Sally Duros

by: Sally Duros | Nov 18, 2014

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.”

by: Sally Duros | Nov 5, 2013

Civic Insight and LocalData are bookends for making information about the built environment of a place accessible to the public and easy to use. The major difference is one start-up collects data from inside the municipal bureaucracy and the other collects it from the outside, from the sidewalks of neighborhoods.

Civic Insight’s tool makes existing hard-to-find government data sets easier to access and understand.  LocalData’s makes it efficient for residents to collect data and create new datasets useful to both residents and government.

Both start-ups got their beginnings during 2012 Code for America Fellows projects and both are funded in part by the Knight foundation.

Both Civic Insight and LocalAccess are being used to help municipalities and residents address blight and vacancy that remains in the aftermath of the disastrous housing bubble. Both products improve the quality of municipal data and make it visually more intuitive and seamlessly interactive. They are flexible enough that they can be used for a range of projects and they are open source.

Civic Insight was born from a CFA project in New Orleans called “Blight Status,” says Alex Pandel, a CFA Fellow and co-founder. (Watch a PBS video about Civic Insight.)

With the mission of co-creating technologies that would help their host municipality, the CFA team took a deep dive into the New Orleans civic landscape. The Fellows met with city employees, community groups, residents  and non-profits to understand the information needs of residents and how the team could help. In addition, they tapped into the expertise of The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center which does mapping and Who Data at the University of New Orleans run by Michelle Thompson.

“We were able to identify that there was this information gap between what citizens knew was going on with abandoned properties and what the city was doing, “ Pandel says. “We asked, ‘What do citizens know ?’ and ‘Why are they not getting the whole picture?’”

What the team discovered is that in New Orleans – as in most municipalities — the data was managed by multiple agencies.

“It was a case of decentralized information that made it difficult for everyone to be on the same page,” Pandel says. “I thought, we can do something about that.”

The team took on a role that in the past might have been contracted out to a team of blue-suit IT or management consultants.

“We went from department to department and found where all the data was living and brought it all together so we could have a “live” connection with it,” she said.

Data is the lifeblood of decision-making in many government agencies, but the problem is that data constantly changes so it is “dead” almost as soon as it is collected. The “live” connection was essential. Although the ideal way to capture data live is through APIs, they also wrote custom importers for some data sources that didn’t have APIs. “Whatever our city customers have, we try to accommodate,” she says.

A designer by training, Pandel worked on user interface. “I was working from the heart of the community to understand how the community understands the process and how does that match up to what the process is really like and how do we communicate that process out,” she says.

Civic Insight has found its next customer in Palo Alto.

Since the company’s core offering is accessing opaque city data sets and making them easy to understand, their product can work with any data. Palo Alto has hired them to simplify permit data so construction companies and architects can have a better feed back loop with the city on their projects.

Pandel and her colleagues thought their product would resonate only with the community and have been surprised by the numbers of inquiries they’ve had.

“We did not want to charge users for access and we want it to be equally accessible for everybody,” Pandel says. “Cities pay a small subscrition fee annually for access to the site. It is publicly available to the residents.”

“We’re different from LocalData because we  need to have an established relationship with whomever is holding data” she says. “Our goal is to reduce duplicate work. Our goal is to go to the source so that we are saving everybody else time.”

Pandel says she doesn’t view this work as journalism exactly.

“I like to think of it as promoting government transparency,” she says. “We take it from being data to being information  that could be understood by a regular person an dthat coiuld be a journalist.”

“The Code for America position is this is a public data. It should be public data. It should be easy to access.  Keep it public. Keep it free,” she says.

The biggest pushback they felt on the project was from city worker who feared that making the data available would make the municipality look bad, but it actually worked in the reverse.

“There was an increase in empathy once residents were able to understand the magnitude of the problem,” Pandel says.

The Greater New Orleans Foundation helped pay for the team’s initial work. The Knight Foundation made a program related investment of $220,000 — technically a convertible note —  through the Knight News Challenge to support Civic Insight’s launch as a company.

In Detroit, a different group of CFA Fellows created the tool LocalData to be used on smartphones and tablets.

“LocalData believes better data helps cities and organizations make better decisions,” says Matt Hampel, a former CFA Fellow who co-founded LocalData.

“The City of Detroit had a huge problem of foreclosure and blight,” Hampel says. “We talked to a number of groups doing important work, walking their streets with printed maps and clipboards, trying to figure out where the abandoned buildings were.“

The Fellows partnered with the City of Detroit and Wayne State University to do a survey of all the commercial corridors in Detroit in record time. The CLICS survey as it is called, was the first comprehensive survey of Detroit’s commercial properties in 28 years.  Using the LocalData tool on Smart Phones, they surveyed 9,538 commercial properties, recording a range of information about their occupation and condition.

“With support from the Knight Founation we expanded nationwide and are providing the toolsets for cities and organizations around the country,” Hampel says.

LocalData builds off the city’s existing geodata. They have a record of where every property is.   “If you have geocodes you can see what has been covered so far, unlike when you drop points on a map,” he says.

“Cities are increasingly seeing the value of opening up their data,” Hampel says. “That leads to support for the goals they want to achieve.”

LocalData has projects under way nationwide – one of the latest is with the SouthWest Organizing Project on Chicago’s SouthWest side. “Residents will be able to collect the data to rehab dozens of properties in their neighborhood,” he says.

Knight is supporting LocalData with $300,000 from the Knight News Challenge.

Hampel says  organizations will pay a fee to use LocalData and they own the data that is collected.“You can have 100 people or 1 person out collecting data,” using the LocalData tools. “You can do your entire neighborhood or just a few blocks,” he says.

by: Sally Duros | Apr 24, 2013

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.”