The Banyan Public
From Banyan Project
The Banyan Project expects that people from all walks of life will read its journalism, but it will focus its coverage on the needs of the regular folks of America -– the half of the population who are neither affluent nor poverty-stricken.
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Characteristics
This is the Banyan Public, people who tend to live in households with incomes of $30,000 to $75,000 and are the bread and butter of American life. They play a major role in the civic, political and economic vitality of their communities and their nation -- 85 percent are registered to vote and 82 percent voted in the 2008 general election.
This huge public has the dual misfortunes of suffering the worst blows from the Great Recession and, at the same time, being abandoned by crumbling newspapers that cut costs by eliminating coverage that doesn't serve the distinctive needs of people affluent enough to patronize upscale advertisers. For the most part online journalism hasn't come to the rescue of the Banyan Public -- its heavy traffic is by and for the rarefied culture of political and policy junkies.
Newspapers now aim at an audience heavy with professionals and executives, but members of the Banyan Public are likelier to be hourly wage earners or solo contractors and others who are self-employed, people who do much of their shopping at discounters that rarely advertise. They fall roughly within the third to seventh deciles of the household income distribution; not many have much money to invest and the bulk of the 46 million Americans without health insurance are in this group. They hunger for useful and trustworthy information that's relevant to the particular life and citizenship decisions they face, but it grows ever more scarce in a challenging time when the need is great.
"The coverage that is serious doesn't connect with them," says Ralph Whitehead, a University of Massachusetts professor of journalism and a member of the Banyan Board of Advisers. "The coverage that does connect with them isn't serious."
The Banyan Project seeks to fill this gaping need with its distinctive approach to journalism, and, at the same time, offer this ill-served public online civic networking tools they can use to organize their civic power.
Ill-served public
Today's metro dailies appeal to the affluent with health sections for people with medical insurance, personal finance features that focus on investing, and pages or sections on home design, gourmet food and wine -- which are of dubious use to people whose spending decisions are likelier to focus on paying off credit card debt.
This trend began well before the recession accelerated the crumbling of newspapers, which have historically provided almost all quality journalism. Since the 1970s newspapers, in response to their advertisers' needs, have increasingly aimed to serve the needs of the affluent and the trend has been accelerated as their business model has weakened.
Clay Shirky, a leading voice in the future-of-journalism discourse, emphasizes the question of how future journalism will serve average people.
"People like me are never going to be ill served in an information rich environment," Shirky told an interviewer after a 2009 appearance at Yale University. The real question in a democracy, he said, is whether citizens will have what Alex Jones of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School calls accountability journalism -- "journalism that keeps their town, their region, their state operating in relatively efficient, relatively responsive, and relatively non-corrupt ways." He added, "What happens to the elite class of info-vores, although it gets a lot of obsessive attention, is never going to be a problem."
The reason Banyan journalism will have to be original, and not aggregated from existing sources, is that no existing quality news organization covers the news, or writes features, in ways that aim to be relevant to the concerns of the less-than-affluent.
Democracy Implications
The extraordinary degree of engagement that participatory journalism inspires among its habitués amounts to a continual digital town meeting. It is exemplary direct democracy -– up to a point. The difference is that in traditional New England town meetings, all adult residents of a town, no matter their skill set, can take part if they choose; today's participatory journalism is theoretically open to everyone, but in reality only a minority with certain skills and inclinations takes part.
We do know that worries about a digital divide have faded significantly, and continue to fade. A 2006 Census Bureau survey found that more than 61 percent of Americans over 18 living in households earning less than $50,000 -- a group extending from the abjectly poor to near the median -- reported using the Internet at home in the previous 30 days. The Census found that even in households earning $0 to $30,000 a year, about half are Internet users; that figure leaps to three quarters in households that earn $30,000 to $49,999. Several other surveys show the incidence of Internet use growing rapidly, and growing faster among less affluent people. And the Department of Commerce is offering $4.7 billion in grants to support deployment of broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas and to otherwise expand access.
But Web-based journalism has a marked participatory divide, so thinking about new journalistic institutions in the light of democracy's deep needs demands a clear understanding of who is inside the relatively tiny participatory community and who is outside -- and where those on the outside land on the continuum from uninterested to passive to engaged almost enough to participate. The sociologist Herbert J. Gans, writing in Daedalus, breaks the news-consuming public down into three groups: 1) Monitors, which is most people; 2) news buffs, and 3) occupational news users. Maximizing participation in Banyan's civic space will require inspiring monitors to become participants; optimizing Banyan's journalism and civic networking software to meet this aim will require detailed research.
The great power shift in journalism in the last decade has been the rise of openly partisan and propagandistic cable news channels; their burgeoning impact on the culture and politics, and thus on democracy, has seemed all the greater as traditional information powerhouses, newspapers and broadcast news, lose their juice. The future-of-journalism discourse focuses on blogs and related forms of largely volunteer citizen journalism much more than it focuses on institutional forms such as cable news, and research about where people turn first for news -- their default mode -- is spotty. A clear understanding of this is crucial to creating effective new approaches to institutional-scale, fact-based journalism that can offset the cultural power of cable opinion. Hence the needed research.
Banyan's New Norm
Banyan's fundamental product will be a daily comprehensive package of original news and service journalism that serves the Banyan Public and thus must be tailored to a norm quite different from the dominant norm set by prestige journalism -- The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR and, indirectly, major political bloggers.
Why a different norm? Because while all Americans want to know about many of the same things, the Banyan Public has specific needs that can be served only by journalism that diverges significantly from the needs of the public that consumes prestige journalism: One size does not fit all.
As the U.S. income and wealth gap has widened, so has an all-but-ignored journalism gap; almost all quality journalism is written and edited to serve the needs of people on the "have" side of the gap, almost none for the "have not" side. This has changed greatly since the 1970s. Since then, newspaper publishers in pursuit of maximum advertising revenue have purposely tailored their content for the affluent; not surprisingly, the accelerating decline in newspaper readership over the same period has come disproportionately among people living in households that earn less than $50,000 per year.
Banyan's business proposition, which must be tested carefully through both quantitive and qualitative research, is that the less-than-affluent people newspapers have discarded retain a deep need that's now going unmet; their life and citizenship needs are no less pressing than those of the affluent, so they have no less need for quality journalism to inform their course through life. This is why Banyan must be a source of tailored, original journalism and not just an aggregator -- almost all quality journalism available to aggregators is written to the dominant norm, not for the Banyan Public.
People who think about the future of journalism tend to be on the well-served side of the journalism gap, and tend to be devotees of prestige journalism, so it's not surprising if their life experiences obscure the idea that it's even possible to create quality journalism that does not fit the dominant norm. And these life experiences make it easy to believe that people who put limited value on prestige journalism could put high value on quality journalism of any kind, even quality journalism that is tailored to their specific life needs. Banyan's survey research will determine whether such assumptions are accurate or if they're the result of the perspective-narrowing power of a dominant norm at work.
At the national and international level, a large component of normative news coverage is trade journalism that serves the information needs of several elite "trades": business, finance, academia, cultural institutions, the media, etc. It focuses on debates over economic and foreign policy; in politics it covers strategy more than issues; it is quick to quote experts who speak in abstractions; it presumes a significant knowledge base. Normative feature coverage serves the tastes of the people who value normative news: fine dining, fine furnishings, intellectual pursuits, high culture, investing guidance, personal health tips that presume medical insurance.
The Banyan norm will be news coverage that addresses the issues that most affect people who earn hourly wages, using practical language more than abstract expert-speak; on this norm, service journalism will provide, for example, health coverage for people who are uninsured or woefully underinsured as well as personal finance guidance for people who are likelier to deal with predatory lenders than stockbrokers. The norm arises directly from Banyan's value proposition: that the Banyan public will find its journalism relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy of their trust.
In short, the quality of Banyan journalism will be as high as that of prestige journalism, just tailored to a different norm so it can best serve a different public.
