming pace. As the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found in their report, The State of the News Media 2009:

  Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.

2) Who’s Holding Power Accountable? But declining reporting budgets are only symptoms of a deeper problem, so clear in today’s debates over health care and energy policy: The media’s fading commitment to public interest and investigative journalism to put a spotlight on injustice and hold the powerful accountable.

Democracy only works if the public is informed, if they know about and understand the decisions that affect their lives. Yet as Big Media has fallen into fewer and fewer hands, ratings and profit margins have grown more important than the public’s right to know.

These trends have left traditional media—and the public—hopelessly out-gunned in the war between the forces of power and secrecy on one hand, and the need for openness and democracy on the other. Consider this: Today, there are less than 500 reporters covering state legislatures—compared to the army of 40,000 lobbyists hired to influence them.

3) The Need for Stronger New Media: An army of bloggers, citizen journalists and grassroots media outfits—some old, many new—have valiantly emerged to fill the vacuum and keep the public informed. As the Pew Center estimates, the number of Americans who regularly go online for news jumped 19% in the last two years.

But most new media journalists will be the first to tell you that they often lack the skills, experience and resources to carry out the in-depth and investigative journalism needed to keep our public informed and engaged. Most training programs in investigative journalism are geared towards career reporters in established media—not the bloggers and grassroots news outlets that are increasingly becoming the go-to media source for millions of readers.

...
The new Freedom Journalism School will give a new generation of journalists in the South the tools they need to ask the right questions—and find answers—about the most critical problems we face. Who is calling the shots on health reform, energy policy and other critical issues? How do we separate facts from hype, spin and media fiction? How do we uncover what policies are being carried out in our name?

Drawing on the Institute’s broad network of award-winning reporters, the Freedom Journalism School will offer concrete skills, mentoring and resources to 50 new media muckrakers. Right now, we’re making plans for two on-site weekend schools—one in Durham, NC and another in New Orleans, drawing on the success of the Institute’s Gulf Watch project.

The Freedom J School will also draw on new technology, hosting a series of online webinars focused on the basics of investigative reporting, as well as useful hands-on advice for reporting on issues like money in politics, energy companies, government contracts, and banking and finance.
...

I’d like more info on the Freedom School training in Durham, since that’s relatively close by. Perhaps Xpress could get help entice some of our local bloggers into going? And send at least one Xpresser? The trained journalists can always learn a few tricks, and seem to me we need to better at bridging the divide ... We’ve got to be able to tread in both worlds (bloggerville and traditional media).

Which brings me to mention the efforts of the NYTimes’ R&D team: Here’s an excerpt from a E&P article:

One of the first moves by the R&D unit was to see the potential for Facebook back in 2007. The team launched an application to push content onto the social networking site, and launched a daily quiz. Today, the Times has the most followers of any newspaper on both Facebook and Twitter. The researchers helped forge a partnership with Google in which Times content is linked to Google Earth maps to show locations mentioned in stories. The team also helped develop many of the Blackberry applications that led to the Times’ current mobile news and sports alerts.

([url=http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004020452]http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004020452)[/url]

And the NYTimes latest work:

The group’s newest efforts, which are still in the works, include new ways to connect the various devices consumers use to get news and information, known as CustomTimes. Young says that in the future, readers will be able to enjoy the newspaper’s content across multiple platforms that will all be connected. “There is a huge explosion of connected devices,” he says.

What I’m getting at is this: combining collaborative efforts (with citizen journalists/other media) with the broadcast tools available to get our content (and theirs) out into the world where the readers/listeners/viewers are.

While what follows might seem somewhat off-topic and impractically philosophical, I think it’s quite tightly interconnected to limited-profit corporations, local media partnerships with citizens, the so-called hyperlocal focus etc.

The changing media climate is just unprecedented. If I hadn’t gotten into the game with the core mission of helping citizens be more engaged in the civic debate and more involved in telling their own stories, I believe I (like many media professionals) would feel almost totally embattled by the rising tide of social media and everyone networking/publishing—which triggered the established media’s loss of monopoly control. But because my dream was from the start that people learn to find their own muses and tell their own personal odyssean tales, and that I might somehow help this happen—I’m thrilled and energized.

Focusing on the excruciatingly local level—while the multitudes chant, rant and otherwise contribute to the global focus—is my personal response to our growing globalism: I’m trying to do my part to evolve a solution to what seems to me to be a central dilemma: that humanity can’t **engineer** a stable highly interconnected world, that global corporations and national governments cannot manage the requisite complexity successfully from the top down—that, while those global institutions are an important part of the story of mankind, there is a missing ingredient: To globalize humanity successfully, there must be respectful and intimately interconnected partnerships with the people, the communities, the ethnic minorities, the tribes and their bottom-up grassroots networks (that emerge and are energized **heuristically**, not algorithmically). My view is that individuals, tribes, communities etc must experience their own worth and wisdom, and then organize autonomously, and then learn to contribute and partner with larger-scaled entities, and so on up the dimensional ladder, until patterned trust and interactions, along with each level’s institutions, reach the breadth of human imagination. But crucial to this is that the so-called rich, the powerful, global decision-makers (the “centralizers”) must realize that, unlike colonial empires or feudal lords, they cannot rob, steal or otherwise treat the “smaller-scale” players as pawns to be manipulated if the whole global system is to be preserved, and certainly if we’re to do so with grace.

So, to return to the thread’s initial question: A network for Asheville’s newspapers, blogs, websites?

Yes, but make that **many networks**.