Home-Grown News For Key Biscayne

Photo credit: Kiko Ricote

TO OUR READERS:
A letter from the publisher

Homegrown news: the tensile strength of democracy.

It can be disorienting to confront the diminished relevance of and even skepticism about news in society.  After all, news traditionally implies some validated report on something new and noteworthy, hopefully verified by a credible source.  How do we navigate in our lives without news presumed to be reliable? How do we reliably differentiate news from propaganda, advocacy or marketing?  The answers ultimately depend on our ability to discern “truth,” pointing to the importance of a good education. But even well-developed powers of discernment must rely on external sources of information. Whatever the nature of “truth” – whether objective or relativistic – decision-making requires external orientation in some manner, to some degree. There’s a lot of variability in how that happens.  Some find cues in bubble-media: echo-chambers reinforcing pre-disposed attitudes. Some rely on social media, channeling an unfiltered flood of information. Some mine information as real-time anthropologists, ferreting out what they need or think they need from all types of source materials accessible in the vast, virtual modern-age repository of records and ideas. Many still read the newspapers.

Legacy journalism is stressed by economics, e-commerce and changing consumer preferences.  A newspaper may still be waiting on your lawn at dawn every morning, but unlike days of yore, many people find that newspaper to be inessential. City dailies, produced with ever-thinner resources, are shadows of their former selves. Television news tends toward superficiality, or weaponized polemics in the case of cable news. Grassroots sources like YouTube and WhatsApp are increasingly dominant informants.

Is this a problem?  It is, if the citizenry is information-deprived; if gossip supplants objectivity.  Here, locally, we’re grateful to retain our venerable Islander News. Local papers are increasingly rare and increasingly precious. But we see that pressures in the publication business create an opportunity and possibly the need to support and supplement the traditional print media. Recognizing this, the Miami-based Knight Foundation recently announced $300 million in grants to rebuild and strengthen “the local news ecosystems” across the nation. Backing that investment, last week the Knight Foundation hosted a two-day conference in Miami, focused on seed work for nothing less than protecting democracy and rebuilding trust in institutions by ensuring access to news and information, locally, from the ground up.  As the Foundation’s CEO, Alberto Ibargüen, put it, “without that reliable news report, you can’t figure out how to run local government. It isn’t rocket science. We’re rebuilding a local news ecosystem, reliable and sustainable, and we’re doing it in a way that anyone who cares can participate.”

We launched Key News online last week to build on our local news ecosystem.  We see a healthy appetite for local news and information in communities like ours, where residents self-identify with the community with a measure of pride and interest in local affairs; where there’s strong civic engagement and an activated democracy. The notion follows that the local democracy can be strengthened where the locals themselves take responsibility to amass and disseminate local news and information. The dedication to do this, “by the people, for the people”, is itself a community-building exercise.  And, we think, a source of trust.

With administrative support (but not journalistic involvement) from the Key Biscayne Community Foundation, our purpose is to strengthen the community and our local brand of democracy through on-the-ground local reporting, examining local governance and also our cultural life – athletics, our environment, health, real estate, religion, business – anything and everything that makes Key Biscayne the enriched community that it is.

I am serving as publisher; an integrity function mainly, separate from reporting.  We’re building an editorial and reporting team, drawing from locals and led by Tony Winton, a veteran journalist. We’re exploring how the The Associated Press might support our local initiative, and we’ll be inviting Key Biscayners with particular interests to be “stringers,” to cover news in text and photos. We’ll host thoughtful opinion articles – clearly labeled as such – to promote informed debates.

We share the Knight Foundation’s premise that local democracy is strengthened by residents sharing in the responsibility for gathering and disseminating local news.  Key Biscayne is a perfect living laboratory to test the premise – that local people invested in their own community, with a tradition of civic engagement, with local knowledge and perspectives, can produce news and information rooted in and tailored for the local audience in a distinctively useful way.  By doing this, working in concert with the Islander News and others, we hope to strengthen and perpetuate healthy aspects of our community. That’s a mission we all should get behind.

FRANK CAPLAN
Publisher