Institutions
From Banyan Project
In an era when bloggers and other citizen journalism advocates decry news institutions and extol individual citizen journalists, Banyan strives to swim against this tide and create a new, large-scale journalistic institution.
Banyan does not aspire to be a single monolithic institution like The New York Times. For one thing, starting an institution of that scale from scratch is probably impossible, even if the capital were available -- The Times, after all, began as a four-page sheet and evolved into what it is today.
Instead, Banyan aspires to create a structure that will invite many independent entities of all sizes to come together to form a new kind of journalistic institution that will grow to serve a very large public. The journalistic entities that will come together in Banyan -- as franchises or licensees -- will have perspectives ranging from hyperlocal to global, and all are crucial to democracy in their own ways.
Importance to Democracy
While hyperlocal journalism is possible without Banyan's metamodel, foreign correspondence of consistent quality is so costly, even when done in the most frugal manner, that it requires institutions that generate the level of revenue made possible by a Banyan-scale institution that can distribute it to a large and engaged public. And there's a crying need for reporting about our shrinking globe.
As the crucial if imperfect democratic institutions of print journalism wither before our eyes, reporting about the world beyond the United States withers with them. At the same time, antidemocratic institutions, especially transnational corporations, are growing ever more huge -– so huge that we have trouble comprehending their scale.
How huge are they? A survey based on 2005 data found that 95 of the planet’s 150 largest economic entities were corporations and only 55 were nations. Comparing nations’ gross domestic products and corporations’ annual revenues, Wal-Mart, BP, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch/Shell Group, for example, are all larger than Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Norway and Denmark. Perhaps in this context vast is a better adjective than huge.
To make good life decisions and good citizenship decisions in this kind of world, people need helpful and trustworthy journalism that not only doesn’t retreat from ground it has historically covered but also patrols a landscape much broader and more complex than it has ever explored. This requires large-scale journalistic institutions with large staffs, sophisticated editors, and an audience big enough to generate the revenue to cover the budget journalism on this scale requires. Consider the challenge of covering the global economy:
As technology shrinks our planet ever smaller and makes it more and more intertwined, what happens halfway around the globe can have direct impact on the communities where we live. But in the face of this, news organizations have been closing foreign bureaus. For example, in the last two years Newsday, The Baltimore Sun and The Boston Globe, all with fine histories of foreign coverage, have abolished every one of their foreign bureaus. Not only are news organizations recalling their correspondents, metropolitan newspapers across the land that once published a significant amount of foreign correspondence are cutting space and narrowing their focus to local news.
But the global village is upon us, and where is the global city editor that our citizens need? Such an editor, supported by an array of reporters and freelancers and collaborating with citizen journalists, could spot the big stories out there that nobody, neither in mainstream journalism nor the emerging participatory forms, is now covering in a meaningful way. The Banyan Project aspires to this role.
WTO and Transnationals
Let’s start with the World Trade Organization. It receives almost no coverage in the general interest press. But in 1994 the Senate ratified a treaty that makes democratically enacted national, state, and local laws subordinate to rulings handed down by unelected WTO panels that meet in private and offer no due process. Corporations as well as nations may initiate proceedings, and there is no appeal. It is the antithesis of democracy.
The WTO, whose authority comes from treaties ratified by 152 nations, may grease the skids of international trade and ease the flow of capital but it also has the formal power to overrule the authority of We the People in our own communities. Particularly at risk are local and state laws protecting the environment and working conditions. Democracy needs the WTO to be covered as the global government it is, tracing its decisions back to their local impacts – and to the corporations whose interests it serves, often at the expense of communities around the world.
A news institution of a scale adequate to this task will have to provide, at minimum, 1) a sophisticated reporter covering the WTO headquarters in Geneva who has sources to alert her or him about impending decisions; 2) reporters in the United States who can follow up in communities that would be impacted; 3) the crowdsourcing capacity to gather real stories of real people that will bring the abstraction of an economic policy decision to life, and 4) reporters sophisticated in the ways of corporations and Wall Street to gauge how WTO decisions impact their bottom lines. At the center of all this activity would be editors who can organize and direct the work of all these reporters and volunteers and who can ensure that the resulting articles are accessible to regular people, accurate and fair, and libel-free.
Let’s consider coverage of the transnational corporations, whose lobbyists made sure the U.S. Senate enacted the treaty that empowers the WTO. Newspapers and broadcast news tend to cover these nation-sized institutions as business stories, as if the only people they affect are investors. But they have huge clout in Washington, in state capitals, in political campaigns, in Third World nations whose embryonic governments are defenseless against their power, in local communities in the United States, and in the lives of millions of Americans. Just ask someone whose job has been outsourced to a country with lower wages or whose child has been poisoned by an imported toy. So to adequately serve democracy, journalism needs muscular institutions with the resources and budgets needed to cover the transnationals in a way that helps regular citizens understand the scope of their power and how it plays out in their communities and their personal lives.
Existing journalistic institutions are not only bringing foreign correspondents home but are also shrinking Washington bureaus and, in an era of endemic corruption, cutting back investigative reporting. Why? Investigative reporting is labor-intensive and expensive, so as newspapers’ and networks’ revenue shrinks they’re cutting big-budget items. While participatory journalism, especially crowdsourcing, can help with some investigative reporting projects, it can’t have much impact without journalistic institutions to organize it, furnish the elements that crowdsourcing can’t, write and edit the project, and distribute the stories to an audience large enough to justify all that work.
Happily, not-for-profit investigative reporting institutions like the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Public Integrity have been stepping into the void. ProPublica has recently joined them with a $10 million-per-year budget, and Charles Lewis, a Banyan advisory board member who founded the Center for Public Integrity but left in 2004, is now deploying seasoned investigative reporters with teams of students at the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University’s School of Communications, where he is a professor. None of these institutions is rooted in the Web but Lewis says he embraces new approaches, including citizen journalism. Still, he is a bit wary: “The litigation and accountability factor of the web hasn’t played itself out yet, but it will over time,” he says. “It has to be something where we use the wisdom of the crowds but we have quality control.” Hence the need for institutions of adequate scale.
Web-based News Institutions
Web-based journalism institutions that do original reporting are emerging but so far they are modest in scale. The first was OhmyNews in South Korea, and it has had a mighty impact on its relatively small and homogenous nation. It was founded in 2000, based on the breakthrough idea that has come to be known as citizen journalism, and has been credited with influencing the outcome of Korea’s 2002 presidential election -– and with setting participatory media in motion all over the world. OhmyNews’s paid editorial staff now numbers more than 50, but it still relies largely on citizen volunteers for most of its content, using the Web-based amalgam of professional and amateur efforts that is the prototype for what participatory journalism advocates have come to call the pro-am approach.
In our much larger and more complex nation, opinion rather than reporting has dominated participatory media so far. But reporting institutions are taking root. Without the small but potent and growing journalistic institution called Talking Point Memo, and without Josh Marshall as its editor, would citizen journalists -– or journalists of any kind -– ever have assembled the story that set off the U.S. attorney scandal? TPM represents another breakthrough idea: an institution that provides leadership, infrastructure and easy access for a community to come together online and discover stories that no editor can know to assign. Working together, TPM participants set off the scandal about the Bush administration’s firing of U.S. attorneys for political purposes by finding a national pattern in what seemed to be eight or nine local stories about firings in widely separated cities. Democracy needs lots more news-originating institutions based on fresh ideas like the ones that brought us OhmyNews and Talking Points Memo. The Banyan Project hopes that its structure will provide an incubator.
This brings us back to the importance of scale –- and to the fact that so far no Web-based news-originating institutions come close to providing comprehensive, in-depth daily coverage on the scale of major newspapers. The need for distinct new journalistic voices and perspectives is clear. But just assembling enough resources to provide a comprehensive news report –- including coverage of the new kinds of stories playing out across the complex global landscape of the 21st century –- is not in and of itself enough.
Democracy also needs this coverage to be distributed to a broad public so that the informed citizenry that’s the foundation of democracy reaches beyond those who not only get some of their news online but have the time, energy and inclination to seek out quality news and information there. It’s particularly important that such coverage be distributed to the hundreds of thousands of less-than-affluent Americans whom newspaper publishers have discarded since the 1970s and have scant choices in their search for trustworthy journalism.
We at the Banyan Project understand that large scale cannot be created in a thunderclap, but it it Banyan's goal to over time achieve the scale that democracy demands.
