Networked neighborhoods study

Out of London, an interesting set of documents forms a study of online network neighborhood news sites, how people use them and the impact on those who do use them.

You'll find them at networkedneighbourhoods.com.

I've only gotten to the summary (PDF), but the general thrust is this: "The research shows that they serve to enhance the sense of belonging, democratic influence, neighbourliness and involvement in their area. Participants claim more positive attitudes towards public agencies where representatives of those agencies are engaging online."

Among other things:

• 42% of those surveyed said they met someone in their neighborhood online
• 75% said participation on the sites made it more likely people would pull together to improve their neighborhoods
• 69% felt a greater sense of belonging
• From a quarter to about two-thirds (depending on the site) said people make negative remarks online, but three-quarters said they are quickly countered.

In other words, these are the sorts of things traditional community media once did and, where they continue to exist, often still do. I have not come across details yet on what community media might have pre-existed in these areas, the attitudes of those surveyed toward any existing media and their community-building roles, or any effect such sites might have had on those relationships.

But this looks to be useful reading and a block on which to build further research.

J-lab/New Voices: Thoughts from the front lines

As mentioned in previous post, am at a New Voices meeting in D.C. where we are reviewing five years of experience with these funded local/citizen journalism/community news sites.

Ours, Hartsville Today, was one of the original 2005 grantees, and, after a recent crash that wiped it out, is slowly being reborn.

Some things that struck me from the first session:

• People often think these sites are, as one speaker put it, "a real newspaper and expected us to send reporters." It takes a lot of education to get around this. For our part, after talking to people in the community before launch, they clearly told us we were the "J"ournalists. They didn't want to be, but they felt they had a role in filling in the cracks and extending the local twice-weekly's coverage. That's why we have tended to use the term "community storytellers."
• It's critical to figure out who your audience is (so "old" media, isn't it?).
• "Just keep going" if you are convinced you are providing a service.
• People love the police blotter. Tracking shows they read items on it three or four times (Susie Pedner, NewCastleNow).
• Save as much money as you can to pay writers (in our grant we built that in as an expense)
• Use things like Spot.us to extend your ability to fund writers (especially with Spot.us now expanding) - Susan Mernit, Oakland Local.
• "Facebook is the AOL of Today" - Mernit. Lots of people hang out here and Oakland Local gets lots of referrals this way. (Note: I agree with her. I think I've mentioned here that I now get more comments on this blog's feed fed into FB than I do on the blog itself.)

Mary Lou Fulton, the force behind one of the original local news sites, Northwest Voice (now Bakersfield Voice) and now with The California Endowment, says more foundations are looking at funding media and the key is aligning with their areas of interest.

Several people talked about how to engage community - send out postcards, use business cards, make sure your contributors know their stuff is being read. (We found the business cards and a couple of relatively inexpensive banners - total about $150 - made at a local print shop were useful.)

And from Clodah Rule, Cambridge Community TV: You can train people to use the technology, but you can't train them how to be invested in the community. So find those invested and work with them. Amen - exactly what we found with HVTD.

J-lab/New Voices: Best line of the day

Am at a J-lab, New Voices gathering in Washington today. All the New Voices community news and similar projects funded over the past five years. Fantastic group. Great ideas.

Best line so far is from a survey Great Lakes Echo did:
Which Great Lakes invasive species is your former significant other?

Papers and Twitter: When all you have is a hammer ...

Everything is a nail, is how the old saying goes. That pretty much sums up a lot of what I still see in newsrooms.

The hammer here is the hard-to-shed orientation that news is still something to be "produced" and "delivered" as mostly a one-way affair, instead of being a conversation. That's probably understandable; organizations really aren't all that good at conversations. They're not set up for it. Conversations are a granular things, and organizations are all about homogenization.

Which is why watching what many news organizations have done with Twitter has annoyed but not surprised me. They've created another dumping ground for shovelware.

Having not learned from earlier escapades online (and still doing the shovelware thing on their Web sites in way too many cases), too many news organizations have turned their Twitter feeds also into a shovelware wasteland. The feeds stick out like a sore, one-way thumb on a two-way medium.

And now someone has called them on it. At the Future of Journalism conference in Britain, researchers said they found that "although 91% had Twitter accounts, only two thirds of those studied actually tweeted and that 98.5% of the hyperlinks tweeted, simply pointed to existing website content."

One of the researchers, Marcus Messner, said: "We found that more attention needs to be paid to community building. It needs to go beyond shovelware. "

Having said that -- and having bashed The (Columbia, S.C.) State around recently for not getting it in one area online -- let me now say that this is one thing that newsroom does right. The State's Twitter feed is clearly produced by human, not machine. It's readable, it reacts and it's generally got the idea.

More newsrooms could follow that lead.

The Batavian

When I was at AEJMC in Chicago at the beginning of August, Howard Owens, the digital strategist for Gatehouse, handed me a card with "the batavian.com" on it.

"Been meaning to tell you about this. We're getting ready to unveil it," he said in that stealthy way that intrigues without giving too many answers. I stuck the card in my pocket. The semester began and the usually routine of classes, and it wasn't until this weekend that I got to look at it.

Most interesting. And my timing seems to be fortuitous, because Owens is out this morning with the "unveiling." (The site actually launched in May.)

Scott Karp has a full post today; he's been in on it for several months And there was more a few days ago from The Fighting 29th a blog in the area.

What Gatehouse is doing is experimenting with the idea of creating a community news site without having a newsPAPER and built around the core idea that community contributions to the site are just as valuable as those of the "professional" journalists. With lower initial and operating costs (without being tied to "big iron"). the chances of success are improved. I'm not going to spend time getting into all the ins and outs of the site -- read Karp or read Owens' post on the site about its philosophy.

I want to talk about a bigger-picture meaning for a moment: What this means for smaller newsPAPERs.

I have said for years now that smaller community newspapers, even if their finances have been pretty good till now, are in as much danger as their big-city counterparts. The world is going digital. Period. Whether you are in South Succotash or South L.A., those 15- to 35-year-olds are increasingly carrying iPhones and similar devices. They are used to maneuvering digitally. It does not matter if you are the "most trusted source for local news" in your three square miles of this Earth.

A recent study here at the University of South Carolina found the state of community newspaper sites to be abysmal (sorry I can't link, but this is the academic publishing business, folks, which sometimes makes newspapers look like screaming centers of innovation - the paper, I hope, should be available in a few weeks at the AEJMC site on AllAcademic.com. Search for Mitchell, K., Collins, E., & Saunders, A. (2008). Finding it, storing it, discussing it: A
content analysis of weekly newspaper Web sites).

The Daily News, Batavia's local paper, would be the poster child. A Web site that has nothing on it but how to subscribe and how to buy ads. And a link if you want to buy some of its old stories from the archive. (One might playfully criticize Owens for picking a too-easy target.)

The point of all this is that it is too easy for competitors to come in, as Gatehouse has done in Batavia, and undercut you, especially by building ties to the growing digital community in your area (and if you think it isn't growing, then what's that farmer in his tractor doing with his iPhone while he plows). And it is remarkably easy to reverse print from the digital content.

Such sites grow community. We have see it in Hartsville with Hartsville Today, a vibrant online community that was done in conjunction with the newspaper but that has taken on a life of its own.

Even my friend and director of the S.C. Press Association, Bill Rogers, a sometimes curmudgeon about "bloggers," realizes some realities here. He's experimenting with creating a template of a site that smaller papers can use to more easily post to the Web. He and I may disagree on how to do it -- he's using Dreamweaver templates, so 2005, when he should be looking into the myriad online tools already available through Wordpress, Drupal and such (because they all are much more compatible with using widgets to greatly expand the power of a site). But the core idea is the same -- no one, not even the tiniest paper in the tiniest town, can afford to ignore the Internet and the opportunities it gives to broaden and deepen community and your ties to it.

To do otherwise merely invites another Batavian to suddenly appear on your digital doorstep. (Tim Windsor even has coined a name for it -- To "Batavian," "to snatch a market away from the snoozing competition with an online-only play.")

Of Zipf curves and online communities

Over at the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group blog, chairman Jack Rosenberry does some detailed analysis of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle's online forums and comes away with some numbers:

Among these frequent posters, the top three accounted for nearly a QUARTER of the total postings. Together just three pepole tallied 2,481 postings out of the 10,356, or 24 percent.

Which leaves him wondering:

When we talk about "news as a conversation" does this qualify? Is it a useful exercise for the community just to have the facilities for a conversational commons available, even if they are dominated by a relative handful of users? Is it a useful exercise for the news organization that sponsors it?

It's actually quite a common phenomenon known as a Zipf curve, and it is found not only throughout the Internet, but in many organizational situations. Simply put, it's a manifestation of the Pareto Principle, which essentially says a few people will do most of the work in almost any endeavor.

I don't think this is something to particularly get agitated about. First, in almost any interaction (except elementary school where the teacher steps in), some people will be dominant and some passive. Second, the Zipf curve is so integral to the Internet -- it is the essential basis of Chris Anderson's long tail, for instance -- that I think you have to examine it in that light -- that even if you have dozens or hundreds of people who have made only one or two posts over time, you have accomplished opening up the conversation.

However, I think this heightens the argument for some kind of active moderation as opposed to the largely put it up and leave it alone attitude I see at too many newsrooms. Moderation does not mean you suddenly lose the protection from lawsuits granted to providers of an online forum. Active moderation means you come up with polls and other ideas to encourage people to comment and reassure them it's OK (after all, this is a form of public speaking). And sometimes you literally moderate, suggesting to people it might be time to give someone else a voice.

One of the first systematic studies of this in operation was our first-year report (PDF)on Hartsville Today. I will be doing a two-year review of the site at the NNA/Huck Boyd conference in September. I think this may be the first systematic longitudinal study of such a community news/citizen journalism site. The curve is still there. It is shallower. That may be the best we can hope for.

Of hyper-local journalism and future journalists

The Carnival of Journalism question for this month is a deceptively simple, yet deviously complex nut. Thanks a bunch to June's host, Andy Dickinson, for posting it (it gives me an excuse to get a Scotch, several, perhaps).

Let's break this in two: 1) is there value to be had in hyper-local journalism, if so what is it and who will do it and 2) what about that journalist of the future, what will he or she be like?

As to the first, I confess, I don't know. I do know -- or at least think pretty strongly -- that any news outlet focused solely on geographic community in the digital age is limiting its growth prospects, if not flirting with suicide. Every geographic community has dozens of sub-communities, many spanning geographic boundaries, and to which the participants may be more closely tied. To ignore those as sources of news (and, as important, revenue) is foolish.

Yet, I still maintain geographic ties and have a need for geographic-based information. I want to know about changes in my trash pickup; I need to know about road closings and similar information; I'm interested in the latest secret land deal the local school district has made for what it portends for growth, my home value and my taxes; I like to hear about the neighbor's children in sports; and I want to know what the county council is doing to my tax rate. Some of that information is hyper-local, but some is, literally, "across the dam" 10 miles away. I need an entity with some sense of geographic community to understand the relative importance of some of those things and bring them to my attention.

The full-service newsroom (some will use the term newspaper, but I prefer not to confound the issue) used to be the agency for that and, as it turns out, not a very good one past a certain size (though I'm not sure exactly what the point is where things start to break down and the newsroom loses its sense of community). Some atomization is occurring. However, I don't see it going as far as some commentators do because.

• I don't think our readers/users/viewers have all that time or desire to click around cyberspace. Some form of aggregation, though not necessarily as we know it now, is likely. It may well be an amalgam of a feed site with a recommendation engine with some original reporting. It certainly will have to have multiple layers of customization.
• News aggregators -- we now call them newspapers and broadcasters -- serve a legal/social function as well. As I've written before, they centralize liability, a critical socio-legal function in modern and post-modern society. Eventually, the legal system may evolve (warning, fellow carnivalistas, that may be next month's question when I play host), but currently it is set up to work on the idea of consolidated liability (read, deep pockets).
  
• In return, the aggregator provides the journalists who belong to it a legal umbrella.
  This is not insignificant. We really have not started plumbing the depths to which the legal system may expose individual digital journalists. (I wonder how many fellow carnival members carry professional liability/defamation insurance.) Just the discussions over AP's broadside at the Drudge Retort should begin to suggest the ramifications.
• The aggregator also provides legal muscle. We may develop some specialized investigative reporting operations, but the very nature of those is likely to be on a regional, national or international scale. But who is willing to go to court to challenge the local school board when it tries to hide its actions by funneling them through its law firm? Yes, perhaps we'll see the development of some kind of foundation support and nonprofit action groups, but by and large it takes some concentration of economic resources to be able to mount an effective legal challenge.

We have found through Hartsville Today, and my colleagues at Missouri have noted something similar through their efforts, that all the rhetoric about how all this would open up democracy and a horde of folks would start scrutinizing the school board, well, it just generally ain't so. Oh, yes, we get many good "stories" on HVTD, important ones, ones the newspaper wouldn't necessarily get to. But one thing you definitely see missing is that "dedicated" hyper-local journalist spending hours sitting through city council or the school board or sifting through the records and asking the really challenging questions. That's big-J "journalism," and in the hundreds of conversations I've had in relation to HVTD and other sites, people still generally expect "us" to do it (even using the term "journalism" to distinguish it from what they see themselves doing).

So, where am I going with this? Well:

1. I think hyper-local journalism has value and is an integral part of our future, but
1. It will be uneven across communities
2. It requires evangelists to make it work well
3. It is never a "build it and they will come" proposition
   
2. In most cases it will benefit from some kind of aggregation and other related services
3. It will have to recognize geographic as well as social and ethnographic communities
4. Realizing any value from it will require aggregating small streams of revenue into larger pools. This is not to say it must be done for revenue, for there will be dedicated individuals for whom it will be a calling. They may be of independent means, find foundation funding or scrape out just enough revenue to cover their marginal costs.
5. Any full-service newsroom that does not 1) start figuring out what its community's communities are, 2) learn to tap into those communities and 3) set up its digital assets so that members of those communities are valuable parts of the journalism (be it contributing, ranking, whatever) should start setting up plans to close.

In all this, I rather like Dave Lee's thoughts on a NewsHub. I don't think he's gotten to it all, yet, because the legal and economic realities (psychological ones, too, I can tell you having been an AP news editor and having had to deal with sharing issues) are vastly more complicated. I also think Wendy Withers has hit on one of the verities -- The problem with digital reporting on the web is newspapers still don’t know what’s going to work. And, when they try to come up with ways to involve readers in the process, they don’t go out of their way to really understand their readers; they look to see what others are doing and then emulate it. Even worse, some newsrooms still think of their readers as “those cute little readers who have to be saved by their base desire to read stories about puppies and celebrities.”

She's also spot on in noting that digital stories require more: If you’re going to stick to local stories, make sure they’re local stories people want to read. Keep sports coverage, but the old “get in, get out, get a couple of quotes and pictures” style of reporting isn’t going to cut it any more. This is true with all stories. One of the biggest problems with modern journalism is stories are stripped away until there are no compelling elements. Find them. Write them. Add your own style and flair, because the old school journalism we’ve been told to stick by is failing.

A Jack Lail has some excellent thoughts on how to make local sites work.

Now, as for No. 2 -- that future journalist. That's actually the easy one. That good journalist in 2013 is going to be a lot like the good journalist of today and a lot like the good journalist of 1913. Journalism itself changes little. It remains one of the true cottage industries, one-on-one piecework, my relationship to my source, my desire to find out things and to tell you about them, and maybe a little outrage or desire to change the world mixed in. (The "my" is the universal "my" -- rest assured I am not saying I am a good journalist.)

We seem to have forgotten that in this modern age. Yes, it may take a village to put out a newspaper or a Web site (though, as shown time and time again as tools improve, that is less and less so). But that comes after the journalism. Never confuse presentation with journalism.

I fear we have done that - and in the process confounded our young journalists, too. I run a small survey in my classes and once again this year, "finding stuff out and telling people about it" was one of the last reasons any of my students chose journalism, even though it should be one of the first. "I like to write," "I'm good with people," "I like the excitement" and similar things all get the bulk of the votes. But all the writing, being good with people and getting excited doesn't mean squat if you don't have the information in your notebook - digital or otherwise.

Yes, our new-age reporter will have to learn how to use various digital assets (many of which probably don't exist yet), and he or she will certainly need a different mindset, one that recognizes the journalist as just one node in much larger intersecting communities. (But then again, didn't we have to learn to use the telegraph, and phones, and faxes, etc.) But I also think that great journalists of 2013 will look back and read the work of Ida Tarbell or Lincoln Steffens and smile a little. They'll recognize a lot of what they are doing in the future in what great journalists have done in the past.

Community moderation ideas

Howard Owens has a good list of tips for newsrooms on how to manage online communities.

Two I really like:

• Make checking comments on stories, forums and other venues for reader-submitted content a routine part of your job. There’s no need for this to overwhelm your other work. Keep a browser window open to your latest story, or the RSS feed or e-mail inbox for where comments appear as they come in. Glance at it between phone calls or before you get up to get another cup of coffee. Make it a habit to periodically check.
• Take ownership ... Ownership means you pay attention and you care. You won’t let guests trash your house or apartment, so don’t let them trash your stories. Assert your ownership on your section or your stories — readers should recognize you as the owner.

Get a peek under the hood

A recent post to a lightly trafficked Google development group is a reminder that if you want to see what's going on under the hood at the New York Times, there's a developer blog worth tuning into at http://open.nytimes.com/ (thanks to Derek Willis for the pointer).

The International Herald Tribune has one, too http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/technology/lab/ (just posted a nice fix to get rid of widows in type)
And if you want to find out what's about at Twitter http://dev.twitter.com/
(Thanks to Joe Mprphy for those.)

And for those using or thinking of using Drupal as a content management system, there's Planet Drupal http://drupal.org/planet

You could do worse than have someone technically inclined on your staff keep an eye on these. After all, they're tackling real problems and solving them. Why reinvent the wheel?

Quick hits

• Lots has been and will be written about the Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest report on the State of the News Media 2008. I've made it a point to refrain from extensive comment on these because they are massive and nuanced -- and I can't really grasp all of those nuances until I've read it three or four times. But the meme among the stories this time seems to be how this Internet thingy really hasn't democratized things like it should have. (Those of us running community news sites could have -- and based on research presented at AEJMC last year* -- did tell you that. The digiterati's original idea that this somehow would become a great sounding board where everyone would jump in and cover their communities was never realistic.) Go read the report and the stories. But the best words on it all may be in a comment by "tedshelton" on the Cnet story:
• I read your article with interest and followed the link to the report. There I discovered an interesting thing, not obvious from your article -- the report, reasonably enough, is focused on this thing called "news" -- narrowly defined. It is, after all, a report on "the state of the news media" not just any old media.
  
  Digging deeper into the report, it looks like the authors are critical of citizens as reporters of foreign affairs or government, or crime... but the share of media time that we are devoting to reading all of this citizen created content (media, if not news) continues to increase.
  
  The democratization of media seems to be progressing just fine -- the report merely points out that NEWS as a subset of media, seems to still be dominated by the professionals. Which makes sense.
• Never underestimate the power of someone in the public to get it right.
• The constant conversation that suddenly has become hot in a lot of quarters is the hand-wringing about what to do with "those people." No, not Barack and Hillary, but all those great unwashed people commenting on news stories on news sites. Why, some of the things they say are downright hateful. (Uh, yep. Not been listening much to the world around you lately, huh?) So along comes Ed Wasserman, who says it's time to write "the rules." Here's why that won't work -- they're your rules, not mine or anyone else's. Wasserman's is a typical top down, C3 (well C2 -- command and control without communication) response. The key to successful, vibrant online communities on newspaper.com sites or anywhere else is not rules, but enlightened moderation that uses guidance, not pronouncements. Wasserman's is very reflective of the view of still too much of the industry toward online. It's a view born of the printing press mentality -- the idea that you set up the assembly line and make the product conform to it. It's a turnkey, static thing. You tend to it as little as possible (which, of course, helps the bottom line). But the Web is just the opposite -- it's a dynamic place, and that means a more expensive place (in some ways) to operate. So let's continue to converse about the best ways to deal with the challenges online has unleashed on our comment boards, but let's scrap the "rules" thing.
• (Pointer from Martin Stabe) Yahoo takes a big step forward toward Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the "semantic Web." The search engine will now use such semantic data and microformats to refine and expand searches. Pay attention. While Wasserman et al. are worrying about barbarians at the gate, the guys who ate your lunch are about to have you for dinner and dessert. If every publishing house does not have a staff that understand what the semantic Web is and how it, along with the coming mobile computing/communications society, is going to revolutionize things once more ... well, what can I say?
• That former "hotbed" of convergence, southern Florida, is still perking along. The Ernie Pyle scholars at Indiana U. are doing a convergence tour and blogging. Worth reading just to keep up with where much of this stuff started in this country.
  
• Rant of the day: I can't understand why so many sites, especially media sites, do not have their articles set up so that when you print one, the stable URL is printed out as part of it. How quaint and cross-media of me to assume I or someone might want a hard copy of something digital, eh? The Wasserman article from the Miami Herald, for instance, comes out sans URL. I know this isn't hard to do because even the humble little Hartsville Today project we run on Drupal has it. The Wall Street Journal, Editor and Publisher and some others go farther by printing out, at your option, the list all URLs used in an online posting. Let's get it together; printing out the URL should be as close to a standard as you can have without having one. (Yes, I know you can set your browser to do it, but long URLs truncate, and not all browsers will do it in a Mac.)

*The paper is available online to AEJMC members. If you still want to see it, you can get an abstract by going here and searching for Littau. See this for more information on buying a copy. (Or if you really, really want it, you know where to find me ...)

Quick Hits

Felix Salmon has an intriguing analysis over at the Seeking Alpha media blog about why he things the Wall Street Journal will eventually be all or almost all free, despite Rupert Murdoch's announcement last week that parts would remain subscription-only.

I like Salmon's last line: In the age of the internet, reading a newspaper has become a social activity. Murdoch, owner of MySpace, knows full well the value of that activity. Which is why I still think WSJ.com is going to be free, even if it might take a little bit longer than I first thought for that to happen.

"In the age of the internet, reading a newspaper has become a social activity" -- lots to chew on and think about there.

Fred Wilson, former chairman of TheStreet.com, has a take on it too -- he's another free WSJ proponent, with this:
Here's the deal. Digital media is not about scarcity and never will be. That's the old media game. Online it's about ubiquity, about being part of the conversation, about links, authority, page rank, and if you are a news organization like the WSJ - its about anchoring the discussion.

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Joe Michaud is stepping aside as president of MaineToday.com in April to start his own consultancy. As a result, he's become more active on his blog. Some good reading there. Check out his take on the Kindle media reader that Amazon introduced late last year. And pay special attention to his call that in 2008, it's no longer enough to innovate -- it has to be innovation for results in this struggling business.

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Dan Kennedy has a nice post on how Gatehouse and the editor at its Danvers, Mass., paper are doing multimedia. This is a good example of Howard Owens' "give them all cameras" philosophy that prompts quality vs. quantity disputes on video message boards and forums.

Watch the video. What do you think? Kennedy has an thoughtful take in the comments area:
My guess is that only a few people will watch it, but that it's the right few people. The people who were interviewed, their families and friends. And now they're all attuned to the fact that their hometown weekly is posting videos, so they'll be more likely to check in the future. This is about the slow work of community-building, not reaching masses of people.

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Howard Owens and Howard Weaver have both linked to this post from Zac Echola about how
out how he discovered and consumed news from Saturday's South Carolina primary. Echola, a producer at Forum Communications, is one of those young consumers you drool over. The Howards have reproduced significant parts -- I'm going to make you go read it with this task: Identify when he first went to a mainstream media site.

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Speaking of Owens, he has an interesting post from the weekend on the "Six roles, or job duties, of modern journalism" -- ethical, guide/filter, understanding and context, conversation leader, aggregator, straight news.

How many of those are you prepared for? Which ones scare you?

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If you're picking up a theme here this morning -- that, as Kennedy says, news is becoming "about community building," you're right.

I did a presentation for the regional American Copy Editors Society meeting this weekend on community building and moderation from what we have learned at Hartsville Today and from what has been learned elsewhere. I'll do a longer post later, but I was struck by how different the "journalist mindset" is from those "out there." Sometimes it's almost counterintuitive.

Quick example from the Nashua, N.H., paper that came up on a discussion group. You have a city councilman who has created multiple pseudonyms on your forums and is making it seem (by posts and responses) that it is more than one person (known as "sock puppeting"). You can tell it is the same person from IP info, etc. Do you out him?

The journalists, of course, hardly missed a beat in saying "yes." And that would be the easy traditional answer -- person in position of trust abuses that trust, even so slightly -- and wham!

But is it possible your online community could read it differently, that instead of doing your job, you are just exhibiting your Zeus-like powers. "Well, if they can out him, they could out me," could be the thinking. And so you lose that member, too. Maybe others. Is is worth destroying the community?

We'll talk more about this later based on this weekend's gig. For now, I just leave you with that to think about.