Rethink Democracy

Since the legislative session started last month, I haven’t had much time to blog. In fact, at the rate things are going, I probably won’t be blogging again until it’s all over. This year is definitely a doozy.

In the meantime, you can read what I’m up to here and here. (I cover mostly environment and energy issues.)

So long, for now…

I haven’t posted anything on the blog for a while, in part because I’ve been working on a lengthy screed about how and why government can help save journalism from its present economic (and in my opinion, ethical) free fall. “The Uncle Sam Solution,” as it was deemed in a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, is an issue that has received a good deal of debate recently — especially in the blogosphere, where there has been a largely visceral reaction against the idea.

Based on what I’ve been reading, however, the debate is thus far being framed in the wrong terms. Supporters of a government bailout of journalism want a massive taxpayer-funded news agency a la the BBC, while opponents envision the inevitable devolution of such an agency into a kind of hyper-partisan state propaganda ministry. What I propose is third way — a partnership between citizens and their democratic institutions, or more specifically, between citizen journalists and nonpartisan government information offices.

Rather than delve into an explanation of how such a partnership might work, let me give you a concrete example of how it’s already working here in Minnesota. On Monday, here at the House of Representatives, the House Energy Finance and Policy Division (along with its Senate counterpart) held a hearing on peak oil. One of the people who attended was Dan Haugen, a local blogger and freelance journalist who writes about energy issues.

Near the end of the meeting, an exchange between committee chairman Rep. Bill Hilty and a testifier caught Dan’s attention. At the House, the sergeant-at-arms’ office records every meeting in the State Office Building and posts it on the House Web site in both a streaming ASX format and a downloadable MP3 format. Dan apparently went home (or to a library, or coffee shop, or somewhere else with an Internet connection) and downloaded the MP3, then cut out the clip he wanted using the open-source audio editor Audacity. He then uploaded the clip to his account at the free podcasting site Odeo and embedded it in a blog post he’d written on the meeting, which you can read here and here.

Voila. A nonpartisan government office makes accessible a simple audio recording that an enterprising citizen journalist uses to create a multimedia article on something that happened in the Legislature that he thinks people should know about.

In an era where major newspapers are gutting their capitol bureaus, this is exactly what we want to happen — more up-close coverage of what’s going on in government. In this case, the government did a minimum amount of work, merely providing the raw data and letting someone else do the hard part. But let’s run through some other scenarios:

I happened to be at the same meeting as Dan, and I wrote a short article on the meeting for one of my department’s publications, Session Daily. It was posted on the House Web site within a half-hour of the meeting’s adjournment. Using that article and the links included in it as a starting point, a blogger or reporter could write their own, longer, investigative piece on the subject. (If we were in session, we would be publishing our free weekly magazine, Session Weekly, and I myself might have ended up writing a longer, more in-depth article on the meeting.) They could also simply repost the article verbatim on their blog or Web site, helping us to disseminate the information to interested parties.

Our TV department didn’t record that particular meeting, but if it had been, streaming video of the meeting would be available in the House video archives for journalists, students, lobbyists etc. to use for research. We also might have provided live streaming webcast coverage of the meeting for people who couldn’t make it to the meeting to watch at home.

This, I think, is the proper role of taxpayer-funded public information offices in the new media landscape: to act as an instrument of transparency, providing raw data about government activities in a variety of formats and in varying degrees of depth. Governments should not only work to inform the public via their own publications; they should also create as many avenues as possible for others to disseminate the information as well.

What makes this possible now where it wasn’t before is the advent of Web 2.0, which not only enables easy access to a wealth of information but also creates a market for it. Although fostering citizen journalism by making government open-source isn’t the definitive cure for all of journalism’s present ills, I think it should be considered an essential part of the treatment.

The Al Franken for Senate campaign has posted an entertaining video on YouTube that does a good job of explaining Minnesota’s precinct caucus process (DFL only?) on Super Tuesday. Naturally, they’d kind of prefer that you caucus for Al. (Although they also make a point of showcasing the intriguing “Mike Gravel/uncommitted/UFO research caucus.”)

Does anyone know if other campaigns have released similar educational videos for the Republican, Independence or Green parties? Let me know and I’ll post them here.

Devoted readers of my blog (all six of you) will have to content yourselves with reading some of the other 71,017, 209 blogs (according to the latest BlogPulse statistics) over the next couple of weeks, as I will be busy getting married and going on my honeymoon. I should be back around Feb. 4. I’ll undoubtedly be busy getting ready for the upcoming legislative session when I return to work, but I’m hoping to make some time to blog as well. So for now, adieu.

Many might not be aware, but the Minnesota Legislature has its own library — open to the public, of course — on the sixth floor of the State Office Building. But thanks to meebo (and some apparently innovative library staff) you don’t have to go there to talk to a librarian anymore.

Without really announcing it to anybody (including, surprisingly, legislative staffers like myself) the Legislative Reference Library has added a meebo widget to its Web site, allowing visitors to chat live with a legislative librarian. It appears in the left-hand navigation column of the page, like so:

I haven’t tried using it yet (and there’s really no need to, since I can just physically walk upstairs and talk to the actual librarian in person), but I think it’s a nifty little tool, and I would assume that it’s first for any legislature anywhere in the country.

Now anybody who wants to get their hands on those Senator Florian Chmeilewski Funtime Variety Show Band vinyl LPs will know exactly where to go.

Via Politics in Minnesota: Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s office is apparently set to launch a precinct caucus locator similar to their Election-Day polling place finder. PIM’s Sarah Janecek says Minnesota will be the first state to have such an application, which should be available on the office’s home page starting tomorrow.

Janecek rightly gives kudos to Ritchie and his office for a job well done. This is sure to help produce the kind of record turnout we saw in the Iowa caucuses — although, as MinnPost’s Doug Grow recently noted, Minnesota’s caucus process is somewhat more convoluted and “virtually impossible to interpret.”

In his latest Rolling Stone piece, Matt Taibbi hits on virtually everything I think is wrong with the mainstream media’s ‘08 campaign coverage. Here’s an excerpt:

The real story of the campaign has been its unprecedented unpredictability — and therein lies the problem. On both tickets, the abject failure of media-anointed front-runners to hold their ground was due at least in part to voters having grown weary of being told by the press who was “electable” and who wasn’t. Both the Huckabee and Ron Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to the entrenched Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards candidacy is a frank and open attack on his own party’s too-cozy relationship with corporate America. These developments signaled a meaningful political phenomenon — widespread voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national political press that smugly enforced the party insiders’ stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates.

But there was no way this genuinely interesting theme was going to make it into mainstream coverage of the campaign heading into the primary season. It was inevitable that different, far stupider story lines would be found to dominate the headlines once the real bullets started flying in Iowa and New Hampshire. And find them we did.

Click here. It’s worth a read.