Response to J-Lab Report on Philadelphia's media ecology
by
Rich Gardner | 06.01.2010
Responding to a report on Philadelphia's media ecology
I was asked to comment on a J-Lab Report that explored the ecology of the media in Philadelphia, specifically as it touched on politics in the city. The report was disputed by the New America Foundation that added in the many other media outlets that are doing fine work in Philadelphia to keep citizens informed and in touch. The person who relayed these two reports felt "Hey! They didn't include PhillyIMC in their assessment."
Nothing would please me more than to argue that PhillyIMC was a serious player in Philadelphia politics. The thing is that for every organization to undergo staff changes, people leaving to take jobs, get married, raise kids, people coming back into the city, people deciding "Okay, the kids are now old enough, I need something to occupy my time with again," people having a renewed interest in lefty politics, etc., all that is thoroughly normal and to be expected. Problem is, for the past several years, PhillyIMC has seen a number of people leave but no one coming in to take their place.
What can we do about that? Two solutions come to mind. Either PhillyIMC needs to undertake an outreach program to convince people that working for us would be a marvelous and socially useful thing to do or we need to start paying folks to work here. I have a problem with paying people (Even though I've been unemployed or at least underpaid for most of the past 10 years) as I appreciate the freedom of working in a "collective" as opposed to a "company." I appreciate working on pieces just because they strike me as being important rather than because an editor told me "Do a story on a dog show." "Why?" "Dogs are cute. People like cute. And remmber to get plenty of photos!"
Convince folks to work for us for free? No idea how to go about doing that*, but clearly we'd have to reach out in person or in print. I doubt that an all-online effort would be useful.
I very much like the idea presented in the J-Lab Report of having a core of around half a dozen area experts, along with people who could do miscellaneous tasks like keeping spammers under control and interfacing with the public. PhillyIMC has had just that template operating at certain times and the results were happy ones.
There are many advantages to the PhillyIMC organizational structure, but we urgently need to solve the one-way staff changes problem. We can't/don't want to stop people from leaving, but before we can return to being a serious orgaizational player in Philly politics, we need to find a way to get people to join up.
*Every American Navy ship (Yeah, I'm a Navy vet) has two officers in charge, the Commanding Officer (CO) and the Executive Officer (XO). The CO is the public face of the ship, the person who sets the course, makes the calls and decides policy. The XO is the person who works more behind the scenes, seeing to the nitty-gritty details, etc. My personality is much more that of an XO than that of a CO. Could I choose pieces to get featured or at least promoted up to News Briefs? Yeah, but I'd prefer not to or to at least do so in face-to-face collaborations with some more CO-type people. I'd rather not have those calls be my personal decisions or to at least have some clearly-developed criteria for story promotions.
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