Category: Local News Sustainability

Unlock the digital economy, please? Thank you!

“Unlock the Digital Economy” is the theme for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, the signature conference and tradeshow put on by O’Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb.

I spoke with Sarah Milstein of UBM TechWeb to get a sense of some of the highlights.

“The web is maturing,” Milstein said. “The business side is increasingly important and viable. We are interested in people who are figuring out how to exploit that.”

So who’s making money on the web and how are they doing it?

Zynga is. Milstein says that the creators of Farmville — whose branding says the company is connecting the world through games — is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from games that include CityVille, TreasureIsle and Mafia Wars.

In an article published yesterday by the Chicago Sun-Times, colleague Sandra Guy says market experts value Zynga’s worth as high as $10 billion.

The games operate from a few simple concepts: You can play the game for free. But each game has its own internal economy, Milstein says. Buy a business, give a resource. Eventually, real money is exchanged.

I’m constitutionally unsuited to these games. I lack patience. Don’t buy me tulips, please, they’ll die from lack of watering. But I do see some synergy between the news world and games. Beyond interactive 3-D crossword puzzles and chess, games hint at a sophisticated landscape that could promise anonymity and new dimensionality in solving the problems of government or create exciting new ways to connect news streams with advertising bases in localities. The Knight Foundation sees this synergy too as it is investing considerable cash into several civic–based solutions with a game interface.

Zynga holds the title of most used Facebook application with 40 million active users. The company has reportedly spent $50 million on Facebook ads alone.

So here in Chicago when my SallyVille [within CityVille] visits friend Rogers Park – my virtual version of my home neighborhood. I can fantasize that someday Zynga will build a game that will allow Rogers Park online to mirror and nourish what is happening in the real economy and community of the neighborhood that is Rogers Park.

These games are a far cry from that robust and useful potential now, but the internet is developing in unforeseen ways – one can dream?

Another company posting some success that will be appearing at Web 2.0 Expo is LinkedIn.

On March 25, I and 999,999 other professionals received email correspondence from Linked In Founder Reid Hoffman thanking us for being early adopters in the first million. I was member 897312. Linked In now has 100 million members.

Hoffman’s scheduled to speak Thursday, March 31. For now, LinkedIn’s key to “Unlock the Digital Economy” is an IPO.

LinkedIn is the pin-striped, always chipper-faced network for folks looking to make business connections — whether for sales or job leads; it will seek $175 million in the public market.

Anthony Ha of VentureBeat did a break down of the company’s fundamentals in January.

How much money is LinkedIn making now? In the nine months ending on Sept. 30, LinkedIn says it made $1.85 million in profits on $161.4 million in revenue. In 2009, it lost $4.0 million on $120.1 million in revenue

Linked-In’s revenue comes from three kitties: user subscriptions, advertising sales and hiring solutions. Its Hiring Solutions services brought in 41% of total revenue. This revenue mix doesn’t sound much different from that of an online newsroom — Help Wanted ads anybody? [If this sounds like a genie that’s disappeared from the bottle, it might find its way back in.]

A good portion of the IPO cash will beef up LinkedIn’s field services in geographic locations, basically sales of its Hiring Solutions in various cities around the US and the globe. LinkedIn shares a problem with the emerging news business. The company has a robust online site, but to grow its successful business model it needs to expand its real world field work in sales. Internet based businesses have been struggling to effectively bridge the online-to-earth gap for a decade at least. It’s one of the reasons that reinvented newspaper brands and their paper distribution streams might be more valuable than some think.

Milstein says gaming companies are doing well if they can transition from desktop to mobile. She says other hot topics include group buying and new buying models, such as those offered by chicago-based Groupon.

There’s so much online news organizations can learn from the Web 2.0 world.Check out the website and if you’re in the Bay Area, the conference runs March 28 through March 31. If you can’t make it this year, you can view sessions later online on the Web 2.0 website on O’Reilly’s YouTube channel.

O’Reilly and UBM TechWeb have another show in the fall. Milstein says the Web 2.0 New York show is historically weighted more toward exploring digital innovation in the media, so you might just want to take out your calendar and ink in Oct. 10-13, Web 2.0 this fall in New York.

You can follow Web 2.0 on its blog, at Twitter hash #w2E or on its Facebook and LinkedIn pages.

Web 2.0 Expo happens March 28-31, 2011 at Moscone West in San Francisco, CA. Now in its fifth year, Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next-generation web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and business strategists.

PRI-Makers open to choices, including L3Cs

“The jury is out,” as to whether new corporate forms like the L3C (low profit limited liability company) and the B-Corp certification will make it easier for social enterprises and foundations to work together, agreed foundation executives at a 2010 meeting of PRI-Makers in Chicago. But foundation executives also said they are open to having more choices. [see note about program related investments at end of this entry.]

Discussions of the L3C and other forms are emerging on the social enterprise landscape with rapidity these days. The Internet gives them viral energy but the question of how philanthropy responds during this adaptation phase is key to how effective these forms will be moving into the future.

“I am really interested in these forms of innovation,’” said Jeff Clarke, from Alaska’s Rasmuson Foundation. “The conversation we are having is ‘How do foundations adapt and test these new forms?’ There’s all kinds of activity happening in the capital markets — How do we participate and how do we influence?”

In a conversation about what PRI-Makers call “this alphabet soup” of new corporate forms a collective light bulb went off as to their usefulness. The following is an interview with Mary Anne Rodgers of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Rodgers moderated a session on new corporate forms at the PRI-Makers conference.

“We had a good discussion about the move to L3Cs and other kinds of corporate forms,” Rodgers said. “What we learned is that the growing interest in corporate forms addresses different needs that are perceived to make not just funding — but also receiving — PRIs easier.

“One of the challenges for a PRI is to establish the charitable purpose and establish that the principal purpose is not to make money but to achieve some other mission,“ she said.

“When you are giving to a 501(c)3 public charity, that test is pretty easy because by definition the organization is a charity and by definition they will not make much money,” she said. “But if you are giving to a for-profit organization, you need a harder test because it is expected the corporation is going to make money, yet you have to be sure the organization is really not just about making money.”

“The point of these different corporate forms is to somehow embed in the corporate structure a charitable purpose or a partially charitable benefit so that the test for foundation investment is easier to meet,” Rodgers said.

“The benefit to the organization is that the manager using that form [the L3C entrepreneur] would not be subject to criticism if in fact they were not maximizing profit but were instead maximizing the charitable benefit.”

“I think the jury is out,” Rodgers said. “These forms are new. They are being adopted at some states. Some states are taking different approaches. The jury is out as to how effective they will be but I think most people in the audience [of PRI-Makers] think the more choices the better. Some forms will work for potential recipients and for potential funders. Others will not .”

“These forms may well make it easier for people to come together and meet the fundamental tests of charitable investing,” she said.

“I think PRIs are things smaller foundations can do. Absolutely,” Rodgers said. “If you want to get started and you are not sure what to do, one terrific thing you can do is find your local community development organization and make an investment that supports community development [through a CDFI, community development financial institution.

“You get a federally insured investment,” Rodgers said. “That’s simple.”

PRI stands for program-related investment, which PRI-Makers define as a type of mission or social investment that foundations make in order to achieve their philanthropic goals. Like grants, PRIs are vehicles for making inexpensive capital available to organizations that are addressing social or environmental concerns. Unlike grants, PRIs are expected to be repaid, often with at least a modest rate of return. Once repaid, PRIs are reused for other charitable purposes.

NOTE: I received this comment from Robert Lang, head of Americans for Community Development. “The statement that PRIs are expected to be repaid is very wrong,” Lang says. “Although PRIs can be loans they may also be equity investments, loan guarantees, low cost leases and anything else that would classify as an investment in the commercial world. This is a common misconception even among some PRI Makers,” Lang says. “If PRIs are to repaid they must be used for a new PRI or grant within one year of receipt,” he says.

Welcome to the birth of journalism!

Carnival of Journalism 2: Take a moment to reflect on your unique skills and circumstances. Then answer: What specific things can you do to increase the number of news sources for a local community.

What specific things can I do to increase the number of news sources for a local community? I can continue to work toward establishing the L3C as a business model for news.

Two things are important to know about the L3C as a business structure for news: 1) it encourages long-term ownership of a news organization that puts journalism first; 2) it is designed to accept an investment from a foundation as seed money.

The starting point for my thought is the current economic and cultural disruption, from which will emerge new ways of doing business. Among these innovations will be branded social enterprise, patient money, slow money and renewed interest in investing in all things local. There’s a lot of cash out there circulating looking for some kind – any kind — of return. The L3C returns 5% or less, and it is designed as a vehicle for investments by foundations, local businesses, institutions and others such as private equity funds.

The ideal owners of an L3C newsroom will be satisfied with this financial return and be enthusiastic about the intangible return, the social benefit delivered by a robust local news stream. Of course, since the foundation provides only seed money, the L3C newsroom in its business plan will have to persuasively describe the full complement of revenue sources for news that everyone is struggling with.

My career spans years in newsrooms, government and the independent sector, so the idea of the L3C newsroom struck me immediately as being worth a shot. But when I spoke to a group of journalism students at DePaul University recently, I was surprised by how easily they grasped the main concept of the L3C social enterprise. They didn’t get everything but they got the gist of it. It was a treat to think how unencumbered they are by the past. My attempt to explain the act of fitting copy on a page the old way could have been a comedy act – with me waving my hands in the air and them watching in puzzled silence. But in the end – who cares? Out with the old and in with the new!

I was also struck by how little the students knew about different types of businesses, including nonprofits. But instructors like DePaul’s Mike Reilley are wise, and they are integrating business concepts into the curriculum. Reilley has assigned the students the task of brainstorming a path forward for transforming their class assignment, “The Red Line Project” into a newsroom with a sustainable revenue stream.

The Knight Foundation points out that the main source of journalism has always been private enterprise and that marketplace incentives have fueled original and verified reporting.

Steve Yelvington, noted thinker on revenue models for news, said at a University of Minnesota School of Journalism event on Economic Models for News: “The truth is that journalism has never had a business model of its own. It’s always been a useful component of some other business model.”

My position is that for the first time, journalism has the potential to be thrown from its “newspaper” nest and born to a higher expression as a crucible for civic life.

Welcome to the birth of journalism as a social enterprise!

The L3C social enterprise is the bulkhead in a growing marketplace, one that values social benefit as well as investment return. There are signs of this emerging marketplace everywhere. Take a look at this recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Shared Value.

Inspired by the Peoria Newspaper Guild and its investigation into the viability of an L3C for the Peoria Journal Star, I brought the idea to my former paper, the Chicago Sun-Times. It didn’t exactly resonant with the Newspaper Guild or the Sun-Times corporate ownership. To answer our Carnival of Journalism question: To help increase the number of news sources I could always knock on the door of the Sun-Times again.

Just as the economy is seeking a foothold to stem foreclosures, create jobs, feed people and improve our lives and communities in systemic and sustainable ways, journalism is now preparing to crawl, then toddle and start to walk on its own. The two can be coupled.

I believe we could we bring together street level metrics and journalism in a mutually supportive system and change the way our society measures wealth while also changing the way we pay for journalism. It’s a nice blue sky thought.

It’s possible some of this blue sky could be added to The Red Line Project as an L3C. I could see adding some community development bells ands whistles – an added plus for foundations that are looking for systemic fixes. Maybe that’s where I should put my effort to increase the number of news sources.

Or I could concentrate on the system of news blogs we have developing here in Chicago and evolving it into an L3C; the Red Line Project could be an arm of it.

Or perhaps I could pitch in at Village Soup, a local news site that is making money and likes the L3C model.

Currently, I know of only one newsroom established as an L3C that has seed money from a foundation and that is the Pt. Reyes Light in the Bay Area. They have the structure in place and the money to get started, but when I spoke with them last fall they were hitting some road bumps in their set up.

It’s been slower going than I would like getting this idea launched and off the ground. Despite limited personal resources I have attended conferences of the Social Enterprise Alliance, BALLE and the PRI-Makers [a group of 100 foundations who make PRIs for systemic change.] I have also attended the FTC hearings on the Future of News, CitiCamp Chicago [Gov2.0] and dozens of events in Chicago about the future of news, as well as numerous technology- and journalism-based events. Thanks to the generosity of the Reynolds Journalism Institute, I was able to attend Journalism that Matters- Detroit, where my systemic community development ideas first started to percolate. I am scheduled to attend the Web2.0 conference in March in San Francisco, as a journalist, where I will be reporting on the latest ideas in developing online revenue.

It’s been slow going because new ideas take time to integrate into the mainstream and there is always push back from existing power centers. The foundations I spoke with at the PRI Makers conference are open to the idea of the L3C and other new economic models for news, but they tend to move slowly and with caution. It’s understandable. In conversations, I found more foundation officers who were open than skeptical. In conjunction with this Carnival of Journalism piece, I am posting a statement from the PRI-Makers on L3Cs and other business models as a kind of sidebar.

One common criticism of the L3C is that it is unnecessary, that there are many ways in which a regular LLC- limited liability company, can be structured to achieve the same purpose. Although it is true that many LLCs have been established in conjunction with 501(c)3s for social benefit, they lack the branding power of the L3C – which some foundation executives see as valuable. As the volunteer convener of the L3C for Media working group at trade association Americans for Community Development, I respond as quickly and thoroughly as I can to questions directed my way. We are all learning together.

To appease the legal industry that has historically profited from PRIs as well as those who have other concerns, Americans for Community Development has drafted Federal legislation to streamline the L3C/PRI process at the federal level. If so moved, the community of journalism thought leaders could join ACD in supporting this legislation. That might give a considerable boost to birthing the future of news as a social enterprise and increasing the number of news sources for a local community.

There is much work to be done. I am confident that with the assistance of many partners, we can establish social enterprise newsrooms that will deliver every possible flavor of credible news for local communities.

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?

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.

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

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

Journalism that Matters Detroit

For those of you who were in Detroit last week for Journalism that Matters, I thought I would share the link for the Mobile Neighborhood Tours I just helped produce here in Chicago.

Produced by community leaders, LISC-Chicago Mobile Neighborhood Tours are — I believe — the first community driven and created media of this kind.

To date, you can only see them in your smart phone.
 Visit this address in your phone’s browser:
tours.lisc-chicago.org

Our sell copy reads:
“A project of LISC’s Chicago Community Showcase, our Mobile Neighborhood Tours connect visitors with the exciting futures of Chicago’s neighborhoods. Whether an ethnic eatery, a local landmark building, an historic site or a place where the future is being planned and birthed, our destinations have been selected through the collective wisdom of the community that values, preserves and creates them.”

As dots connect, whole is emerging for future of news

Chicago Journalism Townhall
Chicago Journalism Townhall (Photo credit: sally garden)

As dots connect, whole is emerging for future of news

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

Continue reading As dots connect, whole is emerging for future of news