I’m currently a staff writer at an alternative newsweekly called the Independent, where I write about local news in the Triangle region (Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill).
My reporting and my occasional column, the Monitor, explore issues of media and technology from a local perspective.
In the past couple of years, I’ve covered the financial struggles of our local daily newspapers as well as the fallout of state-level telecommunications legislation affecting cable and Internet service. Most recently, I’ve covered the issue of broadband Internet access in rural parts of North Carolina and the policy questions around how to make it more widely available — and how much influence the industry should have in answering those questions.
Two essential questions preoccupy me:
What will the journalism of the future look like, and how will we pay for it?
Who will own the Internet, and how will Americans get meaningful access to it?
(OK, that’s really four questions.)
Sometimes these questions seem parallel, but they are not. Not when most discussions of new journalistic formats and business models focus on abandoning dead trees and delivery trucks for the web. Not when many of the same companies that provide broadband service also produce content.
I want to explore the intersection of these two issues, and I’d like to know who else is doing so.
I follow a lot of smart conversations on Poynter, for instance, about what the online-only newsroom of the future might look like, but I don’t see a lot of journalists talking about how readers will get access to vital local news if they’re stuck on dial-up. And I read a lot of smart tech policy bloggers thinking through the complicated questions of how to get people in rural America connected — tax breaks to the incumbent private carriers? municipally owned networks? Would it make a difference if we also considered what sort of information they need to be connected to?
Perhaps there are many people thinking through the intersection of these questions. I’d love to find out who they are and what they’re thinking.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to move forward on a proper design of this web site so I can have a decent, professional home on the interwebs.