Transcript for
AEJMC 2005
Interactive Journalism Summit:
When Consumers Become Creators

August 12, 2005
San Antonio, Texas

David Wiseman
Project Manager, Loudoun Forward

David Wiseman: I started this with a friend of mine, Tamar Datan, and it’s just the two of us right now. You’re looking at 50 percent of Loudoun Forward.

We’re trying to help people understand the changes in their lives and provide a way to better own their community. That’s kind of our overriding goal.

I just wanted to start out by talking a bit about Loudoun County. It’s really close to the nation’s capital and that drives a lot of things. There are a lot of government workers, and it’s close to a very affluent and growing metro area. It’s a place where a lot of people commute into Washington.

Growth is the biggest issue in Loudoun County right now. In the ‘60s it was a very rural, agrarian economy. Loudoun was the largest producer of milk in the region.
Now there’s one dairy farm there and they are about to leave us next year.

These are census numbers. In 2000, we were the fastest growing county in the country with 100.000 people or more, and by 2020 we’re supposed to hit a little over 400,000. By 2010 we’re a little over the curve here with 230,000 [population].

For those over 25, 17 percent are high school graduates, 27 percent have some college, 32 have a college degree and 15 percent have an advanced degree. And the household income for Loudoun County is a whopping $104,000. There are a lot of two-earners.

Of the roughly 110,000 people over 25 in Loudoun County, roughly 47 percent have some form of college degree. And if we can just get 25 percent of those people, that is 13,000 people who could be subscribers and could interact with Loudoun Forward. And just to put that in perspective, that’s the same number of people who voted countywide for the person that sets the agenda for the County Board of Supervisors.

More people in the county vote for president than they do for the Board of Supervisors, and that’s kind of an odd thing because decisions that are made on the Board of Supervisors far outweigh any effects that the presidential election has.

Just a quick thought on growth: The pace at which growth occurs in the county compresses all the decision times there. So when you have a limited time to make a decision, it seems like the arguments all become very polar. Either one side or the other — there’s no consensus building. There’s no time to build a consensus. So extreme positions become the norm in the county and it’s a pretty shrill political environment right now.

Talking about the political environment: It’s polarized. There’s reaction then counter reaction. There are no staggered terms. There are nine members of the Board of Supervisors and they are all elected at the same time, so nine go on and nine come off.

And they can have subsequent terms, and it usually swings 7-2 Republican or 2-7 Republican, and it’s usually based on what their position is on growth. It’s the biggest-driving decision-making thing in the county.

Right now in the political environment it’s hard to get any kind of consensus.

So what motivated Tamar and myself to start this thing? Well, we saw low levels of public participation. I guess this is normal because citizens don’t have the time to become subject matter experts unless it directly affects them or their families.

Also, it’s not a good setting for people to share opinions, knowledge or expertise at the Board of Supervisors meeting. The only time you get to publicly comment is letters to the editor or at the Board of Supervisors meeting and it’s a very official, on-the-record kind of thing, and it’s very intimidating for a lot of people.

There is a low level of public knowledge. People don’t become experts until it affects them and you get that not-in-my-backyard reaction. And I submit that, in Loudoun, if you have a backyard, something is eventually going to happen there. So you need to know what’s going on.

There’s a lack of context right now with the current media in place. Currently, Loudouners get plenty of news, but not much context, so it’s hard for someone to figure out where that news story fits into the bigger picture. It’s a very this-week mentality, instead of this-year, or the next four years.

We’ve got two weekly papers. One’s issued on Wednesday and one on Thursday. A lot of people get The Washington Post. There’s a metro section, but it touches on local counties with the local news scene. The Post has recently come out with a Loudoun edition. It comes out every Wednesday, but it’s about what happened last week in Loudoun County.

Then there’s the react versus plan mindset: People just react instead of planning and that’s what we’re trying to get them to stop doing in the community.

This is a little thing I put together that shows you how we’re going to try to tackle the news versus the contextual topics.

Here’s what happens now: Say in July you get two articles about education, nothing about health care, a big article on technology and a little one about housing concerns. Then in August, you get a lot of education news. In September: a couple little health care issues are touched on, nothing about technology. So there’s no real coherence there.

We’re going to try to do it this way. As part of our civic toolset, we’re going to try to compile all of the articles about technology, healthcare, housing, conservation and crime in a kind of vertical way so that people can say, “Gosh, what happened last year about growth or technology?” Then, they can go back to an archive they can refer to.

There are challenges: time. People just don’t have a lot of time to sit down and read things. I think it’s the highest hurdle we have to overcome.

I think most media entities have this challenge: the attention span. Often conflict makes news in the county and there is a lot of conflict right now. Our challenge will be to create a hook for people that doesn’t depend on conflict.

There will be several things that we think the established media don’t provide right now and that we will provide.

• How does it affect them. We think that is one of the hooks.
Clyde mentioned dogs. People love dogs and they don’t like to talk about really important things like a new power line going in, unless it’s going in their backyard. So maybe we need to talk about the politics of dogs, or some Trojan horse, or kids, to get into the homes that way.
So we’re just trying to connect all these various dots that effect people in a very real way.

• Providing context. How does this fit into to what happened last year and what will happen in the next five years. We talked about that.

• Creating dialogue. There’s not a lot of dialogue in the county except at these very contentious meetings, and we’re going to create public forums were people have another venue to have dialogue.

• Memory. People are just way too busy to remember things unless it directly affects them. We hope to help them remember things or at least provide them access to an archive to help them jog their memory.

One of our challenges, structurally, is that we don’t have an institutional home. We’re not sponsored by another entity, a university or anything. So we have a challenge to build an infrastructure and keep it going.

Here are the five components of the vision that we have. It’s very similar, I think, to the other panelists.

1. We’ll have a discussion paper and it will be delivered to every household in the county and it will be a very deep and thorough analysis and study of a problem. We hope to have a couple writers working on this. We hope it will be the TIME magazine of just Loudoun County. Maybe it’s more academic in nature.

2. We’re going to have moderated public forums. Some of them will be very small. We might have one that is just focused on religion, where you might have only 30 [people] at a time. And there will be some large events.

3. We will have a community Weblog. We already have it up and running. It will be a moderated forum so that when people get the discussion paper, they can go to this Web site and discuss. There will be threads that will go on for as long as they need to be there. There are a lot of really smart people in Loudoun. We want to bring other people into the conversation who just aren’t there right now.

4. We’ll have a topic-centered newsletter. Some people may not be interested in education, but someone may be very interested in technology. So they will be able to subscribe to a technology newsletter, so anything news that comes up that relates to technology, we’ll push that to them so they can keep up to date on it. I know The Washington Post does that right now and I know a lot of papers are doing it. I subscribe to several topics on The Post and they push out a lot of articles with very national implications. These are going to be very local implications.

5. And lastly, this topic-centered Web archive, where you can go back and research by topic.
We had a public meeting that was by invitation only. We invited around 17 people: community leaders, republicans, democrats, bankers — we had very prominent people in the county. We had farmers.

They came up with these ideas for the first issue, and we’re still noodling ideas for it:

• The creative class. I don’t know if anyone has read any of the Richard Florida books on the creative class and the effects the creative class has on culture and the economy, that kind of thing.

• Research universities in Loudoun. We are going to do a student survey on the news that came out of Loudoun on theatrical censorship there.

• What does Loudoun look like when the oil runs out? Everyone’s got two or three cars in Loudoun County, and one of them is probably a Hummer now, so we’re going to try to study what it would be like if we couldn’t depend on our cars so much.

• Politics 101. People just don’t like politics, but I think our challenge — our goal — is just to make it relevant to them. We need to find the hook of why people don’t think it matters because it really does.

• The power of homeowners associations in Loudoun. I think something like 70 percent of the people are members of a homeowners association and they are very powerful, almost quasi-government types of things. So you write your check every month to this group and there may be two or three people who are making big decisions on your home.

• And then culture, art, economic development.

Those are some of the ideas that this group came up with for our first issue.

Here are six goals:

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