Tag: media

Lehi News Organization

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One primary concern for a Lehi news organization would be cost. Especially the upfront cost. Getting a website would be financially painless, but getting paid reporters or printing with any regularity would become cost prohibitive very quickly without a revenue stream. Without a very compelling argument I would not want to take money from the city to run the organization. It should be privately funded and run from neutral sources of revenue. Advertising on the site should be able to pay the modest costs of running the site, but I would be wary of expecting it to pay for much else (at least until I saw actual revenue coming from that advertising). Ideally the cost of printing would be such that a modest price for the printed version of the paper would cover the costs of printing and print distributions thus allowing people to access the news for free from the site if they did not want, or could not afford, to pay for the printed version.

For the reporting, I wonder if it would be possible to get by with less than 5 paid employees. One would serve as editor and head of the paper, perhaps three would be paid reporters, who would be expected to extensively use bloggers and comments from readers as sources of information to drive their reporting, leaving one employee to manage any other administrative functions. I wonder if there would be any possibility of collaboration with the high school or with university students interested in reporting as a way to add some unpaid staff to the press corps.

The initial move in starting such an organization would be to find out how much interest there is. Are residents interested in having a Lehi-centric source of news? Are there bloggers who are interested in their community (as opposed to some other special interest they might blog about) who would be willing to contribute and work with reporters? Are there others who are not current bloggers but who are interested in contributing to an ongoing discussion of local news items? Would the city council and local businesses be interested enough to provide information relative to whatever discussions are current?

Anyone from Lehi or surrounding areas is welcome to answer.

If you are not near Lehi I would still like to hear your thoughts on this – would this interest you in your location? Does the idea seem sound?

Tags community, media, technology

culture

Community News Organization

Post author By David
Post date July 5, 2007
No Comments on Community News Organization

I read a blog post on 10 things about the future of newspapers which seemed to paint a clear picture of what news can and should be like in our current age. One of the key points was that newspapers need to be focussed on items of local importance because national news is pretty well covered already. It struck me that a local orientation to a newspaper could be a very valuable tool in building a community. At times it might seem necessary to “make news.” If that were done by using slow-news days to bring a spotlight on areas of the community that often go unnoticed (like local artists, or community projects) it might help people feel connected to each other in a more meaningful way.

Among the 10 things there is a heavy emphasis on embracing many things that might otherwise be considered competition by the newspaper – search engines, and online advertisements may seem to cut into the potential revenue that is needed to run the paper. Bloggers and other amateurs of reporting might be seen as competitors to paid reporters when they could be used as allies. In the current world of publishing there are also more opportunities for publishing in a variety of media formats (text, audio, and video) and through many different means of distribution (print, rss, website, podcasting, mobile devices). These same technologies open doors to allow more participation and interaction with the audience (comment boards as well as letters to the editor, even the possibility of allowing people to submit images, audio, or video in response to what has been published) so that the newspaper is really a vehicle for discussion instead of becoming a platform for declaration.

This gets me interested in breaking Lehi away from the publishing center of Utah County. Currently we have a town section that gets published weekly by the Provo Daily Herald. With a population of 30,000 there is no reason that Lehi should not have an independent community news organization. We should have no aspirations to compete with the New York Times, or even the Daily Herald, but there is nothing to stop us from controlling our own platform for local news coverage.

I will have to write about how a Lehi community news organization might be formed, run, and financed and see if the idea is viable.

Tags community, ideal, media, technology, thoughts

culture

Subtle Biases

Among the many places I get political news and information is the new York Time Political blog, The Caucus. Unique among those sources, The Caucus displays a tag cloud which shows the tags they use on their posts with the tags displayed in a font size proportional to how often the tag is used.

The Caucus Tags

It is no surprise that 2008 is the largest tag (most common), but Hillary always seemed to be disproportionally large compared to other candidates. I always dismissed that as a result of the fact that her full name is spelled out and thus takes more space. After seeing the cloud so many times I finally got curious to see how much the various tags were really used. The result revealed an unspoken bias at the blog.

The top two presidential candidates for the Democrats have as many stories as the top 3 presidential candidates for the Republicans (548 in each case). John Edwards is tagged 146 times for the Democrats as well. Following to lower tier candidates the coverage of Democrats makes further gains despite the fact that there are more Republican candidates. Interestingly even President Bush receives fewer tags than either Hillary or Barack. The most telling statistic for me however was the fact that there were 62 posts carrying the tag “CONSERVATIVES” (yes, all caps) and not a single post with a tag for liberals (all caps or otherwise). I guess the reader can decide if that is because they don’t cover liberal stories, or if it is because they don’t consider anything to be liberal.

I am not complaining that there is a bias here. My feeling is that every information source is biased, even good, scientific data , but it is better once the bias is recognized publicly. If anyone wants to see the raw data I used they can download it – I have added some tags for sorting between candidates, parties, issues etc. – or they can go to The Caucus and view the page source to get up-to-date data.

Tags media, New York Times, reactions

culture National

Right Thinking

Townhall is not a place I have linked to before because much of what I see there is more partisan than I would care to pass along. Surprisingly today there are two articles there that give me hope that there are still active Republicans who stand for something besides being not Democrats (there are also Democrats who are more than not Republican, but I discovered that a while back).

In the first column, the author rejects the most famous sound bite of the second Republican Presidential debate where the media latched on to the sound bite from Rudy Giuliani and allowed him to twist the words of Ron Paul about terrorism and 9/11 to the detriment of this less popular candidate. Ron Paul gave an insightful answer about the situation we are in but the media covered the sound bite response. Typical.

In the second column, the author reminds us what the Republican party used to be known for and what they claim to represent. By the time I was done with that I wanted to ask the current Republican party which is worse for our economy and our future generations – a spend and don’t tax leadership or a tax and spend leadership? The answer should be obvious. We need to be talking less about funding welfare and saving social security and more about helping people get off of welfare and helping them not be dependent on social security. More importantly we should be doing things to reduce the perceived need for such programs.

So my point is, it’s no wonder that things aren’t looking good for the GOP right now – their words (especially historically) and their actions are inconsistent. That is bound to inhibit people from trusting them even if they like their rhetoric. When people don’t trust them they are less likely to make an effort to vote for them.

Tags government, media, parties, Republican

General

Cabinet Shuffle

Normally I don’t link to things where I have nothing to add, but this seemed like a good exception to make. From the New York Times OpEd Replace the Surgeon General position with the position of America’s Nurse.

Another reason to make this link is to lament that I will soon not be reading the OpEd section of the New York Times once they start charging subscriptions. It’s too bad, they often have good things to say, but not $50/year worth of good.

Tags media, New York Times

National

The Power of the Minority

Post author By David
Post date January 18, 2005
No Comments on The Power of the Minority

I am very interested in the moves that the democrats will make as they try to get back to their winning ways. I found an interesting perspective by David Brooks in the New York times.

I really expect that American Politics are largely going to be determined – for better or worse – by what the Democrats end up doing in their efforts to start winning majorities at the national level.

Tags media, New York Times, parties

National

A Little Prophecy

In one of his last columns William Safire makes an interesting prophecy about the political future of our nation. He says, “If I were starting out in politics or its commentary today, I’d become a Democrat.” Coming from one of the most staunchly Republican pundits I have ever read, that is an interesting statement.

His reasons offer a ray of hope to the democratic party today and a voice of warning to the Republicans who currently hold power. To the republicans he says, “The G.O.P. personality will split in a couple of years, as all huge majorities do in America. Idealistic neocons will be challenged by plodding, pragmatic paleocons, who, by fuzzing the party’s present character, will someday lead it down the road to defeat.” and to the Democrats he suggests that they can begin to win again if they will “take advantage of its bantamweight agility and ‘stand for something.'”

In some ways I am starting out in politics in that I figure that I still have at least 30 years worth of political participation ahead of me. I could not agree more with Mr. Safire that joining the Republicans represents jumping onto an old champion racehorse – lots of victories behind it, but not many left in front of it. Siding with the Democrats gives the newcomer an opportunity to help shape an up-and-coming champion which will start to produce greater and greater victories so long as discipline and principles are vigilantly maintained.

Tags media, New York Times, parties

National

Spin

Post author By David
Post date September 30, 2004
No Comments on Spin

The DNC is busy making sure that Bush doesn’t win the debates on spin after the fact so they have made sure to send their followers to make their voice heard at the polls.

Online polling is unscientific at best no matter which man wins, but they’re making sure that there is no chance of balance when they make such a blatant effort to misrepresent public opinion by overloading the poll results with the votes of the democratic faithfull. It sure looks fishy when CBS News has Kerry winning by an 80% margin when all the other polls have margins of 9 to 40%. I guess the republicans don’t vote CBS.

Tags media, parties