News report
From Banyan Project
Liberated from the grip of outward-only printing presses and broadcasting transmitters, Banyan will use the decentralizing power of the Web to pioneer a deeply relational approach to quality journalism that's firmly grounded in the needs of the public it serves.
Contents |
Overview
Banyan's up-from-the-people but professionally edited approach -- specifics are offered below -- diverges significantly from the practices of newspapers and broadcast news, whose agenda is set by experts and elites far removed from the needs of the moderate-income Banyan Public.
Banyan's journalism will be free to all who wish to read it, but readers will be solicited to join the co-op that owns Banyan.
Here's Banyan's approach to journalism:
Relational
Banyan's custom 2.0 software platform will invite feedback that sets a new standard for both richness and volume; it will also ensure strong public participation in the journalism its professional staff produces. The aim is for editors to have unprecedented capacity to understand what their public needs to know and thus and unprecedented opportunity to serve readers: They'll be able to cover the news in ways that respond to reader/users' expressed wants -- and to know their less-articulated needs well enough to deliver other news they'll find meaningful without knowing they wanted it.
Accountable
Because Banyan will be owned by a consumer co-op whose shareholders will be limited to individual reader/users, the editors will be accountable to the people they serve. This accountability relationship is inherently trustworthy. By contrast, editors for mainstream media report to corporate executives who are in turn accountable to investors, with advertisers holding huge sway. In this structure there is only limited accountability to readers . What makes Banyan's direct accountability practicable is the deep editor/reader relationship the software ensures.
Hybrid
The new approach means Banyan will be Web-native and participatory yet institutional rather than bloggercentric, with journalism created by professionals working in networked relationship with reader/users. It will employ not only long-established journalistic forms -- narrative reporting and story telling (but in text rich with links), plus video and still photos -- but also newer forms that work only on the Web, including blogs, Web data extraction tecnhology, databases that are searchable by the public, and routine crowdsourcing.
Engaged
The 2.0 software will generate civic engagement in addition to editorial feedback and participation in Banyan's journalism. The software will empower reader/users to come together to organize in pursuit of shared interests -- creating a distinctive call-and-response journalistic culture. The civic conversations will provide editors with still another fount of information about the reader/users' interests and needs -- and will bind reader/users more tightly to Banyan.
Accessible
Banyan's daily report will be delivered in whatever form reader/users prefer. It will not only display the day's offerings on its website in the most accessible possible manner but also offer RSS feeds and daily headlines by email in whatever form and at whatever time of day each reader/user wishes.
Sufficient
Banyan will begin with community-level pilot sites and when fully realized it will deliver journalism that will be comprehensive yet customized according to geography and to preferences each reader/user expresses. Even in its pilot stages it will provide a daily news report that reader/users find not only relevant, respectful and trustworthy but also sufficient to their life and citizenship needs in the communities where they live. From these pilots Banyan will expand from hyperlocal to national to global in scope, from hard news and human interest to service features and major investigative reporting.
People will first come to Banyan for its news and service journalism. They will adhere because of its integrity and consistent quality, and they will commit to Banyan by becoming paying co-op members because of the value they place on its welcoming 2.0 community.
The Broad Strokes
Using its distinctive relational approach, the fully realized Banyan will cover the same range of news and service features as mainstream journalism, from the deeply serious to the merely entertaining. And it will adhere to the highest standards of prestige journalism.
Consistent with its commitment to covering the news from the perspective of its reader/users, Banyan will think not in terms of hyperlocal, local, state, national, and foreign news -- categories that largely express newsroom bureaucracies and the locations of institution. Instead it will think in three categories of news based in readers' reality: 1) experiential (the local landfill stinks); 2) issues (lots of landfills stink due to lax state regulations, up one level of abstraction from experiential), and 3) policy and politics (how best to fix the regulations to get rid of the stink, up two levels of abstraction). Banyan will give high priority to experiential coverage at the community level and strive to provide experiential angles and storytelling no matter the topic or where a new story may originate.
In addition, as Banyan matures and gains resources it will expand project reporting whose aim is to keep government honest, what Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, calls "accountability journalism."
Banyan journalism will be primarily text, supplemented with still images, video and audio. The devotion to text rests on the commitment to strengthening democracy, in which text has special power.
Starting with its community pilot sites Banyan's news report will be published once daily, appearing on the website as headlines over crisp summaries of the day’s news that link to full stories. The Project has no interest in reinventing the wheel of Web news presentation; its format will draw on the best practices of the most successful existing sites. Banyan will offer RSS feeds and daily email blasts of headlines at whatever time of day a reader/users may wish.
Banyan is working toward launching pilot sites, which will bear the NewsCoop.org brand name; Banyan is the name for the conceptualization effort but isn't likely to be the brand name once the Project matures.
Tone and Style
The tone and writing style will reflect the lives and experiences of the Banyan Public. Coverage will rarely focus on the lives of elites and experts, and Banyan will never write in their jargon; instead it will tell the stories of regular people, reporting from outside the Beltway, from America’s heartland and from ordinary neighborhoods.
Through its 2.0 publishing software Banyan will proactively invite reader/users to participate in the site’s journalism by offering experiences and insights from their own lives; this will particularly help sharpen Banyan’s community and service journalism by making its stories better reflect the life experiences of its readers.
Out of respect for the Banyan Public's dignity, the news report will contain no snark and no hysteria, and even though the Web makes possible a 24-minute news cycle, urgency will be reserved for major breaking stories.
And while covering the news in all its inherent negativity, Banyan will take pains to spotlight positive aspects of community and American life and to identify common ground where people from all walks of life can find ways to come together.
A Sensitive Staff
Banyan will hire reporters and editors only if they easily resonate with the lives of its public. Hiring a diverse staff, including executives and ranking editors, will be not only the right thing to do but crucial to the venture’s success; a disproportionate number of minority Americans are less than affluent, so a disproportionate proportion of the Banyan Public will be people of color and those from marginalized cultures and heritages.
Presentation
At maturity the daily report will always feature at least two leaders, 1) an enterprise article of at least 1,200 words, exclusive and usually not pegged to the day’s news, and 2) an in-depth angle on a top news story of the day. Audio and video will supplement text.
Banyan stories will be presented with a side rail with links to special features to be selected, on a story-by-story basis, from the following:
The Basics: Crisp, staff-produced backgrounders for people who need to catch up with a running story.
How Others See It: Blurbs on how other publications covered the same story, with links to their versions, plus links to Web resources the staff has vetted and considers trustworthy.
Related Forums: If there are any that focus on the issue the story advances.
Relevant Resources in the Banyan site, including its standing databases if relevant.
The side rail will also include the buttons and links that make for a great Web 2.0 experience in the Banyan platform. The 2.0 tools will include email popups to editor@banyan.com with a request that subscribers send personal experiences relating to the issue the story addresses, and to feedback@banyan.com with a request for the reader to email any corrections the subscriber thinks necessary or otherwise critique the piece.
Assembly by Software
Banyan's software will assemble each reader's daily report seamlessly, drawing from the journalistic efforts of many franchisee/licensees -- local reporting groups, others that offer service journalism, others that do investigative reporting -- as well as APIs and Web sources.
Initially, Banyan will consist of individual pilot sites and then grow in stages until if offers a comprehensive news report. As the project moves toward full realization, software will be introduced that will assemble the maturing pilots and other new Banyan franchises.
Scope at Maturity
When realized, the scope of Banyan's daily report will range from hyperlocal to foreign.
Breaking stories of widest interest will be updated as the news unfolds. The Banyan home page will include a box with the latest headlines so that Banyan can be a one-source supplier for most news needs of the Banyan Public.
Banyan's news, features and service journalism will originate from many independent franchisee/licensees, from one-reporter placeblogs to groups of journalists who cover a metro region or service topic of national interest, such as health or personal finance. It is envisioned that, initially at least, the central Banyan organization will create a national, Washington and foreign report tailored for the Banyan Public.
To live out a deep commitment to public service, the fully realized Banyan will also offer:
The Banyan Index, a continually updated signature feature.
Searchable Databases rich with information on topics of deep interest to the Banyan Public and available nowhere else. Some of these are detailed later on this page.
An editorial page, grounded in intellectual depth and integrity, that injects a needed responsible populist perspective into the public discourse.
Local News
The Banyan approach to local news is grounded in communities and in people's personal-level concerns, with downtown city hall coverage usually playing only a supporting role. Starring roles in news stories will tend to go to community institutions like local schools -- and only rarely to the school superintendent.
Drawing from an old newsroom adage, Banyan's local approach starts even closer to home. When people wake up, the adage goes, their first thought is, Am I OK? Their second thought is, Is my family OK? Then, Is my community OK? And, finally, Is my country secure? Once all that is processed, people can think about the wider world and its people.
So Banyan, in tune with the human nature the adage expresses, starts its coverage at the experiential, personal/family level, serving each of its reader/users as individually as possible with information that's directly relevant.
Banyan communities will be defined less by political boundaries than by the shared interests of residents, a local application of the technique Joel Garreau used in his still fresh 1989 book Nine Nations of North America: Garreau scrubbed all the political boundaries off the map and drew new ones based on common cultures and economies. Local example: In Boston, the Orange Line subway is a shared experience for many members of the Banyan Public.
A Banyan community news operation will consist of an editor, two staff reporters, and three interns from the journalism program of a local commuter college or community college, as well as some freelancers, stringers and community volunteers (who must be co-op members).
The staff and interns will focus first on news of community-level power centers that impact the Banyan Public -- from medical clinics to major ethnic churches to community colleges to community organizers. Likewise, Banyan service journalism will call on local expertise -- doctors at neighborhood medical clinics, for example. Community-level service features will address personal health, employment, education, personal finance, and related service areas. In urban settings "columnists," writing as bloggers, will cover politics and public transit as its relates to the pilot community.
Starting with the launch of the first pilot site reader will be able to customize Banyan's publishing software to specify where they live, the company they work for, their community where they work, the roads or other form of transportation they use to get to and from work, schools their children attend, and other communities that interest them, perhaps where relatives live. In post-pilot phases, this customization will extend to a reader/user's service journalism priorities as well. When each day's news report is delivered, the software will respond to each reader's interests by aggregating information from pertinent Banyan local news franchises, API feeds, city government sites, and other news sources.
The local effort will also include a comprehensive and link-rich community calendar, forums dedicated to each public school in the community being served, a problem-reporting page that draws from ideas pioneered by SeeClickfFix.com and Baltimore Slumlord Watch, and links to relevant community blogs. The software will also include a clearinghouse for volunteer opportunities in the community. Onsite community blogs are a possibility.
All this is congruent not only with Banyan's value proposition of providing journalism that the public it serves experiences as relevant, respectful and trustworthy. It also fits with the inherent intensity of civic interest at the community level. So through its 2.0 software Banyan journalism will not only inform its reader/users but also nourish and provide easy-to-use tools for civic networking -- and for feedback to the editors and other ways they might participate in the journalistic effort.
As the Banyan approach to journalism gains strength and spreads, any given metro area can be expected to sprout several franchisee/licensees, with groups of journalists taking advantage of Banyan's turnkey software and back-office services so they can focus on reporting and editing.
It is at the local community that the franchise structure is most crucial, and not until pilot projects test the water will the optimum scale for franchises will become clear -- perhaps each community where the Banyan Public lives will need its own franchise; perhaps grouping several communities will work better; perhaps different approaches will prove viable in different sizes of community.
Banyan's approach to local coverage stands in contrast to that of most of the local Web journalism efforts that laid-off daily journalists have founded in cities around the country. These tend to focus on city hall and local and state politics, the top-down journalism that's the bread and butter of metro dailies and is of greatest interest to the business community and other elites.
National and Foreign
To create its comprehensive daily report of national and foreign news, Banyan will subscribe to the same wire services available to all newspapers, broadcast organizations and web aggregators –- but its central office staff will add value to the wire stories, recasting them for the Banyan Public by including information and context relevant to the reader/users' experience of the world. The staff will also comprehensively search websites of news organizations in this country and abroad for exclusive stories that can be quoted and credited to make sure the Banyan public gets the best possible report. This is a highly efficient approach, creating a distinctive and valuable news report at modest expense.
When Banyan is mature its central office will occasionally dispatch writers to cover national and foreign stories of particular interest to the Banyan Public that the wire services do not cover, or do not cover adequately. Often the staff reporters will work with volunteer Banyan reader/users who will guide them on local matters and help gather information.
Other plans for national and foreign coverage:
• The truest possible picture of national and global economic life will be presented, shorn of Wall Street’s hype and bias and economists’ rosy lenses. The editors will ensure that Banyan reports not only the government/Wall Street perspective on economic news but also focuses on the report’s meaning to the subscribers’ lives. For example, the Banyan report on the monthly Labor Department unemployment report will focus on job creation or loss and include the rarely reported jobless rate, which takes discouraged workers into account; experts it quotes will focus first on the report's impact on job stability and availability, with impact on the overall economy and the markets secondary. As a matter or course mainstream media reports focus on market impact and give at best modest attention to the questions of job-seekers.
• Banyan won’t have the kind of Washington bureau that has the standard "insider" sources – that is, top government officials who use the media as stenographers, by name or anonymously. But its site will be in a better position to publish news of big Washington stories such as Iraq/torture/civil liberties better than the mainstream media. Instead of relying only on its own reporting staff for scoops, Banyan can present the scoops of news organizations here and abroad that cover Washington and its actions. For example, Banyan subscribers would have known lots about the Downing Street Memo about Iraq even though the mainstream media in the U.S. was ignoring it. Doing this requires knowledgeable writers who can scan the news websites for reliable reports and from them assemble articles that credit the originating organization. Readers of The New York Times rarely hear about the scoops of The Los Angeles Times or Washington Post – not to mention The Guardian. The Banyan public will see them all, via summaries that point to the originals.
• Banyan's Washington coverage will sidestep the mainstream’s inside-the-Beltway fascination with the horse race between Republicans and Democrats and the struggle between the White House and Congress, instead focusing largely on issues of direct subscriber interest such as pension protection, credit laws, access to health care, and issues around how military personnel are equipped, deployed, and treated.
• National politics will be covered from an outside-the-Beltway perspective and pay special attention to people and organizations achieving or fighting for responsible populist goals at the community, municipal, state, regional, and national levels. For national elections Banyan will rely on value-added wire reports for day-to-day coverage; to add spice Banyan will employ contract bloggers –- a Republican and a Democrat –- and offer links to bloggers with Green, Libertarian, Socialist and other perspectives. Perhaps most important, when Banyan is mature enough to afford it, investigative reporters will be assigned to expose deceptive campaign tactics -- where and with whom lies originate, who helps propagate them, their impact on opinion. This is significantly different from mainstream journalism's focus on strategy and how effective it is; the mainstream approach is largely amoral and thus pays little attention to lies as offenses against democracy.
• Rather than cover contentious “values” issues such as abortion policy as culture war battles, the Banyan staff will aim to help its pubic navigate a treacherous culture stained by deception and manipulation. The culture war battles are already covered so broadly that, while news events relating to them will be included in the daily news report, Banyan will rarely devote staff reporting resources to them.
• On-the-ground coverage of the Iraq and Afghan wars will be drawn from the reports of newsgathering organizations that have correspondents there and be credited to them. Foreign coverage will include wire reports of other wars but very little day-to-day coverage of glacial diplomatic talks and of the policy abstractions that fascinate the inside-the-Beltway elite. Staff reporting energy will focus on global business practices and trends that affect the Banyan public in the U.S. World Trade Organization decisions, for example, will be reported not as the usual business-page stories aimed at investors but in terms of their impact as felt by citizens and governments. The WTO will thus be covered as the powerful but undemocratic global government that it is.
• In fitting with Banyan’s grounding in responsible populism, big business will be covered from the people up rather than the institutions down, and news of the business world will be mixed into the run of the news rather than segregated in a business section. Transnational corporations will be covered as the world powers that they are, not merely as stories of interest to investors. The focus will be their dealings with national governments, their role in political campaigns, and their impact on regular people around the globe, positive as well as negative.
• When Banyan has grown to the place that it can do its own polling, it should be confined to questions about issues that affect the Banyan public most directly –- health care, credit card regulation, bankruptcy laws, economic uncertainty, etc. –- and will require samples big enough to allow statistically sound comparisons of the opinions of hourly workers and of salaried employees. Whenever possible, questionnaires should adopt the proven wording of questions that other polling organizations have used for a long time so that Banyan findings can be presented in longitudinal context. (Let other news organizations poll on the usual stuff –- Banyan will report their findings with credit and also report on the compilations of all the myriad polls that ask the same kinds of questions.
At least two of the distinctive interactive Web databases Banyan is planning are news-related:
• Every polling story Banyan publishes will be linked to a database that tracks what Americans agree about –- the common ground that gets so little attention in the mainstream media. The country isn’t as fractured as it seems –- one factor that distorts the image is news of polling that’s almost wholly confined to contentious issues, partisan disagreements on presidential performance, and election season horse races. But there is much that Americans agree about, starting with the 95 percent who say that corporations have too much power. Also, the database will track where public opinion diverges most dramatically from what Congress actually does -- and track lobbying expenditures on these issues.
• A Just the Facts database that any reader can check at any time to test the validity of anything they read in Banyan's journalism or any other source. In this ideological age rife with propaganda, the mission of Just the Facts would be serve as the reality anchor for engaged citizens, journalists, bloggers, and students. It would be Snopes on steroids, engaged in grounding the great issues of our time, not merely in debunking urban legends.
Investigative Reporting
Taking inspiration from the muckrakers of a century ago, Banyan's investigative reporting energy will be directed to the sources of grief in the lives of regular people and not just to the endemic corruption of Washington and many city halls.
Banyan also hopes that an independent investigative reporting organization, such as the Center for Public Integrity, will provide the Banyan public with a new form of investigative database journalism that can be done only on the Web. If this can be arranged, every story on corporate malfeasance will be linked to a database containing every conviction, violation, settlement, and other signal of malfeasance by every publicly traded corporation in the US (above a size to be determined): What industrial sector leads the others in the number of law violations? What corporations hold the record in their sectors for fines and settlements paid, in total dollars and as a percentage of sales? On the positive side, what sectors and corporations stand out for a lack of violations? This information will be presented in an unassailably comprehensive and authoritative way so there can be no question of bias.
Such a database would be continually updated and every change among the leaders in various categories would be the occasion for a Banyan news story and a press release to the rest of the media. Because this database will be open to the public on the Web, reporters everywhere will be able to draw on it for their stories –- and help promote Banyan by crediting it. A reporter for another news organization who is writing about an ad campaign, for example, might find it useful to report that the ads are effective at attracting customers to a company with a record of repeated fraud against its customers.
This kind of Web-database reporting can be applied to many topics and as the Banyan Project matures more and more can be expected to appear.
Service Journalism
Banyan anticipates that service journalism franchises will be among the first national-scale pilots launched. The pilots, which will augment local service journalism topic by topic, will include topic-by-topic listings of links to outside sites and blogs of direct use in subscribers’ life decisions that the editors have vetted and found to be trustworthy. A few ideas for service journalism topics:
Health –- Coverage will focus on developments in diseases that disproportionately affect the Banyan public, keep a spotlight on the politics of who has access to good health care and who doesn’t, and address the diet challenges of people who have little time to cook because they work two jobs. People gaining insurance as a result of health care reform will face a huge ordeal in getting doctors and dealing with other issues the reform sets in motion. Banyan would offer at least two health care forums, one for people with no or poor health coverage and the other for people with adequate coverage, plus:
• Ask the Doctor: a column by a doctor and other health care professionals who work in a clinic that serves the uninsured, with advice on health care tactics for people with no medical insurance. Examples: 1) No matter how little money you have, what are the top five danger signals that you should go to the doctor right away? 2) A top-10 list of best ways to minimize the need for medical care; 3) Supportive guidance on how to quit smoking. In addition to a physician, advice will come from psychologists, dieticians and others.
• Eats: a column on best choices from various fast food menus and other secrets of how to eat better when you have little time to cook.
• An online database of best practices for folks without medical insurance would be immensely helpful to subscribers. This database would be a significant public service –- and a powerful tool for attracting Banyan reader/users.
A health-coverage-spin-off might be a low-price annual reference book, for distribution to drugstores and convenience stories, that's filled with advice about staying healthy when you have no medical insurance or poor coverage with a high deductible.
Money –- Coverage would focus on strategies for saving money when money is scarce, managing debt, and avoiding the sharks of the financial services industry. Banyan will spotlight trustworthy financial institutions such as credit unions, coops, community development banks and community loan funds; a database of financial businesses will offer readers a chance to rank and comment on them. Plus, we envision at least three columnists:
• Personal finance: the columnist will respond to readers’ predicaments, such as how to escape the grip of exploitative lenders and how, when you have only modest savings, to best invest it.
• Mr. Thrift (or Ms. as the case may be) will guide people to bargains and and ideas for saving money.
• Advertising Whoppers: the columnist will critique commonly seen ads to expose their social impact and manipulative excesses.
Career Guidance –- News and wisdom about getting a better job, and about which are the best and worst companies to work for. Because Banyan does not anticipate carrying help-wanted advertising, it would offer a database of all the help-wanted websites, with ranking and commenting features. Supportive columnists would 1) lay out strategies and tactics for job searchers (for example: pursuit of jobs that require only modest education, like certification available from community colleges, but where demand for workers exceeds supply), 2) explore self-employment possibilities, and 3) run the social networking equivalent of a support group.
Self-Employment -- Many members of the Banyan Public are self-employed, and there is almost no practical journalism for people who operate small-scale businesses. Banyan will offer a expert columnist, news of trends and tax changes another government actions that impact such businesses, and a database of resources.
Entertainment – The Banyan Entertainment Guide to low-cost, high-value entertainment on TV, video, etc., will be shaped by editors but ranked by Digg- and Amazon-like customer feedback.
Entertainment coverage will routinely link to a Banyan database that rates companies –- production houses and distribution houses as well as corporate parents –- based on the moral character of the movies on their rosters. The motion picture rating agency not only hangs a PG or R or whatever on each movie but also explains why. This database would yield rankings of companies on the various measures, including violence, sexual situations, and foul language. To draw maximum attention to Banyan, the index would be published right before the Oscars every year. Each season’s movies would also be indexed separately and compared against the long-term index, and this too could be publicized.
Signature Feature
The Banyan Index will track the economy as less-than-affluent Americans experience it rather than from Wall Street’s perspective, mixing economic and social indicators such as access to health care, household income distribution, consumer borrowing, the personal debt-to-asset ratio, and the true jobless rate (which takes discouraged workers into account). It will not only help its readers measure the trajectory of their lives but also attract much attention.
