{"id":2205,"date":"2010-10-18T22:30:39","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T03:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/?p=2205"},"modified":"2010-11-09T22:32:25","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T03:32:25","slug":"free-link-economies-and-moving-from-politics-to-emotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2010\/10\/18\/free-link-economies-and-moving-from-politics-to-emotion\/","title":{"rendered":"Free, Link Economies and Moving From Politics to Emotion"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was originally posted<\/a> on the Local Fourth<\/a> blog as part of my participation in a community media innovation project at the Medill School of Journalism<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

One aspect of spending so much time working on this project in Evanston is eating at a lot of Evanston restaurants. Today, the project coders went to Bat 17<\/a>, which has become one of my favorite places for lunch in Evanston. Just after lunch, we had some tough conversations about how a site built on the platform we\u2019re developing might be sustainable and why, if we\u2019re able to drive content to local publishers sites, we don\u2019t charge them for that privilege. One example of how another local business (one big takeaway from the Block by Block conference was that online local news sites need to convey that they\u2019re small local businesses too) leveraged free stuff to get more business was right there, digesting away in my stomach.<\/p>\n

Bat 17 has free coffee, not just for people stopping to eat, but for anyone who wants to stop in. Their reasoning is that people may come for the free coffee and decide to stay for lunch, or appreciating the service, come by after work or class for a few drinks. I don\u2019t have the numbers, but it seems like a smart move because the restaurant has been full the couple of times that I\u2019ve been there. The restaurant also makes a big deal about sourcing ingredients from other local businesses like Bennison\u2019s Bakery<\/a>.\u00a0 Rather than competing in the Evanston food space, the two businesses have\u00a0 a relationship that is mutually beneficial. Sourcing from Bennison\u2019s gives Bat 17 local credibility (according to the Bat 17 website, Bennison\u2019s has been around since the 1930s) and also drives business to Bennison\u2019s. If local news organizations want to compete with the emerging Paneras of local news, they need to find platforms for mutual benefit in the same way that Bennison\u2019s and Bat 17 have used sandwiches. I want to think that we\u2019re imagining such a platform.<\/p>\n

Another good analogy for the link economy is this YouTube video<\/a>. It illustrates that part of what builds a business\u2019 reputation isn\u2019t just what it sells \u2013 it\u2019s also its knowledge of who can best provide the goods or services it can\u2019t offer.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, Terri Gross interviewed John Stewart<\/a>, host of \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d on her show \u201cFresh Air.\u201d Though the title of the show was \u201cJon Stewart: The Most Trusted Name In Fake News,\u201d Stewart had some insightful things to say about real news:<\/p>\n

GROSS: Did doing the show make you more political than you ever expected to be \u2013 more politically aware, more politically engaged?<\/p>\n

Mr. STEWART: I think it made me less political and more emotional. The closer you spend time with the political and the media process, the less political you become, and the more viscerally upset you become at corruption. So its \u2013 I dont consider it political because political \u2013 I always sort of denote as a partisan endeavor.<\/p>\n

GROSS: Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n

Mr. STEWART: But we have \u2013 I have become increasingly unnerved by just the depth of corruption that exists at many different levels. I\u2019m less upset about politicians than the media. I feel like politicians, there is a certain, inherent \u2013 you know, the way I always explain it is, when you go to the zoo and a monkey throws its feces, its a monkey.<\/p>\n

Mr. STEWART: But, when the zookeeper is standing right there, and he doesn\u2019t say bad monkey\u2026<\/p>\n

Mr. STEWART: Somebody\u2019s got to be the zookeeper. And that\u2019s \u2013 so I tend to feel much more strongly about the abdication of responsibility by the media than by political advocates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I found Stewart\u2019s juxtaposition of politics and emotion particularly intriguing and it made me think of some of the comments I had read while exploring the online news ecosystem in Evanston. Many comments expressed anger, frustration or fear about things that were happening in the city, but many also seemed designed to overwhelm opposing viewpoints. People were voicing their concerns or trying to raise their pressing questions, but these perspectives where often overshadowed by the conflict, sometimes with the commentors losing their own valuable insight amidst a rant. People respond emotionally to the things that happen in their life. I think part of the media\u2019s job should be to validate that emotional experience, but it needs to take care to not exploit it.\u00a0 In his book \u201cWhat is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism,\u201d Jack Fuller even suggests that emotionally honest reporting becomes more important in an age of media overload and responding to increasingly emotional media stimuli.<\/p>\n

The point of our platform, which drives rich context for local news through questions, concerns, answers and responses all tied to discovery from local media, isn\u2019t to de-emotionalize people\u2019s responses to the news in their community. Instead, by forefronting brief questions and concerns that distill responses to their most direct form, I hope the platform can validate people\u2019s perspectives while offering a path to discovery of new information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was originally posted on the Local Fourth blog as part of my participation in a community media innovation project at the Medill School of Journalism. One aspect of spending so much time working on this project in Evanston is eating at a lot of Evanston restaurants. Today, the project coders went to Bat 17,… Continue reading Free, Link Economies and Moving From Politics to Emotion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20589],"tags":[365,20590,30,22],"class_list":["post-2205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medill-community-media-innovation-project","tag-free","tag-johnstewart","tag-media","tag-politics","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-zz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2207,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205\/revisions\/2207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}