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Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker just received high praise from a major news-industry magazine. Thanks!

Editor & Publisher, a leading publication about the newspaper industry, just published a thoughtful and very positive column about Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker. See: Knight People To Help Build Digital Communities, by veteran new-media analyst Steve Outing.

The best part about this column is that Outing managed to articulate a larger aim and potential application of this project, which Adam Glenn and I haven’t really articulated well. Here’s what Outing said, in part…

“What Gahran and Glenn are devising puts the onus on the community to cover an issue (from multiple perspectives), rather than journalists. Professional journalists can be involved in their scheme — indeed, it’s logical that they lead it — but it will be more as facilitators than as reporters.

“…[This project is] not dependent on editors’ or reporters’ focus on the issue, but is meant to keep attention on it over a long period by actively engaging community members over an extended period.

“…Newspapers have struggled with open-to-anyone initiatives and features online, of course. Some open comment threads on stories have become overrun by trolls, rudeness and abusive behavior. Discussion forums, due to the large size of some online newspaper audiences, too often have run amok, as the politeness of most participants is drowned out by a minority of crass, rude and/or abusive participants.

“In part, these troubles result from the size and breadth of these online communities. When any discussion forum gets too big — and if the topic focus isn’t sufficiently narrow enough, or is controversial enough (e.g., Iraq war, abortion) — things can get unruly and difficult to manage. Why I think Gahran and Glenn’s concept holds promise is that these online issue trackers will not likely bring in huge crowds.

“While the stated goal of the Tracker is to attract ideas from all sides of the issue and, it is hoped, build toward a consensus, I think that it will attract participants who care enough about the issue to engage in a reasoned discussion. Ergo, publishers who are skittish about opening up their websites to unfettered community interaction may want to give this concept a try.

“These kinds of issue trackers seem like a logical progression of the ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘grassroots media’ trend. The Gahran/Glenn model can put journalists in the facilitator role — instead of reporting, they’ll be scouting for the best people to involve within the community, and guiding their contributions. That’s a role that journalists increasingly should be taking on.

“…I encourage newspaper editors to consider this new kind of open-to-all intiative for themselves. Any editor must have long-term issues affecting the community that could benefit from this approach of accessing the intelligence of community members and local experts (and letting that drive the project, rather than relying on traditional reporting).

“ I’ve long advocated that newspapers open up and allow community voices to have their say under the newspaper umbrella. The Gahran/Glenn approach seems like a relatively safe way to do that.

Best of all, the Tracker model takes the long term approach to important issues. If there’s one legitimate criticism of traditional newspaper journalism, it’s that reporters and editors have short-term memories when it comes to issues that don’t continually produce sexy headlines.”

Wow, wow, and wow!!!! Outing nailed it!

One of the main reasons Adam and I wanted to do this project is that we care deeply about journalism. We both come from a strong background in environmental journalism, and on that beat particularly we see key long-term stories getting scant play in traditional news media — often because the true significance of the story unfolds gradually and subtly. This has long been a sore point for environmental journalists and others on specialty beats.

If this project can help refine a model for integrating journalistic practices with constructive public conversation and diverse analysis — something that could be applied to other stories that “creep,” rather than “break,” — I think we’ll truly be onto something major here.

Thanks again to Outing for being so cogent and supportive!

(Full disclosure: Outing is a colleague and former business partner of mine. He’s also my predecessor as editor of the Poynter Institute’s weblog E-Media Tidbits. I’ve always found him to be sharp-eyed and scrupulously fair-minded. So to me, praise from Outing is a major feather in our cap.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 11:15 pm and is filed under About this project, Publicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.