December 12
OK, Chicago, it’s time for Chicago news media to stop moaning and groaning about gangs and drugs in Chicago and start helping Chicagoans DO SOMETHING to solve the problem.
This clip was shot in a mostly white upper class Chicago suburb and spoken by mostly white people. So you may ask: who are these people to talk about gangs and drugs in Chicago?
Well, just wait ’til you see our next clip shot at El stations and places in Chicago.
Independent filmmaker Dan Skubal (with the dog) shot this video in Glenview, IL. The man has talent.
The video is a promo for our submission to the Knight News Challenge. While we can’t discuss the specifics of the online interactive platform of news and information that we’ve designed for Chicago and its 77 neighborhood areas, we are proud to say that it
- Values Chicagoans of all ages as informed participants in the government decisions that affect their lives.
- Values journalism and democracy as integrated, collaborative/competitive enterprises.
- Works across media platforms to make reporters and problem-solvers of everyone at all stages of its problem-solving news cycle.
- Re-invents and re-energizes the news cycle, morphing it from the clock time between editions of a news outlet to the mental time between community-generated solutions to a problem.
- Facilitates its news cycle impartially and accurately.
- Taps (profitably, in time) the “Market of the Whole” of all Chicagoans by meeting massive, citywide demand for productive civic discourse.
- Can be utilized by other news media.
Morphing the news. From reported story to defined solution to newsworthy outcome. That’s our core idea. Expanding the news cycle from the traditional 24 hour cycle of news reportage to an extended, even multi-month, cycle of news reportage and problem-solution. Creating a news cycle that gives Chicagoans time to consider and advance the city’s most promising opportunities, whatever these may be, and to address its most intractable problems, from potholes to economic growth to youth violence. And, that enables Chicagoans to revisit and revise past solutions even as it generates new ones.
This, as we see it, is the future of journalism in a viable democracy. And it’s what our interactive platform will create in Chicago.
Chicago Civic Media 