The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age

8. The Care and Feeding of the “Former Audience”

113 CHAPTER EIGHT The Care and Feeding of the “Former Audience” About two hundred people filed into the auditorium at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School in downtown New Haven on the evening of Tuesday, November 30, 2010. They had come to hear Diane Ravitch, an author and expert on public education, talk about the city’s nationally recognized effort to reform its schools. As they soon learned, they were also there to take part in an experiment in civic engagement. Using every technological tool at their disposal, Paul Bass and the New Haven Independent put together what Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green later called “a three-ring ‘education summit.’”1 Stage right, Ravitch sat with eleven other people—principals, teachers, school officials, a high school student, a board of education member, and the like. Stage left, a half-dozen media folks and elected officials, including Mayor John DeStefano, were live-blogging the event. That morning the forum had been the subject of an hour-long preview on public radio station WNPR. The evening event was webcast by WTNH-TV, New Haven’s ABC affiliate, as well as by WNPR, the Independent, and the New Haven Register. Viewers at home—and, for that matter, those in the auditorium who had laptops—were able to engage in a real-time, online conversation with the live-bloggers. Afterwards, readers posted a total of fifty-three comments to the two stories the Independent published.2 The archived 114 CHAPT ER EIGHT video was posted as well. Finally, in a touch that seemed almost old-fashioned , those who attended were invited to line up at two microphones during an extended question-and-answer period. What was the impetus for this unusual on- and offline gathering? Bass told me he had read Ravitch’s book on education reform, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, and had recommended it to DeStefano. The mayor, in turn, bought copies of the book for the board of education and suggested that the Independent and WTNH bring Ravitch to New Haven.3 Ravitch was an ideal person to host such a conversation. A former education official in the administration of President George H. W. Bush, she had morphed from advocating to opposing tough reform measures such as charter schools and high-stakes testing, and had emerged as a defender of teachers’ unions.4 New Haven’s school-reform program differed from those in some other cities in that union officials and the school administration were working together rather than battling with one another. Ravitch’s role was to act as the honest broker. She helped set the tone for the evening— civil and respectful, if occasionally impassioned—as teachers talked about the challenges they faced. And if not much that was said that evening was memorable, well, that wasn’t the point. From my vantage point in the auditorium, I sensed that I was missing half the conversation. I opened my laptop but was unable to get a working WiFi connection, so I couldn’t look at the online component of the proceedings until later. In August 2011, though, I got to experience a similar event when the Independent and La Voz sponsored a mayoral debate between DeStefano and four rivals.5 This time I stayed home. I found it a bit bewildering—there were two different video feeds, and even after I had picked one it was hard to follow the action taking place in the debate hall and the live-blogging at the same time. Nor did it help that the blogging software, Cover It Live, emitted a clicking-typewriter sound every time someone posted a comment, interfering with the already shaky audio. Still, taken together, Bass and company have come up with some impressively innovative (and award-winning) ways to bring the community together around important public-policy issues—and to get people talking about local news.6 There was nothing revolutionary about what I had witnessed. On one level, it is not unusual for a news organization to sponsor a debate or a community forum. As DeStefano told me when I asked him whether he saw anything innovative or unique about the Ravitch event, “News organizations , at least in my experience, have always been part of providing a 115 The Care and Feeding of the “Former Audience” platform for public discourse.”7...