I know my friends in Bloomsburg, PA aren’t going to give up. What I really hope is that the town finds ways to come together to fix what the root cause of the problem is — there just may not be a way to do that. In a lot of ways even this video can’t tell the story of what is happening in Bloomsburg, but at the moment it is one of the few I have seen.
This morning, while I was in an active online debate with folks about the need for open access to Bloomsburg Flood news at the Press Enterprise, I got an email from a producer at AccuWeather asking if she could use some of the Creative Commons marked photos I had posted from last weekend. These are the same photos that have gotten over 75,000 views in the last few days. While the Press has decided to close access, AccuWeather decided that they would seek assets from wherever they could on the open web — and all they had to do was ask and give attribution.
Up until today I hadn’t seen a professionally produced piece focusing on the stories of the people in Bloomsburg. And this one is built on the back of open content. This is why we need to find a way to make the news of this event open — so others with a much wider audience than any of ours individually can share them. Sure, I love they used my pictures … but what I am most happy about is that they are using them to expose what has happened and have now built an open resource for someone else to use in the future to learn about these events. That is why open needs to win and this is why I’ve had enough of closed news ecosystems.
Besides nature, this idea of recurring floods and a sense of being fed up is not referring to a chronic mismanagement in Bloomsburg? I mean why is there no coverage? WHy are insurance agencies backing out? I guess my question is their a theory of municipal negligence and some sense of having something to hide that provides a subtext to this narrative?
I am afraid something is afoot in Bloomsburg as it relates to the closed nature of the news cycle. Just last night my wife and I were discussing how all this might fit together. Amazing it has taken us this long to link ongoing challenges with standard rhetoric in the local news ecosystem … time for a deeper dive.
I could really see a documentary on this event but also on the closing down of the news as you’ve described it. All of this really illustrates the divisions of pre and post internet thinking, there is a narrative here not only of the victims and their personal stories but of responsible dissemination of critical information that could be used to gather resources and aid for the victims of the flood. After learning about all of this in your blog and not seeing any news coverage I really feel disconnected from that part of PA as if it is in a very far away place, which is really a shame.
Justin, I would love to produce just such a documentary. The lack of open access to news is maddening on so many levels.
I would love to direct such a doc, I bet crowd source funding could be used to rent good equipment and leave a polished piece. Perhaps we should talk more about this if your up for it, it might hopefully shed light on the plight of the town and it’s citizens and hopefully increase disaster relief efforts.
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