I am delighted that Montclair State University (MSU) has won its bid to take over New Jersey public television, for in this moment I see an opening to reimagine and reinvent public media in a new image — as the public’s media.
And nowhere better for that to happen than in New Jersey, where threads have been coming together over years — most running through MSU — to support and grow the broader news ecosystem in the state. This support has come from private-public partnerships working with the university in what we have come to call the New Jersey Model.
Adding public television adds one more piece. Montclair State has first-rate television facilities and the chance to involve students and faculty in producing content for the channels. But to me, television is the least of it.
What really excites me is that Montclair has the opportunity to build on the strong foundation of its NJ News Commons and Center for Cooperative Media, which now serve more than 300 independent, community-based news providers, new and old, small and large.
Here I want to tell you the story of how this has evolved from what I have seen. I don’t mean to paint myself as a Zelig of the tale, as most often, I merely witnessed and cheered what has been happening. But I have been proud to have had the opportunity to watch as a new vision for local news, media, and community has been built here — a vision I’ve long believed in. I am also proud to say that I am a fellow at MSU’s Center for Cooperative Media, where I hope to help work toward that vision.
For me, this saga goes back three decades, when I began beating the drum for thinking of news through the lenses of ecosystems and communities over newsrooms and corporations. I was doing that while working as president and creative director of Advance.net, where we started NJ.com while developing hyperlocal news, and then in my research on news ecosystems and innovation at CUNY.
In New Jersey, this history stretches back at least as far a 2011, when then-Governor Christie sold off the state’s public media — and bandwidth in an FCC spectrum auction — to plug a budget hole. It was a short-sighted decision that robbed the state of its only broadcast outlets. The president of Montclair State at the time, Susan Cole, very much wanted to take over NJ’s public media. The state instead gave the TV and radio stations to WNET and WNYC in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia.
When that happened, an emergency meeting was convened in Newark with journalists and political leaders brought together to consider what to do about our state and news. Some wanted to start a newsroom. I instead beat my ecosystem drum, arguing that we had the chance to support the growth of news outlets in communities across the state, now made possible by the internet.
Soon, the Dodge Foundation — where I was an advisor and would serve for a time on the board — convinced Montclair State that it had the chance to support and grow the state’s independent and open news ecosystem with the creation of the NJ News Commons, headed at first by hyperlocal blogger Debbie Galant. At Advance, I had tried to persuade Debbie to start a Montclair blog on our site. “Good idea, Jeff,” she said. “But why the hell would I do that for you?” She was right. Instead, she founded Baristanet, a pioneering, independent hyperlocal blog that lives on in a merger that is now Montclair Local.
Debbie had the trust of the ragtag bunch of very independent local bloggers who were trying to make a go of it covering their towns online — and who frankly did not trust big, old news media. The Commons’ mission was to support those local news outlets with training, mentorship, and collaboration — not to compete with them by making a newsroom and content with it.
The Commons led, in turn to the founding of the Center for Cooperative Media, which under the leadership and vision of Stefanie Murray has been doing pathbreaking work. The Center has just launched a news-sharing network across the state’s ecosystem, funded by the Google News Initiative. It conducts research on communities’ information needs. It helps local news sites with their business and technology and it brings them together for collaborative projects. This is the foundation on which the real public media of New Jersey — the public’s media — is already being built.
After Christie denuded New Jersey’s media, the legislature was lobbied (read: guilted) to fund support for New Jersey news with the creation of the NJ Civic Information Consortium, which gives grants to applicants from across the state that meet its criteria for supporting the information needs of under-served communities and developing new models for sustainable news.
Together Montclair State’s Center and the Consortium — working with the hundreds of outlets in the state — have demonstrated what could be done when private and public, journalistic and academic entities work together for the good of communities. Back then, Tom Glaisyer of the Democracy Fund, dubbed what was happening here the New Jersey Model, and he vowed to spread it to other states in the nation.
I’ve testified about the New Jersey Model before legislators in California, Oregon, and Illinois as I’ve tried to dissuade them from passing legislation written by lobbyists for the old, hedge-fund-controlled newspaper industry as it seeks handouts via protectionist, retributive taxes aimed at tech companies. Instead, I say, look at what Jersey has done to build something bigger and better, more open, inclusive, and innovative, by offering support to folks who want to cover and serve their communities.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that old media should be left out of this future. I just joined the board of the not-for-profit that acquired NJ Hills Media, a chain of local weekly papers and sites. Through the Montclair State connection, NJ Hills is reaping benefits from the connection.
Enter MSU’s Professor Carrie Brown. We worked together at CUNY to build a new program in engagement journalism that she directed, centering communities and their priorities in students’ work. Both of us left CUNY and came to Montclair, where Carrie is bringing the values of the movement she has pioneered to classes and to the ecosystem.
In the latest term, Carrie had her engagement students go to listen to residents of Parsippany, where NJ Hills just started a new, online-only and free news site. A few weeks ago, the students presented the reporter covering the town, Nicole Flanagan, and her boss, NJ Hills CEO and publisher Joe Territo, with their findings and recommendations for coverage. Halfway through the presentations, Joe turned to me, saying he wanted help like that in every one of the towns the company covers.
Meanwhile, at Montclair, we are looking at other new programs, including potentially working with libraries in towns across the state as information hubs for their communities. That, too, is part of New Jersey’s news ecosystem.
This is the environment into which the new New Jersey public media fits. Stefanie Murray, alongside Keith Strudler, dean of MSU’s College of Communication and Media, and the university’s president, Jonathan Koppell, created the winning bid to convince the state to bring our stations back to our air after WNET decided to drop its franchise. I had no role in the process, other than getting to read and comment on the proposal in progress. I am confident that MSU’s team will use this opportunity to bring imagination, innovation, and inclusion to the task.
Here is Strudler illustrating how this all comes together around MSU’s vision of the public’s media:
We’ll have staff reporters — North, Central and South Jersey coverage to start, with a full-time Trenton reporter as an aspiration. But the bigger story is what’s already out there. There are hundreds of content creators across New Jersey — people doing serious storytelling on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, local news sites — who already have audiences and are already doing good work. Our goal, working with the Center for Cooperative Media, is to figure out how we partner with those people. How we give them a bigger platform. How we extend our reach without pretending we can do everything ourselves….
The Center for Cooperative Media has been better than almost anyone in the country at building networks of storytellers across platforms. That’s going to be a real asset. And the best approach is to go to those communities and ask what they need — not come in from the top down and say we know what New Jersey wants.
Amen.
This is also a chance to rethink television. In the long-ago, I was TV critic for People and TV Guide, and so I have opinions. That is why, in the mid-1990s, my frequent boss and mentor Jim Willse — former editor and publisher of the NY Daily News, later to be the editor of Advance’s Star-Ledger — brought me in to consult on a project to launch a 24-hour news channel in NJ. I devised an eccentric content plan that proposed building the studio in New Jersey’s real main street — a mall. And so we could hear the voice of the people, I borrowed an idea from Canadian TV pioneer Moses Znaimer, whose CityTV built a “speakers’ corner” on a Toronto street, so anyone could record a message that might be included in a TV show. What became News12 New Jersey did build a kiosk to capture vox pop and parked it in a mall, for a little while, until Advance left the project.
Of course, today, we have the ultimate speakers’ corner in the internet, where even with its problems, communities can come together to share knowledge and need. Journalism should begin by listening to them. This is where and this is when the public’s media can be built, here in my home state, Jersey.
