Digital Technologies and Local Journalism

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

Earlier, I wrote about my recent travels to Boston and how the great conversations I had kept returning to the many ways that physical proximity cannot be replaced by virtual tools.

This very point is part of the underlying logic of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a project I worked with in its beginning stages, which is dedicated in part to how digital technologies might affect citizenship and the dissemination of news in specific towns or communities.

While I was visiting in Boston, I had the chance to talk with the center's director, Ellen Hume.  That conversation emphasized how the project is both developing projects to better understand how news is and can be spread today, as well as new technologies that can play a role in these processes. According to their official description:

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

These three activities are vitally interconnected. We study the existing uses of civic media to identify best practices and urgent needs; connect those insights to the development of new tools and processes; partner with local groups to put these tools and processes into the hands of community builders; and monitor the results to inform the next phase of development.

I'm very interested in these issues as a journalist myself, writing for weekly newspapers in rural Kentucky.  As a columnist for The Ohio County Times-News but writing from New York City, I'm interested in how people are continuously tied to various localities throughout their life, and how virtual technologies help us build on physical-world relationships. See, for instance, this piece I wrote for The Convergence Newsletter back in 2006.

In that piece, I included a list about ways in which local newspapers could take advantage of digital technologies:

1.) Take Advantage of the Web – Many weeklies have a poor Web presence, but expanding Web sites can give newspapers another source of revenue from existing advertisers and can create a space for news coverage building on stories that appeared in the previous edition while previewing upcoming editions.

2.) Focus on Maintaining Local Connections – If weeklies can develop stronger Web presences, they are positioned to help maintain local ties. Newspapers should seek to reconnect with natives who have dispersed across the country but who still care what is happening in their hometown. Make the Web a gathering place for people from an area, and use that function to help draw in regional or even national advertisers at low rates.

3.) Remember the Function of the Paper of Record – Local historians and school volunteers may be willing to work with weeklies to help restore and digitize the newspaper’s archives. Providing a digital archive generates more interest in the newspaper and could greatly expand the paper’s Web site.

4.) Build Strategic Relationships – Weeklies may also have an advantage in seeking relationships with local dailies and/or broadcasters. More regionally based news entities are not competition for weeklies but could instead be sought out for mutually beneficial cross-platform relationships for larger news entities, which can provide better regional coverage, and the weeklies, which can benefit from increased regional exposure.

Journalism and public relations are closely connected, so I wonder likewise how digital tools affect the intersection of the two in terms of local markets and regional/local brands.

Comments

[Kare Anderson]

Ellen might consider partnering with the National League of Cities.

Since local governments are
• starved for money as less and less comes to them from state and fed.gov, and

• more requirements are being placed on them from above, often with put funding to carry out the requirements

...there is a greater need and desire for ways to secure citizen participation in choosing how monies should be spent, the elected and appointed folks and the staff are acutely aware of the need for fresh ways to engage and involve people.

Sam - am so happy to hear that you will be doing your work at Pepper

Kare, movingfrommetowe

[Tom Christoffel]

Hi - Google's Blog alert sent me to this post because of the term "regionally." You might find some resources for your discussion at Regional Community Development News. http://regional-communities.blogspot.com/ Please visit, check the tools and consider a link. I'll include a link to this post in the July 9 issue. Tom

[Sam Ford]

Good suggestions, Kare. And thanks for the kind words. Also, Tom, thanks for the link, and for your plans to include a link back to the discussion here. Feel free to stop by anytime.