Poynter on Knight CEO Alberto Ibargüen's WeMedia Interview
Bill Mitchell posted on Poynter this morning (full post):
As more than 200 staffers of the Rocky Mountain News got the painful news that their paper would close Friday, a similarly sized group at the We Media conference was listening to the Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen describe some of what's emerging to replace the fading established media.
But he began with a discussion of what's being lost, and pegged it to geography: "For the first time in the history of the republic, the delivery of news and information is not happening in the same space as democracy."
Unless somebody can devise a sustainable geographic model for journalism, he argued, the United States needs to figure out "how to structure democracy in a different way not rooted in geography."
Read the entire post here.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:58 am
A book colleague Paula Ellis told me about is called "The Next Form of Democracy," by Matt Leighninger. It argues that Americans are smarter than ever but have less time. So we must find new ways for citizens and public servants to work together. People feel powerful when they organize to take action around issues they care about... even through web-based things like participatory budgeting, problem-solving exercises and neighborhood councils. If they can't connect to a place, today's mobile citizens are more likely to move.