As a result, and particularly in industrialized countries, and areas with developed telecommunications infrastructure, the advertising revenues of newspapers are shrinking. Many newspapers have consolidated or lost circulation, have reduced their reporting staffs, closed satellite offices and curtailed deliveries.
At the same time, the public is increasingly accustomed to interactive, real-time communication via e-mail, blogs and Web-based social networks. However, experts such as Robert Putnam, writing in his book, "Bowling Alone," see a link between active news consumption and active civic involvement at the local level.
There is a need for a service which links news and community at the local level, using the best tools of physical and virtual engagement.
"Newscafes.org" is a system for creating and sustaining civic engagement through a network of coffee shops which double as community news and social networking centers.
In brief: Newscafes recreates the historic functions of 18th century English and Colonial America coffee houses which spawned journalism and the concept of free speech. They were crucibles for democracy, a shared space for uninhibited debate and discussion of issues and events.
In no small part, they were responsible for establishing a sense of shared concerns in the face of diverse, often divisive opinions; a meeting place where businessmen, artists, politicians, farmers and blue-collar workers could share the latest happenings around town, the news and issues of the day. Coffee houses helped create a sense of community, and Newscafes. proposes to recreate this environment that is essential for a thriving democracy.
Newscafes is a concept for adding to current local coffee houses a news-sharing module that would reprise its historical role of encouraging discourse and debate about local issues, and how extralocal issues translate into local consequences.
The products of this public dialogue -- news stories, opinion pieces, investigations, features, old-fashioned broadsides -- would then be processed at the coffee house location, in a transparent way, for promulgation on a Newscafes.com Web site, for broadcast on radio and video via Web streaming, and for collection into a print product.
Newscafes is be hyperlocal, accessible and transparent focal points for disseminating information and for sharing ideas.
Newscafes will have designated "News Hours," when Newscafes staffers will be in residence to collect and edit material submitted by Newscafes.members and others, and to update the Web site.
A signature Newscafes event will be the monthly (or biweekly, depending on the quantity of content) "Town Meeting," during which people gather to discuss the material that.s been gathered at Newscafes. and news generated within the café about the world outside the café.
Newscafes provides a venue to do what citizens from a diverse demographic in a democracy ought easily to be able to do -- meet and talk. By adding the component of easy access to media consumption and creation, it directs conversation towards the civic sphere.
It creates for the café a natural, branded niche at the center of that sphere, and its activities and forums would, of course, be available on the Web, to any community members wishing to access it. But in order to participate fully in the Newscafes. and Newscafes.com content-creating environment, people have to go to the café itself.
Newscafes takes advantage of the culture of modern coffee houses where people congregate for company and wireless access. Newscafes. offers them an active, physical avenue for connectivity to the democratic process, each person side by side -- and, not insignificantly, it reinforces the re-emergence of America.s downtown cores and village centers as vigorous, vital locations for originating civic discourse and debate.
The Newscafes, as a component of the coffeehouse, would become self-sustaining through advertising, sponsorships, donations and volunteerism, achievable either as for-profit or not-for-profit entities.
To learn more about Newscafes, please contact David Scribner or Bill Densmore at newscafes (at) newshare.com.