yelvington.com

I had dinner Friday night with Dean Mills and several other folks from the University of Missouri J-School. Not one word was said about the death of print, the crushing debt loads taken on by big publishing companies, or other depressing topics that tend to dominate journalism conversations (and blogs) these days.

It was an upbeat conversation about exciting possibilities, all hope and energy and yes, optimism. Mizzou has all sorts of fascinating projects in the works.

In the background, though, I was thinking about the  Columbia Missourian, for 99 years the keystone of the hands-on Missouri Method of teaching journalism.

The Missourian isn't a school newspaper -- it's a serious, professional, commercial daily newspaper that's operated as a teaching laboratory.

As the Number Two newspaper in a small town, it's having big financial difficulties. To be honest, hardly anybody on the "town" side of the "town vs. gown" divide reads it, and I don't think it's doing all that well on the "gown" side, either. You can't sell advertising in a paper that doesn't reach an audience that advertisers need.

Losses at the Missourian are running well over a million dollars a year, leading to talk of cutting the Missourian back from its daily publication cycle and focusing more on the Web.

Last year it spent $1.67 million on print-related expenses (composition, printing, mailroom, circulation) and only $93,722 on Web expenses, so it's not exactly been starving the past to feed the future. The daily paper reaches 7,400; a weekend free sheet reaches 43,000 homes, and the Web product claims 100,000 unique users. Think about that.

Maybe the Missourian becomes a Web-focused operation with a weekly print product, or more likely, an array of multiple targeted products. It already has a weekly free entertainment tab and a Hispanic-targeted product.

Or perhaps it might  buddy up with the competition: Hank Waters' Columbia Tribune, the "town" paper.

I've known for awhile that these ideas were simmering in Mizzou's pot. The path forward might seem pretty straightforward and obvious. But it's not simple, because of a risk of a potential backlash from donors.

Make no mistake about it: Higher education lives or dies on the largesse of donors, mostly alumni. The ones with the most to give tend to be older, which right now puts them on the opposite side of the digital revolution. Many fondly remember their college years on the staff of the Missourian, which until recently even operated its own presses.

These ideas about radically changing the Missourian are now in the open, and some people don't like it one bit. Dalton Wright, publisher of a small daily in Lebanon, Mo., and a member of the Missourian's board, already has been quoted: "I think Walter Williams would be turning over in his grave."

But I wonder how Williams really would react. What would make him roll over in his grave?

Walter Williams, for those who don't know the story, was the guy who founded both the Missouri School of Journalism and the Missourian, so you might think he'd have a sentimental attachment to the past.

But Williams was a change agent. He was a guy with a high school education who talked the Missouri General Assembly into creating the world's first journalism school at a time when reporters served trade apprenticeships rather than getting formal educations. Williams was a guy who never attended college, yet got himself appointed dean of that radical new school, then rose to become president of the University of Missouri.

It's easy when you walk through an ivy-covered campus, looking at statues and portraits of great men and women who were founders and builders and creators of empires, to drift into nostalgic fantasies about tradition and past glories. We all do it.

But those people in the portraits were pioneers, risk-takers, change agents. We don't honor their memory by clinging to what they built, but rather by understanding why they did what they did and finding new ways to apply those principles in modern contexts. Embracing the future requires learning from the past, but also letting go of it.

We need our universities to not merely churn out qualified job applicants. We need universities to take a constructive role in research, analysis, ideation and experimentation. We need help to figure out the new forms of journalism -- and the business models to support it -- that will serve society in the digital future. I hope potential donors will see and honor the needs of the future and not get stuck on preservation of the past.

At lunch Saturday, Gary Kebbel told me about a new Knight Foundation project:  a five-year, $24 million challenge grant program targeted at local information needs.

It's not handing money to projects to save newspapers. It's looking to persuade local community foundations to adopt the cause of "creative uses of media and technology to help keep communities informed and their citizens engaged."

It's open-ended and forward-looking, and likely to lead to some projects that many might not recognize as "journalism." But isn't keeping "communities informed and citizens engaged" what drew people like Walter Williams into newspapering in the first place?

Back in the early 1800s a young French writer wrote some observations on the character of American society that I think have something to tell us about how journalists and newspapers should use the Internet.

The writer was Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville, and he wrote Democracy in America, a remarkably clear and astute commentary on the nature of American society.

Consider the era. Most of Europe was ruled by coalitions consisting of aristocratic families, monarchs, and the Roman Catholic church. The French revolution had ended disastrously, as most revolutions do. The unfolding apparent success of the American experiment was no mere curiosity.

De Tocqueville was looking for lessons, and he sought them by using the tools of the reporter. He traveled, he visited, and he interviewed hundreds of Americans.

Occasionally a newspaper journalist will write something arrogant and stupid about the blogosphere today. Such writers should read de Tocqueville carefully. His frank account of the failings of the press, and his carefully hedged defense of freedom of expression, might help one or two newspaper columnists understand that bloggers ultimately are part of the fraternity and not the enemy.

But the parts that I find most compelling have to do with the process of association.

De Tocqueville found the United States to be populated by joiners -- people who spontaneously associated in various types of clubs and groups, formal and informal, as their first response to any sort of challenge.

"If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare and the circulation of vehicles is hindered," he wrote, "the neighbors immediately form themselves into a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to a pre-existing authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned."

In other words, when faced with a problem, Americans get together in groups and solve it. But it's not just about problem-solving; it's about everything.

In his second volume: "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association."

The reason I find all of this interesting and germane to the question of how journalists should use the Internet is simple: I think the ultimate product of journalism is a political product.

By informing, we empower individuals to take an active and participatory role in defining our collective future. Our real product is not the newspaper or the website or the corporate profit margin, but rather a democratic society that works.

If that is our actual goal, how should we use the Internet?

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam cites de Tocqueville and the American practice of forming associations in Bowling Alone, his landmark book on "the collapse and revival of the American community."

Putnam documents a decline in our tendency to form and join associations, and correlates that with a number of depressing statistics including the decline of interest in, and readership of, newspapers. Journalism is part of community, drawing from and contributing to the process.

Democracy works when people have a strong enough web of trust that they are able to work together, and when people have faith that their own actions can make a difference.

Both our trust and our faith are endangered by an array of powerful forces as diverse as entertainment television, the automobile, and the cynical political consultant who seeks to divide us in order that his clients may conquer. As we withdraw from the process of association and pull back from civic life, we suffer both individual and collective setbacks.

But if we understand that as journalists we are participants in this process, and not mere observers (or victims), we may find clues that lead us to an answer to my question.

Print journalists tend to look at the Internet as a publishing platform, a distribution channel that they should adopt only on the principle that "readers" should be able to get "news" in any form they might prefer.

But that misses the salient characteristic of the Internet. It is a network in which all nodes are created equal, and endowed by their creators with with the potential to contribute and participate as well as consume.

This democratizes and transforms journalism from an institution belonging to persons of rank ("professionals") to one that is open to all, and that is disruptive. But it also creates opportunity if we recognize that our goal should be an informed and engaged democratic society that works.

By convening, by leading and facilitating conversational processes, we can feed and reinvigorate the American habit of association that de Tocqueville saw in the 1830s. We can help rebuild the "social capital" that Putnam describes as declining.

But to do this, we have to not only rethink our jobs and recognize the constructive role we play in community. We also must confront some fears. These include fear of technology, fear of our own inadequate skill sets, fear of opinion, and ultimately fear of the "people formerly known as the audience."

And we need to understand the big value of small talk.

There are many ways to fail when convening community, whether online or off.

The abandoned garden represents one kind of failure. A newspaper launches a forum or adds commenting capabilities to its website with no statement of principle, no aspirations other than adding some cheap pageviews, no leadership, no management, and often no rules. The result is chaos and damage.

But the opposite also is possible. Diving into the deep end of the social capital pool also can lead to failure. An empty forum and a failed "citizen journalism" project are as forlorn as an empty restaurant.

To succeed we need, as de Tocqueville described, both the "enormous" and the "diminutive."

Human beings naturally exchange meaningless pleasantries about the weather before engaging in serious conversation. When we seek to build community online, we have to recognize that the small interactions are how we establish the social norms and the trust relationships that can open the door to productive and serious conversation.

The Saguaro Seminar prescribes "150 things you can do to build social capital." Some of them are very small actions. I particularly like "ask neighbors for help and reciprocate." Borrow a shovel, then return it. You've done something very small that can transform a relationship.

Now apply that to the Internet. And heed de Tocqueville's words:

"In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made. ... If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased."

At the risk of once again being told that I hate America, I'm compelled to cite Neil McIntosh's observation that the United States has an ugly characteristic in common with a certain African country: "Were I to take up reporting again and do my thing from Web 2.0 in San Francisco next week, I too could be locked up and thrown out the country - just like reporters from Zimbabwe whose fate she [Mindy McAdams] highlights on her blog. A freelance working for the Guardian suffered this fate a few years back, and I know journalists fall foul of this reasonably regularly. Long weekends in New York get a whole bunch harder after that, I’ll warrant."

It is one thing to have a constitution that protects freedom of speech and of the press, and quite another thing to practice it. But human rights are human rights, not merely citizen rights, or the rights of corporate media, or the privileges of the licensed few.

It's traditional in journalism for everyone to talk at the beginning of an election cycle about how they're not going to descend into horse-race journalism and, instead, focus on meaningful, issue-centered coverage. And then everybody forgets all about it and wallows in the gutter.

Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor, hits the nail on the head with this blog item:

"Does Russert really believe he’s doing the nation a service for this parade of spin doctors talking about potential spins and the spin-offs from the words Obama used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime for a network that doesn’t give a hoot about its supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to up its ratings by pandering to the nation’s ongoing desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk about real problems. ...

"Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment – all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now."

The networks aren't even trying. If you can stand it, try watching any of the cable networks for 24 hours and count the actual news stories they cover. It's the same shallow crap repeated over and over with the same faux astonishment.

It doesn't have to be this way. While traveling in southeast Asia over the last couple of weeks I watched a bit of CNN International, which actually covers news now and then, as well as the BBC and a couple of foreign-language channels that I can't follow very well.

But I also, much to my horror, found Headline News on cable in Phuket, Thailand. We're actually exporting Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace.

Journalism? Public service? The networks aren't even trying. It's just a puppet show aimed at getting ad dollars.

Here's another example of how the Internet has shifted power from institutions, and how that can be a good thing. While the Internet certainly has empowered whispering campaigns and hate bloggers, it also has enabled us to get to the truth behind badly reported news, if we care enough. Today I found the full Jeremiah Wright sermon from Sept. 16, 2001, in which he made the "inflammatory" statement "America's chickens have come home to roost." It turns out he was quoting Edward Peck, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force. And the focus of the sermon is quite different from what you've heard. Watch it all.

Let's hope I am among the last to comment on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, because honestly, it's getting tiresome. But I have to ask: Is anybody listening to anybody else? And is the press working toward understanding, or just redistributing noise?

I spent some time tonight actually listening to the YouTube snippets of Rev. Wright's intemperate ranting, which is being spun as "racist" and "hate speech" by many of the jabbering television commentators who seem to be mostly interested in perpetuating drama and not really interested in the issue of racism in America.

I got to wondering: What's he really saying? If you set aside the shock value of the phrase "God damn America" and the emotional style of the delivery, here's what I extracted:

1. America is a nation of sinners. The idea that we're all sinners is mainstream Protestant Christian theology, isn't it? Is it hate to enumerate some of those sins?
2. Our actions have consequences. Saying "America's chickens have come home to roost" to a nation utterly convinced of its own purity and infallibility may be shocking but is it hate?
3. Hillary Clinton doesn't understand the black experience and Barack does because he's had the experience of being dumped on because of his color. Is that hate? Or is he just not giving Hillary credit for having any empathy because he wants Barack to get the votes?
4. America created AIDS to kill black people. OK, that one's nutty, but consider the Tuskeegee experiment in which black people were systematically denied proper care and allowed to die and spread disease so the disease could be studied. So is that hate, or just another conspiracy theory fueled by a little bit of fact?

This is what really bothers me about the political conversations we've been seeing for the last decade.

People aren't listening to each other; they're looking for mistakes and ways to grab advantage and accuse the other side of something. That's fine for arguing about football, but this is real.

Here's my position: Jeremiah Wright is an angry old man. There are a lot of angry old men, and it just might be worthwhile to think a little bit about why they're angry.

We'd all better hope that they're angry about the past and wrong about the future.

I grew up with the idea that listening to people who are angry at you can be a growth experience. Earlier this evening a relative forwarded to my wife something my dad had posted on a Chicago Tribune/Topix.net discussion:

I was managing editor of a daily newspaper in East St. Louis, IL during the '50s and the racial actions of that period were reflected in the newsroom itself, at one time filled with belligerent protesters. I know well the protests, the white excuses and, yes, the white fears. The perceptions of the blacks and the whites all were/are real, and both are usually wrong. Obama penetrated all those false fears and told the unvarnished truth. I hope that the nation appreciates his calm and comprehensive understanding of racial issues and his basic tactic to effect change: look first for our similarities and our common ground, then deal with the differences. He has my vote.
Rube Yelvington
Louisville, KY

As a teen-ager I saw how my dad, a newspaper editor, functioned as an agent of mediation and conciliation. His approach to journalism was activist by some standards, but it was an activism focused on bringing people to mutual understanding.

Today I see journalism falling into two traps. One is the passive abandonment of responsibility that sometimes comes along with the "objective" mode, and the other is the crass exploitation of divisive opportunities that you see from infotainers like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.

And that brings us back to my point. Is anyone listening? And is the press helping us all listen? Are we working to further understanding?

Or are journalists just parroting words and perpetuating the racial divide that has scarred this country throughout its history?

Update: John Stewart's brilliant-as-usual take, which I found through Jay Rosen:

From Pew Research: "The financial crisis facing news organizations is so grave that it is now overshadowing concerns about the quality of news coverage, the flagging credibility of the news media, and other problems that have been very much on the minds of journalists over the past decade."

From Editor and Publisher: "The McClatchy Co. reported at the close of the market that total revenue in February slid 11.7% to $156 million while advertising revenue plunged 13.3% to $130 million on weakness in the classified category."

From Dow Jones, via CNN: "The digital wave washing over newspapers has turned into a tsunami in the past several weeks, as hundreds of newsroom layoffs coast- to-coast are raising fears that the push for profits and a dismal economy are teaming up to accomplish the unthinkable -- putting the print industry in its grave."

OK, I think we're past the denial stage now. So who's responding in an interesting way. I don't mean interesting as in gee, "who's getting canned now?" I mean interesting as in reorganizing the newsroom to work more efficiently, redesigning the products to be more interesting and relevant, retargeting the advertising sales process to go after new money from new customers?

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Are there any success stories out there, or are we all just sitting around and whining?