Outtakes from Sustainatopia

Tweet
Buffer

Tweet
Buffer

And an interesting debate: Should journalism offer calls to action?

This week I spent four days at Sustainatopia, the Caribbean-flavored conference in Miami that brought social entrepreneurs, VCs, artisans, celebrities, media activists and a fair number of Miami’s beautiful people together for a celebration of sustainability — and a call to arms over what needs to be done next to help the planet.

Above you’ll see a few of the photos from the Sustainability Honors program at Miami’s just-opened New World Center, but it will be another day before I can upload the entire set. I also conducted several interviews that I hope to share soon.

Meantime, here are a few outtakes from Sustainatopia’s Social Venture Capital/Social Enterprise conference:

• I loved this Haitian aphorism that a speaker shared: “A little lamp can fill the whole house with light.”

• I’ll admit that it escaped my attention that Donna Karan — one of the key award winners — has been doing some wonderful things in Haiti with her Urban Zen Foundation, including a Hope, Health & Relief Haiti project captured by the photographer Marc Baptiste.

• Greatly admired the work and artistry of Barbara Guillaume (pictured at top), the woman behind A Million Hearts for Haiti, who enlisted local artists and designers to create wonderful little carved stone ornaments with elegant stylings. She and her teenage choir were the hit of the night.

• Enjoyed meeting Frank Sesno, the former CNN correspondent who now runs Planet Forward, and Tom Hudson of PBS’s Nightly Business Report. A number of the conference-goers and I questioned why public broadcasting and traditional media don’t do more to offer citizens a series of action items around issues that their newscasts cover — a set of options that lets viewers connect with organizations offering possible solutions rather than letting them feel frustrated and powerless.

“Under the very strict set of PBS rules, you’re not going to hear a call to action,” Hudson said flatly. “There’s a fundamental difference between an advocate message and a media message.”

“The average American thinks 27% of the federal budget goes to foreign and humanitarian aid, when the true number is less than 1%.”
— Frank Sesno

But there’s a difference between advocacy and giving citizens the tools to participate in the democratic process. I sense that this is part of the ongoing cultural shift in values about the news media’s role and responsibilities. Young people in the room seemed to think it should be a natural outgrowth of a story to be able to connect with sources or forces at play, while Hudson and Sesno — who admitted they came of age during a different media era — largely averred, saying that journalists shouldn’t cross the line into anything that even resembles advocacy, even if that amounted to just offering a selection of vetted options for viewers to pursue on their own without the journalists taking sides. PBS’s News Hour and the Huffington Post offer a list of resources in a limited way, but few other news organizations do — and, yes, I consider it a shortcoming in the way modern journalism is conducted. The end of the story should not be the end of the story. If newsrooms don’t have the bandwidth to do this, use a deputized, crowdsourced pool of community advisers.

• On the other hand, Sesno — who was thoroughly engaging and forward-thinking throughout — heaped praise on the model being blazed by 350.org, the climate change advocacy organization. “It’s a great idea — access to technology and the ability to reach young people and engage them with a call to action. That’s a magical mix. It’s the model of democratic media in many ways.”

• More Sesno: “Studies show that the average American thinks 27% of the federal budget goes to foreign and humanitarian aid, when the true number is less than 1%. Of course, that kind of misinformation skews and distorts the debate in this country.”

• His take on changes in the mediasphere: “I’m utterly dispirited and totally excited by what’s happening in today’s media environment.” The tough part, he said, is getting an audience — because everybody can be his or her own newspaper and TV station. “Look at partnerships — it’s the only way this works.”

• Interesting tidbit from Tom Hudson: “‘Shareholder’ is a word that doesn’t exist in Mandarin [in China]. They interpret it as stakeholder, having a much broader meaning.”

• I wasn’t aware that Clean Skies Sunday, aka “The Energy Report,” is in fact an “infomercial funded by the natural gas industry,” as Sesno put it. “It troubles me that people don’t know what’s behind that program,” which airs Sunday mornings on ABC.

• Rick Allen, CEO of Snag Films, during the Media2Movements conference: “A significant part of the public will run if they see you coming at them with an issues message.” He held up Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” as a superb example of a documentary that explored a serious subject with an engaging, lighthearted touch.