Since beginning Columbia news, views & reviews over a month ago we have been complimented by some; thanked by some and castigated by a few of the “old guard.” We have been told to “go away.” And a few people have asked, “Why are you doing this?”

Our response goes back to an article we posted in early March citing the Knight Commission Report on ”why communities need a platform.” In that report these reasons were given:

• Communities need to coordinate. Activities like elections, emergency responses, and even community celebrations succeed only if everyone knows where to be at what time and what role to play. This requires a system of information and exchange. Information is also the central resource in enabling the creation of economic and social connections that build a community’s capacity for action.

• Communities need to solve problems. They have to identify goals, challenges, and options for response on everything from building the local economy, to improving the performance of community schools, to protecting health and safety and combating local hunger. They have to estimate the consequences of alternative approaches. They have to weigh those consequences in light of community values. All of this requires information, interpretation, analysis and debate.

• Communities need to establish systems of public accountability. Public officials answer to voters for their performance in office. Voters need information and analysis to assess how officials are doing their jobs.

• Finally, communities need to develop a sense of connectedness. They need to circulate ideas, symbols, facts, and perspectives in a way that lets people know how they fit into a shared narrative. A community’s system of meaning evolves as new voices and new experiences enter the information flow. People need access to that information to avoid feeling alienated and excluded.

After a career spanning more than four decades in the business of newspapers here and in post Soviet nations, we have seen the result of communities with diminished connectedness. We know that reliable, truthful, accurate and timely reporting happens with locally focused news resources. Absent, those resources, people are victimized by rumors, no information or half-truths and mis-truths.

The recent news from a college in Carlisle about the shielding of information concerning sexual assaults is not really all that much different than the shielding of news in despotic nations or closed societies. [NOTE: Last monday, the Reading Eagle Times reported rapes at the Kutztown University campus; we applaud Kutztown University for their concern for their stakeholders and their sense of transparency.]

What do all despots and evil empire rulers want to control: media, information, expression, idea exchange and truth? We just saw this repeated in Egypt, Syria, Libya and nations in turbulence everywhere. If you are in charge and want to maintain absolute control, do not allow your constituents to have access to other “news, views and reviews.” Employ any means and tactics to filter or obfuscate what they get. Eventually, the people will roll over. As one public servant stated to me recently, “Maybe they just don’t care.”

Or, maybe the people do care but they have been isolated, mis-informed and removed from the information that is news for so long that they are frustrated, confused and tuned out.

There is a saying often attributed to a newspaper writer that his job was to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” While the attribution is not accurate, a columnist at the Poynter Institute suggests, “We need journalists to get at the truth and to keep watch against abuses of power.”

Fortunately, Columbians can get information from daily newspapers, television stations and a few local news sources on the Internet.

Look for “and the times they are a-changin’” part III next Tuesday, April 26.