Tom Stites changed the world for me back in 2006, when he gave the keynote speech at the first Media Giraffe conference at U Mass-Amherst — a lively event addressing issues of innovation and public participation in media. At a time when the winds of change were slowly stirring, he upped the ante, made clear the issues, and affirmed the basic hope and struggle of journalism and media reform.

Now, with hurricanes of change battering journalism and media, Stites again has the opportunity to raise the roof — and raise the stakes and aspiration of the whole conversation on media, journalism and democracy, through his finalist status at the upcoming WeMedia GameChangers contest.

In Amherst, getting up in front of a roomful of entrepreneurs, academics, newsroom leaders and publishing, Stites asked: Why do we care about media? What’s the point of this work in journalism? If all we are worrying about is newsroom jobs, technological innovation and saving the advertising model, will our work come to any consequence?

Stites put it all on the line by questioning the impact of the ad model on mass-market journalism. He identified specific communities that were categorically underserved by an editorial focus on content that appealed to advertisers who valued “upmarketing” above all else. He linked the ongoing coverage of celebrity lifestyles and glossy materialism with the equally relentless disinvestment in newspapers and news media by everyday citizens (i.e. market share fleeing in droves) who find little value in paying for reporting that’s not relevant to the immediate needs of their lives.

His essay based on that speech — “Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?” — is required reading for anyone who cares about journalism and media today. It grounds the discourse in what really matters — people, communities, and their meaningful participation in democracy as a granular, daily activity that directly impacts the quality of human life from the individual to the societal level.

Since then, he’s been an adviser to my own work, and that of my peers. He’s also taken on his own, amazing project — BANYAN, a consumer co-op that links journalists directly with the communities they serve, with the aim of producing real “news you can use” for all the people dropping the upmarketed commercial newspaper like a cold, stale potato.

Here are the key links. Check ‘em out, vote for Tom on the WeMedia Web site, and, tell your friends and peers about his great work!

http://www.tomstites.com/

“Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?”
Keynote speech, Media Giraffe Conference, July 2006

The Banyan Project

GameChangers Award VOTE! (Stites is listed aphabetically near the bottom)

The good folks at Free Press gave me a li’l soapbox on their SaveTheNews.org blog. I took the opportunity to mouth off about journalism institutions vs infrastructure, a familiar topic to readers of Illuminated Media. Here’s a teaser — read the rest on SaveTheNews:

Institutions or Infrastructure? The Real Opportunity for Online Journalism and Democracy
Josh Wilson, January 26, 2010

This is a guest post by Josh Wilson of Newsdesk.org, a commercial-free, non-politicized news source covering important but overlooked issues from around the world.

Want to save the news? Stop worrying about journalism institutions, and start worrying about journalists.

Much of the discussion about media and journalism is about institutions and their relationships with citizens. The issues — that journalism institutions must be transparent, accountable, and provide real value and relevance to the community — are clear enough.

The problem is, the Internet is not about institutions — by which I mean social organizations with a gestalt that is singular and self-prioritizing. Rather, it’s about peer relationships — the egalitarian multiplicity with common goals and mutual needs.

This idea of peer-to-peer relationships is built into the physical architecture of the Internet itself. When you talk about institutions as singular, therefore, you talk about intermediaries that more often than not get in the way of peer relationships …

READ THE REST ON SAVE THE NEWS DOT ORG

Once shunned for its suspiciously reddish tinge, the word “cooperative” may have regained utility, and credibility, in the vocabulary of journalism business models.

As the newly formed Chicago News Cooperative appears to demonstrate, it’s not just a way of organizing journalists when the traditional model is failing; it’s also a means for undercapitalized commercial media companies to offload the expense of maintaining their own local/regional newsrooms.

A New Type of News Nonprofit
Though I don’t think we’re quite dealing with a new dawn for anarcho-syndicalist worker’s coops, the emergence of the Pocantico community — a diverse group of investigative-news nonprofits that have banded together to share resources and multiply impacts — has been followed by this more regional, heartlands venture.

The Chicago News Cooperative, as reported by Poynter, will get its startup funding from the MacArthur Foundation, and support from local public radio and TV outlets.

Its first major client will be the New York Times; the CNC will produce two original pages of content for the Gray Lady’s Chicago edition.

It’s telling to note that a major commercial news outlet such as the Times is now embracing nonprofit newsrooms as an affordable source of quality local/regional coverage. A similar effort is emerging in San Francisco, with the Times getting local content from the semi-cooperative (and semi-controversial!) Bay Area News Project.

Emerging Trends
The Times also dipped its toe in the nonprofit waters earlier this year, offloading onto Spot.Us the expense of sending a freelancer reporter to the Pacific Garbage Patch. The breakthrough crowdfunding service (disclaimer: My own Newsdesk.org project is an ongoing Spot.us partner) has raised more than $6,000 for this purpose — though one wonders why a multi-billion-dollar media corporation couldn’t have shelled out the dough itself; are there are some murky lines being crossed?

Regardless, the breakthrough here is the twofold acceleration of new trends in organizational and revenue development:

• Journalists are self-organizing into cooperative business organizations that are more responsive to their needs than existing commercial and “dinosaur” nonprofit structures.

• Commercial news outlets, starved for resources and battered by Wall Street economics, are increasingly turning to lean nonprofit service providers to develop public-interest coverage that is not viable under a for-profit business model. (The Associated Press offers a precedent for this, though that agency itself is a dinosaur, and potentially vulnerable to increasing competition from smaller, emergent nonprofit networks and agencies.)

The “market pain” is clear. Unless there’s some dramatic change in journalism business models nationwide turn for the better for commercial journalism business models, these new trends will come to define news production in the 21st century.

Traditional for-profit news outlets, meanwhile, could largely become hollow brands, mass-market vehicles for lighter content about sports, entertainment, political “chatter” and requisite ambulance chasing, and turning to nonprofit third parties for the serious stuff that doesn’t quite capture eyeballs en masse like Octomom.

Whether this is a final state for 21st century journalism, or just another step in the transformation of the news sector, remains to be seen.

But there will be much, much more of it.

(As an aside: My own Newsdesk.org project is pushing a cooperative/peer-driven model for organizing newsrooms, and a third-party-provider model for generating revenue from public-interest reporting. Stay tuned to Illuminated Media for updates.)

From the Columbia Journalism Review, a comment on executive pay and the startup-funding issues that confront small, nonprofit-news projects (such as my own Newsdesk.org endeavor):

“Newsosaur Alan Mutter [noted] that Paul Steiger, the editor in chief of the non-profit news startup Pro Publica, earned a $570,00 salary in 2008. Mutter compared that situation to the Chi-Town Daily News, a startup that folded in September after it failed to raise $300,000 needed to meet its annual budget …

“Adding Steiger, a former managing editor at The Wall Street Journal (where he earned more than twice as much), to Pro Publica’s masthead surely provided the start-up some much-needed star power. On the other hand, half his salary would still leave him well off by industry standards, and free up enough money to hire half a dozen reporters. So this raises the question: Can very large news salaries be justified in the current business climate? And does it make a difference whether the outlet is a non-profit startup, a for-profit newspaper, or a television news network?”

Having long railed against Bay Area news publishers for essentially ignoring an abundance of important stories and demanding readers in favor of Wine Country ad supplements and lurid screaming headlines, I read with some interest the following item, about the NY Times and Wall Street Journal’s plans for Bay Area editions:

Both The Journal and The Times seem to be betting that the Bay Area is the place to try first. Its biggest newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury News, have suffered through some of the sharpest downsizing in the industry, and a very high percentage of the region’s residents moved from elsewhere, which usually means less attachment to the local paper.

I mean, how can a publisher, in a market it essentially owned, let it all slip away?

Maybe by … ignoring the stories that matter, and firing the reporters that do their best work?

The Chronicle fired (er, laid off? bought out?) environment reporter Jane Kay — Jane Kay! — the steroids-in-baseball-busting Lance Williams and superstar foreign correspondent Anna Badkhen …

Somehow — how, though, seriously, how? — these five-star newsroom professionals were viewed as liabilities in the Chronicle’s struggle for survival.

And now the news heavyweights are moving in. SFGate.com will do fine as a source for local lifestyle information (movies, restaurants, etc.) plus crime reporting and occasional City Hall columns, but can Hearst compete as a serious local news outlets given the devastation of the SF Chron’s reporting capacity? Let me note the Gate has already begun direct-linking to other outlets’ coverage of important stories they lack the firepower to cover.

And how does the Examiner fit in? Sure, they have a knack for punchy and succinct coverage of local news, but can they even give away wood pulp sporting 50-point morning headlines about major news items people learned about online the night before?

As ye sow, so shall ye reap, or something like that.