Information Ecology

From The New York Times to the Council on Foreign Relations, news producers come in all shapes and sizes these days. An increasing number hail from the nonprofit sector, and the journalistic legitimacy of such news organizations has been a popular topic of debate recently. On one hand, columns from Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post and Jim Barnett at Nieman Journalism Lab last week argued that at least some of these organizations provide accurate, useful journalism about the particular subjects they cover and fill gaps left in mainstream news providers’ coverage. On the other hand, despite all of this chatter, the role of nonprofit news organizations in the landscape of modern media remains a largely unanswered question.

Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Seattle, Washington, have little in common.  Scranton is landlocked, tucked in a valley 120 miles away from the nearest major city in the Northeast, with a population of approximately 73,000. Seattle, three time zones to the west, is on the Pacific coast and has eight times the population of Scranton.

Scranton's population is half of what it was in 1940; the Seattle population has nearly doubled in that time. Seattle is younger and more ethnically diverse than Scranton, and its residents are higher paid. 

We’ve just published our first two information ecology case studies, which take a close look at the local conditions in Seattle and Scranton. When we started investigating these media ecosystems, we used the Knight Commission Report, "Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age," as our guide. Newspapers, television, and radio were all important to us, but so were residents’ access to education, broadband, government data, libraries, and other community institutions, as well as evidence we found that showed how citizens engaged with the information. The results were illuminating, and the two cities are an interesting contrast in showing the diverse resources available to today’s American communities.

Seattle, in particular, seemed to offer a preview of where today’s media landscape is headed.

[Note: This post is one of a series that will document Scranton’s information ecosystem and how it is changing.]

Scranton, PA – One of the tests for an informed public advanced by the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is: Does the community have at least one high-quality online hub?

Until 2009, the newspaper of record here avoided the drastic cuts already underway or completed in other metro area, and each of the three major commercial television networks aired local news. But by spring, the family-owned Scranton Times-Tribune would reduce its staff by 15 percent through buyouts and layoffs (I was among those laid off), and CBS affiliate WYOU replaced its lagging local newscasts with Judge Judy and Hollywood Insider.

I have spent the last few months (with my colleagues Nick, Kara, Amanda, and Molly) populating a database with information that seeks to describe local information communities. The objective is to provide a qualitative understanding of the information health of a community. This data will take some time to consolidate and share, but I wanted to provide an example of one city councilor working in one city council in one state. It’s not sensible to draw strong conclusions about this example, but it suggests to me an interesting future.

There’s nothing especially unusual about Pepper Pike City, Ohio. It’s a small community—smaller than average, perhaps, at a population around 6,000—outside Cleveland, with weekly town meetings, a public library, local school system, a budget to balance, and, one imagines, the occasional broken street lamp to fix. But it also has plenty of concerned citizens, who not only want their community to be able to afford gas for snow plows, to give a recent example, but also want their neighbors to weigh in on their own budgeting priorities, to have a voice in the proceedings whether or not they make it to the town meeting.