Transportation politics — especially bike and transit politics — can be fascinating stuff, especially to a transportation geek such as myself, but for most people it’s just all so much hot air. At the end of a day, to an average commuter, biker, walker, etcetera, does it really matter that so-and-so said such-and-such to so-and-so at such-and-such meeting? Does it matter to the average citizen what Fred Hansen (or now Neil McFarlane), David Bragdon, or Sam Adams has said? Doesn’t this all miss the point that, for most, transportation is about getting around, not about being a blood-sport to watch while eating popcorn?

Thinking about mostly non-auto transportation this way — as a consumer issue not a political one — is something that Michael Andersen thinks is an important but rarely undertaken endeavor. So after almost a year of toying with the idea, Andersen quit his job as a journalist at The Columbian this spring to concentrate on launching a new “10-minute newsmagazine” dedicated to the “bus, bikes, and low-car life.” Called Portland Afoot , the magazine put out its first issue this month.

Quitting a solid day job to stake it all on an untried niche publication? Some might question Andersen’s sanity, and when prompted he freely admits that they may be right. “I’m definitely crazy. But there aren’t enough crazy people in this business any more to come up with the ideas that’ll keep it alive. And I’ll be working like a dog all year to prove this crazy idea can work.”

Crazy perhaps, but Andersen has a method to his madness. In Andersen’s view, there is an increasing market in cities such as Portland for niche publications. “Regular newspapers are optimized for the 1950s distribution, with a very little [amount] of everything,” he explains. At the time, people weren’t paying for the news, they were paying for the aggregation of it in one place. The Internet has largely supplanted that role, meaning that the media have to concentrate more on producing valuable content people are actually willing to pay directly for.

Thus was born Portland Afoot, and Andersen isn’t kidding when he says it’s a “10-minute newsmagazine.” The publication feels like a small, high-quality newsletter, but unlike most of that breed it is not a haphazard collection of causes and events struggling for your attention. Instead, it’s a very graphically pleasing and efficient pub with more practical approaches to stories. A news brief about whether or not MAX will get to Clark County via the planned Columbia River Crossing, for example, includes a (thankfully shortened!) link at the end to additional information on the Portland Afoot web site about the related upcoming Metro president race. The primary feature for the inaugural issue is a ranking of TriMet’s bus lines for on-time performance, number of chair lifts, number of stops (a characteristic Andersen labels as “most hectic”), and so forth. In short, the magazine is a gem for those dependent on the non-auto transportation system, or those who are just plain transportation geeks. Subscriptions to the magazine are $14 for a year — thats about a buck per issue — and are well worth it.

Some may ask why Andersen is producing a paper publication in the age of the iPad. Andersen lists a number of reasons, including the ease of reading a paper publication, making the publication available to an audience that is both “rich and poor, young and old,” and the fact that paper publications are still a hallmark of credibility. There’s also a less tangible, more emotional appeal to a paper publication: pleasure. Says Andersen, “Getting a magazine in the mail makes me think somebody likes me. Getting an email newsletter makes me think I have something to do.”

Andersen has many ambitious plans, including filling out the Portland Afoot web site (which is a wiki) with more detailed, slightly “more wonky” content. The next issue is currently in the works, and will include an interview with famous bus driver and blogger Dan Christensen and an article on the best and worst places to sit on a MAX train. Andersen is working on stories that he hopes to break as well, noting that originating stories that matter is important to the publication.

To learn more about Portland Afoot, visit their web site, or subscribe here.

Thomas Pettitt on the Gutenberg Parentheses from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

The possibility that we may be entering a post-print age is a fascinating one, and if true will have huge ramifications for the traditional press. Journalism, however, will not be the only profession or activity affected.

How, for example, might public relations work in a post-print world?

For one, as information sharing becomes less textual and more oral again, I believe there will be an even greater need for individuals to facilitate dialogue with key stakeholders, a role that is much more akin to community outreach than to traditional notions of PR. Strategic messaging and media planning will still be required, but interpersonal and group facilitation skills will be relied on more and more.

Skills and methods of communication will not be the only dynamics that will need to change in order to ensure the success of a project. The very nature of how projects form will also need to change. For the public sector in this region, this should not prove to be a difficult transition, given our history of public participation processes.

However, this participation will need to be more effectively handled. At present, many instances of public involvement are little more than window dressing, the obtaining of input on a plan that is already 99% completed by paid technical experts.

In an oral world shaped by Social Media, however, there is the expectation that communication is truly two-way. If input is met with no more than thanks, and not reflected by real physical changes in a project, an organization or agency will at best be considered unresponsive, and at worst may find itself in serious political trouble.

Over last weekend, I attended the We Make The Media conference at the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of journalism, both in general, and in the Portland metropolitan region. I have already commented on the experience of attending the conference, but now I’d like to examine some of my takeaways from the event with an eye towards how the changing nature of journalism will affect the public participation (P2) (and to a lesser extent the media relations) profession. Although this event centered on this region, the lessons learned are broadly applicable.

First, the division between traditional journalism (as defined by the postwar mediums of print, radio, and television) and new media / amateur / citizen journalism is gone. Today, there are just as many people turning to new media journalists for news as to traditional sources. In many cases, the quality of the content being produced by the non-traditional media is just as sophisticated and readable as the traditional media. (Example: Jonathan Maus’ BikePortland.org.) It is no longer access to technology and distribution that determine who the media players are, giving content (be it subject or quality of reporting) more primacy.

This rise in citizen journalism will mean that the P2 and media relations fields will need to work closer and closer, not just on planning how to inform people about projects, but also in what channels and methods of communication to utilize. Gone are the days when media relations can center a media campaign around a press release mechanism. Further, it will be necessary to provide specific media outreach to non traditional media, meaning that you might be listing the contacts for “citizen joe’s blog” right alongside your contacts at the local daily newspaper on your media Rolodex.

As the Chinese wall between media relations and P2 is brought down, it will be important for the strategies of both efforts to be one. The work and words of a public information officer (PIO) will no longer be able to be at odds with or independent of P2 efforts.

The second major change in the media landscape is directional: media is now fully two-way. Centralized hierarchy based media is waning rapidly. While it may never go away completely, it may very well lose its primacy, especially among certain segments of your stakeholder base. In its place is technology enabled new media that makes two-way communication the center of its structure.

Media and public outreach, then, becomes less about disseminating information to the public and more about facilitating that most basic unit of communication, the conversation. This means that PIO/P2 people need to be prepared to respond to and dialogue with stakeholders. Don’t do what most newspapers do with their online content and assume that providing a comments functionality is enough. Use comments sections and other technology tools to acknowledge and in some cases respond to stakeholder input. Talk to each other, not at each other.

Third, accept that media is now multichannel than just three mediums. Using just one form of social media to communicate with, for example, is not enough. Not everyone is going to use Facebook or Twitter, powerful and popular as they are. Use them, sure, but keep an eye on the horizon for the next social media tool, and evaluate these new tools routinely to assess them for inclusion in your outreach kit. Note: don’t automatically join and use every social media tool you encounter, either; an article about social media on Mashable from 2007 listed over 350 different social media sites, and (as commenters to the story noted) it was incomplete even then. Follow Alexander Pope’s advice on fashion: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

Lastly, be aware that as traditional media wanes, the digital divide will shift into a media divide. Those without Internet access will be less and less likely to be served by analog forms of media, especially newspapers. Your organization may need to pick up the slack by producing its own analog media to reach those who are elderly, low income, or otherwise unable to utilize web-based media.

Newsletters and fliers, however, will likely not be enough, and will not deliver to your organization the two-way communication it will get from new media forms, thus disenfranchising some stakeholder groups. The solution? Mark out your calendar for more time out of the office and in people’s businesses, front porches, and living rooms. Pound the pavement, but before you do that, get yourself and your fellow P2 practitioners more training on interpersonal and small group communication as well as conflict management. Don’t put your people on the front line without the tools to survive exchanges in a healthy and positive way.

The strongest takeaway I have of the conference is that if the proceedings are reflective of the state of media, we are in deep trouble. Throughout much of the conference I felt as if I were stuck in 2002. People — usually older, white, male employees (or former employees) of dead tree media — were talking about how they wanted to revolutionize media by including things like websites, YouTube videos, and the like. When I hear the term “digital divide” I usually think of low income people who cannot afford a computer, not of upper crust Portland establishment types who apparently are too busy picking lint from their golfing sweaters to understand what all those crazy kids are doing on the spooky Intrawebs.

Okay, that was snarky, but if you want to really understand the vibe at the event, snarky is just it. There was a massive divide — aided partly by the location of outlets for plugging in laptops — that resulted in one corner of the room becoming the Twitter Corner. Although the distribution of ages and backgrounds were not even, there were far more younger crowd people in the Twitter Corner. Sadly, I had decided to be lazy and had failed to bring my near-death iBook, so instead I kept up with the Twitter feed by looking over the shoulders of other laptop users. The conversation going on in the feed was far different than that in the room. It was more net savvy, it was more innovative, it was more frustrated, and it was more snarky. It represented a demographic who felt that the point of the conference was to advance journalism, not to advance the journalistic establishment that presenter Joe Smith nobly enshrined in the clothing of patriotism.

It wasn’t just the damn kids and their Twitterisms that felt this way. I was sitting at the edge of the Twitter Corner, near a lot older freelance writers. One, an environmental writer who was stringing for some big eastern papers recently, kept shaking her head. During a break, we talked, and she pointed out that everyone was so focused on the structures of the journalism establishment that they’d forgotten it’s about the writers. “It takes longer [these days] to pitch a story than to write it,” she related. “I end up putting it on Huffington Post because it’s better to get it out there than wait until it is stale.” This is a key point that has to be understood: this person was willing to put her work up on the web and bypass traditional media (as well as meaningful income) because the story came first. Nobody seemed to understand this. Writers were wanting help to make their magic happen, and instead the center of discussion was some kind of WPA/CCC jobs project to support editors and staff reporters.

Perhaps it is time that the media considered the idea that the era of the staff reporter is over.

Much hand wringing also centered around how little investigative reporting would happen as newspapers continue to decline. The local beat reporter concentrating on attending local government meetings was raised to the level of some kind of hero, bleeding for the people. Local government reporting? I’m sorry, but as someone with a lot of local government experience, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever been impressed by local government reporters. They tend to write happy-happy kumbaya stories, or they write stories that seek controversy at the expense of deeper digging that would reveal a more balanced perspective. I don’t think it’s entirely those reporter’s fault — short deadlines, lack of staff, and low pay all contribute to the quality of work here — but really, if what we’re trying to do is preserve the kind of local government / small town reporting that we’ve had for the last thirty years, let’s just take this horse out to the pasture and shoot it already. I’d rather read Twitter. (And not that long ago I had no use for Twitter.)

Is there any hope, or was the conference a total waste of time? Certainly some of the Twitter Corner denizens were toying with ditching the place with two hours left to go and hitting up a bar for some real conversation. I don’t think it was a total waste, though. For one, it was a suitable — if not particularly hopeful — fodder for thought about where media might be going, but that’s a story for next week. For another, it allowed the Twitter Crowd to emerge. Sometimes, the best motivator is something to react against, and I think there were enough interesting moments of failure of imagination by the conference presenters and some of the older ink-and-paper crowd that there’s fodder to react against for a couple of years. I also think that the idea of a journalism incubator might be the kind of decentralized, cooperative tool that could unite many of the lone wolves in the Portland media world.

Most of all, it taught me that I should never, ever, ever go to a conference and leave my laptop at home. Better that it die in the noble service of Twittercasting than leave me out of the loop of the real conversation — the interesting conversation — from the back corner of the room.

But what I want to talk about is not the future of newspapers, or how blogs are changing our media environment. Instead, I want to talk about how the debate about the future of journalism I distracting us from the debate we ought to be having, which is how to subsume journalism into our daily lives as citizens of a free country. And I want to start that discussion with the social media site Facebook.

It begins with my university, Marylhurst. The school has an eclectic, adult centered student base, with an average age of 35 years. Many of the school’s students are returning to college after a long absence spent in the business world. Over half the students are online students that never even set foot on the beautiful campus, and the campus itself, by catering to non traditional students, is primarily a commuter campus with little on site social institutions or activities.

Small wonder, then, that until 2009 there was no campus newspaper, much less student organization.

Recently, some students from the English Literature and Writing department agitated to produce a school newspaper. With the cost of printing being prohibitive, however, the paper, which launched in January, is web only, consisting of about 5-6 articles per month and published on a proprietary system with limited graphic capabilities. It is uncertain how many individuals actually know that the Marylhurst Messenger, as the virtual paper is know, even exists. The semi-independent publication is not even mentioned on the university’s web site, nor on its online learning intraweb. My point is not to degrade the effort of students to put together such a publication. It is a noble pursuit and no doubt a worthy outlet for writing students to produce work for. Rather, the point is that, like all newspapers and their associated web site mirrors, the Messenger has limitations that are inherent to its structure. A newspaper — paper or virtual — places hierarchy, structure, and format first, and delivery of content and facilitation of discourse second.

Meanwhile, in Spring 2009, after a protracted absence, the university launched its own Facebook page. Marylhurst students and alumni with Facebook profiles immediately began to link to the page by becoming fans of it, thus driving increasing amounts of traffic to it. Just over a month after being created, the page now has 226 fans. Updates about current events on campus, student achievements, and the like are constantly provided, filtering into the “feed” on the home page of those fans. And those fans are talking back, commenting on posts, and engaging in discussions with each other in a forum tab on the Marylhurst page.

Questions about the future of journalism or the future or newspapers are often the subject of debate these days, but what debaters often forget is that newspapers (and journalism in general) are only tools to achieve an end: disseminating information and facilitating public discourse. Viewed through this lens, Facebook pages become a far more natural tool for building community and spreading stories than a newspaper — or even a web page made to mimic a newspaper — ever could.

Social media sites like Facebook are far from perfect, but they have a fundamentally different structure that makes them far more suited to carrying out the duties that traditional journalism has for the last century and a half. Discourse is far easier when communication is two way, and giving every person the power to wear the journalist’s hat means that instead of one or two or ten journalists covering a beat, there are as many as there are readers. Indeed, Marylhurst has made the permissions on their page broadly open: “You may have noticed that we left permissions as wide open as possible. This is intentional, as we encourage YOU – students, faculty and staff – to contribute content. Some of you are already doing just that.” The university is taking advantage of the more democratic orientation of Facebook’s capabilities to enable average students — the citizens of the school — to take on the duties that a journalist would once have bore. Not to support the conversion of an old media giant into a new media world. Not to drive bottom lines and salvage a company from red ink. Not to satisfy the needs of advertisers. Rather, the intention is to disseminate information about the Marylhurst community, and to stir that community to engage in discourse.

Today we face a world where journalistic duties are now decentralized, and become merely another part of the duties of an engaged citizenry — or in this case an engaged student body. This suggests that the discourse about the future of journalism — especially discourse aimed at how professional journalists and media outlets can adapt to the new environment — is a distraction. What we really need to be debating is how the best aspects of old journalism — quality writing, analytical ability, and ethical conduct — can be Incorporated into a new discipline of citizen education that focuses on engaging in public discourse on the web as well as in person. What we are studying here is not the future of journalism, it is the future of citizenship. When we stop debating how laid off journalists can build a community of readers around themselves, and instead begin to discuss how every citizen can incorporate the best of what journalism offered into their civic toolkit, then we will truly be debating the future of online journalism.