Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

We can see an example of social knowledge management in The Budget, the weekly national newspaper of America's Amish communities. With volunteer scribes, The Budget has followed a very bloggy publishing model for decades:

The national edition of The Budget, now available in print only, is largely composed of submissions from hundreds of volunteer “scribes” from across the country. Typically, a scribe talks about the weather and segues into the goings-on in the local community. Around 500 scribe letters a week take up roughly 50 pages....

By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. [Jessica] Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus.

“They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”

There are 843 scribes, Mr. Rathbun said, and they must write 12 times a year to get their subscription free. For others, a subscription costs $42 a year, and the national edition has about 9,000 subscribers. The local edition has about 10,000 and includes the national.

Like bloggers, the scribes have no editor and no limit on how much they write; like Twitter users, the scribes have followers who track their every utterance [Noam Cohen, "Exploring News by the Amish Online," New York Times, 2009.09.20].

This amateur local publishing model also serves as the foundation of a social knowledge management mechanism for Amish communities nationwide:

Another new-media analogy from Ms. Best was how those scribe letters — viewed over the nearly 120-year history of The Budget — represent a database for the Amish, who regularly visit the newspaper’s office to consult its archive of microfilmed pages.

“Basically it is a search engine for them to catalog anything and everything,” she said.

Mr. Rathbun described how the newspaper will “get a call from Illinois, Missouri, from someone who needed to get a birth certificate” to deal with the government but whose home birth was never registered. The government, he said, will say, “If you can get the documentation from The Budget, we can give you a birth certificate.” The caller will tell the staff the date of birth and the scribe who reported on it, and The Budget will send a copy of the report [Cohen, 2008].

This citizen journalism captures knowledge that no other media are archiving and thus becomes an essential knowledge management resource for the dispersed community it serves.

Jessica Best tells more about what she learned during her two-week visit to Amish country on her blog.