The Folks Are Coming

By Donna Ladd Friday, April 27, 2007 10:45 a.m. CDT

A JFP reader commented on our Web site Tuesday that it is a very different world in which citizens can watch live feeds of a trial on WAPT's Web site and then click to jacksonfreepress.com and comment on it, ask questions and have them immediately addressed by the lawyers obsessed with the site. It is, indeed.

We are seeing many crazy things this week during the trial of Mayor Frank Melton and his two bodyguards for destroying a Ridgeway Street duplex, and some of them aren't encouraging (especially the folks who don't believe the Constitution applies to poor blacks). But one thing is amazing: Just how much our Web site is, and has been, intimately involved in the saga of the mayor.

More important is the engaged citizenry that has resulted. Had Jackson residents been this engaged over the years, and this interested, we likely wouldn't be at this place in the city's history. But I'll come back to that.

Most of you know that JFP reporter Adam Lynch broke the Ridgeway Street story on our Web site on Sept. 1, 2006, just as many of the city's major stories of the last two years broke first there. Witnesses have told us that they told The Clarion-Ledger and other media earlier that week. But those media did not do this story until after the JFP did it.

In the journalism world, we call that "megaphoning," and it is a primary role of a small-but-quality newspaper such as ours. People who talk to other people read our paper. And boy, do they read "the blogs," as the JFP Web site is now known around town.

We came out of the gate blogging when we launched the paper in 2002. We believed strongly that an engaged citizenry must have a way to talk to and hear each other. That did not exist in Jackson with a pitiful, superficial daily newspaper (that hadn't bothered to notice the problems with Melton over the years, for instance), and weeklies targeting black people, or white people, but not all races.

We were on the bleeding edge of interactivity on the Internet, with corporate media like The Clarion-Ledger now scrambling to do what we already do so well—get citizens talking, and posting, and blogging, and questioning, and factchecking, and thinking.

Thinking, of course, is the ultimate goal. A citizenry that thinks together can build together. A citizenry that comes together to question potential corruption in elected officials and the violation of people's rights can together build a stronger city foundation.

It's amusing to watch outlets like The Clarion-Ledger trying to play catchup—when they don't even get the paradigm. The Ledger had pretty decent activity on their forums, but they didn't moderate enough and ended up with a bunch of loud jerks drowning out the thoughtful people with various views.

They then decided to change the format into a dumb, unfriendly "StoryChat" format that doesn't even allow readers to post links outside the site. In so doing, of course, they missed one of the main points of user-generated content—to factcheck by linking to and discussing a variety of sources. This ability is a prime difference between blogging and talk radio—keeping us honest online—but The Ledger couldn't stand the idea of readers linking to other sites (presumably like ours). So what do the readers do? Blog elsewhere.

Corporate media don't get what people want from the Internet. They want an alternative to corporate media—to the gatekeepers that decide what they can read (or where they can link) and who keep valuable information away from them if they don't want to offend major advertisers. In the pre-blogging world, that worked for a paper like The Ledger. They could be the arbiter of what was news and what wasn't—and then use the excuse that they were giving people what they wanted.

That lie won't work any longer. All it takes is a "small magazine distributed outside grocery stores" (as Melton attorney Merrida Coxwell called the JFP Monday as he worked diligently to eliminate jurors who read our blogs) dedicated to good journalism with a saucy band of bloggers who will challenge and discuss and push for progress. As John Dewey said, "Democracy begins in conversation."

Even if Melton walks, Jackson is facing a new media climate and an engaged citizenry that is not likely to roll over and allow the likes of him to emerge again, riding high on a house of sensationalistic cards, built with half-truths, scare talk and empty promises about "ending crime in 90 days."

As we face the formidable challenge of how to rid our city of an ugly cancer, and re-focus solidly on our Renaissance, it is vital to remember that Melton wasn't created in a day, or in a few months, or in one campaign. He has been building his "folk hero" persona for many years in Jackson, girded by a non-questioning media that prickles at the suggestion that citizens have the right to question them (or him) and their cherry-picked "facts."

Imagine, say, Melton's fact-challenged "Bottom Line" rhetoric over the years. Had the JFP blogs been fully operational, our bloggers would have been factchecking and challenging him within seconds, then shaming the corporate media into reporting the real story, as we have done over the last two years with him. The JFP journalist-blogger team would have exposed him for what he was long ago—a tragic figure who really loves to play pretend-cop. We would have questioned why and how he got away with "bringing in" alleged criminals, thus screwing up the evidence before it got to the prosecution stage.

That is, our citizen journalists would have blazed a trail that the corporate media could have followed, rather than blindly leading us to a point where the city is hamstrung by a man the city knew so little about.

I know the trial can go either way. Certainly, justice will not be served if Melton and his helpers are not punished for spitting on the law and causing such damage. But as I listen to his attorney obsess over whether or not the jurors have read "the blogs," and our citizens' comments, I know that Jackson will be stronger when we get to the other end of this thing due to growing civic engagement.

Our citizens are getting more involved, more questioning, and more demanding of better media by the day, and they're going to help make it happen. Therein, folks, lies the path to a better day for Jackson.

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