January 15, 2009 (abridged version) — While Knight Foundation is a very longtime and committed supporter of University of Miami programs – most recently the Knight Center for International Media and two endowed chairs in the School of Communications – the subject of business is not an area of obvious interest to a foundation that focuses on informed and engaged communities. The attraction for us is found in the brochure for the conference:
“…leaders will gather at the University of Miami to address the financial crisis, along with energy demand, health care, the environment and other issues related to global connectivity.”
Global connectivity
I’m here to propose to you that as you participate in these proceedings, you hear them with an ear toward the phrase “global connectivity.” At Knight Foundation, we’re convinced that we are about to see an acceleration in connectivity of all sorts, beginning with an explosion in digital access and participation by citizens in a fundamentally different way than before.
As it happens, that’s what we’ve been working on for some time and so we welcome it. And I take this opportunity to encourage you, too, to consider every one of the subjects discussed today and when you return to your businesses in light of a new age of connectivity.
So, I’d like to tell you a little about what we think is coming, why I think it should matter to you and a bit of what we’re doing at Knight Foundation.
I. Connectivity and why it should matter to you
First, let me tell you a quick story:
On the night of Barack Obama’s election, my wife and I were watching on television the gathering at Grant Park in Chicago, waiting for the president elect to speak, when her BlackBerry buzzed. She read the message and smiled, saying something like, “Oh, look, isn’t this nice. Barack sent me an email on his way to Grant Park. Wasn’t that thoughtful?”
Now, I assure you that Susana didn’t think the president elect had sent her an email just for her from his famously ever present BlackBerry. But the sense she had was of connectedness. The sense the folks in the Obama campaign had managed to create with her was of belonging to a community. Over the course of dozens of emails announcing policy initiatives, candidate visits, notes from Michele Obama and even the announcement of a vice presidential choice before she had seen it in the newspaper or television, she felt included.
That’s how they’ll govern. And that’s how they’ll lead. And, in the process, they will change the communication expectations of Americans.
If you want to get an early taste of it, go to www.change.gov. The first thing that will strike you, I think, is that it not only invites your ideas for the president’s agenda, it invites individuals to tell their stories and ideas that can help change the future of the country. It invites formal and also intimate participation. It only tells you what Obama thinks or is doing after asking you for your thoughts. That is different. That helps to build a sense of genuine community.
In the future, when the president seeks legislative change, he’ll of course continue to deal with Congress and media and interested parties of all sorts. But he’ll also likely deal with people in a very direct and interactive way, using social media…putting questions out there for people to discuss – and maybe act on, more or less spontaneously.
We know that at the end of the campaign they had email addresses for 11 million Americans. Sliced/diced: geography, gender, issue, date they joined the campaign, at least.
Since the week after the election, they’ve been looking at the technology platforms of government, finding them inadequate in functionality and looking for ways to upgrade to their world, the world of 2.0.
Yesterday, word leaked out that Julius Genachowski will be named the new head of the FCC. Genachowski has been a strong and consistent supporter of net neutrality, which favors open versus closed systems, and is an advocate of making broadband access available and affordable for all Americans. It is one more indication that this administration is dead serious about a connectivity revolution.
This will change the way we think and work and play and consume. Actually, what it will really do is accelerate what has already started. Think of your own consumer habits and how they’ve changed, from buying clothing to shopping for cars to looking for information of all sorts and connecting with people without respect to geography.
Why does this matter to business? I can think of two big reasons, one macro and one micro:
Yesterday, I read reports of Fed Chairman Bernancke’s speech at the London School of Economics about the current economic crisis. In the speech, he noted policy communications as “an important tool” and ended the speech noting that, “…a clear lesson of the recent period is that the world is too interconnected for nations to go it alone in their economic, financial and regulatory policies.” Of course, Chairman Bernancke was focused on substantive international cooperation and I don’t want to mislead you into thinking that he made a speech about digital access. But what struck me in the speech was the Fed Chairman’s recognition of the role media – meaning all of us who have access, not just news organizations – have in the interconnected, global world. You can’t get more macro than that.
Another reason why this should matter, and this one you might categorize as micro, is that when the world economic order functions in concert, when the president of the United States introduces social media as an everyday tool in the management of our civic affairs, when it becomes the policy of the United States that a citizen without digital access is a second class citizen and therefore access is imperative, you’ll find not only an explosion of opportunity on the web but a change in the way business is conducted and in the expectations of your customers.
The work we do at Knight Foundation may be of interest to you as you explore new ways in which you and your customers will interact. Our operating principles are simple:
- We believe that the role of information is to enable citizens to determine their own true interests.
- We believe we’re living through a time of such enormous change that the most responsible thing we as a foundation can do is to experiment and learn, experiment more and learn more.
- We believe that the best communities are informed and engaged communities and so we seek to support programs and projects that lead to that end.
In doing this, we follow the example of our founders. Jack Knight was a journalist and his brother a businessman. They were both also community builders and realized that information was vital to communities. And in order to get that information to communities – and to make a profit — they seized upon new technology in printing, transportation and communications, including relatively new inventions like the telephone.
They didn’t seek to make their news operations uniform across communities. They ran a company of newspapers, not a newspaper company. Each of their newspapers reflected the needs and values of each different and distinct community.
They delivered to their communities the news and information that helped people decide their “own true interests,” as Jack Knight used to say. And they delivered it in a pattern consistent with the government, social and economic units in which we lived. In other words, the circulation of a Knight newspaper was roughly defined by the definition of the metropolitan areas they served.
II. A Community is Connected by Shared Knowledge
The notion that units of government, local and regional economies and social patterns should be consistent with information delivery and sharing is not new and the Knight brothers were not the first ones to build on it. The notion goes back to the ancient Greeks, to Aristotle, who suggested that the ideal size – and limiting factor – of any polis was that it should be small enough so that all citizens could gather in a central square and hear a public speaker.
A community, and the ideal unit of government, was only as large as the sphere of shared information. Fast forward through history, even to the relatively recent history of the United States of America and you’ll see that, even as we grew, Aristotle’s “sphere of shared information” could be defined by the circulation area of a newspaper or the reach of a local radio or television station.
Stop for a moment. Just think how dated that sounds …that a sphere of shared information should be limited to an area the size of a newspaper’s circulation.
Think about Google, Yahoo!, YouTube and Facebook, any newspaper with a website or any individual with Internet access can be heard in every town square all over the world. As I indicated a few minutes ago, I believe we’ll see more and more uses of social media, more and more communities on the web that will be as real to their participants as living on Elm Street or Brickell Avenue was to an earlier generation.
These changes have been hard on traditional media. You all know that newspaper readership is down and revenues have tanked. Local television covers less civic information and a Clear Channel radio station might actually be run by remote control from a central location thousands of miles from the community they serve.
Institutional investors in newspapers have financial – not civic – interest in news operations, and their interests are short term, defined by an investment strategy not an indefinite commitment to a community. For example, an investment group might move in and out of their stake in a Chicago paper but the Chicago Tribune will only ever be Chicago’s paper.
But there’s little to be gained from lamenting how the media landscape has changed. A more productive approach is to embrace the change and make it yours, infusing it with your values.
III. The Knight Approach: Experimentation and Engagement
At Knight Foundation, we believe our role is to foster engaged and informed communities.
We believe technology can strengthen community information, and through that information, communities themselves. We believe that great communities are informed, engaged communities.
We, like the Knight brothers, support ideas and innovators whose work transforms.
Our signature effort in this is the Knight News Challenge, now in its third year. We offer $5 million each year, funding ideas that use digital platforms to deliver news and information to geographically defined communities.
Our second media innovation initiative was a $20 million investment in the Knight Center for Digital Excellence: a pro-bono consulting organization that will bring in expertise of whatever sort is necessary to level the playing field between public and commercial interests in providing digital access. Our participation can help not only facilitate a better deal for the public interests but ensure focus on that part of the community that would otherwise have fallen on the other side of the digital divide of economics or of age. More than any other of our initiatives, I think this one will prove prescient and the communities in which we work will be better able to meet the challenge of an Obama administration to allow digital access to every citizen.
We started with the premise that, today, if you’re not digital, you’re a second class citizen. You’re second class in access to information and second class economically and even socially. For a foundation dedicated to community and communications, that’s not acceptable. So we set out a goal of universal digital access in each of our communities.
IV. Call to Action: Community Grants
We’ve funded several other initiatives but I’d like to tell you about just one more. Community foundations were created to meet the core needs of communities. In a democracy, information is a core need. But like most people, community foundations usually just assume communications will be there as they always have been, in their newspapers and local radio and TV. They have not, until now, paid much attention to the diminishing availability of civic information and, until now, have had little reason to believe that they can affect that slide.
We want to change that. Knight’s community foundation initiative is a five-year, $20 million experiment designed to match community foundation efforts to meet the information needs of their communities. We plan to match their funding of proposals to support innovative, community-based journalism delivered on digital platforms.
We just announced the winners yesterday. They range from online publications in New Haven, to the creation of community problem solving groups in Minnesota, an online news network in San Diego and online investigative journalism in Boston. And, of course, one closest to home is to the Coral Gables Community Foundation, to bridge the digital “gray” divide that keeps seniors from engaging on the web. In partnership with the University of Miami School of Communications, the community foundation will help create and maintain a digital news site for seniors. University students will pair with seniors to train them to report, write and blog.
So, you see, everybody is getting into this act! If you want to know more, go to www.knightfoundation.org.
What all of these have in common is
- An assumption that the era of “I write, you read” is over.
- An assumption that we’re entering an era of social media that empowers small “d” democratic movements the likes of which we haven’t seen since we actually governed through town meetings,
- An assumption that the rules are yet to be made, and
- An assumption that these changes will affect all aspects of our lives, political, social and commercial.
If there’s one thing I’d like you to remember from my remarks this morning, it’s this: information is a core need for communities in a democracy and a core need for commerce. How that information is delivered and used will increasingly determine the health of communities and success of your enterprise.
For the rest, consider that we’re only at the beginning of a transition. As a professor at MIT put it recently, on a change/time scale of 1 to 10 we’re at about “2.” This is a brave new world and I invite you to consider global connectivity as you consider each of the many fascinating topics of this forum.
Thank you.