by Denise

Following our steering committee meeting on Wednesday, Drew, Laurie and I raced off to a mushroomish building downtown that the Grand Rapids Press calls home.

There, we met with Editor-in-Chief Paul Keep and a number of the GRPress bigwigs to demystify The Rapidian, In the course of our meeting, we talked about editorial standards, Web site functionality and whether local press could use pieces published in The Rapidian. Since we’ve had comments on this in the last blog entry, as an update, The Rapidian is looking into different levels of Creative Commons because sharing with local press would be ideal. However, there are more interesting issues to explore with the last point.

As an experimental project partially funded by the Knight Foundation, The Rapidian is in the midst of the journalism-blogosphere hoopla. We’re here to stress that The Rapidian is not an end-all, be-all alternative to traditional media. Titans in the journalism industry have fallen, legacies are marred and journalism strives to find a new business model. The idea of journalism has never really been lost, but the business model has not evolved to support it. In these adventurous times, almost all eyes are on journalism start-ups. This creates the opportunity for more robust news.

I’ve always been a strong believer in media literacy, and unfortunately, the United States does not emphasize this in its educational system. There are little hints of the need to triangulate issues in grade schools. After that, the emphasis is made only to journalists in training. Societally, we often believe so much in cultural literacy that we neglect the need for media literacy.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho (lə-sü-tü), a country that is midway between an agrarian and industrial society. It is practically a given that the international stereotype of Americans is promiscuous, white and rich. And if you were a Mosotho (a person from Lesotho) who ocasionally skipped school to catch Days of our Lives (practically every one has at some point), you’d probably also think Americans are never-aging backstabbers. A handful of Basotho (people from Lesotho) also treasured dilapidated, years-old magazines that a passing Westerner had bought as entertainment nosh for the plane ride over. To the Basotho, couture ads were not a suggestion but an American reality. I remember at the beginning of my service, trying to battle these artificially flavored perceptions by whipping out my subscription to Mother Jones, The Sun or Adbusters (does a more depressing magazine exist?). I’d try to explain post-traumatic stress, labor, racism, the prison system, corruption, suicide and other darker topics to unveil the stresses of industrial life not sealed in most glossies.

After much time, I came to understand that this inability to reconcile the few contrasting media portrayals that managed their way to the Mountain Kingdom also came from a lack of Western cultural literacy. A sprinkling of Basotho had traveled outside of southern Africa. Some had studied abroad and returned to change their countries. However, the vast majority would never go farther than South Africa.

This breakdown really highlighted that literacy comes in two parts: cultural and media literacies. As Americans, we rely too much on cultural literacy, and in some ways, it justifies the idea of objectivity and a singular source of news. We’re a population that doesn’t usually verify one news source against another and yet we feel justified in blaming the press when they don’t have absolute coverage. In Italy, a professor stressed to me that the best way to understand a culture is to read their news. Where there is no cultural fluency, strong media literacy practices are the key to understanding a different culture.

If we view all press as a collective where each publication complemented another publication’s ability to report accurately, then we are working toward robust news. As an opportunity to feature community voices, The Rapidian will be one more news source balanced out by the existence of the GRPress, Rapid Growth, WZZM, WOOD TV, FOX17, WGVU and many others. And because creating for The Rapidian familiarizes individuals with media tools and effective communication, we hope to contribute by turning out savvier news consumers.

The Gruen Transfer is a popular Australian show that examines the logic and tricks in advertising and marketing by dissecting recent commercials on air.