Archive - Jan 11, 2010
Woodbridge Board of Education Finance Committee Meets
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 23:13Monday evening at the Woodbridge District office conference room, the Woodbridge Board of Education Committee met to review the monthly financial reports and discuss what metrics are most useful in understanding the proposed 2010/2011 budget. For the month ending December 31st, 2009, the school is running approximately ten thousand dollars over on its $11.9 million dollar 2009/2010 budget. The largest over budget items included $66 thousand due to additional transportation needs and $63 thousand due to additional tuition costs for unanticipated special needs students. This was offset in part by changes in teaching and custodial staff which occurred after the budget had been finalized.
Committee member Steve Fleischman inquired about the status of the funds set aside for GASB, asking about how that money was being invested and what sort of returns have been received. These funds are being handled by the Woodbridge Investment Committee which meets on an as needed basis. The most recent meeting of the Investment Committee, as listed on the Town Website was March 31, 2009. Those minutes report the recommendations of the committee to the Board of Selectmen to adopt an ordinance to establish a Town of Woodbridge Other Post-Employment Benefits Trust Agreement as well as the Trust Agreement itself. There is no information in the minutes about any investment decisions.
It is believed that the Investment Committee will be meeting soon and it is hoped that more information will be available from the committee at that time.
The administration reported that the proposed 2010/2011 budget as approved by the Woodbridge Board of Education calls for a 2.47% increase. A discussion followed about the importance of the administration communicating to the town what the value proposition of the school budget is to help people understand some of the different cost structures in the Woodbridge Board of Education budget when it is compared to other school districts.
It is also worth noting that the Superintendent is giving back his 2% salary increase for the year with the money being made available to support professional development for teachers as well as to provide instructional resources for the children of Beecher Road School.
The results of the Finance Committee meeting will be discussed at the next Woodbridge Board of Education meeting.
(Cross posted at the Woodbridge Citizen.)
Original News Online
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 12:37Today, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism issued a new report, How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City. Here in Connecticut, Rick Green posted about it on his CT Confidential blog at the Hartford Courant, Where does news come from? From the NEWSpaper. He highlighted:
Fully eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information.
To this, I added the following comment:
It is a fascinating report. Good job for repeating or repackaging it! Your decision to repeat it, shows, I believe, that repeating other reports is important.
That said, the report has other very interesting aspects. The LATimes repackaging of the Pew report includes this:
About two-thirds of articles that did break new ground came from newspapers. Television news accounted for about 28% of the stories that offered new information, with radio providing 7%. The study included websites affiliated with these traditional media sources.
Digital-only outlets accounted for just 4% of original pieces of reporting: One report came from a local blog, and the other was breaking news disseminated by a police Twitter feed.
My concern is that with newspapers accounting for the breaking of most stories, what happens as newspapers cut back staff, or spend more time repackaging stories? The public will know less, and that is bad for democracy, unless something else can come and fill in the gap.
Personally, I think volunteer local citizen journalism may be an important part of this. That's why I set up the Woodbridge Citizen this weekend, to get people in my small town to start writing about things that the newspapers are missing.
I also find it interesting that one of the examples of breaking news came from a police department Twitter feed. Today, the Hartford Police added me as a friend on Facebook. It is great to see them making good use of online media to better get their message out.
They have also recently agreed to start sending their press releases to the CT News Wire, a Google Group that I set up where community spokespeople can send press releases and media advisories to bloggers and citizen journalists. Tools like the CTNewsWire can also help with the repeating of important stories.
All of this brings me back to a discussion on the Journalism That Matters mailing list. Recently, Clyde Bentley, an associate professor in Print and Digital Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism, and fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute wrote a comment on the list which he expanded into the blog post Journalism’s dreamers must keep their eyes on the statistics. He suggested
The issue here is how to tweak a media system — a massive, interconnected system of information providers, marketers, Main Street merchants, and just plain people.
The Pew Report and the various reactions to this help illustrate Clyde’s comments and I encourage you to go out and read his whole blog post. Newspapers, police Facebook pages, mailing lists and citizen journalism sites are all important parts of the massive interconnected media system. It is a vibrant system that is constantly changing, and those that care about media and democracy need to join together in the efforts to keep tweaking the system so that we do not lose access to important breaking information.
Thoughts?
