Category: Future of News

To understand Open Government in Chicago, start by visiting Schoolcuts.org and pick a school. Any school.

More than 38,000 children will be affected by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposed school closings in Chicago. Angry parents are marching in the streets and debate is heated about whether the process for deciding which schools to close was fair and open.

Although, the Chicago school system makes public nearly all of its data, the data lacks context that would make it useful for making arguments pro or con any specific school closing. Making sense of it is too big a job for the parents that are so passionate about the school closings themselves, and no newsroom had the technical capacity to tackle the data on its own.

Enter a group of volunteers, including a grassroots parents group, web developers, data scientists and coders passionate about open government and education. They created the Schoolcuts.org site to provide information to the public in a visual form that would be useful for understanding the problems —  or not —  with each school closing and how it might affect the children and the neighborhoods.

“The very day that CPS announced the school closing list, that evening a group of software coders put up the site Schoolcuts.org,” says Terry Mazany, President and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust, who had also served as interim CEO of the Chicago Public Schools in 2010.

“They had aggregated all the datasets about school performance. And geomapped the schools that are on the list for closing …. That’s the sort of service you would hope that government might provide but these groups did it out of a sense of community service,” he says.

“They had this site up and running — and it is masterful.”

Coming full circle

Development of SchoolCuts to solve a problem for the public, means conversations and research begun 4 years earlier by the Chicago Community Trust have come full circle.

In 2009, executives at  the Chicago Community Trust were confronting two frightening possibilities.

The first was the fact of significantly weakened news operations with both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times in bankruptcy. For the first time, it appeared likely that Chicago could become a one newspaper city. With decimated coverage and reporting, the Trust was worried about the loss of watchdog and accountability journalism.

The second was heightened awareness of the increasing digital divide, where in some neighborhoods on the South and West side only 30% to 50% of households had Internet access. With the Internet fast becoming the primary source for news and information, these Chicagoans would be left out of any emerging digital information streams.

Given shrinking news holes, the digital divide, and conditions created by the deep recession, civic leaders had gathered a working group to understand the problems and develop solutions.

“Here in Chicago we had not really had to be attentive to the news ecosystem, because the 4th estate was doing just fine and taking care of business.  So we could take it for granted,” Mazany says. “I repeatedly say how grateful I am for Alberto Ibargüen and the Knight Foundation for bringing it to our attention in a way that engaged community foundations as authentic partners.”

The Trust as a platform

Those talks in 2009 were the beginning of the evolution of the Chicago Community Trust’s news and information programs into something new.  With funding from Knight, the Trust began to view itself as a platform, a place that could host unexpected partnerships and encourage new ideas, experimentation and innovative solutions. Since then the Chicago Community Trust has led projects mapping the local new ecosystem, and made grants to online news start-ups.

But the most influential spin-off from the Chicago Community Trust platform to date is the Smart Chicago Collaborative, whch is also a leader in the Open Government movement.

“That was our game changer,” says Mazany.

Funded by the City of Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust, Smart Chicago says it is a funding collaborative:

 We help bring together municipal, philanthropic, and corporate investments in civic innovation.

By most measures, Smart Chicago’s line items at the Chicago Community Trust add up to a powerhouse with $3.8 million in funding from MacArthur, and $10.8 million from the City of Chicago. Totaled together with Trust matches and other funding, Smart Chicago has a total budget of $14.7 million.

With Dan X. O’Neil, former people person and co-founder of EveryBlock as Executive Director, Smart Chicago became the intermediary working with a number of existing and new initiatives related to digital media and learning funded by the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the agency overseeing implementation of the City of Chicago’s broad band initiative bridging the digital divide.

Smart Chicago’s role

Smart Chicago is where the circle becomes full. Through its 15 projects, Smart Chicago strategically combats news deserts in neighborhoods, extends broad band access through out the city and hosts the open government community. By creating new ways to quantify problems and identify fixes, current open government projects are the beginning of a new kind of accountability journalism.

“It’s about community, its about digital,” says Mazany. “Then we have the Knight Foundation– it’s about digital media. Then it’s about government and all of these come together.

“What Smart Chicago gives us is the brain power, the brain trust around the coding community, understanding better big data….” Mazany says.“We continue to serve as that connective platform here at the community foundation.

“The confluence of all of these elements is just mind blowing! It is redefining the future …on a digital plane,” Mazany says.

Over the past five years, the Chicago Community Trust has been awarded $704,000 in Community News Matters and Civic Innovation Challenge grants from the Knight Foundation. They’ve also won a $350,000 commitment from the John D. and Catherine T.  MacArthur Foundation and provided matching funds bringing their total for the Knight Information Challenge to more than $2.0 million.

For most of the past four years, Chicago’s OpenGov meetings were small gatherings of a dozen or so data scientists, software architects and coders who would meet at various offices and talk about data sets they were interested in “liberating” and mapping out.  One of those early projects was Chicagolobbyists.org.

Today, OpenGovChi convenes in the main meeting room at the Chicago Community Trust. Now, the circle has expanded to include members of the public and several partners. Joe Germuska, a co-founder of OpenGovChi, who now runs software development at Northwestern University’s Knight News Lab runs the meeting with O’Neil. The room is often filled to capacity with 100 or more and there is a waiting list.

Public radio takes a seat

One partner who attends regularly is Matthew Green, who runs the data news team at local public radio station WBEZ.

“We are supported by Chicago Community Trust and the Smart Chicago Collaborative,” says Green. “We are the first partner that they have that is a loudspeaker to the movement. This movement itself has lots of stories. The movement is unearthing stories in a new way.” The team from WBEZ develops ideas that stretch the capacity of the public radio’s newsroom to use data to report on problems that the public wants solved.

At a recent meeting Thoughtful Critiques of the Open Government Movement, Mike Stringer, a managing partner at Chicago’s Datascope Analytics, talked through a simple history of the Open Government movement.

It used to be “We have this Data, what can we do with it?” Today it is “Start with a problem.  Use data as a resource, “ Stringer says.

Exactly.

Thoughts for getting started with Open Gov

• Learn about the importance of government data in shaping policy and accountability journalism. Develop insight, because that’s where it begins, with the CEO having an understanding that data and Open Government matters.
• Understand the news ecosystem in your locality and the role of the community foundation as a hub of that ecosystem.
• Do a needs assessment and identify the contours of your own news ecosystem.
• Devise strategies, convenings and funding unique to your locality.
• Connect with technologists perhaps by hosting Open Government events. You don’t have to employ a software coder, a digital expert , an app or web developer, but you do need to connect with the coders and technologists.
• Be prepared. As in the SchoolCuts.org example, have a loosely structured network where the people know each other interact.
• Allow self organization.
• Become a platform. Media consultant Steve Yelvington wrote this in 2008.

“When you choose to (become) a platform, you make a trade. You give up some control. But in exchange, you allow someone else to make your platform more valuable, more important, more essential.”

The social Web challenges me to get out of my way and to think anew about whatever it is that I am doing – whether it is washing dishes or crafting a Tweet. But still it’s easy to get stuck in a mindset that values fast and efficient over fun and meandering. It’s a times like these that I go mingle with the creatives to recharge with what’s new and exciting. It’s in these creative narrowcasts where I find the passion of fandom unleashing the potential of the social Web.

If you don’t get off Facebook much, you might want to meander around Kickstarter and see what’s playing front page. Your friends or your kids have probably sent you to this service that provides a great set of tools — from video to messaging to marketing advice — to help you fundraise for your project. There’s one caveat. You have a deadline for raising your nut and if you don’t make it, you’re out. A stroll around Kickstarter is always amazing , often moving and usually inspiring. Seeing others creations might give you some ideas for your own.

This week, I stumbled upon a Kickstarter project: Good Ol’ Freda. Freda Kelly was the secretary for The Beatles from the early days at the Cavern Club until 1970. She’s still a secretary and until now has been mum about her life with the fab four. Now she’s opened up her scrapbooks to a filmmaker and they are looking to raise $50,000 by Nov. 12 for their film project. Shes offering all kinds of goodies in exchange for your donation.

Another place to easily get lost in a wonderland is YouTube. And not just in the old music video section. There’s real talent at work here making excellent niche TV shows that are better than the best of Hollywood, precisely because they are so deeply engaging with their audiences. A fan girl friend recently pointed me toward Issa Rae’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which Rae creates and stars in. The production values and acting are very good. But the writing is superb and funny.

Or if you are feeling geeky, you can head on over to the Twit netcast network, “Netcasts you love from people you trust.” Here you’ll find some inspiration for that underused conference room, that yoga studio that’s empty during the day or the slow time at the café in the afternoon. Set up a stage and some talkative folks and you have a TV show. OK. The folks on This Week in Google aren’t every day people — they are some of the Internet’s most prominent thinkers — but you never know what talent lives in your building or up the block.

I was bungling around on Facebook and found actor friend Don Bender is involved in a new online theaterical production by Jamil Khoury, Silk Road Rising, which he says is engaging theater onstage and online around important issues. His play, Mosque Alert, is about “Two suburban American families living in Naperville, IL -one Christian, the other Muslim- find their lives torn apart by a proposal to build a new mosque in their community.”

Khoury says:

In the hopes of generating deeper engagement around this issue, I have designed a ten-step, interactive, on-line, new play development process that will assist me in developing and writing my play “Mosque Alert.” Viewers are encouraged to both influence and assist me as I pen this new play.

My ten step artistic process allows each participant to act as co-creator throughout the entire development cycle. I like to think of it as a spiritual convening of the individual with the art.

Each of these is a narrowcast co-creation with a passionate audience. It’s the way the future of the Internet is rolling out. There are millions of ideas blossoming. Yours could be one of them. If you know who your people are, you can find your idea. It can be as simple to execute [the writing wasn’t simple] as a humorous tweetalogue like Dan Sinker’s Mayor Emanuel, which started as an anonymous satire of then Chicago Mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel and ended up as a book. Or it can be as elaborate as a traveling global round robin musical like Playing for Change, which made its name with Stand by Me. Take some time to stroll around and fire your imagination. Let us know what you find and most important what you and your colleagues dream up for yourselves. We’d love to hear about it.

To supplement a conversation we are having on Block by Block Resource Network on Facebook about how to measure impact of a newsroom, here’s some thoughts that recently flew by on a recent Carnival of Journalism thread.

Jessica Binsch, Digital Journalist:

Hi Carnies, how much do we love the fact that one of our jcarn-topics will now be explored in more depth by the New York Times? They got funding from the Knight-Mozialla News challenge to research a better metric for measuring journalism, which Greg proposed as a topic a few months back. Not surprisingly, he’s also behind this attempt. Writes Aron Pilhofer: “The project our Knight-Mozilla fellow will help tackle was hatched in January during a bus ride to the Austin airport with news brainiac (and karaokaholic) Greg Linch. He had just written a terrific post on his blog, The Linchpen, about the need for more sophisticated metrics to measure the success or failure of journalism online. I’d been thinking about the same problem, but Greg crystalized the challenge and the opportunity perfectly.In his words: “So, what if we measured journalism by its impact? (…)The ideal outcome would be a suite of open-source tools, techniques and best practices that, in aggregate, help all of us understand readers better and enhance the impact of our journalism. At a bare minimum, we hope to start asking the right questions.”http://aronpilhofer.com/post/27993980039/the-right-metric-for-news

Denise Cheng, Journalism Accelerator [?]:

This is awesome! There seems like a lot of overlap between what NYT proposes to do and what Joy Mayer explored during her Reynolds fellowship.

She interviewed many journalists and technologists to triangulate a definition of engagement, and in spring 2011, she and Reuben Stern convened around 30 practitioners from all over the country to survey different engagement tactics, how they were beginning to measure those or how they’d flesh out those metrics. It led to a white paper. It’s such a great spring board that I hope Aron and Greg tap her for her insights.

Sally Duros, Indie journalist:

I have been saying this all along. I don’t think advertising is all of the equation for funding journalism, which is “birthing” itself right now. I don’t think journalism really knows what it is.  I’m not sure the world knows what journalism is! As I wrote last week in a post about SEO …. 

Local news is about telling stories  to inform, educate and ultimately help build stronger connections in a community. Its simpler for content marketers. Content marketers are using the tactics of newsrooms — storytelling — to attract clients for something they do.  While newsrooms are using their storytelling expertise to attract clients  — businesses, churches, theaters, restaurants — to help build a platform for more storytelling through community news, ads, events and more. So, once again, I am right! 🙂

Jan Schaffer, JLab: 

Aron’s interests ring true with us at J-Lab and echo some of the frustrations we surfaced in our “Engaging Audiences”  report and suggest there might be a correlation between impact and genuine audience engagement:  http://www.j-lab.org/publications/engaging-audiences/Some key takeawaysSocial media connectors such as Facebook and Twitter were highly valued, but they were primarily used to alert users to new stories or information. New analytical tools gave these news startups some useful data, but survey respondents said their top metric for measuring engagement was still website usage – unique visitors and page views. Many expressed dissatisfaction with the information they get.“We feel these numbers only give us part of the information we need,” said one respondent. “We’re interested not just in breadth of engagement but more in depth of engagement.”Even though data on depth and stickiness of audience engagement were missing, creative ideas were not. In more than 1,300 open-ended comments, respondents described many resourceful strategies they are using to involve their audiences in community issues and information.Many of these ideas extend beyond conventional definitions of engagement as audience interactions with content. At least four types of engagement surfaced in the survey responses, but how well the respondents optimized these engagement strategies varied by organization.

They include:

• Engagement as outreach, driving users to consume content.
• Engagement as reaction, inviting users to comment, share, like and chat.
• Engagement as stakeholder participation, getting users to contribute stories, time, funding.
• Engagement as civic participation, activating audience members to address community issues.
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Sally Duros, Indie journalist:

Engagement as civic participation, activating audience members to address community issues.

Jan Schaffer, JLab :
You know your journalism has had impact when people start participating in more than just your website, facebook page, blog or twitter feed.  🙂

Sally Duros, Indie journalist:

Brilliantly said! 🙂

Michael Rosenblum, RosemblumTV:

If you can’t create a profitable business around your journalism, then the rest of the discussion is moot.

 Sally Duros, Indie journalist: 

Agreed, Michael. What I am saying is that the ways that money can be made for the journalism business are nascent but under development. I believe we will see a clear way forward. We’re just not there yet.