There has got to be a better way.

Here at OCNN we believe that the traditional media are not doing an adequate job in covering and delivering the news and that alternative approaches are needed to promote an informed and active citizenry.

There are several interrelated trends that got us here at OCNN thinking about finding a better way.

The first of these is simply that fewer people seem to care about the news. A 2000 survey by the Pew Center had this to say on that point:

Less than half of the public (45%) now says it enjoys keeping up with the news a great deal and just 48% say they follow national news closely most of the time. Both of these percentages represent a modest decline from two years ago, when 50% said they enjoyed keeping up with the news and 52% reported following national news closely most of the time. But the percentage of Americans saying they enjoy keeping up with the news has fallen steadily since the mid-1990s.

The 2004 version of the Pew survey showed an uptick in news interest, but even with the nation at war and still trying to figure out how to deal with the terrorist threat, most Americans have only a moderate interest in hard news.

Why don't the traditional news media try harder to do something about this situation? We don't know —but it certainly isn't because of a lack of money. This chart provides comparative data about profit margins in the media industries and shows pretty clearly that these are very healthy businesses.

(In 2002, for example, newspapers reported operating margins of 21.1 percent. Even so they cut employment by almost 4.5 percent that year.)

Another indicator that traditional media have lost their way is the fact that they have had to admit in a number of high-profile cases that they are falling far short of their professed standards. Gannett, the company that owns our local newspaper here in Oshkosh, recently fired one of its star reporters at its flagship publication, USA Today, after discovering that this journalist, Jack Kelley, had:

fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nearly two dozen quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he gave for the newspaper and conspired to mislead those investigating his work.

But Gannett is hardly alone. Consider how The New York Times essentially took back much of its reporting on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction after previously acknowledging problems with the reporting of Jayson Blair. In a front-page story The Washington Post acknowledged that it hadn't done a very good job of reporting on the Bush administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

We don't pretend to have all the answers to what ails the media, but we have a couple of ideas that we think will take us in the right direction. We believe that we can practice a better kind of journalism by being:

• Nonprofit.
• Participatory.
• Project-based.

"Some things should be about money, some shouldn't," says Craig Newmark, a San Francisco programmer who started a highly successful noncommerical Web site called craigslist.

When the country's Founding Fathers made the news business the only industry to enjoy the protection of the U.S. Constitution, they said their goals were to "form a more perfect union [and] promote the general welfare." They didn't say anything about guaranteeing high stock prices and outsized returns for investors in media companies.

Jay Harris caused a great stir in the newspaper industry when he resigned as publisher of the San Jose Mercury News in 2001 rather than carry out what he believed were ill-considered budget cuts. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he likened what was happening in journalism to what had happened in health care:

Over the last 10 to 15 years our nation’s health care system has been ravaged by a variety of market forces and the drive for increased profitability. Today, shortages of nurses and even medicines are not uncommon in many hospitals. At times doctors don’t have necessary equipment available or adequate support. HMOs can be more focused on their bottom lines than the health of their clients. In short, the quality of the nation’s health care system has declined because of market forces and business imperatives, and with it there has been a decline in the health care industry’s ability to meet the nation’s needs.

By operating as a nonprofit, OCNN hopes to minimize the effects of market forces and business imperatives. But we recognize that nonprofit organizations are common throughout the healthcare industry and that this form of operation will not in and of itself allow us to accomplish our goals.

That's we why we also intend to promote participatory journalism, which is the way journalism is practiced at thousands of nonprofit organizations around the country. At a typical nonprofit organization, publications are a collaborative venture between a small staff of professional journalists and large numbers of volunteer contributors.

Both groups make vital contributions and provide a simple, but effective, system of checks and balances. The professional journalists make sure that deadlines get met, that standards of fairness and balance are maintained and that new voices and perspectives are sought out. The volunteer contributors are the ones who bring authority and deep subject-matter knowledge. They also help to keep the professionals on track should they fail to live up to their own standards.

While OCNN cannot currently afford to hire professional journalists, our goal is someday to have a small staff to work with volunteer members/contributors.

Technology has given a huge boost to participatory journalism. “In a real sense, we're all journalists now,” says J.D. Lasica in his review of “We The Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.”

The third element of our vision is to be project-based. To some degree this is a matter of making virtue of necessity since we lack the resources to function as a full-fledged 24-hour news operation.

But we are also motived by several other facts. First of all, we do not believe that Americans living in the 21st Century suffer from a shortage of information. What's missing is a mechansim that can help people sort through this information and turn it into a tool for effective decision making. We believe that by undertaking specific projects we can provide a service to make information more useful.

We intend to experiment with new ways of getting at the news, and that's another reason why we intend to be project-based. Undoubtedly some of our experiments will be more successful than others, and the project orientation will allow us to concentrate on the better approaches.

Finally, we believe the project approach best suits our chosen medium, the Internet. As David Weinberger has written, the power of the Web is the way that it presents "small pieces loosely joined." In the 2002 book of that name, he writes:

The Web isn't primarily about replacing atoms with bits so that we can, for example, shop on line or make our supply chains more efficient. The Web isn't even simply empowering groups, such as consumers, that have traditionally had the short end of the stick. Rather, the Web is changing our understanding of what puts things together in the first place. We live in a world that works well if the pieces are stable and have predictable effects on one another. We think of complex institutions and organizations as being like well-oiled machines that work reliably and almost serenely so long as their subordinate pieces perform their designated tasks. Then we go on the Web, and the pieces are so loosely joined that frequently the links don't work; all too often we get the message (to put it palindromically) "404! Page gap! 404!" But, that's ok because the Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets. And, most important, the Web is binding not just pages but us human beings in new ways. We are the true "small pieces" of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we're still inventing.

Oshkosh, Wisconsin
August 18, 2004