Stock, Flow and 3-D news

From Wired.

Josh Kalven writes in the CJR about Stock, Flow, and My Entrepreneurial Origin Story. Josh’s metaphor on Stock and Flow goes to the heart of what has been ailing news delivery for a long time: creating context. Some of the context, what Josh calls stock, resides in splintered form within your affinity community. News, what Josh calls flow, describes shifting conditions. Over time flow accumulates to create new stock — much like the 6-foot snow drifts we have here in Chicago. Used to be the reporter held the stock of the story, and the flow emerged from within her context. With online news, we now have tools to reveal the stock independent of the flow, and fold new flow in to create new stock. We also have the tools to crowd source the stock and reveal the flow against many points of view. As we approach what feels a lot like 3-D News, the question remains what new tools will evolve to deliver it?

The Roar of the University

I managed to catch a few minutes of the end of the PBS special Dinosaur Wars the other night. The story is famous. Two brilliant paleontologists— Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh — over a three decade rivalry separately yet together created a vast collection of fossils and body of scientific work that formed the backbone of Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as our most beloved childhood monsters — dinosaurs.

In the final chapter of Dinosaur Wars, information was leaked to a journalist, whose coverage played out the story in dramatic headlines over a period of weeks. The story rose to a crescendo of partisan politics, erupted into a bleating Congressional squall and then eventually switch-backed, knocking the two great men on their respective professional behinds, where they steeped in their individual flavors of bitterness until they reached their miserly and sickly demises shortly thereafter. As a byproduct, their behavior created a cul de sac in advancing the scientific mission of the U.S. Geological Survey.

The PBS biography of these two men on PBS says:

While the feud between Cope and Marsh consumed the scientists’ lives and damaged their careers, the amount and quality of bones they each collected became the foundation of paleontology in America. Cope left behind 13,000 specimens, and Marsh’s comparable collection proved to be “the best support of the theory of evolution,” according to a personal letter from Charles Darwin himself.

Their work was inspired. Their feud a waste. And journalism was a pawn in their game.

Spin forward to today where different kinds of dinosaurs wander the land. Our industrial age institutions — governments, universities — look for green shoots in a knowledge age frontier. How will they scale their lumbering forms to this digital, media-steeped landscape? Will they understand that there are enough bones for all of them?

That brings me to the question David Cohn has asked us journalist/ bloggers to discuss in this revival of the Carnival of Journalism.

One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.”

I see today’s university as a place where ideas are researched, published and vetted in accordance with standards, and as a place where discourse and push-back from opposing points of view is encouraged, required, public and communicated through numerous media channels. As an active hub of journalism, the university is its own news room. Journalistic communicators working in the university newsroom showcase knowledge and ideas, host the conversation, and understand that the university’s contribution to the world is knowledge, not public relations.

So my point of view asks: What would Dinosaur Wars look like today if the two scientists had not been working in institutional silos? Cope and Marsh would still not have liked each other, but their academic differences would have been aired openly and the press would have been manipulated less.

Since I’ve been talking with entrepreneurs more than college kids these days, I asked Mike Reilley, Online Journalism Instructor at DePaul University, College of Communication, for his opinion of the media literacy issue.

“Universities move at a snail’s pace to adjust curriculums sometimes. They want to stay true to their foundational courses, which is fine, but it stunts growth and change,” Reilley replied in an email. “Technology has revolutionized communication at a core level, and we have to re-think teaching it. Not just to communications or journalism majors, but to everyone.”

In his classes at DePaul, Reilley embeds the use of Twitter, Foursquare, blogging and other digital tools as they emerge. He asks his students to think critically and to explore views on an issue and then justify their points of view. As part of their classwork, Reilley requires his students to build and report on a website, The Redline Project.

“Media literacy can be taught across any discipline in a college environment. Just as students are required to take core courses in their field of study or overall basics, a media literacy course could easily be integrated into a curriculum.”

“Twenty-five years ago, when I was an undergraduate,” Reilley says, “such a course probably wasn’t necessary. But with the emergence of the web and cross-platform mediums, including the ability for anyone to publish, [students] require a new level of critical thinking skills.”

“Anyone with a Twitter account knows this. Should I retweet the link or not? Should I retweet what someone said? Is the information I’m forwarding or sharing credible. What to do?” Reilley says. “If technology gives everyone a voice, we at least need to teach them the fundamentals of using those tools correctly.”

I agree. I developed sea legs in the twitter and blog worlds by using these tools. That is the only way. But my personal radar that detects credible and high quality information has developed over a lifetime of reporting. How to teach that?

Community News Matters Info session Jan. 19 – be there!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f3dUPk5uyQ[/youtube]

If you live in Chicago and you report on happenings in your neighborhood, you might want to check out this grant program by the Chicago Community Trust. CCT and its partners are making small grants to fortify the news stream in underserved communities. You can read all about it on CCT’s website.

Attend the information session Wednesday, Jan. 19, to get the details and meet others who are involved in creating Chicago’s hyperlocal news system. I’ll be there – join me!

Foundations Create Local Reporting Initiative For Low-Income Communities
The Chicago Community Trust Explores Development of an Advertising Network for Online News

January 10, 2011, Chicago – The Chicago Community Trust, our region’s community foundation, announced the creation of a one-year, $247,000 Local Reporting Initiative to stimulate a wave of new reporting and analysis of important issues affecting low-income communities on the south and west sides of Chicago.

“High quality reporting and analysis is the lifeblood of civic life,” said Ngoan Le, vice president of program for The Chicago Community Trust. “With so many important decisions affecting our city, county and state in the coming year, it’s essential that citizens and policy-makers know what’s at stake.“

As part of this Initiative, the Trust issued a request for proposals from nonprofits, for-profit companies and individuals for Local Reporting Awards totaling $110,000. Some of the awards will be for $2,000 each and others will be for $10,000.

Le said she hopes that “policy groups, community organizations, media outlets of all kinds and individuals who care about these communities will be inspired by the Initiative to step up” with proposals for new reporting projects.

The Initiative is part of the Trust’s Community News Matters program, launched in 2009 by an initial grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to increase the flow of truthful, accurate and insightful local news and information and help the region’s cutting edge innovators develop new models for providing news and information. The Initiative is funded by The Chicago Community Trust, Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the McCormick Foundation. The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and Woods Fund of Chicago provide funding for other Community News Matters activities.

All those interested in applying for an award through the Local Reporting Initiative should attend a special information session January 19 from 10 a.m. to noon on the second floor at 618 South Michigan Avenue. Proposals are due by noon February 21, 2011.

Go to www.communitynewsmatters.org for a copy of the award application and Request for Proposals. For additional information, contact vivian@cct.org.

Chicago Social Venture Forum at Booth

Social Venture Forum

News of a Chicago Social Venture Forum at University of Chicago from long-time colleague Linda Darragh at Booth.

In 2010, Chicago Booth teamed with the Foundation Source to launch the first-of-its-kind Social Venture Forum, which aims to offer private foundations new opportunities and techniques for social enterprise investing. Foundations learn how to further their social mission while generating financial return by deploying philanthropic capital in innovative ways. If your social venture seeks funding, we encourage you submit an application to the Chicago Social Venture Forum. Please see the application and rules (PDF). All submissions are due to Erika Mercer [ Erika.mercer AT chicagobooth.edu ]by September 20, 2010.

Learn more at the Polsky Center.
Continue reading Chicago Social Venture Forum at Booth

Where have you been?

Interesting post by Dan X. O’Neill on using FourSquare to record where you go and what you do. Counter to what Dan suggests here certain aspects of my life are so private I would not think of putting them on Foursquare – i.e. a visit to my gynecologist — for instance.

As I read Dan’s post I felt some pushback – perhaps generational and gender based — against answering the question “where have you been.” How about you?

I was, however, thinking about transparency on the Web and feeling my personal edges around my
reputation” when earlier today I was testing Unvarnished, which says it is a “Truth in Reputation” tool.

Choosing my Unvarnished “reviewers” felt different from choosing my “reviewees.” I found that I wanted my reviewers to be people who I see as having some amount of “prestige” in their work, whom I feel have a good personal brand and are willing to experiment on the Web – my peeps with brand clout. In selecting my reviewees I tended to select folks whom I know well, who are experimenters in the Web or start-up worlds and whom I know well enough to say something about.

Unvarnished is not the first reputation-ranking tool on the Web, by the way. But the fact that is plugged into both Facebook and LinkedIn reinforces its likelihood for longevity. Whuffie anyone?

People to Pitch and the New News

Thom Clark at Community Media Workshop does a great job connecting non-profits with journalists and the new news landscape. Here’s a little piece on my philosophy CMW did a few months ago.

For fun, Sally Duros follows the “future of news”. A former reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Duros has rebranded herself as a digital strategist “who provides insight and solutions to organizations.” At the height of the media downfall, Chicago industry insiders labeled the Internet as one of the threats to newspapers. Yet, Duros doesn’t think the Internet or social media technology is co-opting how news is produced and distributed but rather creating room for collaboration.

Community Media Workshop talked with Duros about social media and how nonprofits can utilize the technology to continue getting their stories to the public.

What kinds of shifts do you see happening with how information is being disseminated? Do you see competition walls coming down in the media?

It’s a really interesting issue—the issue of competitiveness. The word “compete” in my opinion is almost an oxymoron. Because you’re competing on grounds of trust and willingness to collaborate. So people who are willing to collaborate and people who are trusted sharers of quality information are the people who are going to rule. Journalists have a real advantage because historically, journalists are viewed as trusted information providers. But the grassroots perspective, the perspective of an NPO on the ground, the perspective of a citizen on the corner, around many of these issues are very valuable too. They’re going to learn additional dimensions of an issue from that point of view, and the real challenge for journalists is to incorporate all of those points of view in a new way into what they do.

When I can get all that information from a service, like Everyblock (or GOV 2.0 and SeeClickFix.com), the journalists no longer have to deliver that kind of information. Reporters no longer have to collect that information. It’s being delivered thru systems like Everyblock. And that frees up the journalists to be able to understand patterns of these kinds of behaviors. Then working with citizen watchdogs who care about that corner of that block can create more than a story and help create action that could improve that block.

Is journalism heading to a place where there are no more gatekeepers? Is everyone a ‘gatekeeper’ and you’ve got be participating?

Well, there’s a need for vetting. I want to be clear—there is a need to vet information. There is a need for journalists to be curators. We’re just so much more sophisticated now…We just know all the information has a point of view and so there’s a really important role for journalists. Gatekeeper is probably too strong a word. The voice of the journalist as a moderator, as someone who is enabling good conversation, a credible conversation. I think that’s where journalism is going.

Well what about the situation with Shirley Sherrod? How does a nonprofit using blogs to get information out take precautious?

I think that if I were a nonprofit trying to communicate these days I would make sure that whatever I put out there was tested and right. I wouldn’t put any information in my stories or in my press releases that are not verifiable and true. When a journalist gets it and they look at it, they’ll say, “Oh yea this is right.” Then you’re building credibility. I would caution anyone who is blogging as an NPO or putting press releases out as an NPO or writing stories and distributing them online as an NPO to make sure that your information is bullet proof.

So in that [Sherrod’s] situation, I think that people get very, very excited to be the first one out with information. And I think with the Internet there is an incredible drive to be the first one out with information.

Could a nonprofit use SeeClikcFix.com, Everyblock and GOV 2.0 as additional support for making their stories 3-D?

They could use some of these tools to organize their people. If you lived in Uptown and you have an Uptown citizens’ group and your group thinks that there are too many potholes and nothing is getting done, you could put a call out to your members and say, “Hey if you know a nasty pothole on your block, go report it at SeeClickFix. ” When you report it at SeeClickFix you’re making a report with 311 and you’re also making a report with the alderman’s office.

I think the real challenge here is getting the city, the state, and the government entities to update their technology so that so they can deal with these kinds of issues.

How did you find out about this new technology, like SeeClickFix and how can nonprofits stay abreast of new technology that could help them stay ahead of the curve?

You could follow me on Twitter (@Saduros). I do try to report on new tools as I find them on my blog Sallyduros.com. I follow the Internet and how it’s developing new tools for journalists. How do you follow that? We have quite a few smart people in Chicago, like Dan O’Neill, and (Brad Flora) Windy Citizen, which is a place where you could post a story and say “Hey we’ve got a great story and we’re going to put it here and please vote it up.” So those are all people I follow and you follow them and you follow the people who are following them. And before you know it everyone is smarter than everybody and we’re all building something new together.

Follow Sally Duros on Facebook at Sally Duros, on Twitter @Saduros and on her website at Sallyduros.com. You can contact her via gmail at sallyduros@gmail.com

Social Dev Camp Chicago

You can also take a look at the Event Weave.

To get me talking ask me about: Would you like to hear my idea about how new technology could be used for measuring wealth as it is created and circulated in neighborhoods? And how the collected metrics could be translated into a driver for foundation investment.

I’d like to build a newsroom delivering information for specific communities of interest. Foundations would fund it in part with investments. The return they would expect would be decided by metrics of community wealth and community connectedness.

As dots connect, whole emerges for future of news

First published Huffington Post, June 12, 2010

The online dots are quickly connecting. Gov2.0 entrepreneurs are building a strong backbone for a hyperlocal new stream. And much of the innovation is seated here in Chicago.

Everyblock and SeeClickFix have formed a partnership.

Many Chicago alderman are signed up for SeeClickFix. We are forming new communication channels on the Web for talking to our governments, creating a crowd-sourced complaint system and measuring the quality of government’s response to our complaints and requests for service. [I’ve embedded it here on my website – so give it a spin.] More to come on the feedback systems that could drive all this.

I haven’t talked with OutsideIn for a while but I see that the creators of the conceptual framework of the Emerging Ecosystem of News Delivery have a robust stream of information coming in from news blogs.

There’s no formula for bringing all this together and making it all work like a well-oiled machine. But – as was evident from a panel on models for news and the optimistic viewpoint of Steve Rhodes about revenue models at Chicago’s Community Media Workshop last week, we have many reasons to look brightly to the future.

We also have the “Big” thinkers now stepping forward and touting tools for getting the information you want, many of which James Fallows outlined in this June piece in the Atlantic Monthly. Give GoogleNews a spin – you’ll like it. Even the New York Times Magazine is taking notice of the plight of New Journalism Entrepreneurs in this May 10 piece by Andrew Rice “Putting a Price on Words.” It’s something I first noted in a ChuffPo post last year.

At this rarified high level of information exchange online, there’s much going on front stage and behind the scenes. There are more moving parts than can be counted.

I was reminded last week that all this blue sky can quickly go gray from the clouds cast by the lack of online access for underserved communities. Committed community news activists and journalists (no longer news-room bound) gathered in Detroit for “Create or Die” an open space on Journalism that Matters.

That’s a conversation that is continuing at a higher pitch and urgency June 24 at “From Blueprint to Building: Making the Market for Digital Information,” which Bill Densmore calls an action congress for trust, identity and Internet information commerce serving newspapers and beyond. Trust is our currency on the Web, and we’ve made much progress defining that since Pierre Omidyar made his first discoveries on eBay. Now even Omidyar has gotten the news bug and has launched Honolulu’s Civil Beat. Densmore hopes his “Blueprint” will dot the “i’s and cross the “t”s on the next phase of online trust. We’re hopeful and we will see.

As the Chicago News Cooperative continues to explore the idea of the low-profit limited liability, or L3C, business structure, the Pt. Reyes Light in Marin County says it is taking the plunge and will become a mission-driven newsroom.

As Steve Yelvington explained so well in this presentation last year at the University of Minnesota Economic Models for News, journalism has never had a business model of its own. My thinking is that it is about time it does, as I explained at Community Media Workshop panel last month. That’s why I am continuing to follow and braid the threads leading to a social enterprise news stream.

It can’t be long now before this all comes together, and when it does it will be in several robust forms that will provide access to volumes of information we’ve not had access to before. And it will be up to a diversity of journalists to do the job of helping to create, vet, sort and distribute these streams.

Hold on for a wild ride.

Follow Sally Duros on Twitter: www.twitter.com/saduros