6/4 evening: Building and Engaging Community... with Folklore?

Michelle again mentions folklore: fascinating word, and apt! Folklore is the stuff we tell each other, the stories that move through and fix themselves in the collective consciousness organically. Folklore reinforces community. If journalists hop online from the mainstream media but still turn to their same old Rolodex of sources, they may be failing to engage the community.

Online citizen journalism works differently. If it works within Michelle's folklore paradigm (and perhaps I overtag it as a paradigm -- what do you think?), our form of journalism finds its stories in what people are talking about before the media get to them. We tell our version of those stories, and then leave the door open for others to add to and remake those stories and tell their own stories on top of it all. That's the interactive community-building folklore that can happen online.

Now maybe my kind of blogging fits here too. At the Kiwanis meeting in Madison right before the conference, Charlie Stoneback said that my blog puts big stories in a local perspective that no one else gives. Who else talks about the farm bill or the presidential race or the cyclone in Burma in terms of Madison, South Dakota? Well, we do. My blog does. Folklore is about local events and mores, but it also reaches out to the stories of the larger world to put them in our own terms. Folklore isn't just local tales. It is the stories we tell to make sense of our world, the whole world.

6/4 Evening: Making Money

Matt Thompson: "payment may not always be monetary."

Definitely not what most folks in the room wanted to hear! But as Arnie commented to me, it's like health care: outcomes are measured in much more than money. You don't go to the doctor based on how much money his prescription or treatment will help you make; you go for your health. We don't blog just to make a million bucks (though don't let me stop you from making a donation!). We blog to contribute a valuable service to our communities: telling stories, building social capital, weaving a thicker social tapestry.

Blogging for profit may cause us to fall victim to the GDP Fallacy: making money doesn't mean we're succeeding. Think of your community blog like Cheers. Remember Sam? He didn't value that bar for the money he was making. He valued it for the people, the community. Of course, he wasn't running the bar as a charity; he had to pay the rent. But when Sam closed the show saying, "I'm the luckiest [s.o.b.] in the world," he wasn't thinking of his bank balance.

We do need to pay the bills, and a number of folks at JTM convened sessions on business models, insurance, and other pocketbook issues. Alas, I can't tell you much about them. I told myself I was going to this conference to learn how others have found ways to turn their online efforts into financially sustainable enterprises, but every time I saw such a discussion posted, I saw another session on Democracy 2.0 or government transparency, and I forgot all about business. Silly me—always putting the commonwealth ahead of financial wealth. ;-)

Paying the bills is nice. We can only do so much for free or for love. But even if we start breaking even or better, we always need to build social capital, not just the capital in our bank accounts.

6/4/ Circle: Notes Big and Small

In this big circle session, we did the usual introductions, plus an experiment in which we had to come up with a brief headline -- a "Twitter" -- to desccribe what we hoped to get from the conference. My headline: "Madville Times raids best minds in country, takes brilliant ideas home to make South Dakota smarter, freer, funner." Bit long for a headline, but maybe I can use that last part for my next (first!) book.

I described myself as geocentric, thinking geography, then realized the better word for my online efforts (and others) is topocentric, centered on place. All this talk about dispersed online communities is interesting, but it would make Wendell Berry nervous. Place, literal place, matters.

Olivia Ma from YouTube informs us that YouTube has created a new account labelled reporter.

Bob Cox from New York observes that four years ago, no one at the Journalism That Matters gathering was talking about making money. He sees here a sign that the community journalism scene is becoming more stable: we're figuring out what we want to do and now can spend time figuring out how to make a living from it.

Tish Grier of Placeblogger says we are the stewards of the communities we create.

Michelle Ferrier fires off a couple great comments:

• her headline: "the nexus of folklore and the future." Folklore! The stories, the knowledge, the shared language and narrative that make our memory collective!
  
• "social capital is the infrastructure that allows for democracy" -- placeblogging builds social capital! It builds connections along which democratic discourse and collaboration can flow.
  

6/4 Circle Discussion

Don't forget: the circle is the oldest form of human communication! The old hunter gatherers didn't sit in rows all facing the same direction. They spread out in a circle so everyone could look everyone else in the eye.

Some key concepts:

• hi-tech, hi-touch journalism: we can put all these tech tools to work, but we also have to be deeply involved as people, giving our journalism a voice people can recognize and engaging with our fellow participants
• Ready Fire Aim!: Just do it! Put your words out there, in rough-draft/you-draft form, let the story evolve collaboratively. This is conversation, not lecture: we don't go to parties with prepared written statements. We build our most important narratives on the fly.
• media literacy: we've got to prepare kids for all this! Evaluating and engaging in participatory community journalism is very different from being a consumer of mass media.
  • [CAH] Now maybe this isn't as big a challenge as we think. We all grow up getting fairly good practice at reading conversations; maybe we just need a little more heads up now to apply our common-sense community interaction filters to this new media. Maybe it's just a matter of unlearning whatever we've learned about mass media literacy.
• community is now often so big that you have to have technology to get the word out.
  • [CAH] If you're placeblogging someplace like Madison, SD, you'd think this wouldn't be a problem. You tell your neighbors over the fence and at the grocery store, they tell their friends, boom! Message disseminated.
  • But even here, media and community are fragmented. People commute to Sioux Falls and Brookings, work night shifts that keep them out of the loop, tune in different TV and radio, read different websites.
  • Even Madison can use a shared, asynchronous portal to serve as a little bit of community glue.
    
  
  

6/4/ small group: discussion

various comments:

• "Build it and they will come" doesn't work! If you want to build an online community, you have to nurture your users, show appreciation
• implications for DSU research: we can't just adopt some system and say to the organization, "O.K., everybody, start blogging!" We need someone at the tiller, helping to establish the culture of the online community: expectations, rules, boundaries, etc.
  
• Journalism should evoke interaction (again, we are participants, and we want everybody else to participate!)
• Citizen journalism is here to tell the stories the papers don't.
  • This isn't just beating the corporations and power-peddlers; this is telling about the debate team, the visits, the human things that maybe don't make the cut for the paper but which build community, which give different groups a sense of belonging.
  
  

6/4 small group: Chris Naff on Coaching, Changing the World

Chris Naff, HumanKind Media

• "media for the global citizen" reads her logo
• [CAH] interesting slogan to put in the context of a conference on placeblogging.
• [CAH] Can we be "hyperlocal" and "global" citizens at the same time?
  
• [CAH] Can we establish a sense of community with all these people we connect with online and with the people we see at the grocery store every day?
• [CAH] Will local community and dispersed community have the same qualities?
  
• Chris wants to change the world [my kind of goal!]
• Go beyond the crime and violence; do stories about people making positive change.
• Community participants needs lots of coaching
  

6/4 small group chat: Michelle Ferrier

Michelle Ferrier, Ph.D., proprietor/managing editor, MytopiaCafe.com, Daytona Beach, FL:

• Community calendar is the "gateway drug" on MytopiaCafe.com: it's the easiest feature for new users to use, introduces them to putting content online, inclines them to go further.
• Photos are usually the next thing users start posting [everybody loves pictures!]
• Stories are the hardest to get from participants [remember what Mary Turck said about how skittish people are about getting negative feedback from their writing?]
• 75% of the MytopiaCafe audience is women. The community is much more social and inviting than the forums on the associated/sponsoring newspaper site, where you get the typical hot-air insult contests [just like the KELO and Sioux Falls paper fora]