Since my last post on the future of the news in Connecticut, I’ve received lots of interesting comments and there has been plenty of other interesting news about news organizations.

In personal news, my wife got me a shirt that says, ”I Get My News from Twitter”. (Note: The preceding is a flagrant attempt to monetize my writing. My wife gets a commission on each shirt like that that gets sold.)

In the big picture, GateHouse Media has sued the NYTimes Company over aggregation. Most of my online friends are smacking their heads, and saying “WTF?” As a general rule online, you don’t discourage people that link to you online. Instead, you seek them out and encourage them. As an example, if you go to the Connecticut section of my blog, you will find links to stories from the Journal Inquirer. The JI is trying to establish a stronger presence online. I’m linking to them, and they are listing my political posts on their opinion page. At least one of their reporters is on Twitter, and I would love it if they would set up a Twitter stream that posts their hottest stories as they occur.

Yet the GateHouse v. NYTimes case is a bit different. Both sites are competing to be the hyperlocal media gateway in the greater Boston area. I can see how the old mentality at GateHouse works its way out. Sue people who try to compete with you, instead of trying to find win-win situations that help both companies. As you might guess, I’m not particularly sympathetic to GateHouse’s move. It seems a little bit too much like a rehashing of the RIAA’s approach to the digital distribution of recorded music. Sue anyone that tries to come up with a better approach.

My previous post did receive a great comment from Rick Hancock. Rick hosts a weekly segment on WTIC about the Internet and is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut. It is a well thought out “Pat On The Back” comment and I greatly appreciate it. He talks about various types of comments, including his comment on my blog in a great post, A Comment About Blogging. If you are a blogger, especially relatively new to blogging, you really must read his blog post. He makes important points about more and more elderly people getting their news online, and talks about how University of Connecticut should consider providing instruction to citizen journalists. I think this would be great.

Beyond that, his comment, in and of itself, illustrates an important trend in blogging, and I would suggest any good journalism. We are moving from a broadcast mentality where a news anchor could be “the most trusted man in America” and a newspaper could claim to print “all the news that’s fit to print”. People want conversations. They want to think about the issues and discuss them with others. Ideally, we will foster friendly discussions that encourage an exchange of views, instead of the anonymous efforts to present one view and not listen to another view that we see on so many sites like Topix.

I touched on this a little bit in a previous post, Graffiti and the Public Sphere. Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix responded with a well though out comment. He says, “If we get 20% of the American population engaging with each other in Topix, then we have indeed expanded the public sphere”. I disagree with him on this and need to write a longer response when I have more time, but I do not consider people anonymously posting inaccurate information as characters attacks on others as an expansion of the public sphere.

I also received an email about one of my blog post saying

I think it would be more productive to be broader, to address filling
Connecticut's local news gap in general, not necessarily by
volunteers.

Some steps might be:
* Inventorying what already exists, what's been lost, what's needed
* Exploring possible conference venues and dates
* Contacting potentially interested parties

My initial reaction to this was somewhat negative. Here in Connecticut, we’ve had substantial cuts in news staff. We just lost about a dozen weekly papers, and there are around another dozen papers slated to be shut down in about two weeks. More significantly, the local papers that are still around seem to have been losing any significant role in the public sphere. There are not enough articles being written about local government, or for that matter, with a few notable exceptions, about state government. There seem to be fewer and fewer political debates being organized and sponsored by local news organizations.

One line of research I want to pursue is how the Citizens Election Program has affected advertising in local news outlets. Much of the data will become available for analysis early next year.

Yes, it would be good to find a venue and a date for some sort of conference, but I’m weary of conferences. It seems like more and more people spend time wringing their hands and conferences and little seems to get done. Conferences, in and of themselves, seem to hearken back to the old broadcast mentality instead of the conversational approach that new media seems to be moving towards. Perhaps what we really need is an un-conference.

To illustrate this, I want to mention two emails I received on a different post I had written about promoting civic involvement. One person responded, “My attempts to bring this sort of engagement politics to my town were not well received. The status quo like thrives best on opacity and limited citizen participation.” Another responded, “In my town things are a little different. The Mayor and School Supt. just LOVE committees and task forces - which they then either ignore, or mismanage, or both. It's a great way to marginalize citizens.”

So, where does this leave us? I’m going to run out the door in a few minutes to attend a Tweetup wearing my “I get my news from Twitter” shirt. When I get a chance, I’ll follow up with Rick and a few others and see what we can do, to get more people involved in our media and in our communities. If I get a chance, I might even follow up on a conference, if it can be run in a way that does not marginalize citizens.