« Back to blog

In The Decline of City-Based Newspapers, MIT’s Center for Civic Media Works to Create Informed Communities

The founding fathers of the MIT Center for Civic Media — Henry Jenkins, Chris Csikszentmihályi and Mitchel Resnick — knew the media’s overall focus was skewed.

“The focus was, ‘How do we save newspapers?’” says Andrew Whitacre, the Center’s communications director. “No one was asking the predecessor question, ‘How do we make sure we have informed communities?’”

So, in a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the Institute’s Comparative Media Studies program, the team entered the Knight News Challenge to bring the Center for Civic Media to life. They won an initial four-year, $5-million grant from the Knight Foundation, who looked to the Center to “develop new technologies and practices to help newspapers as a greater number of Americans use the Internet as their primary news source,” according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The Center officially opened in 2008, and began moving beyond the discussion of newspapers and into the “Information Age,” where Whitacre says they predicted “everything was going to be much more geographic-based than anyone imagined.” In the years to come, their prediction came true. “So much of these tools have been very localized,” Whitacre says, admitting they’re “very quickly filling this decline of city-based newspapers.”

The Center’s defined “civic media” as “any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents.” Students, researchers and faculty members have then developed tools around that idea, such as Sourcemap, a social network built around supply chains, enabling collective engagement with where things come from and what they are made of.

Whitacre says the Center’s been working with different groups around MIT, including the new Open Documentary Lab and CSAIL. They’ve also teamed up with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Nieman Journalism Lab, as well as organizations outside the higher ed realm.

Projects like Lost in Boston: Realtime have helped the city’s halfway houses. “People are really dependent on good information to hold down jobs,” Whitacre says. The problem, however, is that people need to get to those jobs, and for those who don’t have smartphones, it’s hard to tell when their next bus might be coming. So, the Center’s helped install LED signs in several houses that flash when a bus is 15 minutes away, taking into account walking time.

The Center’s site reads, “Transforming civic knowledge into civic action is an essential part of democracy.” And through the projects they’re developing, the Center’s been able to help strengthen our democracy.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/04/11/in-the-decline-of-city-based-newspapers-mits-c...