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April 2016

Local journalism matters more than ever

You may have heard about this little news story we’re covering in Michigan. People in the city of Flint (MI), almost 100,000 residents, haven’t been able to safely drink their water for about two years. While the Flint water crisis revealed a massive failure on the part of state government in Michigan, it also demonstrated the importance of local journalism, the kind of journalism local newspapers, radio and TV stations should strive to do every day. The results of this story – the problem being admitted, the people of Flint getting help, the state and federal officials who resigned or were fired or reassigned, the renewed interest in lead poisoning and water systems around the country - it would not have happened if it were not for LOCAL journalism.

We sometimes treat local journalism like it’s not as big a deal or as important as the national networks. But in the communities we cover that is not the case. This story would not have come to light without local journalists, and now that the national media have turned their attention to Trump, and Zika and the Panama Papers, local journalists are still in Flint chasing this story. Whether you’re in a big shop or a small one, being in your community every day and paying attention to what’s going on and asking questions and challenging authority and not buying the narrative offered by the powerful, that will result in quality journalism. And yes, the national media may still say “nobody covered the story” until they came to town. But you’ll know, your audience will know, and hopefully the people who make poor decisions in the future, that affect so many people in your community, they will know as well.

In Defense of the First Amendment

In the 20th century, news organizations played a major role in protecting the press and speech freedoms enshrined by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. They went to the nation’s highest courts to fight for government documents, report fully on public figures, fight censorship and protect confidential sources. Their efforts helped to shape American laws on libel, privacy, prior restraint and many other legal principles. In the latter half of the 20th century, daily newspapers in particular paid hefty legal bills to fight for—and in some cases expand—speech and press rights.

In the past decade, however, economic pressures on traditional news companies appear to have diminished their capacity to engage in legal activity. What’s more, the digital-age technologies that upended legacy media economics also have complicated First Amendment law. Today, Americans can carry a megaphone, a printing press, a protest march, a petition or even a virtual church in their pockets. We can exercise each of our First Amendment rights within a smartphone. These devices, and the electronic systems that make them possible, do not slide easily into existing law.

Smartphones could transform our response to homelessness

[Commentary] At a time when technology is disrupting so many aspects of our lives, from the way we communicate to the way we get around, our approaches to homelessness remain stubbornly resistant to change. Indeed, in San Francisco (CA) — home to some of the most forward-looking innovators in the world — a disturbing number of people still sleep on the streets. This resistance to change has taken a major human toll, but fortunately, there is a cheap tool that could turn the tide: the smartphone.

Smartphones offer a way to bridge the gap between the needs of the homeless and the services that are available to them. Imagine if every homeless person had a smartphone, and he or she provided daily data on his or her health, happiness, income, family connections, use of services, and where he or she slept each night. And now imagine that a team of researchers, data scientists, and formerly homeless people had real-time access to that data. These researchers could try delivering all sorts of interventions to individuals via their smartphones — for example, cash deposits in online bank accounts for taking positive actions, or referrals to particular service providers. The team could then track the results in real time using the data they receive. And as they learned what interventions work best for which people, they could be charged with actually implementing and refining them as people’s situations change and as they tested even more innovative ideas.

Unprecedented Collaboration among Development Partners to Improve Infrastructure Implementation

The inaugural Global Infrastructure Forum 2016 brings together for the first time the leaders of the multilateral development banks (MDBs) -- African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank, Inter-American Development Bank Group, Islamic Development Bank, New Development Bank, and the World Bank Group – as well as development partners and representatives of the G20, G24, and G77, to enhance multilateral collaborative mechanisms to improve infrastructure delivery globally. The Forum is organized in close partnership with the United Nations.

Infrastructure plays a critical role in growth, competitiveness, job creation, and poverty alleviation. Yet increasing access to basic infrastructure services remains a critical challenge in developing countries. Sixty percent of the world’s population lacks Internet access, while 1.2 billion people in the world still live without electricity. At least one-third of the world’s rural people are not served by an all-weather road. Addressing the infrastructure gap requires a boost in investment including better leveraging of private investment, but also better governance, capacities, and improving efficiency to get more from existing spending on infrastructure.

With young people trading AM/FM for streaming, will radio find a home in your next car?

The audio listening habits that we’d acquired during years of public transportation-and-walking commutes came into our new car with us. We listen to the radio if our phones are low on batteries or if we’ve forgotten to download podcasts. Our two-year-old hates the radio and only wants to listen to music we’ve saved offline to our phones from Spotify. In dire tantrum situations, we’ll stream music, data plan be damned. Our car is the basic model — it doesn’t have its own Internet connection or anything like that. But its in-dash entertainment is good enough to let us skip the radio completely if we feel like it, and we usually do. There might be room for everything in a dashboard interface — but there’s usually only room for one thing in your ears at a time. And the “young people will eventually come around to old media” story is one newspaper veterans will remember — and not in a good way.

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