“Publishers can fight it and cling to old, crumbling distribution models, or they can get in the game themselves by offering content producers sophisticated ways to reach/observe/respond to reader behavior, directly.”
– Johanna Vondeling,  Berrett-Kohler

Our next posts will cover Chapter 2, Vol. 2 of The Big Thaw, including:

• Getting Serious About Community
• Strategic Technology
• Being Multiplatform
• Tightly Integrating Functions
• Counterintuitive Ways of Working
• Shifting Roles
  

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

For weeks, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has opposed climate change legislation. In the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, he openly voiced his doubts and was the only Democrat to refrain from voting for the bill’s passage. Now that the bill is in the Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, many worry that the bill is doomed. However, it looks like Baucus might have outwitted us all.

Aaron Wiener of the Washington Independent reports that Baucus’s opening statement at the Finance Hearing on Tuesday was surprisingly favorable. Baucus pledged his commitment to “passing meaningful, balanced climate change legislation” and even preempted economic attacks on the bill.

Jeff McMahon of AlterNet argues that this was the strategy all along: “By appearing to oppose the climate bill, Baucus may be staging its passage.” House Democrats implemented a similar strategy for health care reform when they appeared to give up the public option to stifle the opposition’s absurd antics. Much like the Senate’s climate bill, the public option was prematurely declared dead. Nevertheless, the House still successfully passed a health care bill with a public option—and the climate bill was still able to move past the EPW committee.

“Max Baucus’ no vote in the [EPW] Committee establishes Baucus as the bill’s credible opposition, the representative of money and industry, especially with Republicans excusing themselves from the process through either the certainty of their opposition or, in the case of a boycott, their literal absence,” McMahan writes.

Baucus’ strategy helps him effectively gain traction within the Senate and in his home state, where the outdoors and hunting are valued. As the chairman of the Finance Committee, he advocates for economic concerns and a strong climate bill that is likely to pass the Senate.

Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) can’t seem to catch a break, as Kate Sheppard notes for Mother Jones. The Republican Party of Charleston County, S.C. unanimously voted to censure Graham for working with Democrats on a climate bill. Charleston Country Chairwoman Lin Bennett argues that Graham has “weakened the Republican brand” and that “his work on climate legislation is the last straw.” In addition, the American Energy Alliance, a shady industry group that benefits from blocking clean energy, has reportedly spent $300,000 on advertisements to rebuke Graham for his support on climate legislation.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly argues that Graham’s censure is particularly ridiculous because Graham has one of the most conservative voting records. According to VoteView analysis, Graham is currently the 18^th most conservative member of Congress. Evidently, that is still not enough for South Carolina Republicans.

“One of the other angles I find interesting is that, for the better part of the year, the small and discredited Republican minority has insisted that they’d like to see “bipartisan” lawmaking,” writes Benen. “And yet, when Lindsey Graham tries to work with Dems on one issue, and gets much of what he wants in concessions, he’s immediately slammed — formally — by Republicans in his own state.”

It is clear that South Carolina Republicans have no tolerance for politicians that stray from the hard party line of “freedom, rule of law and fiscal conservatism.” But Salon’s Andrew Leonard notes that Graham’s censure is hardly surprising, considering the state’s history of succession: “South Carolina Republicans are sui generis: Whether it’s Sen. Jim “healthcare will be Obama’s Waterloo” DeMint or Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson or Gov. Mark “no stimulus for me” Sanford, they rarely disappoint. One would expect no less from the first state to secede from the United States after Lincoln’s election and the first state where shots were fired in the Civil War.”

Finally, the Applied Research Center (ARC) is working to ensure that women and people of color will also reap the benefits of a green economy. Michelle Chen notes for Air America that ARC has created a Green Equity Toolkit to help marginalized communities hold employers accountable for just working conditions and equal access to green jobs.

“Considering how difficult it’s been to get big business on board for meaningful carbon-emissions regulation, Congress might want to bank on some of the enthusiasm springing up from communities that are starting to see the link between their economic and environmental futures,” Chen writes.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Social Cascades on Steroids

The web’s viral dynamics cannot be fully understood without considering social cascades, which describe how information spreads socially. They reinforce or oppose conventional thinking depending on their source.

Cass Sunstein, head of President Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, described this phenomenon in Republic.com 2.0. He explained that cascades either lead people to conform in order to protect their reputation, or form an opinion based only on others’ opinions instead of their own judgment. In either case, the “behavior of the first few people can, in theory, produce similar behavior from countless followers.”

“One freak-out that is just getting started is superdistribution,” Clay Shirky notes, which is an approach to distributing digital products free of physical distribution limits that amplifies the effects of social cascades. Since information sharing no longer has transactional costs and has risen to warp speeds, the social cascades that have always existed are now on steroids—which Sunstein called “cyber-cascades.” As a result, online social networks simultaneously ratchet up both amplification and filtering. Shirky says, “Superdistribution’s remarkable property is that content can spread widely without being sent to people who don’t care about it.”

People have been talking about viral spread for a long time, but superdistribution takes it beyond an important threshold: A single story can now hurdle the readership of its original publication. For instance, Shirky explains that an article in the Boston Globe about the priest abuse scandal had a bigger distribution than the entire nominal circulation of the newspaper. “It used to be that an article was a subset of a newspaper, but that’s not the case anymore,” he notes.

Superdistribution is the new “mainstream”

Superdistribution, which underpins mainstream media’s new distribution system, has potential value to create social good. Sunstein described old mainstream media as a “solidarity product” that was valuable in generating a widely shared experience. “General-interest intermediaries [such as newspapers or TV], if they are operating properly,” he claimed, “give many people, all at once, a clear sense of social problems and tasks.” The scale of their reach can help ease social interactions and promote shared hopes, goals and concerns.

Independent media has been valuable in creating alternative influences to the shared mainstream experience. A popular metaphor in progressive circles is the “echo chamber,” in which a message pushes the larger public or the mainstream media to acknowledge, respond, and give airtime to progressive ideas because it is repeated many times. If done well, the message within the echo chamber can become the accepted meme, impact political dynamics, shift public opinion and change public policy. If the messages in the echo chamber are not done well, they simply remain insular and preach to the choir.

Today, alternative and mainstream conversations are less clearly differentiated. Since superdistribution’s mega-hits can far surpass a single publication’s circulation, the story itself drives shared experiences more than its source. In many ways, superdistribution determines the new structure of mainstream media, and it is much more unpredictable.

The major implication of superdistribution is that independent media needs to adjust how it promotes shared conversations that challenge convention. Instead of fighting for mainstream media’s attention, independent media organizations have greater opportunity than ever before to bypass them altogether, if they focus on understanding their customers and mastering new social media. In fact, the new target of independent media might be more ephemeral: The crowd. While the problem of oversimplifying complex issues is nothing new, cyber-cascades and superdistribution feed a decentralized populism that blunts nuanced thinking more than old centralized mainstream media ever did.

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

After 30 years, commentator Lou Dobbs—infamous for his tirades against undocumented immigrants—has left CNN, as TPM reports. Dobbs employed disturbing, dangerous, and dated language to slur immigrants, often equating them with disease and infection. There is a connection between this type of demagoguery and violence.

Clearly, the organizing efforts of groups like Basta Dobbs have borne fruit, as even Dobbs admits. GRITtv recently covered the “way the mainstream media equates ‘Latino’ with ‘immigrant’” and Latino organizing efforts to correct this perspective.

“Over the past six months, it’s become increasingly clear that strong winds of change have begun buffeting this country, and affecting all of us,” Dobbs said in his last live broadcast for CNN. Other commentators belonging to the old school of racist separatism ought take note. It’s a new day in the USA.

Much like the ideological frames that Dobbs was fond of, our current immigration policies wrongly mark some citizens as harmful so that others can “benefit.” This week, ABM Industries in Mineapolis worked with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to execute a silent raid similar to September’s raid on American Apparel. In the case of ABM, 1,250 janitors were fired in an economy where massive job loss further harms struggling communities.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio continues laboring under this illusion, as National Radio Project reports, and the effects of enforcement-first policies have been drastic. Once upon a time Latinos and immigrants and whites lived together mostly peaceably in Maricopa County, AZ. Now, people scream “build a wall, deport them all” and law enforcement sweeps are aimed at the undocumented. Fear rules the town. National Radio Project reports on these seismic changes, and also how gangs are able to extort community members because nobody dares call the police.

Tyler Moran reports for New America Media on how the broken immigration system affects all workers, and not just the undocumented. Systems that would normally redress unfair working environments fall apart when workers cannot stand up for themselves. Moran calls this dynamic “a secret weapon for keeping down wages and working conditions.”

Using a wicked sort of revolving door style, “unscrupulous employers” hire the undocumented for lower wages, and if they happen to complain about conditions or pay, the employer calls the Department of Homeland Security or uses the threat to suppress challenges. This type of exploitation brings down the wages and conditions for all, and has no place in a modern society.

Jorge Rivas reports for RaceWire on recent attempts by some cable news networks to diminish the worth and meaning of Megrahtom Keflezighi’s New York marathon win. Even though Keflezighi legally immigrated and is an American citizen, to CNBC Sports Business Reporter Darren Rovell, the win was “empty.” And Keflezighi’s Americanness itself is merely “taking a test and living in our country.” Dividing “real Americans” from people like Keflezighi is an ugly reflex. It does nothing to prom0te a healthy country.

Emily Deprang reviews Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America for the Texas Observer. The story unfolds on a bus trip from Tucson to Houston and back and “details four young Mexican women” in varying legal situations—two with papers and two undocumented. DePrang calls the book “an epic journey through the realities of undocumented life” and feels that “every American—documented or not—deserves to meet Marisela, Yadira, Elissa, and Clara.”

Marcelo Ballve, reporting for New America Media, recaps the minute, but important, shifts that have come about since last week’s elections, and how they may aid the coming immigration reform showdown. “Viewed through the lens of the immigration issue,” the results are not dramatically telling on either side.

In states like Virginia and New Jersey, Republican hardliners gained power. But in other places, like New York’s 23rd district and California’s 10th district, the Democrats picked up two seats. This two seat gain should make it “just a bit easier for House Democrats to marshal the votes” they need to advance immigration reform soon. Ballve explores numerous other states, stances, and policies—such as the 287(g) program—and how the political landscape has been affected. Clearly, it’s all very much in play.

Finally, a note on Veteran’s Day from Alemayehu Addis, an immigrant and a veteran.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Power law: (aka “rich get richer effect”) is a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. For example, the more babies are born, the more people grow up to have babies; or the more money you have in the bank, the more money you earn to put in the bank.

Both of these are more volatile and less predictable online, which creates opportunities for independent media.

Chris Anderson popularized the term “The Long Tail” in a 2004 Wired magazine article that became the inspiration for a best-selling book. The concept has become the basis for countless business models. Before the term was prevalent, Amazon had already grown from the effects of a Long Tail—which describes the graphical representation of the popularity of all books available in the world, 80% or more of which are not sufficiently popular to justify the expense of stocking them in a traditional bookstore. The economics of combining broadly eclectic tastes with efficient online distribution is what make it work.

The Long Tail flips the conventional business logic of “power law” on its head by capturing value from the Long Tail of less popular, less profitable content. In recent years, the promise of The Long Tail has become a mirage for online media-makers. Successful long-tail strategies hinge on companies’ ability to provide a large scale of niche products at little to no marginal distribution costs. If the collective number of products in the tail is not large enough, it will not work. In other words, it mostly serves the interests of big corporations that can accumulate and distribute massive amounts of content, not independent producers who create the content. In fact, in his critique of Anderson in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell asked, “Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?”

To make matters worse, since news goes out of date quickly, the value of The Long Tail is limited for journalistic organizations. Furthermore, many types of media require considerable production expense, such as investigative journalism, television dramas or console video games. Even with a long time period, The Long Tail is often insufficient to recoup these costs. For example, Netflix’s long-tail model worked for distributing other producers’ films, but when they tried to produce and fund their own films, costs were prohibitive. As a result, NetFlix closed its Red Envelope Entertainment division in 2008 after investing in more than 100 film productions and losing money every year.

For the complete analysis, download Vol. 2 of The Big Thaw. We will post more tomorrow on the value of social cascades.

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

A clique of anti-choice Democrats in Congress joined forces with Republicans to write abortion access out of the House’s health care reform bill last Saturday. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) wants to force women to choose between affordable health insurance and abortion coverage, even if they pay for abortion coverage with their own money.

Pro-choice Democrats and women’s health activists are up in arms over the eleventh hour deal. Ellie Smeal of Ms. Magazine denounces the Stupak amendment as a betrayal of women:

Millions of poor and middle-class women would be denied abortion coverage and millions more would lose the coverage they already have, since 85 percent of private plans now cover abortion. Far from being abortion-neutral, the Stupak amendment is a giant step backward for women. It’s unacceptable. In the compromise to get the bill passed, women and their health-care rights were thrown under the bus.

Yesterday, The Pulse interviewed Jodi Jacobson, political director of RH Reality Check, about the implications of the Stupak amendment for reproductive choice in America. Jacobson explained that, if language from the Stupak amendment finds its way into the final health care bill, insurance companies would be forced to eliminate all abortion coverage if they wanted to participate in any aspect of the health care reform plan. Listen to the full interview here. (Note: there’s a slight delay before the audio starts.)

Jacobson calls the Stupak language a “monumental setback.” If an insurance plan accepts customers who take government subsidies, then nobody on that plan could have abortion coverage—not even those who were paying their whole premium out of pocket. In effect, the Stupak amendment would be “a total ban on public and private money for abortion coverage,” Jacobson said.

In TAPPED, Michelle Goldberg accuses the Democrats of “leaving women behind” in their rush to pass health care reform at any cost. Goldberg warns that if the amendment becomes law, Democrats will have handed the anti-abortion lobby its biggest victory since the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act.

In the Nation, Eyal Press argues that the Stupak amendment would be an especially cruel blow to poor women:

If this highly regressive amendment makes its way into the legislation that Barack Obama eventually signs, millions of less affluent women who obtain access to affordable health insurance will thus join the ranks of low-income women on Medicaid, most of whom live in states that don’t cover abortion procedures. The two-tiered system that dictates who in America has “choice” (more privileged women do, less affluent women do not) will be further entrenched.

Robin Marty of RH Reality Check wonders whether the Stupak amendment would apply to miscarriages as well as elective abortions. Sometimes, when a fetus dies in utero, doctors must surgically remove it. It’s the same procedure as an elective termination and it has the same name: Abortion. Last month, Marty lost a much-wanted pregnancy. Doctors laid out her options: a $1500 surgery, a $40 chemical abortion, or an interminable wait to expel the dead fetus naturally. Marty chose the surgery. She worries that the Stupak amendment would take that choice away from other women.

The House bill is not yet the law of the land. There is still time to strip the Stupak language out in conference (the merging process whereby the House bill is combined with whatever comes out of the Senate).

But will it actually get stripped out in the senate? Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) announced that “If it isn’t clear that government money is not to be used to fund abortions, I won’t vote for it.”

On a conference call yesterday, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) told The Pulse that he was optimistic that a compromise could be worked out. “Ben Nelson said he wasn’t going to support a bill if it isn’t clear that government money won’t be used to fund abortions,” Specter said, “Well, we can make it clear that if someone wants to buy abortion coverage with her own money, she can do it.”

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Acting Free of Institutions

“People are increasingly acting on their own, free of institutions. They are taking distinct actions on distinct issues online. If I was concerned about an issue in the past, I’d start an organization, open an office, get a bank account in order to organize letter-writing campaigns, do outreach to Congress. But, today, I might start a Facebook group and draw awareness without ever opening an office or a bank account,” says John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation.

Civic engagement, for example, can no longer be measured by formal affiliations (a basis for past research). In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam claimed a decline in “social capital” by pointing to declining participation in civic organizations. Today, however, affiliations may even be higher—they are simply happening in more informal and decentralized ways. In fact, some research has shown that online social networks have actually increased social capital in many new ways.

The implications for institutions are significant: their relationship with constituents is more casual than what was previously acceptable, traditional organizational hierarchies are flattening, and network effects are amplified independently of institutions. Twitter has succeeded, often in spite formal institution, because of its open platform. The government of Iran couldn’t even shut it down.

Don Tapscott, author of Growing up Digital, says that every institution faces a fundamental transformation. “People can now self-organize like never before. Young people have at their fingertips the most powerful tools, to find out what’s going on, to organize collective responses. Every institution in society is going to be naked and if you’re going to be naked, you better be buff.”

Readers Not Tied to Publishers

Today’s online users, particularly casual newsreaders, increasingly receive news from direct referrals and links from their social networks. Only approximately one quarter of casual newsreaders, who comprise most of Americans, say they trust a few news sources more than others. In contrast, two- thirds of hard-core newsreaders feel that way, which indicates the value of trustworthy sources remains high for at least a small segment of consumers. Furthermore, people increasingly consume news from multiple sources. A 2008 Pew Research Center survey asked news consumers to list their most frequented online news sites. The results mostly included portals and TV news sites, yet revealed considerable fragmentation across the board. Only eight websites were mentioned by more than 2% of respondents. Only Google and Yahoo! increased their perceived trustworthiness as news sources, compared to the center’s 2006 survey.

As a result, publication-centered news may continue to face greater challenges in turning readers’ fragmenting attention into a steady return of visits. Michael Hirschorn went as far as saying that, “The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands.”

The new rules of online engagement, according to Verclas, mean that there will be no central control. “It mutates and adapts; it’s flexible and agile,” she says. “We have no idea in the media how to do this. With the principles of decentralization, profits go away.”

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

On Friday, we learned that the U.S. unemployment rate officially broke 10% for the first time since the early Reagan years. This is about as bad as it gets for a modern, developed economy. No economic force takes a heavier toll on a society than rampant joblessness, and few personal setbacks take a deeper psychological toll than being out of a job for months on end. If Congress and President Obama don’t do something to create jobs fast, both are going to pay a hefty political price when next year’s mid-term elections roll around.

So how bad is it? In October, the economy shed 190,000 jobs and the unemployment rate jumped from 9.8% to 10.2%. That percentage is the most optimistic reading of the labor market in Friday’s report. If you take people who want full-time jobs but are settling for part-time work, then add those who have simply given up on finding a job, the rate is a massive 17.5%.

The problem is not that either Obama or Congress have failed to act on the problem, but rather that they have not done enough. When Congress was moving on Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package back in February, we were shedding upwards of 700,000 jobs a month. So the stimulus package has worked—it’s probably helped keep unemployment from jumping to 12% or 13%. But this is cold comfort to the nation’s 15.7 million unemployed, 5.6 million of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

As Robert Reich notes for Salon, Obama’s economic advisers dramatically underestimated how bad things would get when they crafted the stimulus package. As a result, the package was too small and unemployment has remained high. Obama needs to go back to Congress and demand more economic relief funding. Republicans will continue to whine about government spending to excuse their obstructionism, of course, and conservative Democrats will probably start sweating, too—Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) helped cut back the original stimulus bill in February to help boost his “centrist” credentials. This of course had nothing to do with economics or policy. Government spending is what saves the economy in a recession. In a downturn as severe as this one, it takes a lot of spending to turn things around.

But as Reich notes, Nelson and his cohorts will have a lot more to worry about in the 2010 elections if the economy doesn’t actually improve over the next year. And few economists think it will. The Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a conservative economist named Douglas Elmendorf, projects an average unemployment rate of over 10% in 2010. That’s worse than this year. Democrats from swing districts need to support economic relief packages. Continued economic malaise will severely hurt them at the polls.

Congress finally took some action on joblessness on Thursday, voting to extend unemployment benefits for an additional 14 weeks. If we want the economy to recover, we need people to spend money, but if people aren’t working, they don’t have any money to spend. So the government cuts people checks to help them get by and stimulate a demand for goods and services. Even most conservative economists thinks this is a good idea.

But as Kevin Drum notes for Mother Jones, the soundness of the policy did nothing to prevent Republicans from fighting the effort to extend benefits tooth-and-nail. The bill had to overcome three—that’s right, three—filibusters in the Senate from Republicans, who held up the bill for weeks for no apparent reason. In a blog post for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen explains the economic cost of this obstructionism: In the weeks of delay, 200,000 people looking for work stopped receiving benefits.

But extending unemployment benefits will not solve our economic woes. The total program is just $2.4 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars the government put up to salvage Wall Street. $2.4 billion is not enough to reverse the unemployment trend. Cutting the checks certainly helps, but as Matthew Rothschild emphasizes for The Progressive, we need an economic policy that actually puts people back to work. We’ve known for months that the stimulus was too small and watched the labor market continue to deteriorate. We need more than tweaks at the economic margins, we need a robust job creation plan.

As Stephen Franklin notes for Working In These Times, we already know that the recession has created a significant jump in the nation’s poverty rate. According to official government statistics, the rate climbed from 12.5% to 13.2% in 2008, the largest increase since 1991. But the National Academy of Science thinks the government statistics are misleading, as they account for rising costs associated with medical care, transportation, child care and different regional living standards, as Franklin notes. Taking these factors into account, the National Academy of Sciences calculates the actual poverty rate to be 15.8%. That’s an additional 7 million people living in poverty, for a total of over 47 million. That’s more than the entire population of the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas combined. What’s worse, we don’t have poverty statistics for this year, when the most severe economic damage was been dealt.

Workers are facing tough economic prospects around the world. Writing for The Nation, Kristina Rizga details Latvia’s economic turmoil. Just like the US, overexcited bankers in Latvia inflated a massive real estate bubble that took down the entire economy when it burst. But with the bubble burst, much of the country is now out of a job and stuck with a mortgage worth far less than what they paid for it. It’s almost exactly the same story we’ve seen at home.

No domestic economic problem is more pressing than our epic levels of unemployment. We need another round of stimulus to get people working again. If not, we’ll see the same public unrest here as in Eastern Europe.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Effects of Diversity

“Independent, progressive journalism doesn’t understand that progressives are speaking past Black and Brown audiences, but are dependent on Black and Brown votes,” Irving says. “They are condescending to these communities, afraid of these communities, and are not supporting and building in these communities. The reality is that five to ten years from now Browns and Blacks are going to make up more than 50% of the vote.”

Attitudes about diversity are changing in the United States. “There is a lot less concern among the younger generation about the racial divide,” says Irving. “For some Black Americans it’s important that the media they access is Black. But for younger people who want Black perspectives, it doesn’t have to be from Black people all the time. Black is one of the things they are—they have grown up in a diverse world. Some of the walls we’re seeing now are crumbling.”

Shifting demographics create both challenges and opportunities for content producers: Different groups use media in different ways. Irving notes that for Latinos, Facebook, MySpace and SMS texting drove greater adoption of technology. Furthermore, according to a 2008 Pew Research Center study, African-American Internet users are 18% more likely to watch online video than white Internet users and 15% more likely to have a profile page on a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook. In terms of gender differences, for instance, women tend to watch network TV news (particularly morning programs such as the Today show), while more men watch cable TV shows. It is insufficient for a publisher to simply make content available anytime, anywhere on any device. They must also customize content for different audiences on different devices.

Effects of Millennial Generation

“I’m concerned that independent media organizations are not figuring out how to tap into the next generation of news consumers,” said Erin Polgreen of The Media Consortium (TMC). Young people (born between mid 1980s to early 1990s) are leaving print and television news, and for a long time incumbent organizations believed that they might eventually come back. “In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has increased substantially over the past decade,” according to a 2008 Pew Research Center study. “About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998.”

Nevertheless, the Millennial Generation’s members are world-changers with strong democratic values, which indicates that they are interested in information about the world around them. Don Tapscott, who authored the 2008 book, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing the World, explains: “This is the first generation to come of age in digital age. They have enormously strong values—they care a lot. It’s not true about this being the ‘narcissistic me’ generation. Civic engagement in U.S. has been growing decade-to-decade and is currently at an all time high, and it has turned into political action. This generation is going to change the world.”

If independent media can experiment with bold new ways to engage audiences, they may tap a new generation of users that will transform the world and how the news is reported. “In the progressive community, (young) people will have the more universal POV, and also be the ambassadors for their communities,” Irving says. “Don’t expect progressive media to have a direct path initially. They need to find trusted voices inside the community that can help create the echo chamber.”

For more information about globalization and its effects, download Vol. 2 of The Big Thaw.

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

Senate Democrats in the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) finally squelched Republican boycotts and passed a version of the climate bill yesterday morning. Last week, Republican Senators refused to show up to committee hearings in an attempt to stall the bill. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that EPW has now set “the stage for other panels to amend the legislation.”

To no one’s surprise, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) immediately complained about the legislation on Fox News. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) was the lone Democrat that did not vote, which Inhofe interpreted as a sign that the bill is “dead.”

Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was much more upbeat and argued that the Republican boycott actually marred their credibility. “The absence of the Republicans during the Environmental Protection Agency’s presentation was a clear message that their criticism of the EPA analysis was not a substantive one,” Boxer said. “We are pleased that despite the Republican boycott, we have been able to move the bill.”

Inhofe also condemned Boxer for passing the bill through the committee unconventionally. Aaron Wiener writes for The Washington Independent that “Without a quorum that included at least two Republicans, the committee was unable to open formal debate on amendments to the bill. But passage requires just a simple majority, and Chairman Boxer and the Democratic leadership chose to forgo amendments in order to move the legislation quickly, given that the end of the GOP boycott was nowhere in sight.”  Luckily, now that the bill is moving on to other committees, Inhofe and his Republican EPW colleagues will no longer have much of a say on the bill’s final outcome.

With Copenhagen just a month away, Kate Sheppard argues for Mother Jones that the odds of passing a viable climate bill before the climate summit are very grim. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will run a series of studies after each committee’s climate and energy bills are combined into a single piece of legislation. Even though the bill passed through the EPW committee, other committees, such as the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Finance Committee, and Agriculture Committee, need to weigh in before the bill is reviewed by the EPA and sent for a vote in the full Senate. How will this affect climate talks in Copenhagen? Sheppard writes that, “Without the urgency imposed by the Copenhagen deadline, any little momentum that the climate bill had could disappear very fast.”

While this news is discouraging, Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly points out that, “It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t too terribly long ago that reports said the same thing about health care reform. Legislative battles can often take some unpredictable twists and turns.” This is certainly true, but in order for the legislation to pass, more Republicans will have to get on board. Democrats are trying to gain Republican support for a bipartisan bill by pledging to meet them halfway.

“For several GOP lawmakers, the key on energy policy is building new nuclear power plants. So, Dems are willing to make a deal — they’ll back approval for expedited construction of U.S. nuclear reactors in exchange for support for the rest of the bill,” Benen writes.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC.) showed that some Republicans are capable of exerting leadership. In a press conference with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Graham criticized Republicans’ childish behavior toward climate change legislation. He asked, “If you can’t participate in solving the problem, then why are you up here?”

David Roberts writes for Grist that the three senators pledged to work with the White House to rescue the climate bill. The senators’ plan is not meant to undermine Sen. Boxer’s efforts but to strengthen the bill overall through a “dual track.”

“By stepping in, Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are letting the political establishment know that the Very Serious grown-ups are back in charge. (It’s pretty telling that Kerry feels the need to craft another bill alongside the one with his name on it.) They will go to the White House, close the door, and hash out what kind of bill can really pass,” writes Roberts.

The road ahead won’t be easy. Congress’ inability to pass climate change legislation could ruin any chance of success in Copenhagen. In weeks to come, the bill will move on to other Senate committees and the world will be watching. Stay tuned.

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