Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
Happy New Year!?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/01/2009 - 13:35Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, Happy New Year, and all that stuff. The snow is bright white beneath the cold deep blue sky. In the background, I hear the Rose Bowl parade on television. My mind is a bit foggy due to an annoying head cold I’m trying to shake off.
There are many things I want to write about, thoughts about the year that has just ended, hopes for the year to come, and reflections on what it all means. Yet I can’t concentrate, so this may end up being a bit stream of consciousness.
2008 was not a great year. It was difficult for us financially, as it was for many of my friends. Yesterday, I listened to Colin McEnroe do his farewell show on WTIC. I twittered parts of it, and friends listened in to WTIC’s live stream of the show. Another friend has sent me an invitation to the Facebook group, Bring Back Colin McEnroe. Colin is one of the few media personalities in Connecticut that seems to get what is going on. He appears to understand the role of the media ecology and the relationship between print, radio and online.
It is becoming popular to talk about the convergence of different types of media in the newsroom, but there is another part of convergence that should be considered. Colin, like a few other media personalities that seem to get it, also teach at various higher educational institutions in Connecticut. This makes a lot of sense to me. I wonder how many people started in journalism in hopes of educating people about what is going on. It seems like a convergence that should be promoted and nurtured.
Later, last night, I received an IM from a friend that lost his job a while ago, and has not had any luck finding a new job. We chatted and neither of us had a lot of hope for the New Year.
I read some of @BlinkyStJames tweets and her blog Anywhere But Here: Chronicling near(?) homelessness. I highly recommend her writing.
Around midnight, I was twittering with friends. One person from the left coast, still waiting for New Year’s in his town, asked those of us on the right coast if 2009 was any different from 2008. I responded that while it is good to have 2008 done with, it feels like New Year’s won’t really be here until January 20th. I’ve seen many people echoing that thought.
As I tried to find words to describe 2008, I remembered an old Calvinist joke.
What did the Calvinist say when he fell down the stairs?
Thank God, that’s over.
I guess that captures a little bit of my feeling about 2008. So, what’s on tap for 2009? I’m really not sure. I’ve kicked around resolutions to make. One is to stop rolling my eyes or shaking my head in disbelief every time the President of the United States speaks. It is going to take a little work, but I suspect I should be able to achieve that in about three weeks. With Kim’s Lyme disease currently seeming to be under control, we are hoping to get back into a little better shape. Personally, I would like it if our family could go for more walks on some of the wonderful trails around Connecticut. I would like to work on some sort of Social Media Relationship Management system, and do a better job of nurturing my relationships in social media.
Yet for big resolutions, I’m still at a loss. It feels like I should make a Sisyphusian resolution, to enjoy the view of the boulder as it rolls back down the hill. Yes, I would like to make a difference, to somehow help people find their voices and get more involved in the public sphere, yet that boulder seems not to be budging very much.
So, there you have it, out with the old boulder and in with the new. What about you?
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Tweetup
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/28/2008 - 11:09The light warm rain fell on the hard cold snow, producing an eerie mist rising from the ground. @ahynes1 maneuvered his old hybrid into a diagonal parking spot on Main Street in Middletown, CT. He looked at the dilapidated awnings of local stores where young men loitered. He glanced at the pile of junk in his car. Anything of value was sufficiently buried in the clutter of the front seat.
He grabbed an unmarked brown bottle from the pile. If he had had more time, he would have labeled it “@ahynes1’s highly tweeted hard cider”. He had documented many aspects of brewing and bottling his hard cider; key talking points being about buying local produce, like the sweet cider he had used, and about handcrafting.
As he walked down the street, a young man approached him. “You going to the Tweetup?” the young man asked.
“Yeah, are you @dacort?” @ahynes1 responded. They had never met face to face but they knew of each other from their online writings. @dacort nodded. “I’m @ahynes1,” the older man said, reaching out to shake @dacort’s hand.
The walked into Pho Mai, a small Vietnamese restaurant on Main Street. The restaurant had about six tables. Two or three tables had couples sitting at them enjoying their lunch. One table, sitting closest to the kitchen had an unattended laptop, and two other tables had been pushed together, making room for four people to eat together. At these tables, @joecascio and @juliedarling were sitting.
They greeted @ahynes1 and @dacort as they entered the restaurant. As with @dacort, @ahynes1 felt that he knew both @joecascio and @juliedarling from their online writing. In addition, he had met both of them at a bar in Chester a month or two earlier.
@juliedarling was a regular at Pho Mai and @ahynes1 had been to Pho Mai once before with his wife, @khynes2000 when they were returning from Hartford after @ahynes1 had liveblogged the Citizens Election Program hearing.
@dacort wrote various programs to analyze social networks on Twitter. It seemed a logical outgrowth of his work on data security, and the discussion revolved around first followers, data visualization and other geeky topics.
There was a brief digression into steam punk which got @ahynes1 thinking. The small restaurant with some of the best Vietnamese food in Connecticut, the bottles of local hard cider, and the discussions about using emerging technology to foster communications, instead of relying on trusted names in broadcast media telling everyone what they needed to know, interspersed with ads for large multinationals serving up homogenized culture, almost felt like the backdrop to a dysutopian science fiction story.
These tweeters were part of an alternative culture, using emerging technology to find local niches of good food and other quality products. Yet there wasn’t the aspect of the sinister overlord trying to thwart these heroes. Instead, the dominant culture seemed mostly blissfully unaware of tweetups like these and at most, a few educators tried to keep stories about such gatherings from minors out of an uninformed fear about possible sexual predators that lurk online.
With the meal over, our intrepid tweeters headed back to their families with good food in their bellies and friendships renewed.
Continuing the Discussion about the Future of Newspapers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/27/2008 - 12:10Since 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.
Last Call for Lame Ducks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 11:15When Gov. Rell called for a special session to address the rising state budget deficit, her press release said, “Some will question why I am calling the Legislature into session five days before the next regular session is slated to begin.” She is right about that. I am one of those people who question this. To paraphrase a different press release from the Governor’s office, “This is an overtly political maneuver by the Governor. At a time when our state faces significant economic challenges, it is unfortunate that Governor Rell is spending her time on a partisan political ploy rather than trying to help create jobs or help Connecticut families.”
The second press release was actually about Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz’s proposal to discourage commerce; the trading of open U.S. Senate seats behind closed doors. Yet the concern with the how open U.S. Senate seats are filled is closely related to one of the larger concerns with Gov. Rell’s call for a special session, both are about citizen participation.
Special sessions do not require public hearings. Information about the special sessions might leak out in the press, if we have any press left in the state, but bills being considered for special session do not appear on the General Assembly website with as much time for public comment as bills considered during the regular sessions.
At a special session, the bills are introduced by the Speaker of the House and the Senate President. If the proposed special session is called, the bills will be introduced by Rep. Amann, who will cease to be a member of the house five days after the session. It seems as if the only person excited about the special session other than Governor Rell is Speaker Amann.
There are the special costs of having a special session. These are compounded by having the special session in January. Lobbyists badges expire on December 31st. Either the ethics office needs to grant some sort of waiver allowing lobbyists who had registered for 2008 to lobby at the special session, or the ethics office needs to open early enough to let any lobbyists that want to register before the session to do so. I suspect that the same applies for members of the press.
If this were such an emergency, Governor Rell could have called a special session to start much earlier and provided time for citizen input. Yet it seems as if the real issue, like with how an open U.S. Senate seat would be filled, is that Governor Rell appears to distain citizen input. Perhaps that is part of the reason she is seeking to raid the Citizens Election Programs funds as part of her special session.
If you believe that citizens should be involved in our state government, if you believe we should be spending tax payer money on things other than a special session for the Governor, then I urge you to contact your state legislators and urge them to just say no to a special session starting five days before the regular session is scheduled to begin.
(Cross posted to My Left Nutmeg.)
What Now for News in Connecticut
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/21/2008 - 13:20As the first snow of the year started coming down here in Connecticut, word slowly leaked out that the Journal Register Co. has shut sixteen of its weeklies in Connecticut and laid off twenty-one reporters and editors. These are different papers than the eleven weeklies and two dailies that the Journal Register had announced plans to close in January. All in all, over the course of a month, Connecticut could lose nearly thirty newspapers.
The reactions were fairly predictable. Some lamented the loss of local government coverage and the decrease in public accountability it would produce. Others suggested that the newspapers had long ago stopped providing adequate coverage of local government, that this was part of the reason for their demise, and there would be little change. Still others fretted about the loss of cheap material for wrapping fish or training puppies.
Some blamed the youth for not being more interested in the news. Others blamed the news organizations for not making their news more readily accessible where youth look for the news online. Many blamed the management of the Journal Record Co.
Some people did find bright spots, highlighting the work of CTNewsJunkie and the New Haven Independent as examples of where quality reporting still happens.
Perhaps, some have suggested, online citizen journalism can help take up the slack. I’ve often suggested this myself. However, we need to think very carefully about how this could happen.
Steve Collins has raised the concern about what happens to people that are not online, especially the elderly who are major subscribers to many of these papers. I’ve suggested that one solution is to get people to use community access television to read some of the news. Already, we have good government access broadcasts of various meetings in Woodbridge. Yet getting new community channels up and running is a lot of work, and this would be a large project.
Doug Hardy has commented about the loss of institutional memory. There are reporters who have covered events in Connecticut for many years and they bring a very important perspective of how the current events relate to a bigger picture. This is a big issue in my mind. Sure there may be some Web 2.0 type ways of gathering, storing and searching a little bit of this, but that is a big project in and of itself. Perhaps we need a Connecticut News Wiki. Yet even the best Wiki fails in searchability when compared with asking the person in the newsroom who knows where all the bodies are buried.
Yet there is a greater issue; how do you get citizen journalists to cover events that matter in a fair and informative manner? People write about what interests them. You may find some good coverage of Little League by parents of star pitchers, but what about getting someone to cover local selectmen meetings or the town committee meetings of various political parties?
Here, there is a chicken and egg problem. Unless someone is covering what is going on, others may not realize that there is something important going on in their backyards. If people don’t know what is going on they may not be inclined to produce try and cover events themselves. Even if they to get motivated, it may take a while before they get proficient in writing good articles.
It seems as if this is a place where two interesting groups can and should get involved. The New England News Forum has suggested getting journalism schools in New England to help jumpstart online citizen journalism. Central Connecticut State University and Southern Connecticut State University could play key roles. It would be great to see some conferences around the state on this.
Help Fill the Local News Gap: How to be an Effective Citizen Journalist
Other organizations like the Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists would be great additions to such an effort. The IRE provides great training for investigative reporters and some of their material would be a great addition such conferences and every journalist, whether they be a professional journalist or a citizen journalist should read and adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
The other interesting group would be local good government groups. Organizations like Common Cause and The League of Women Voters as well as people energized by the 2008 Presidential campaigns could bring energy and an important focus on watching local and state government.
Would such efforts help the situation here in Connecticut? It’s better than nothing and I would love to work with anyone who wants to help bring together people to provide better citizen journalism. If people have better ideas, I’d love to hear them to and see if there are ways I could help in that area.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to have happy holidays, and keep up my own writing about events in Woodbridge, in Connecticut, and in the media ecosphere.
