Radically Rural has extended the ticket offer for NENPA members through the end of next week September 17, 2021. Use the promo code NENPA for the member-only discount. Please contact Terry Williams, twilliams@keenesentinel.com, if you experience any issue signing up.
Dear NENPA colleagues,
I’m writing to all of my friends in NENPA with an invitation to attend Radically Rural’s Community Journalism program this year; it will be staged in person in Keene, N.H., and online.
As we hope to finally emerge from a pandemic and seek out footing, I am enthusiastic that the sessions we’ve assembled for Radically Rural, Sept 22-23, can be helpful toward that objective.
September 22 I 10:30 a.m.
Building Trust: Measures to secure faith in local journalism
Speaker: Joy Mayer, director, Trusting News
Mayer, director for Trusting News, founded Trusting News in 2016; she leads a panel discussion on the ways and means local journalists can improve bonds with readers and confidence in the news they produce, all leading to a more trusting readership.
Panel: Lynn Walsh, assistant director, Trusting News; Peter Huoppi, director of multimedia, The Day, New London, CT, Crystal Good, founder, Black by God – THE WEST VIRGINIAN.
September 22 I 2:15 p.m.
Funding News: Media organizations successfully find philanthropic help for their missions
Speaker: Frank Mungeam, chief innovation officer, Local Media Association
A panel of experts provides a road map for crowdfunding, landing grants, and the future of philanthropic support of newsrooms. Whether you are a for-profit or nonprofit organization, there are ways to build more community support for journalism.
Panel: Blake Kaplan, editor, and general manager, Sun Herald, Biloxi, MS; Manuel C. Coppola, publisher, Nogales International, Nogales, AZ; Traci Bauer, vice president, print and digital content, Adams Publishing Group
September 23 I 10 a.m.
Crazy Good: Tools to make you a better – and more efficient – journalist
Speaker: Samantha Sunne, freelance investigative journalist, and expert on tech and tools, presents our annual “50 Ideas” program. This is a fast-paced romp through hacks, sources, tech, and techniques to make you a better, smarter, and savvier reporter and editor.
Radically Rural is a partnership between The Keene Sentinel and the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship. The summit features tracks in community journalism, arts, and culture, lands, and community, main streets and downtowns, clean energy, healthcare, and entrepreneurship. For more information on the Radically Rural summit and to purchase tickets, please visit the event’s website at www.radicallyrural.org.
Use the promo code NENPA for a member-only discount.
Sincerely,
Terrence L. Williams
President & COO
Looking for that next step in your career? Searching for your dream job? What better way to celebrate Labor Day than with some fresh newspaper and journalism job listings throughout New England!
Build trust or lose readers, listeners, and viewers. That’s the challenge facing news organizations these days, says a key speaker for Radically Rural’s Community Journalism Track.
Perspective: Protect assembly and petition by preserving listening at public meetings
Two of the least-known freedoms protected by the First Amendment — the rights of assembly and petition — are being tested in today’s rancorous, confrontational social atmospherics.
With confrontation comes vexing problems, for both speakers who fear retaliation from opponents and the government officials who often must preside over meetings that run from contentious to violent.
DEMOCRACY REQUIRES ROBUST BUT PEACEABLE DISCUSSION
To be sure, more of us than seen in recent decades are speaking out peacefully, from those opposed to what they see as heavy-handed government enforcement of COVID-19 restrictions to Black Lives Matter supporters calling for police reform.
Passions run high. The words, like the issues, are strong and challenging. But the process of self-governance calls for degrees of patience, tolerance and often — in the final push to a workable policy — compromise. The First Amendment itself provides protection when we “peaceably assemble” and “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
No strangers to the hot tempers, provocative speech and outright violence that accompanied political turmoil in their day — think Revolutionary War — the nation’s founders felt compelled to provide protections in the amendment for two contrary ideas: We can speak in tones, terms and words that provide for what the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 called “robust, uninhibited and wide open” discussion of public issues. But then the founders provided that conceptual counterweight word just before assembly and petition: “peaceably.”
SPEAKING HAS A COROLLARY: LISTENING
While the First Amendment allows no government judgment about the content or viewpoint of what we say, we ought to be worthy of its protections by having something worth saying.
And it follows that if it was worth saying, it’s worth hearing — if only to be better prepared with a counterargument.
Far too often today, that entire thread that supports our core freedoms is lost in the heat of the moment — or in intentional disruption that, no matter how loudly one proclaims patriotism or waves a flag, is just as anti-American as any foreign foe.
We have “robust” public discussions on small and large issues, not just to vent our emotions as a kind of civic therapy, but to parse approaches, proposals and legislation and determine that which best serves the greatest number of our fellow citizens, hopefully in the shortest amount of time.
The “heckler’s veto” and intentionally packing meeting rooms with vocal opposition to intimidate public officeholders are tactics as old as time, but that does not make them valid in a participatory democracy.
WHERE FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTIONS END
Federal and state courts through the years have held that the public has a right to attend and speak at government meetings — but also have upheld the authority of public officials to set reasonable “time, place and manner” rules to ensure orderly sessions or deal with intentional disruption.
Such rules walk a fine line between protected free speech on matters of public interest and allowing government to carry out its responsibilities. Courts consistently have said government officials cannot restrict speakers because of their viewpoints, however controversial or critical.
But free speech protections do not cover threats of immediate violence — which may well include protesters threatening harm to speakers in the parking lot following a meeting. Even more importantly, such threats have a multiplier effect, likely chilling speech far beyond the specific target. A new survey by the Freedom Forum, to be released Sept. 22, finds significant numbers of our fellow Americans today fear retaliation if they voice their opinions.
Let’s turn to Franklin again: As he was leaving the Constitutional Convention, he reportedly was asked what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
For more than two centuries, we have kept that republic in no small degree because we have freely spoken to each other, secure from government interference or punishment — benefiting from that shared wisdom Franklin noted.
And, just as certainly, we have kept that republic because so many times we also have listened.