“How the major stakeholders in a community align themselves to respond to broad cultural, social, economic, and political change, and how that alignment is shaped by the character and history of interaction among and between them, informs our understanding of the ecology of civic engagement.”

- Marion Orr, “The Changing Ecology of Civic Engagement”

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The mission of the Lakewood Observer is to attract, articulate, and amplify civic intelligence and community good will in the city of Lakewood and beyond.

Our goal is to help Lakewood residents and neighbors learn as much as possible about the city. In its efforts to know Lakewood par excellence, the Lakewood Observer will illuminate the many facets of culture, arts, business, education, religion, and lifestyle this diverse city has to offer.

The Lakewood Observer will capture Lakewood life in the present, imagine its promising future, and celebrate its rich urban history.

The Lakewood Observer shall provide a sounding board for charities, institutions, schools, children, families, events, and City Hall. We intend to open a space for long running dialogue with everyone who works, lives, or plays in the great city of Lakewood.

In this twenty-first century urban experiment, the Lakewood Observer will strive to construct for the city an open and unbiased ensemble of white papers for mapping community solutions, advancing responsible economic development and sustainability strategies, and tracking results.

Finally, the Lakewood Observer will invite the entire community to celebrate the vibrant mosaic of culture, nature, history, and personality we call Lakewood.

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• Create a municipal revolution in civic chops and community norms through a retro-experiment in Polis. That is to say, enact the myth of the whole community in the central location, i.e. an independent, economic, social unit with strict boundaries.

• Reject anonymity, cynicism and neighborhood anomie.

• Build from Jim O’Bryan’s “I Love Lakewood” narrative circuits for affectual barter upon the vertical mysterium and across the postmodern horizontal.

• Serve the anti-individualist classical idealism of the Lakewood polis by producing civic phantoms more believable and more frightening than those produced by the PD.

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• Dare to know.

• Commit with others to face-time education and ecstasy through production of a community newspaper in the city that would know itself better than any other.

• Join poet’s intuition and scientist’s scrutiny in an exploration of Lakewood’s conservative chthonic.

• Execute through all species of collaborative psycho-geographic genius the poetic art of the dialectic in ecstatic time.

• Advance across real and unreal Lakewood both rigorous deflationary assessments of any representation of social capital and wildly inflationary mirage making for any potential social capital.

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• LO advances through the logic of commonwealth, critical consciousness, deep image, mytho-poetic narrative, social order, territoriality and tribe the vision of the ‘Supreme Land” or “Holy City.”

• LO is a local roots civic engagement, reinvigoration and self-defense strategy with an economic development component designed for the global era of corporate de-localization.

• LO envisions a robust ecology of civic engagement and hyper-local identity with individuals, businesses, institutions and political regimes each supplying narrative kernels and good deeds documented in the newspaper and on-line.

• LO documents the good deeds of the tribes in territorial field of the city to create a sense of common ground.

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• LO is a community organization effort that targets people, organizations and neighborhoods in the heroic effort to transform the affectual ecology of a street car suburb into the celestial register of harmony and love. The very simple goal is to make people feel good about making a concerted effort to increase individual and community control, political efficacy and improved quality of life.

• LO is thick with locally rooted DIY working class resistance kernels, at odds with professionally operated and top-down advocacy and regionalist organizations that seek to dominate the civic landscape.

• LO offers signs of hope in a period of economic and social challenge by bringing ‘I s’ into the fold of the hyper-local we.

• LO focuses on embodied space and cyber space to advance new modes of civic membership.

• LO follows a highly conscious and highly evolved code of civic combat and engagement.

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• LO is, in effect, a new popular front, deploying cutting-edge media production technology while embracing the moral residue of working class consciousness through hyper-local instigation and resistance to corporate dislocation.

• LO is a post-ethnic press with stem site production software designed to advance the self-renewal of the newspaper’s relationship to the people formerly known as advertisers, readers and subscribers.

• Wall Street has constructed for Hyper-localism a simple cost-cutting meaning, based on the challenges faced by mainstream media. The LO project radically challenges this meaning.

• The focus of traditional newspapers is narrowing into the "hyper-local" in the effort to define a local brand and breathe life into the dead big city metro.

• A battle of the brands is being waged between traditional newspapers, such as the PD and the Sun Post, and the post-ethnic hyper-local press like the Lakewood Observer. This battle will be fought over the means, methods and presentation of post-ethnic hyper-local imagi.

• Executing through citizen journalism, the LO resists the imposition of a regional brand by capital, corporations and mainstream media upon local consciousness, culture, economy and politics.

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• Hyper-localism is the new fundamentalism of locality. The only true-believers are persons with skin in the game of the common ground.

• Hyper-localism must be physical and territorial; it must be embodied through a palpable paper with enough gravity to go ‘clunk’ on your stoop.

• There is no mercy in the hyper-local civic dojo.

• Hyper-local cannot be meaningfully aggregated in a major metropolitan newspaper without damaging the ecology of civic engagement and neighborhoods.

• The local community must cohere through words and images in order to define its brand and make its place meaningful in global world of diffusion and distraction.

• If it’s not Lakewood; it’s Leakwood.

• LO is a populist, post-professional platform for community organization, storytelling and technological innovation.

• LO is at war not only with traditional media and commercial newspapers selling the diffused nature of regionalism and evacuation of the demos of subsidiarity from City Hall.

• LO is at war with local bloggers for atomizing and dis-inhibiting effects on the moral order of the hyper-local community.

• With LO, hyper-local citizen journalism becomes, in the final analogy, jihad for the other guys.