Last week I learned that David Cohn knows how to tell a joke, bust a move and host an awesome conference.
In all seriousness, the Hardly Strictly Young conference was a whirlwind of new people, old friends, big questions, bright ideas and lots of food. About 30 of us got together at the Reynold’s Journalism Institute in now tornado-stricken Missouri for a small conference gathering designed to compile alternate implementations for the Knight Commission’s report on informing communities.
We sat around for a full day in small, rotating brainstorming groups to tear the Knight Commission’s report to pieces and find ways to implement the very vague concepts recommended. Notably, the four topics we discussed:
- Journalism or media education at various levels
- How we can increase the sources of news providers
- Expand local media initiatives to reflect the “full reality” of the communities they represent
- Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub
These aren’t small topics to tackle for only an hour and a half at a time. Half of each discussion was simply trying to figure out what the language of each recommendation really meant.
One criticism I have of the ideas we came up with implementation is that most of them were abstract, and I think that’s partially due to to time limitations that kept us from drilling down to the heart of each recommendation. Part of the thought processes for such abstract concepts is starting at a high level, breaking the concept into subparts, then tackling each subpart. We were forced to skip from step one to step three, though, and our conclusions were far from exceptional. A few notable implementations that stick out in my mind.
Demos not memos — in the K-12 classroom
On the topic of media education, it’s more important to focus at the lower levels than on higher education. Because teachers learn better from role models than from instruction, create a network of teachers who are making exemplary use of media literacy in their classrooms, then distribute that information to teachers across the nation to guide them toward what works, rather than trying to recreate the wheel. Incentivize teachers with grants and awards.
Report for America
On the same topic, the best and most implementable idea was the “Report for America” concept, comparable to Teach for America or Code for America. Although this idea was presented in the scope of increasing media literacy, I think it would work better for the last recommendation we looked at: ensuring every community has one high-quality, online hub.
Take a look at the description for Teach for America’s approach: “Teach For America corps members commit to teach for two years in low-income communities, then go on as alumni to lead efforts to change the face of public education.”
If you replace “teach” with “report” and “education” with “journalism,” you have a way to ensure communities have online hubs (Report for America members commit to report for two years in low-income communities, then go on as alumni to lead efforts to change the face of journalism).
Combine that with the technological aspect of Code for America: “Code for America enlists the talent of the web industry into public service to use their skills to solve core problems facing our communities” and you could have a sustainable partnership for creating informational hubs in every community.
Wikify it
Although it seems like a no-brainer answer, one way to ensure there’s an online hub for all communities is by expanding Wiki tools. Of all the solutions presented at HSY, this was the most practical and takes the fewest amount of new resources. The group that presented it, Jenny 8. Lee and Chris Amico, referenced the greatly successful Davis Wiki out of Davis, California (see the video below).
LocalWiki – collaborative, community-owned local media! from Philip Neustrom on Vimeo.
Why I absolutely love the LocalWiki project as a means of creating an online hub for communities is that it’s truly community owned, and can become an important informational tool for any community. It doesn’t require the participation of journalists or newsrooms or extra tools — it’s just people informing people.
Overall takeaway
- Putting a bunch of smart people in a room is an awesome idea. Limiting their topics of discussion to recommendations from the Knight foundation — maybe not the best use of our time
- Next time, I’d love to see some kind of hackathon and a way for us to continue talking about and building our ideas after the conference.
- I’m not a fan of invite-only conferences overall. I understand space and resources are limited, so next time I’d suggest having an application process so that those outside of our immediate circle of twitterati are given the opportunity to participate if deemed worthy.
- Agree with Chris Wink: “It’s tough to do so with such a busy crew, but I think we all would have been more productive had we all fully read the Knight Commission report (I did on the plane there) as I believe there was some duplication.”
- The diversity at this conference was awesome. People from different backgrounds, ethnicities, professions, etc. were there. Next time I’d like to see people from outside of “journalism” (entrepreneurs, general community members for whom we’re making these decisions).
Thanks to David Cohn and RJI. It was an amazing weekend.
If time and money were unlimited – all of those things woulda happened
I know, I know! But you asked about rec’s for next time
. It was seriously an AMAZING experience. Thanks for putting it together.
Oh no – it’s actually more than welcome. This is probably more than you asked for – but here’s part of a report I’m writing on the event. (p.s. you rock)
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Weaknesses
If an event like this were to take place again, these three weaknesses would need to be addressed.
1. The first was time constraints. This was a jam packed 1.5 days. The first full day was dedicated to discussion. The second half-day spent reporting back.
A little more time would have allowed for a third step and perhaps less of a stressed schedule on the first day.
Potential third steps could have been
(a. Swapping of project leads. Passing recommendations from one group to another in order to scrutinize the ideas from a different perspective.
(b. Further prototyping. Some of the groups did get to this last stage, providing slides, concrete examples, etc. One group even went so far as to register a URL: http://www.catsignal.org/
2. Breadth: I purposefully kept the conversation very broad. I thought it important not to try and influence the direction of recommendations or the conversation, but to allow people and individuals to direct their own recommendations organically from their own conversations. As one participant put it “you can’t make a cocktail with a full bar.” Which is to say – constraints may have directed the conversation considering the limited time.
Other constraints that the participants suggested would be to have the conversation around implementations that would require little to no money (under $150,000 for example).
In the end, I don’t think the broad scope was so much a weakness as a path that the discussion was based upon. One could organize events like this around all kinds of constraints and that would fundamentally change the course of the event. With that in mind, this could also be another way to understand the constraint of time already mentioned above ie: you can only pick one (or no) constraints if you have limited time.
3. Intimacy with Knight Commission Report.
While links to the Knight Commission Report was sent out to all the participants their level of intimacy with the report was still limited. Perhaps with more time and pressure they would have been more comfortable with the material. Despite the instructions to start with the recommendations and think forward about implementation much of the conversation still circled around the recommendations. As one attendee said ” ….yet discussions always seemed to reference the difficulties involved with helping people find and judge quality news and information, along with significant challenges such as the lack of Internet access in rural and isolated communities.”
In other words, a lot of time was spent acknowledging the challenges that have already been expressed in the recommendations. This is important and perhaps required to put forth any implementation, but future gatherings should find ways to jump directly into the conversation getting past discussing the merit of the recommendation itself.
4. It was a diverse group in every way but two. There was an intentional bias for a younger crowd. The majority of folks came from a ‘journalism’ background. We could have benefited from getting more people who are approaching these issues from outside the framework of a ‘journalist.’ Alas – about 5 of the individuals I had originally invited who would have served that purpose were unable to attend.
Note: from an anthropological perspective it would be interesting to have a similar event with various other groups ie: majority technologists, majority teachers, etc and see if unique bias’ or language evolve to each gathering.
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Great post, great discussion. If there is ever a Report for America I will be the first to sign up. Would love to help such a thing get off the ground as well.
-Homeless Dan.