Filling A Vacuum Creatively

The local newspaper story in Colorado provides lots of fuel for discourse. First and foremost, rather than looking at the fall of this community treasure as a tragedy, we can look at is as a challenge ripe for interjecting diverse ways of gathering and sharing knowledge and perhaps even running a failing business.

We can enhance the level of community input and community control, for instance. We can also go back to traditional ways of sharing knowledge and skills as well as wisdom, and help to overcome inherent biases for which newspapers are notorious. Newspapers allow for minimum feedback and interaction. They are typically a one-way transmission of limited facts, valid or invalid, from the journalists and editors to the readers.

Youth might fill a vacuum created by the fall of the newspaper by creating digital newspapers, digital newsletters, and other forms of digital communication (e.g., digital story telling, blogs, glogs, wikki, twitter, face book, bebo, and the like). Other members of the public can do so as well. Members of the general public can become informal journalists, finding, creating, and sharing stories themselves.

On a related note, the newspaper might also be handed over to its readers in the form of a community coop, giving the readers a bigger say in how the paper is run, what news is shared, and how it is shared.