Idea Lab

What is news?

If we define news as what's important, and we were to ask regular folks what they considered important enough to be in the news each day, I wager we'd get a much more serviceable media than we have now.

Serviceable, in the sense that we would have an idea of what's happening in our world and, equally important, an understanding of how to affect the conditions that shape our lives..

In blogging about Related Content, the little Drupal module which will try to show that news plus ideas can equal action (that will be the next day's news), and in writing about "reinventing community news for the digital age" generally, I will try also to talk about what's important, and who decides.

The amazing people you will meet on this blog may be too polite to belabor the point, but they're not here only because they have cool ways to connect journalism to community-building through internet technology. They're here, in part, because they find aspects of our media system broken in ways that endanger the human experiment, let alone democracy, and they are actively trying to help fix things.

Not being so polite, I will occasionally point just how high the stakes are.

I'm honored to be here and look forward to helping build a better media, bit by bit.

What do you want to happen here? Let me know.