Category: Local News Sustainability

Some audience engagement tools to check out. Could any of them be useful to you?

HEARKEN IS PUBLIC-POWERED JOURNALISM

“Q: How do JOURNALISTS know the stories they report are stories their COMMUNITY finds relevant?
A: They ask them. And they use HEARKEN to manage engagement”

Listening Post and Curious City. What do you wonder about Chicago, the region and its people? Pose your question to Curious City and we’ll track down answers together, with stories online, in a weekly podcast, and on WBEZ 91.5 FM. Follow what we do — and learn how you can help investigate — on our website, on Facebook, on Twitter and Tumblr.

MediaPublic
What does it mean to be a member of a public radio station in the United States? What could it mean? How could expanding the definition of membership instill a sense of ownership and identity among listeners, allowing them to feel more connected and invested in public media’s content, work and mission? Follow Melody Kramer on GitHub.

Framed by WDET
An audio-visual experience that integrates PHOTOGRAPHY and AUDIO STORYTELLING to tell the story of ETHNIC AND CULTURAL COMMUNITIES throughout metro Detroit.

ChiHackNight
Chicago’s weekly event to build, share & learn about civic tech. “Open data  without journalism is public relations.”— Barb Iverson

Blendl
With Blendle, you read all articles from your favorite newspapers and magazines. Without subscribing. Coming soon to a locality near you.

New developments
Here in Chicago, City Bureau, SmartChicago and Invisible Institute have developed the Task Force Tracker.  
Using an excel sheet and Genius, a team of City Bureau Community Documenters  an annotated, updated and independent hub for public use that will measure the ~200 individual recommendations against existing contracts, policies, potential conflicts and public discourse; such as the Fraternal Order of Police contract, local legislation and media reports.

A couple of large scale initiatives involving remnants of big newsrooms brought together hold lessons for Chicago. And yes, they contribute to the “Could it happen here?” factor.
Poynter details how a non-profit now runs Philadelphia news and here’s an explainer. The Knight Foundation held a discusson last week and you can watch a video of the panel discussion  if you want more details. In Detroit, here’s the story of the Detroit Journalism Cooperative  and how the coop’s members — the Center for Michigan’s Bridge Magazine, Detroit Public Television, Michigan Radio, New Michigan Media, and WDET FM101.9 —all learned to play nicely together. Check out NextChapterDetroit.

Here’s a link to a WTTW clip from March 2009. Yeah – it’s almost five years old. In it, I, Owen Youngman, the Knight chair at Medill, and Geoff Dougherty, then the founder of Chi-Town Daily News, discuss the future of news. Owen is still teaching at Medill and is busy doing what tenured professors do – teaching, researching and advancing knowledge in his area of expertise. It looks like Geoff is successfully pivoting  into the world of science. His linked in says, “I’m a social epidemiologist and PhD student in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, with research interests in neighborhood-level determinants of cardiovascular disease, systems- and agent-based modeling and application of GIS to public health questions.”

Continue reading The future of news is a rainbow

J-Lab founder Jan Schaffer sees an emerging civic impulse driving the future of journalism. As part of that, she sees journalism outlets that are more catalyst than commodity.

Schaffer has been leading the edge of innovation in the news sphere for 20 years and most of her work has been enabling others to innovate. In late October, she wrote about her coming pivot where she’s taking J-Lab to a new chapter and concentrating on projects of her own.

Schaffer will still be around under the name J-Lab, since she owns it. She’s writing a book on Law for Media Start-ups for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, and teaching media entrepreneurship at American University. Beginning in January, Schaffer will have a one semester visiting professorship in Memphis teaching entrepreneurship and working with the start-up community there. And she has several other projects waiting to be born.

“My aspiration really is to spend more time writing stuff I want to write, and less time writing grant proposals,” Schaffer says.

She and I discussed the trends she’s observed over the past 20 years and what important trends she sees emerging.

Become a cause

Any conversation about the future of news revolves around issues of sustainability. As part of that, Schaffer sees a redefinition of what journalism is.

“I do believe that people will be less successful asking stakeholders to pay for journalism, and more successful when they ask them to pay for a cause. And what do I mean by a cause? Well, a cause may just be disseminating news and information,” Schaffer says. “But, it’s like the Guardian’s model. People will pay for the Guardian because it’s something they believe in, they don’t necessarily pay for it to get stories.”

If community stewardship is the newsroom’s core value, then that could be cause enough.

“I think that we already are seeing new taxonomies of journalism emerging that have more of a civic impulse then the kind of journalism I grew up with,” Schaffer says. “So, what does that mean? Well, it means that some of the people who are getting involved in community news and information really want to build community, and not just cover it. That doesn’t mean build it with one agenda, but instead be stewards of good community life. And that’s a different mind set.”

In the past many professional journalists would have squirmed at that idea. Schaffer says that in that past, she would have as well, but she doesn’t anymore.

“In fact, I find the kind of journalism I like to consume right now has a little bit more of a civic impulse,” Schaffer says.

This brand of journalism is evident in a range of online reporting — from the work of journalist Glenn Greenwald — which Schaffer labels as anti-government — to the social justice reporting by The Marshall Project.

Spotlighting problems that can have solutions

“While it’s not actively campaigning, it is, by force of it’s journalism, spot-lighting problems that can have solutions,” she says.

As another example, she cites Catalyst Chicago, a long-standing publication — now online —founded by Linda Lenz to report on education.

“Catalyst is very much covering public schools. But they’re unabashedly doing it from a lens that says ‘We care about good public schools.'”

Schaffer did a case study of a Catalyst’s program, through which the publication held community meetings to educate the public about preschools.

“Well, you know, that’s not a classic kind of activity that a standard journalist would be comfortable with,” Schaffer says. “But again, for the mission of the Catalyst it was fine. (Lenz) felt comfortable doing it. And it worked out pretty well. … (The program) got a lot more enrollment as a result of informing the community face to face instead of just writing a story.”

The kind of function Schaffer describes used to be the work of intermediaries, non-profits, often service providers, who were subject matter experts and had long reach into their communities. They’d have held the meetings and Catalyst would instead have reported on them.

In the case Schaffer describes, the intermediary party has been replaced with a newsroom.

“Just like a lot of non-profits are creating their own media. I think a lot of journalism outlets are becoming less of a commodity, and more of a catalyst,” Schaffer says.

That’s not a bad thing. Although in this scenario, newsrooms have to be careful that they’re not banging the drum for something with a hidden agenda or that the community would not support.

The changing definition of pure journalism

“But I think you could still be pure, in the journalists definition of pure. But also catalyze some community conversations, and brainstorming around problems and issues and solutions,” Schaffer says.

What’s considered “pure” is being redefined.

“The definition of pure is changing. And I think a lot of where it’s changing, and a lot of the drive for change, is happening with entrepreneurial news start-ups who don’t feel quite as constrained by the do’s and don’ts of the old rules,” Schaffer says.

She sees evidence of that in her students who are less resistant to the idea of advocating for an outcome.

In one example, a news site run by volunteers in Milwaukee ran a series on a run-down section of town, with a photo of the existing streetscape. They then hired a graphic artist to draw an improved streetscape, with street lights, trees, new curbs and bike lanes. The site ran the before and after pictures side-by-side. Once shown the possibilities, the community and the alderman jumped on board and made it happen.

“I’ll show that example to some journalists and they’ll say, ‘Oh, well, we don’t do that.’ Then I’ll show it to some students in my classes, and they’re kind of scratching their heads and saying, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ You know? So there’s really different mindsets emerging,” she says.

As the ground shifts, what is allowable shifts as well. But for the new ground rules to work ethically, transparency is essential. There’s also the fact that “If people don’t agree with what you’re doing they’re not going to read you,” Schaffer says.

N.J. model for community foundations

In terms of news ecosystem development, she sees the work of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in New Jersey as a model for other community foundations.

“To me, it’s a classic example of building capacity and infrastructure, not just funding individual sites as commodities,” Schaffer says. “The foundation is really building an ecosystem for the state that feels good. There’s a lot of collaboration. There’s training. There are some small grants for seed funding.”

“New Jersey is a densely populated state with a thin sprinkling of major media. If if gets major commercial television coverage, it comes episodically from stations based in New York City or Philadelphia. Its largest newspapers, the Newark Star Ledger and the Asbury Park Press, have dramatically downsized.

What is emerging is a media ecosystem of independent startups — NJSpotlight to cover the state legislature and scores of local and niche-topic sites. Dodge, with some Knight Foundation funding, is helping to build both a support network and some connective tissue among both new startups and legacy news outlets. I think they are doing that to a greater degree in an individual state than anyone else I know of,” she says.

“Dodge funds NJNewsCommons, which is really acting as a robust hub for the new landscape, providing training, brainstorming, consulting, seed funding and even a place to work from at Montclair State, if you need a desk to sit at. I think there are some 50-60 partners or more, now that are part of the Commons,” she says.

They share story, tech ideas and revenue ideas to try to achieve sustainability.

Newsrooms must find appropriate scale

At the newsroom level, Schaffer says sustainability is all about finding he appropriate scale.

“I think the sustainable model is not to scale up too quickly. Stay small.”

That means for members of the Investigative News Network, a budget less than $500,000 per year, and for members of the LION publishers, budgets less than $250,000 a year.

The key is to work backward from your aspirational budget — and determine what’s possible.

“I think there’s a finite amount of income you’re going to get from advertising in any small community. So you figure out what that is, and what your penetration can be for that,” she says. “There’s a small amount of income that you can get from donors or members. And then at that point, you have to just decide what you can do, and what you can’t. ”

Some newsrooms have grown accustomed to paying for operations with large multimillion grants.

“Really, funders are not looking to pay operating costs,” Schaffer says.

Big newsrooms with $8 million to $10 million per year budgets, such as the Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica as Public Integrity, have “a lot of money to raise every year,” she says.

Schaffer sees micro-streams of revenue as the key to sustainability.

“I think there’s not a sustainable model, I think there are models, plural. And I think they’re all based on micro-streams of revenue,” Schaffer says.

Micro-streams include some advertising, events and consulting as well as members, donors, or subscribers. She also thinks running press releases could become a lucrative stream.

What’s ahead for the J-Lab founder?

“I feel excited about it, I feel very energized, and I’m happy for the change. The exception is, of course the Baby Boomer Grant program. But I think that’s going to be my swan song. That’s going to be the last one I launch.”

J-Lab’s Baby Boomer Grant program has been christened “Geezer Grants” by some. It will offer $12,000 in startup funding to people age 50-plus who want to launch a news project. Learn more and apply now. Deadline: Dec. 15. (Download a preview application.)

“(In the boomers) you have a cohort of people who often can bootstrap some of the stuff themselves. They have skills. They have a network. They have experience in the community. They have people that they can tap to help with the effort. So I think there are robust opportunities there, if somebody wants to dive in.”

Smart Chicago Collaborative is a new institution charged with bringing the one partner to the civic innovation table that truly matters – community.

Established by the City of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation and The Chicago Community Trust, Smart Chicago Collaborative connects the dots between technology and community to improve lives in Chicago through technology.

“The idea was to create a sort of  center of gravity where you would have  staff and founders and others  thinking about how you can actually transform the climate in the city so it is taking advantage of technology and access,” says Julia Stasch, Vice President of U.S. Programs for the MacArthur Foundation.

Community is the only partner that matters in a civic information ecosystem, because without it, hackers, coders and government activists are operating with incomplete knowledge of real problems that need to be solved.

With an agile touch, Smart Chicago leverages deep local knowledge and expertise so grant funds can be used strategically to achieve maximum impact.

“We seek to be useful in the smallest possible way for the greatest possible gain,” says Dan X. O’Neil, executive director of Smart Chicago Collaborative and former people person for open data pioneer Everyblock. “I see value in building the civic innovation infrastructure, to help underserved people live better lives in their areas. And improve lives in Chicago through technology.”

Initially financed by federal broadband money, Smart Chicago Collaborative is a pivot from creating a citywide wifi network to instead creating an agency that could engender a climate of digital inclusion and innovation in Chicago to bridge the digital divide.

“We think of Smart Chicago Collaborative as civic infrastructure,” says Alaina Harkness, Program Officer, Community and  Economic Development for the MacArthur Foundation.

“In response to a competition for federal dollars for broadband projects, the City of Chicago and LISC/Chicago built a really smart set of programs for reaching deeply into neighborhoods that did not have great access to the internet,” says Harkness. “They leveraged existing training programs and organizations with strong connections to community, and built on the city’s existing network of places where people have access to public computers, from libraries to City Colleges.”

“The Collaborative was able to help bring all that together,” she says. Upon evaluation, Internet access increased between 11% and 19% in those low-income neighborhoods that had access to this program and this will likely mean a further commitment of matching funds to the program by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, she says.

Why community?

An important way to better understand the work of Smart Chicago Collaborative is to look at its Knight-funded Civic Works Projects.

In a recent project on the Southwest side of Chicago, staff and leaders of the Southwest Organizing Project are walking the streets of a three mile area, block by block, recording the locations of abandoned buildings and other blight. What’s different about SWOP’s work is that instead of clipboards and pencils, neighbors are armed with a mobile app — LocalData — that allows them to collect information about vacant buildings with lightning fast speed and real time accuracy. (Learn more.)

By connecting community organizers and community development consultants with new technology, and adding some funding, Smart Chicago Collaborative was able to help the community address a vexing problem.

The SWOP project is one of six Civic Works projects run as part of a Knight Community Information Challenge grant awarded to the Collaborative and the Chicago Community Trust. These six projects are just a few of dozens under way in Chicago creating what O’Neil calls “a civic innovation infrastructure.”

“I was able to — in an extremely light way — do my job, to take other funding from Knight, to take decade long leaders in this space and in this city and take this new energy with civic hacking and put it all together,” says O’Neil. “This is a far more strategic, far more organized and specialized effort. They had conditions at SWOP that were ripe for engagement.”

Role in Open Government

Smart Chicago Collaborative is also highly visible in Chicago’s open government movement. O’Neil was a co-founder of Chicago’s OpenGovmeetup before he joined Smart Chicago Collaborative. He continues his leadership role in it today and there is considerable overlap.

If data is the lifeblood of bureaucracy, it is also the lifeblood of making government work for people. Data collected by a local government is used internally to record, benchmark and evaluate delivery of public programs and services and to record and report legislative actions. More important, it is also extremely useful for the public when quantifying problems and identifying solutions.

Arguably, government data does not become useful information until the public starts using the data to solve a problem.  For that to happen, the community has to more closely participate in the process of identifying problems to be solved.

To date, this realm of problem solving has largely been occupied by foundations and small groups of activists and coders. For instance, the Pew Center on States has been working with Google and other partners to solve problems with antiquated election systems and make it easier for voters to find their polling places and ballots. In Chicago last spring, activists created a tool to help communities understand school cuts proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

One could view civic information as the product of a shift in understanding that takes OpenGov from “data” driven to  “knowledge” driven.  The people who live in the place – the community — are holders of the knowledge and can identify the problems of a place that can benefit from government attention.

As part of  fostering an open and welcoming environment to community, Smart Chicago Collaborative often hosts meet-ups of Chicago’s Open Government world at The Chicago Community Trust, where it is housed. In attendance are hackers, government activists, researchers, academics and community members all trying to understand current events and determine next steps. Action may be taken collectively, but most of the time work groups form and head off on their own to devise solutions.

“We are trying to foster a culture of shared learning that is more open and more effective for residents,” O’Neil says.

In service of that, O’Neil develops programing, bringing in speakers on special topics. Smart Chicago Collaborative staff serve as a newsroom, broadcasting events, and reporting out using the tools of the social Web. O’Neil takes photos and encourages conversation in person and online about everything that is going on. If it’s a Smart Chicago Collaborative meeting look for photos, blogs, twitter feeds, live streams and conversation. A partnership with local public radio station WBEZ reports regularly on developments in Chicago’s Open Data world.

“I give all credit to Dan for putting a human face on all these Smart Chicago Collaborative inititives,” say MacArthur’s Harkness.

At a Smart Chicago Collaborative event, what happens is the data and it is full of information that can be processed and distributed. Everyone is welcome and nothing is wasted. Including the food. There’s always lots of it, with O’Neil encouraging everyone to take home leftovers.

“Smart Chicago Collaborative has promise to do leading edge work for at least the next decade,” says Terry Mazany, President and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust. “Our entire modus operandi is to do all of this with an eye toward creating availability – not that Smart Chicago is replicable, rather, that the products of it is. Its products are the approaches to accessibility, to skills training —  then,  to leveraging that to increase information access and opening up civic data for everyday uses.”