Citizen Journalist: Independence Day
Waving a flag for civic journalism from the rubble of the Fourth Estate
Independence Day comes to Mount Dora as usual, red, white and blue in all its Florida summer glory, hotter now in the global melt, gathering storm clouds around the city by mid-day and tolling thunder which looms closer and fades. Last night it was barbecue and corn on the cob and ice-cold watermelon wedges so red they look like they’d been hacked from a sweet body: A time for spangled banners & calligraphic sparklers and booms up and down our street spooking the critters and leaving drifting solo trailers to spectre the orange-rimmed night. And then the fireworks down in Evans Park, lifting and blossoming booming tracers of red, white and blue.
Through the night, the news lingers like the scent of cordite in our plush, humid dark. It’s the end of Ramadan and ISIS-inspired attacks rage across the Muslim world — the Istanbul airport attack killing 45, 22 killed in Bangladesh, the bombing of a market in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood which killed 140. A man stepped on a makeshift bomb in Central Park yesterday (some say it just a lame fireworks device), uncontrollable gun violence rages in major American cities, Donald Trump is in his next hot water over an anti-Semitic meme he tweeted in connection with “Crooked Hilary” and Hilary Clinton’s husband returned the favor miring her campaign deeper in Hilary’s email scandal. Down in South Florida, blue-green algae goop is sucking at docks from Fort Lauderdale to Venice, and in Leesburg a 27-year-old man recovers from blowing off most of his hand trying to light the fuse of what he thought was a dud mortar-type fireworks device.
But now to celebrate. On this our nation’s birthday, this holiday celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence and its immortal (well, to this date) American statement:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Adding this pointed, militant caveat:
Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
In 1776 that meant independence from Great Britain, the colonial powerhouse which the locals threw off in an upset akin to Iceland’s recent drubbing of England in European Cup soccer just after that country had Brexited from the European Union.
Such astonishing pole-axing could well be in American sights. A post-political age makes the very act of beheading Washington as we know it a scary possibility, akin (but hopefully not literally so) to the ceremonial guillotine at the Place de la Revolution where tens of thousands of “traitors of the people” lost their noodles during the Reign of Terror phase of the French Revolution. King George got off easy saying bye-bye to the Colonies.
Florida Gov. Scott may need to be circumspect in his travels around the state for this holiday as the toxic blue-green algae bloom fans out through South Florida. Scott was hasty to blame the federal government for failing to buttress the barrier which keeps nitrogen-polluted waters in Lake Ockechobee (thanks to the sugar industry located there) from spilling into waterways throughout South Florida. The feds have been trying to get the state to comply with the Clean Water Act for years (“onerous regulation,” Florida attorney general Pam Bondi called it), and now, due to excess rain in the region this past winter, the toxic bloom is spreading everywhere. Enraged citizens at a recent emergency meeting of the Martin County commission to discuss the crisis (the bloom has caused beaches there to close). One citizen told officials, “I’m done being a peaceful protester. If you don’t start acting, we will take things into our own hands.”
At some point the algae bloom will crash and die, and the result will be a massive fish-kill that will drwarf the recent kill in the Indian River lagoon. Gov. Scott, mind your patriotic high-hat and fickle finger of blame.
With all that, this Fourth of July arrives hot and more fraught than ever with context. Mount Dora’s Independence Day parade will be the bright part, a testament to traditional white American community, with floats, clowns, kids, marching bands, Shriners in tooty toy motorcars, marching police, police on bicycles, police on motorbikes, a SWAT tank, Lake County police on horses, the Lake County Sheriff and his deputies, flags and, of course, City Council as well as the new crop of candidates.
But behind it there be shadows everywhere …
1.
In the 1996 summer blockbuster Independence Day, the new global order of mankind teamed up to declare its independence from a nasty tribe of truly alien overlords with a penchant for turning cities into slag and apparently intent on exhausting the Earth’s resources before humans could accomplish that. The aliens were defeated by a computer virus (a higher-tech but similar doom to that which befell the alien invaders of Jules Verne’s War of the Worlds) and the mothership explodes at film’s end like a July 4 fireworks display. Boom boom, we are free.
Human time moves fast nowadays. In just 20 years, digital technology which was just beginning to look zippy in 1996 has all but consumed humankind. The aliens of Independence Day have shrunk in stature compared to digital disruption and now resemble quaint insects with Compton attitude.
Maybe it’s also because Independence Day can be seen on any day at any time somewhere in the vast wasteland of cable TV, draining the last bubble of sizzle through endless reruns. (I’m watching it again on HBO Now.) Not much surprise in those stellar dudes anymore. Another perpetual movie, The Matrix, suggests that we’ve found more tangible, terrifying threats, a paranoid world where Big Brother a digital copy of the old grand oppression, an avatar in a suit with sunglasses who too much resembles the good government guys in Men in Black. Who’s on first? We really don’t know, any more.
And if all of that’s confusing, take no hope of clarity from Independence Day: Resurgence, the howlingly bad burst knockwurst of a blockbuster sequel to the 1996 film. David Sims in The Atlantic Monthly called it “25 minutes of plot stretched into a two-hour film that somehow feels interminable — and it doesn’t even have the decency to blow up an American landmark along the way.” The film apparently can’t make up its mind who the aliens are (there are two tribes here, one good and the other nasty), nor can conjecture bigger disasters befitting a reboot (in one scene, an ocean-sized mothership picks up Asia and dumps it onto Europe, belying a horrible loss of any sense of proportion). To add insult to basalt, we get poor Jeff Golblum, reprising his role as David Levenson, sighing, “What goes up, must come down.” The defeat of the aliens is such a foregone conclusion that there’s no real tension in the film, so the only independence theater-goers will feel is respite from the Florida heat for a few hours — and wonderment at how much better they will feel leaving the theater.
Maybe this is just par for the course for our moment, raw and scared from incursions into the American heartland by shooters who are also sometimes terrorists and not at all trusting the ability of Washington to fix anything again. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness may still feel like grand American values, but the sense of their precariousness today as well as the dubious manner in which we advocate for them makes Independence Day seem bright in in a collapsing middle and complex and ironic all around its edges.
Far too nuanced for American brains now raised on cultural Cheetos like TMZ and Facebook and Independence Day: Resurgence. Recent studies indicate that the brain powers down almost immediate when you flip on the TV or scan for celebrity news on an entertainment website. Deep reading — the stuff you get from literary fiction and poetry and scholarly articles — lights up the brain’s concert hall, expanding thought on a resonant magnitude. Not much of a concert when the only instrument in the house is a digital kazoo.
Thomas Ferling suggests in Whirlwind, The American Revolution (just released in paperback) that the Declaration of Independence is our most memorable political document because its primary author, Thomas Jefferson, knew how to write from and for the deep mind:
Other congressmen might has written a document that squeezed in much that Jefferson included in his draft, but it s not like that any could have matched the magical literary qualities of his composition. With peerless eloquence — and in simple and uncluttered language — Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence glided effortless, like a vessel on placid water. There was a rhapsodic quality to his handiwork, for he was a penman with a genius for the cadence of the written word, a writer conversant with music …
The single glaring omission from the Declaration — removed in order to get the South Carolina delegation’s vote and thus unanimous consent of Congress — was a passage stating that “the king had abridged the ‘most sacred rights of life and liberty’ of Africans by ‘captivating & carrying them into slavery.” (Ferling 164). Thus “all men are created equal” rang hollow from the beginning of America’s history independent of the Crown. “Liberty” became the economic freedom to make a buck no matter how dubious the goods — like slaves. Laissez faire capitalism grew out of a lacuna in that master text, and now our corporate overlords, thanks to Citizens United, granting corporations a degree of free speech greater than what was intended for rank-and-file mortals in the First Amendment.
The two drivers of this year’s election — economic dislocation due to global capitalism, and a desperate attempt to save the vestiges of white life, white liberty and the pursuit of white happiness (“Make America Great Again”) — are all about what the edited Declaration of Independence was not allowed to say. It’s also what gives our present Independence Day celebrations in Mount Dora both its gaudy color and sweaty apprehension.
Not that anyone will catch this on Donnelly, barely lifting their eyes from their cell phones long enough to cheer the American flag-waving patriots whose Jefferson is a capitalist antipolitical outsider named Trump.
2.
Things aren’t looking very good for citizen journalists these days.
For one thing, the news ship we’re riding (albeit third class, down in steerage) is going down fast.
In a survey by the Media Insight Project, just six percent of the people in the United States say they have a lot of confidence in the media — a far poorer number than even Congress’ dismal 17 percent approval rating.
Granted, media covers a lot of ground — everything from porn to Pinterest to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed — and given that an overwhelming majority of it is not, really, the news, percentages like that don’t hurt quite so much.
But still. The latest Pew Research State of the Media report shows continued sharp declines in newspaper circulation in the past year (4.2% for Sunday, 6.9% for dailies), along with revenue (7.8%, its biggest decline since 2009) and newsroom jobs (down 10 percent in one year, to 32,000 jobs nationwide). When the Pulse nightclub massacre rallied the Orlando Sentinel’s newsroom into action, it was with a 60 percent smaller workforce than 10 years ago.
Technology — which doesn’t have a clue how to stop its momentum, much less question what it’s doing — is disrupting newspapers from their traditional base faster than ever. Two phenomena of note:
- Traffic is going mobile. In the Pew Study, 38 out of 40 news organizations reported getting more visitors from smartphones and tablets than from desktop computers. And mobile users are spending less time now when they visit a news site.
- Content meanwhile is fast-morphing to video. One official at Facebook even expects that in five years, all of its content will be in video — that written content will cease on that channel.
Digital advertising isn’t saving the accumulating losses in print advertising. While digital ad revenue which was up to $60 billion last year, only a trickle of it is reaching news organization. The tech giants Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook — take in more than half of that ad volume with Facebook gobbling 30 percent of the total.
As a citizen journalist — writing for beans — Facebook is the only hope for mainstream-enough visibility in my small town, where its weekly newspaper finally threw in the towel in 2009 after a decade’s worth of losing competition against the Web. The Mount Dora Citizen is web-only, and traffic comes in through an e-mail blast and Facebook links. (We could do a lot more to chase readers with tools like Facebook Live, Instant Articles, and Snapchat Discover).
Maybe it gives an illusion of presence: I work the Facebook page, so I see the daily feed we offer, some of it we’ve created, a lot that we’ve aggregated from other online news sources. Still, it’s all Mount Dora, a fine channel among several (our city has a wealth of Mount Dora-centric sites): But our collective offering of local information is just one spinning lily pad in an endless stream of whatever else an individual chooses to Like and link, a visibility deeply determined by algorithms which decide the priority and frequency of posts that appear in each feed.
And however much we are actually seen, it is hard to tell how much we are read. (One recent study showed that six out of ten people who share the link to a story do not bother to read the story.) Not good news for anyone who cares much about the news.
Now comes the news that Facebook is tweaking is news feed algorithm to give priority to posts about friends and pets, pushing commercial pages — like news site posts — down into the drowning leagues of the flood.
Irrelevance piled on irrelevance: that’s the state of the Fourth Estate. Things have fallen a long way from when George Mason and Elbridge walked out of the Constitutional convention in 1789 until a bill of ten rights were amended to the constitution, including the very first, the right of free speech and a free press.
Maybe because I’m a relic of my age, brought up on reading newspapers and late in life tasked to write local news in lieu of any consistent and reliable other local source, that I have a stronger focus on what the news used to be.
But I can’t help wondering if this rapid shift is happening so fast that its still surprising that no one really does seem to care about the news. The technology has done as it always will — provide and advantage, a faster gradient — but in the process it has all but eliminated our desire for news.
And without that desire, what are we?
3.
The instinct for news is as basic as drumbeats from a neighboring village: our sense of security is rooted in knowing where the next threat is coming from and whether it’s OK to rest.
“We need news to live our lives, protect ourselves, bond with each other, and identify friends and enemies,” write Tom Rosensteil and Bill Kovach write in The Elements of Journalism. “What we came to call journalism is simply the system societies generate to supply this information about what is and what’s to come. That is why we care about the character of the news and journalism we get: News influences the quality of our lives, our thoughts, and our culture.”
My reason for joining the fray as a citizen journalism in my little town after 19 years of suburban quasi-existence burrowed away in my nice house is the conviction that informed communities make the best decisions for the community. Who we elect as our municipal leaders is crucial, especially as we face an immanent period of massive growth. How these leaders are monitored to ensure they are keeping the interests of the entire community in mind is also crucial.
I think I’ve helped. In the past year, I’ve written about utilities projects, open government, development deals, parks and recreation, high school football, the Innovation District, the food pantry, trees, commuting, vision planning, the history of local newspapering, the library, racial injustices, imbalances in campaign opportunities throughout the city, the threat of opiate addiction, historic preservation, the challenges of poverty, code enforcement … and a whole lot of council meetings where all the decisions are made but no one much cares to know.
But is this citizen journalism project — attempting to provide what far more capable hands have largely abandoned, chasing ever-more distant and abstract dollars — a futile one? Is anyone listening? The declining numbers don’t look good.
Does anyone care? That’s a more difficult question, because half of it concerns whether I’m doing it well enough (in both the journalism and efficient distribution), while the other half asks if people have become so saturated with media that they care little for what amounts to local news — and far worse than that, if they are that disengaged from their civil responsibilities as well.
Some studies indicate that the connection between low news usage and civic engagement may not be as strong as you would think. That may be especially true at the regional or national level of news, since politics is discussed just as ably by John Oliver on This Week Tonight as Politico.
Locally, I’m not so sure that there are that many other available channels in which to get your local news. In the seven years since Mount Dora’s weekly newspaper folded, the city’s local politics has grown increasingly strident and polarized in one sense and more indifferent in another — neither way a fruitful path for healthy, growing communities.
Seeking the news that affects one’s decisions about community is a choice. There are a million excuses not to do it — just let your eyes slip from here to something blinking over there — but there’s only one good reason: you choose not to.
Civic involvement is a choice. It is a decision that tomorrow is important enough that you’re willing to devote time to it today. There are a million excuses not to do it — survival’s necessities and leisure’s leftover priorities shout loud enough — but the only good reason is that you don’t care.
News and democracy aren’t so separable, after all. But it sure seems easy to wash them both away.
4.
A few years back I remember Douglas Coupland writing that he had seen a dramatic shift in the perception of time starting around 2003:
It’s now obvious to people who were around in the twentieth century that time not only seems to be moving more quickly, but is beginning to feel funny, too. There’s no more tolerance for waiting of any sort. We want all the facts and we want them now. To go without email for 48 hours can trigger a meltdown. You can’t slow down, even once, ever, without becoming irrelevant. Music has become more important because music is a constant. School reunions are beside the point because we already know what our old classmates have done. Children often spend more time in dreamland and cyberspace than in real life. Time is speeding up even faster.
He called it “timesickness” — “ People are now doing their deepest thinking and making their most emotionally charged connections with people around the planet at all times of the day. Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us. We create complex webs of information and people who support us, and yet they are so fleeting and tenuous.
What Coupland concluded may be ominous thing I’m struggling to get a hold of today:
The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be “you.” Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.
If you’re like me and find yourself immersed in digital media just about every day, the experience is a little akin to playing poker in Vegas after midnight: there aren’t any clocks in the room, so there’s only your engagement — the next hand’s possibilities and the money you might win — to face squarely off with your weariness and dwindling funds. You expect everything and nothing. Online is the fragmentation bomb you keep pulling the pin from, diving in to the next thing fighting for your attention.
Without time, what is life and living, and where does it step to the right and end up dead?
5.
Between citizen journalist and citizen involvement, I keep hoping that there’s some firm ground out there somewhere we’ll finally stand on that feels like forward movement.
(For me they’re identical. Is that a problem?)
If it doesn’t happen, what then? The slide away from news is also means the fall of the informed public, ripening the ground for the worst political solutions.
There used to be a standard for journalists, and a time when what they said really mattered. Edward R. Murrow was roundly praised for calling out Sen. McCarthy on his CBS news show, As I See It, when he said
We will not be drive by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are no descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
With this (and the withdrawal of support by his fellow Senators) Joseph McCarthy’s reign of Washington terror came to an end.
It’s not so much that we don’t have newsman of Murrow’s caliber any more — though certainly the job has been greatly tempered and tampered with for corporate profits — as that we don’t have the audience who takes this news this heart and changes it mind.
One of McCarthy’s chief counsel was a seedy lawyer named Roy Cohn, and it was Cohn who saw Donald Trump as his final project before dying of AIDS in 1984. Cohn taught Trump McCarthy’s strong-arm political tactics.
The greatest irony is when Donald Trump revoked the press credentials of The Washington Post for covering his events, calling the paper “phony” and “dishonest.” Kettle, pot.
So far, despite the voluminous dirt dug up on Trump by scores of qualified journalists, until recently none of it has budged the needle of his faithful. They have moved away from the dial, absorbed in their own bubbles and feedback loops.
It is telling from the Brexit vote that informed opinion was not a driver of the decision. The day after the vote, the heaviest-trafficked Google search in Great Britain was, “What is the European Union?” Shoot, ready, aim: Scorn of experts, like elites, is running at an all-time high, Europe is in upheaval and the British pound is taking, well, a pounding.
In his recent Atlantic Monthly essay, “How American Politics Went Insane,” Jonathan Rauch argues that our polarized, stalemated, ineffective political system suffers from what he calls “chaos syndrome,” the political middle — where the dealmakers and compromisers thrive — has been overthrown, resulting in a system increasingly “individualistic and unaccountable.” “Chaos becomes the new normal — both in campaigns and in government itself.” How did we get here? He writes,
Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.
And like all illnesses — especially mental disease, the blight which tries to convince the sufferer that everyone else is sick — “chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction.”
Which brings us back this shrinking home square of zero, smaller and more meaningless every time we land back here.
It’s like the ultimate digital disruption, minus the winner who fled with all the loot.
6.
Laboring away as a volunteer citizen journalist is in many ways a whole lot easier than trying to slug it out a large daily newspaper.
Analysts think this will be a very rough summer for those in the business of newspapers. Some of the large newspaper groups, like Gannett and Digital First, are on a buying frenzy in an attempt to gobble up one another to survive (the) digital apocalypse,” as a March 29 Bloomberg headline suggested. Digital is growing, but it still isn’t paying for itself, and a number of digital only startups have stalled this year.
What of the most embarrassing spectacles of the summer is the clown parade at tronc, the newspaper publishing group once known as Tribune Publishing. The group owns major metro dailies like the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune, as well as a score of smaller suburban-market papers like the Orlando Sentinel and Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Tribune corporate spun off the newspaper group a few years ago in the manner of a locomotive that sets loose the burning cars in back (they still own a large portfolio of TV stations and all the real estate the newspapers are housed in — that’s right, those papers now pay rent to Tribune). Trib Publishing commenced sinking like a stone as soon as they were cut free, and were on the verge of getting bought by Gannett when Tribune CEO Michael Ferro (having just taken the job from Jack Griffin in a venture-capital coup) announced the name change to tronc and a mercurial shift to data-driven, algorithm-smart digital video production so thick with buzzwords that the Washington Post called it “the worst press release in the history of journalism.” Besides the cringe-worthy name (“Honk if you love tronc!” read one Tweet), there was nothing in the announcement that acknowledged the real work of its newsroom employees.
A piece by Greg Satell in the Harvard Business Review titled “Tronc’s Data Delusion” unpacked the announced venture as a dated, foolish and reckless gambit. Rather than “the future of journalism,” as proclaimed by the tronc release (“from pixels to Pulitzers,” an obnoxiously perky tronc employee video proclaimed), Satell calls it a “shiny new digital strategy (which) seems mired in the recent past.”
One thing Satell wrote about data-driven content optimization — the thing that every digital news organization for the past several years has been trying to unhook like the bra clasp of the Holy Grail — is that it creates an illusory audience: “Algorithms are agnostic, but tend to favor certain types of articles over others. Before you know it, you are judging your audiences preferences on the basis of assumptions you’ve embedded into the system. At that point, you’ve lost editorial control to a data-driven mirage.”
Has the news faded from our view because it now serves that mirage?
“The role of a great publisher is not to predict what readers may want ot read, but to help them form their opinions through strong, authoritative journalism. You win in the marketplace not by chasing readers with algorithms, but by attracting them with a superior product.”
Too bad know one knows how to sell a superior product any more.
7.
No, there isn’t any real money any more in newspapering. The crash no one wants to see happen (at least if you work in the business of news) is accounted daily. And so I read about two community papers in Ohio with a combined age of 287 years, shuttered by their parent newspaper group Civitas Media, which is owned by a private equity firm.
That’s one reason why it isn’t so painful working for free for a hyperlocal. I came into this expecting no money. Thankfully I have a full-time job which pays the mortgage and car payment and groceries.
I do worry whether paid journalism will survive. On balance, I worry that citizen journalism will have go down with it. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed for all the remaining players in the Fourth Estate.
As a citizen journalist, my job is to supplement that work in my neighborhood with all news that the dailies can’t routinely cover — council meetings and interviews with local business people, updates on crucial construction and development, kudos to those who have served well and worked hard.
But what about the responsibilities of citizens? Does everyone in our town play a part in the reporting of its news?
Rosensteil and Kovach in The Elements of Journalism think so. The following list of citizen rights are also journalist responsibilities; and when both parties are doing their job, the following is true:
- Citizens have the right to expect that the evidence of the integrity of reporting be explicit.
- Citizens should expect to see evidence that the material has been prepared for citizens’ use above all.
- Citizens have a right to expect that commentators, columnists, and journalists of opinion present their material with supporting evidence that demonstrates they are viewing the subject to inspire open public debate, not to further the narrow interests of a faction or a move toward predetermined outcome.
- Citizens have a right to expect that journalists monitor and hold to account the most important and difficult centers of power.
- Citizens should expect their news providers to create several channels through which they may interact with them.
- Citizens have the right to expect journalists to be aware of our basic dilemma as citizens: that we have a need for timely and deep knowledge of important issues and trends at a time when the proliferation of information and outlets has become increasingly unmanageable.
All of this is to prevent “the threat that the press will be subsumed inside the world of commercialized speech or the undifferentiated world of broad communication,” write Kovach and Rosensteil. What is needed then is a clear sense of mission, they conclude. “The only way to avoid this threat is for those who are committed to journalism to have a clearer and more vigorous understanding of the elements that make journalism a thing of value, a transparent enterprise that creates its own demand by inviting citizens into the process, reconnecting journalism and citizen in a conversation and not a lecture, and that turns journalism into a service that improves people’s lives.”
8.
Put citizen and journalist in the same shoes — perhaps that is the inevitable downsized result of our times, in those large swaths of the country left behind in disruption’s fray — and the list of rights and responsibilities I just outlined from The Elements of Journalism could also be seen as Mount Dora’s battleground for independence, freedom and democracy in rapidly changing times.
The smothering forces are everywhere — a broken Congress, corporate dominance of the economy, digital disruption of the brain, resurgent nationalism and anti-politics and racism (Trumpism) and (here in Mount Dora) a city government shadowed by insurgent politics.
The call to independence is clear: the job, however, is ridiculous, fraught with lousy odds against success and no clear support from anyone.
But if I would try to articulate what this independence might look like, I would suggest calling it civic journalism and characterize it thus:
- Civic journalism is a later incarnation of the Fourth Estate. As the commercial enterprise of journalism quickly fades from view, journalism as public service becomes increasingly essential.
- Its primary job however is true to its roots: to engage, inform, energize and promote democracy.
- Civic journalism is a high-low operation, both literary and complex as well as compelling and emotional. Only a full-hearted, passionate and engaged mind is sufficient for a life-long devotion to sustaining community.
- It is deep in the sense of place and the many communities which participate in it. Memory is cultural as well as physical; place is where the two come together.
- Civic journalism as I see it must be platform-atheistic. While platforms like Facebook or email or a print product may serve to get the message out, there can be no real dependence upon them, as the change gradient is mercurial and wholly untrustworthy. Let others tweak algoirthms or do web analytics: those technical devices for commandeering attention create illusions of audience. It should be as effective online as well as if online did not exist.
- Civic journalism both partners with government as well as serve as an independent critique. The job of education is crucial, but also is critical reflection.
- It admits to its opinion — ever faithful to the citizen — while ever striving for journalism’s standard of balanced, evocative, and sustaining truth.
- Civic journalism knows it begins from the rear and will always be in an upward battle to clear the middle ground. One of its greatest opponents is white-washing.
- There is no way forward into the good, next America without reparations for all that has been wrongly taken. That sense of amends directs the work.
So — that’s this citizen journalist’s personal Independence Day parade, what there is to celebrate, what so desperately more is needed.
I wonder how inclusive today’s parade down Donnelly will be. That march is the measure is how prepared Mount Dora is for its future.
Better than a lot of places, I’m sure, but I’m afraid too far from enough.
Well — a slice of watermelon and then I’m off to take pictures of the parade. Then back to work; I’ve got to get cracking on a piece about utilities relocations in advance of Wekiva Parkway expansion, and thn another about the Mount Dora High Hurricanes’ summer training regimen.
Council meets tomorrow night.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
