Mr. Jim Kenney, who in his first-day as Mayor-Elect of Philadelphia expressed frustrations with the media, might find redress by building his own newsroom in City Hall.
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The big, bad news today in Philadelphia, though not reported by the City’s biggest media outlets—because they themselves, in this instance, are the grim story—is that more than 40 journalists from the Philadelphia Media Network, which publishes Philly.com, The Philadelphia Daily News, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, have been laid off. Their jobs will cease to exist in December, and the morale in the newsroom, one of my sources informed me, is quite low.
Also low in the city is voter and civic participation: a less than 30 percent voter turnout in Philadelphia is a safe bet in most elections, as was the case Tuesday.
To most people, these two issues have no commonality and, thus, require separate institutions to intervene and mitigate woes: for the newspapers, it may be philanthropy, and to bolster civic participation, community-led advocacy fused with a restructured Board of Elections whose representatives are paid, in part, based on voter turnout.
But I—as a journalist, CEO of Techbook Online, and a Pennsylvania representative of Black Youth Vote,— believe that news and civics are mutually reinforcing: news junkies tend to be more civically engaged than not, and news reports often are the catalysts for activism.
This fact is how I arrived at the point of this article: Philadelphia’s Mayor-Elect, Mr. Jim Kenney, who yesterday launched a web portal to crowd-source ideas on how to fix Philadelphia, should consider recruiting many of the recently laid off journalists from Philadelphia’s largest news outlet to produce and market public access media on behalf of the local government, with the outcome being to establish a digital-first, non-partisan, opinion-free news platform that informs the public and fosters a greater connection between citizens and their government.
The types of stories produced would be, in addition to those left uncovered because of layoffs, coverage—and some analysis—of all public meetings—like the Board of Election meetings which are barely advertised let alone noted—and profiles of government’s success stories, like those Mr. Kenney, who won his Mayoral bid in a historic landslide, talked about at a South Philadelphia elementary school during his first day as Mayor-Elect.
“We had two Gates Scholars at a South Philadelphia High School. We’ve had an automotive team at West Philly High that beat MIT and Harvard in a design competition for a fuel efficient car. But if we have a flash mob this spring at 15th & Chestnut, I’ll get three days of coverage of that, but not the coverage we need of our kids doing well. We have kids matriculating into the Ivy Leagues; we have parents, teachers and principals doing great jobs; we need to highlight these folks, because they work hard every day.”
The idea of recruiting former Philadelphia journalists to oversee government-produced media is new but not foreign.In fact, at one City department the notion is already at play.
Former 6abc new anchor, Ms. Denise James, now works as the Director of Strategic Communications for the Philadelphia Police Department, working sometimes at events with a whole camera crew, and other times, leveraging the power of her smartphone, but always owning the story.
The hard truth that most of us don’t want to face is that the majority of mainstream media is not meant to inform the electorate in a meaningful way, rather infotain them with subpar stories that lack historical context and viewpoint diversity. This requires, at some point, another institution to fill the void. And since commercial media won’t change its stripes because of its capitalistic nature, government, in my opinion, has a role to play in telling its own stories.
I believe that, over time, an audience can be generated through quality and timely produced news and media about government and by government, which then starts the conversations about advertisers and the standards they’ll follow, ultimately creating a new revenue stream for the city to disperse on neighborhood improvement projects and ‘Get Out The Vote’ initiatives.
There’s a motto I follow which government must embrace: if you don’t tell your story, you become a character in someone else’s, thus how you’re portrayed is beyond your control.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time, I’m Flood the Drummer® & I’m Drumming for JUSTICE!™