A post here a couple of weeks ago about a State Street Alliance meeting brought up some issues about how the city reaches its residents with information.
What I’d personally like to see is an effort toward accountability, so that when someone asks, "How was this meeting announced, how can I hear about the next one?" someone can point to the city public meetings web page, for example, and say, "It was posted there a week in advance like the city does with every public meeting."
Whether the paper publishes such information it or not is up to the paper, but the public’s awareness of the meeting doesn’t have to hinge on that. I don’t think the press can currently be treated as an entity to work effectively as a clear channel or a neutral, educated, alert and informed partner.
In handling public meetings, a two-pronged strategic approach would be very helpful:
Announce meetings effectively, assertively, through the city’s own official channels online, and
Document the meetings as much as possible for the public record.
A very straightforward method of documentation is to videotape. This captures imagery, you get a sense of community and familiar faces, humor comes across better, as well as questions or frustrated comments; it also captures the spoken word, saving someone the trouble of all that transcribing. It puts the onus of time spent on the viewer. (Transcribing is a great investment, though, because it eases online searchability and quick-reference.)
At the city’s announcement of the ten-year plan to end homelessness, for example, mayoral aide Raphael Nazario stood there with a video camera taping the proceedings. Not Comcast, as is the procedure for City Council and Finance Control Board meetings. A mayoral aide. It occurred to me, why can this not happen at a lot of important city meetings, if not all?
The press can be a great partner in this if the press is functioning well in a diverse ecosystem, but we lack that right now. If the city had 50 bloggers then maybe some of them could be "relied upon" for documentation or announcements. We’re not there (yet).
The city, ideally, should not sit back and just see what the press does with its material—and I’m not saying it does that across the board—I think different municipal departments and individuals in those departments must all handle such stuff in their own way.
A consistent policy around this would be great to see develop. The city increasingly generates its own information for the public to access directly; since the local media clearly is struggling to provide that information itself, it must be a sign that the media is inclined to have some other role besides information-provider. Citizens could step to the plate. Are they?
The city has a role to advocate for the public interest, and that includes encouraging good participation at meetings—as good as we can get it to be. Inexpensive channels for that information exist, and now that we have a community liaison as well as a city web admin, well, why not?
I favor bypassing the press entirely for some of this need—the public outreach. We ought simply to do what needs to be done because someone has to do it, for the sake of the coherence of our city. The press will work itself around that and see what new angles to take on the changed dynamics. Perhaps it will still be staring at its own bottom line, but then again, perhaps not. That would be interesting to watch.
