Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations bemoaning the long slow decline of UU World magazine, the denominational magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Ongoing budget cuts at the UUA have cut many departments, and UU World is no exception. In the past two decades, staff has been cut, print publication has dropped from six times a year to twice a year, and online publication is less frequent.
UU World may have hit its peak as a glossy publication in the 2000s. Chris Walton, one of the sharpest commentators on the UU scene, was on the editorial staff (Chris later became editor of the publication), while the editor-in-chief was Tom Stites, a long-time journalist who had been part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams. Chris started his own design business. But what happened to Tom Stites?
I happened to run across Tom Stites when I was researching an upcoming series of sermons on challenges to democracy. It turns out that Stites is now the president of the Banyan Project, a nonprofit organization working to create community new outlets based on a coop-ownership model. It’s an ambitious project — they’ve even designed a new software platform for community news outlets based on a coop model.
This is a super interesting project. The demise of local newspapers remains one of the biggest challenges to democracy in the United States today — just as the echo chambers of social media remain one of the biggest threats to democracy today. If you live in a local news desert, it’s very hard to learn what’s going on in local government, and very hard to make informed decisions as a voter and as a citizen. A coop model may not work for every news desert, but at this point we need as many options as possible — anything that can help to eradicate news deserts is A Good Thing.
Definitely worth taking a look at the Banyan Project website.