Amy Gahran recently pondered: Is community news just a “Nice-to-Have?” That generated quite a conversation in the comments about the value of community news. It’s hard to answer that question if you aren’t clear about how you measure success.
Your success metrics might be economic (i.e., advertising dollars), or based on participation (i.e., number of registered users). Or they might be about “civic engagement” or “democracy” as I often hear placebloggers and others mention… but I’ve never heard how people measure those last metrics, even though they often are cited as the most important value of a hyperlocal online community.
People like me who run community sites (mine is MyTopiaCafe.com) often talk about “civic engagement” and believe that the community information we provide encourages broader and deeper civic participation. Nice happy talk, but there’s little research to determine whether our efforts really are effective in that regard. As a scholar, I see the value in such research — but as a practitioner, I just haven’t had the time to do it.
How exactly can community sites strengthen civic engagement? Through content? Site functions for feedback and social networking? Site architecture? The personalities engaged in making the site work through these means, and more? The people who engage in action based on something posted to the site?
That’s why I’m excited to see that the Knight Foundation, in partnership with The Aspen Institute, is examining this question. The newly formed Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy intends to address why information is a core community need.
Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of The Aspen Institute, said “We believe we can put the power of technology to use in strengthening community information — and through that information, communities themselves.”
Becky Blanton, a freelance writer and photojournalist, argues the same point in her comment to Gahran’s post. Her view is that community news is not a “nice-to-have” kind of thing. “It’s the fabric of a society. Local news is the way in which a community adjusts its views, morals, and understanding of itself,” she argued. “Local news is the feedback people seek out in order to adjust their own behaviors and beliefs.”
One measure of civic engagement is social capitala term coined by the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America. Dr. Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) explained: “Social capital [is] the collective value of all ‘social networks’ [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [‘norms of reciprocity’].”
Notice this definition makes no distinction between physical and virtual networks. Thus, I think Putnam’s broad research on social capital can apply to online communities, as in this example using MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games).
The work of the commission, according to Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibarguen, will be to “articulate the information needs of communities in this democracy; determine where we are today; and propose public policy that will encourage market solutions.”
The commission’s first meeting is tomorrow (June 24) in the Knight Conference Center at the Newseum in Washington DC. They will discuss integration of technology, the future of community information, economic sustainability, and the changing media landscape. This meeting will be Webcast live on the Commission’s site.
I hope that this commission examines the groundwork already done by the Saguaro Seminar folks, as well as research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The Saguaro short-form survey instruments could be adapted to be deployed on hyperlocal online communities and blogs to test whether the content, functions, design, architecture and personalities create a rich exchange — and growth — of social capital.
Donica Mensing, assistant professor at the University of Nevada, summed up the issue in another comment: “If we believe that journalism has a role in civic life, then it would make sense to conceptualize communities as publics — as political entities that have an interest in taking collective action about public problems — not just to aggregate personal preferences, but to organize actual public work to make where we live better. Yes, it’s activism. But don’t we want people to take action as a result of our journalism? Then we could make that mantra part of how we do what we do, rather than ‘cover’ things hoping that someone somewhere will be motivated to respond in some way.”
I think we should add social capital to the metrics we use to judge the value of our sites, and our work. Also, let’s see if together we can adapt Better Together’s 150 ways to build social capital from the physical world into virtual environments. We may not be able to attend a baseball game with friends and root, root, root for the home team (suggestion #111); but we can “greet people” (a “high-touch” suggestion #101 that I’ve translated into an online practice called “waving” that I recently discussed on E-Media Tidbits) and help them feel like they belong.
How might news organizations and their community sites adapt Better Together’s list? Please comment below.
