Apology to Krystal Knapp

On July 1, two articles by independent journalist Krystal Knapp appeared on this website without her knowledge or permission.  I have apologized to Krystal and removed those articles, but I feel I still owe her, and AllPrinceton’s readers, a more thorough explanation of why this happened.

AllPrinceton is an experiment in community news.  Unlike traditional newsrooms that cover the news and then publish it online, my goal in creating AllPrinceton was to see whether, given the proper platform, a community could be organized to cover itself.  The Web has made it possible for anyone to publish.  The downside of this is that it has also shifted the burden of sifting through information from the publisher to the reader.  As media commentator Clay Shirky put it, the problem we have now is not “information overload”, it is “filter failure”:  it’s getting harder to fish useful information out of the rising tide of digitized words.  AllPrinceton is trying to help by curating credible sources of local information.

At the weekly “Community News Workshops” which I offered at the Princeton Library last Spring, I explained that there were basically three ways for local news to end up on the site:  (1) AllPrinceton writes about it in the “News Articles” section (2) a writer chooses to blog in the AllPrinceton “Town Talk” section, along with other contributors, à la Huffington Post, and (3) for those who already maintain and update their own websites, AllPrinceton aggregates their RSS feed in the “Feed Items” section.  The articles from these feeds are published to the site by algorithm, automatically. 

Of course it was I who originally added the RSS feed from Krystal’s site, Planet Princeton, to the AllPrinceton list of locally relevant feeds.  I chose Planet Princeton because I have the highest regard for Krystal Knapp’s reporting, and felt that anyone who wants to know what is going on in Princeton should include her stories in their daily news routine.  I did not stand to gain anything monetarily from including Planet Princeton in the AllPrinceton feed list, as we have no advertising on the site.  AllPrinceton is currently supported by a grant from J-Lab, and a great deal of volunteer time on my part. 

My grievous mistake was not asking Krystal first, and assuming that a public RSS feed, like a public Facebook page, is there to be accessed.  The second mistake was that, although Planet Princeton was given credit for the article, there was no link back to the Planet Princeton site.  That is a serious breach in web protocol, and a technical shortcoming in our aggregator that I asked a web developer to help me fix over the weekend.  When the fixes are finalized, hopefully by the end of this week, each feed item in AllPrinceton will contain only the first few lines of the original article, along with a “read full story” link back to the original source.  Yes, you could argue that this feature is a no-brainer, but it was not included in our original software.  Hence the term “beta” on the AllPrinceton logo.  We are a work in progress, and hope to improve with public feedback.

So why include the feed aggregator at all? Many of our community organizations, including governments, maintain their own websites, but nowhere can you find in a single place all the news from the Township, the Borough, the Library, the Regional Schools, the universities, the Arts Council – just to name a few of the important local “publishers”.  The next time we have a storm, will it be necessary to visit a dozen websites to see who closed for the day, or will our community be organized enough to bring all that information together in one place?

Curating other people’s articles is not enough.  Original reporting is the most valuable component of any news ecosystem, and for that I am grateful to journalists like Krystal Knapp for the many hours it takes to diligently cover local events.  I hope that AllPrinceton can, in some way, lead more readers to appreciate her efforts.  That is the real potential of social media.

After closely monitoring the precipitous decline of the news industry for years, I decided last year to stop kibitzing from the sidelines and see what it would take to build a locally-relevant, web-based news operation. The AllPrinceton.com site is the result, and I invite Princetonians to use it as their personal news lab.  I use AllPrinceton to conduct community news workshops, to facilitate community communications -- especially on the part of the many non-profits based in Princeton -- and to give local students some hands-on experience with web journalism. 

I do this because I believe that participatory media will go hand in hand with participatory democracy.  I also believe that it will take a village to re-invent the news industry, and since I live here, I am starting here.

About the Author

Donna Liu

Founder, AllPrinceton

Donna Liu is a digital journalist who has lived in Princeton with her family since 2002.  She founded AllPrinceton in 2010 as an online hub for community news and information.  At Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she built UChannel - an online archive of public affairs lectures in academia.  Before that she established and managed CNN International's Asia Production Center in Hong Kong.