Conference Report: Sharing the News

Opinion Notes from: Sharing the News: Reaching Students, training citizens
"A one day workshop for teachers, advisors, professors, editors, bloggers, and citizen journalists"
Saturday, June 28th, U-Mass-Lowell
http://dbs.hosting.crocker.com/wiki/index.php/Sharing

Takeaway: Rich communities will be able to buy reporters. (note 1). The truth of journalism and science forgets philosophy (note 2). The battle continues over fair use (note 3). And we're all trying to figure out how the trained and untrained, the local and global fit together (conclusion).

Reporter's subjectivity: Operationally exhausted from thesis. Notes organized by personal interest, and cr
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1) Representative Journalism--the Northfield, Minnesota Experiment
Leonard Witt, head of the Representative Journalism Project, where communities decide to financially support a reporter. Reminds me of a knight foundation winner from the conference. Essentially he presents the business model.

Polarized Q&A follows. Attendees either think this is the best thing since the printing press or the end of free speech. OK. Slight exaggeration, but I fall towards the latter. I immediately heard community buy reporters. Which doesn't sound so different than community buy public relations firm. Now, this conclusion comes both from the affect of the presentation, as well as the proposed business model. I can see how its _possible_ that communities not able to get their news out, "buy" a good reporter to tell their story. Think the micro-funding of journalism. But, since this seemed more about making journalism a profitable profession (and I'm sure they need more money) and not about giving agency to under-represented communities/issues, I am a huge skeptic. In fact, I think this falls in line with business taking over so much of our public services. Shouldn't communities be banding together to provide freedom, access and voice, to the news we're not hearing? Not the local news the privileged already know, nor the local news that keep our information insular.

From my internet archeology (aka, what I've seen, not what I've read), places with computers and money, have news. Maybe it's not in paper form, but its on blogs, email lists, cell phones, facebook!. I'm sure the little league even knows how to put flyers up to disseminate information. The communities with less computers and less money don't have media outlet. And if they band together to start micro-funding, in a bidding war for good journalist and good coverage, unless it's extraordinary, they're going to lose out.

This is a dangerous. I do not trust it.
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2) Howard Schneider Dean, School of Journalism, Stony Brook University, Long Island: "What should news literacty look like in America's classrooms?"

A rather animated Howard Schneider went over Stony Brook's "news literacy" curriculum. Notes that many consumers often confuse journalism with propaganda and entertainment (see C4FCM Bull Session 06/24), and that these lines continue to blur. News literacy, then, builds around three phases:

1) know your neighborhood
2) deconstruct news stories
3) understand the news AND audience bias

During the deconstruct news stories explanation, Schneider tells of a debate. What is Truth? For the Journalist, Scientist and Philosopher
Journalist and Scientists in parallel. Scientist: provisional that truth is a statement of probability in relation to the evidence. Journalist: truth unfolds over time, with enough digging and enough work. Schneider conveniently forgets the philosopher.

When I asked during the Q&A about the philosopher, we find that the philosopher's perspective: THE MEANING TO THE FACTS, IS THE TRUTH. Isn't this the most important definition? The meaning we put to the stories?

Other points of interest:
It is often the students from Bosnia/Yugoslovia/Russia that defend the our press. Makes me think, do we understand the value of free speech? Will we notice its growth and erosions?

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PS. this is not done.