Blogically Thinking

Observations and Learnings from J-Lab's Jan Schaffer

Free and Easy

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Monday, March 08, 2010

Much of the news about start-up community news sites and their impact is anecdotal.  While J-Lab collects a lot of those stories, yesterday we heard a refreshing tale of how nimble some new community media makers can be.

A shout out goes to Growthspur for its post on how seasoned journalist Bobbi Bowman took matters into her own hands and jumpstarted a way to publish breaking news.

From Growthspur:

Bowman learned that officials planned to close the public library in McLean, Va., for more than a year for renovations. No temporary site had been found. “Bowman knew that she couldn’t wait a few weeks to get her full-blown site up and running. She had a Big Story. So she went to Plan B—and demonstrated just how easy it is to get into the community news business.”

With help from J-Lab’s learning modules, Bowman got a crash course in WordPress and set up a quick blog using the name of her forthcoming site, The McLean Ear, to report the news. In the process, she had a chance to market her site and break more news when officials landed a new interim location.

The site just cost her time and energy.  And when she’s ready for more, we have additional freebies here at the Knight Citizen News Network:  http://www.kcnn.org/modules/the_freebies_list/

Have a similar start-up success story? We want to know.

Published on 03/08 at 04:00 PM
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Entrepreneurship and the Future of News

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Friday, February 26, 2010

Speech by Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director

Hosted by USC Annenberg

February 24, 2010

Los Angeles, Calif.


      The Role of New Media Makers:

Entrepreneurship and the Future of News

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to share what J-Lab has been learning in its work.  As many of you know, J-Lab funds community news startups and women-led media entrepreneur projects. We reward innovations in journalism, and we build online learning models for professionals and amateurs who want to be new media makers.

I want to tip my hat to your efforts at USC. We were pleased to help fund community news efforts like the South LA Reporting project. We applaud the Knight Digital Media Center for training new media entrepreneurs. Hats off to David Westphal’s blog and the Online Journalism Review as well.

There is a lot to share with you today about the changing ecosystem for news and information.  But I want to start with a little story. One that reflects how some citizen journalists are contributing to today’s news landscape. In 2005, J-Lab funded a startup community news site in Deerfield, N.H., a rural community that wasn’t getting much coverage from any of the state’s newspapers. And in 2007 we funded a news site for Chappaqua, N.Y., and its hamlet of New Castle, a well-heeled bedroom community outside of New York City that also got, at best, episodic coverage.

In both places, citizen reporters now regularly cover town meetings and school board meetings that never got consistent coverage. When these people first began showing up, the town leaders didn’t like it very much.  “What are you doing here?” they wanted to know, mired in suspicion. Deerfield Forum founders were mostly Democrats in a mostly Republican stronghold.  NewCastleNOW founders were former PTA leaders and activists.  Surely these folks were up to no good.

But the citizen journalists persisted. They kept writing stories about the meetings.  The stories were accurate. They had impact.  New faces were elected to the Chappaqua area school board. More voters turned out on election day in Deerfield.  People in town learned about some issues before they became done deals. And the town leaders started to relax a bit and even began counting on the coverage.

Now, when their citizen reporter can’t make it to a meeting, the town leaders get a little put out: “Where were you? Why weren’t you there?” they want to know. (How dare these citizen reporters take a vacation or have a conflict on the home front?)

These sites, and scores like them, have developed a reputation for being not just good community news outlets, but also good community stewards.  Quite frequently, they are started by people who have long been active in the community and carry a lot of community knowledge.

In Deerfield, N.H., founding editor Maureen Mann was actually elected state representative a couple years ago.  She stepped down as managing editor of the five-year-old Deerfield Forum, but she still writes news about the legislature in a very explanatory way, peeling back layers of the onion.

Welcome to the promises and perils of this new breed of citizen journalists. They are not merely bloggers, inveighing against something they don’t like. They are more than photographers or videographers, bearing witness to some catastrophe or breaking news event.  They do more than post tweets shouting out some bit of news.

These people have deputized themselves to systematically cover town news as best they can. Some have “beats;” they have formulated rules of governance for their news enterprises; they have guidelines for content; many have sought nonprofit status from the IRS. They edit content that comes from other contributors. They moderate comments on their sites. Many buy libel insurance.
    
And, for the most part, they are doing this as a labor of love. They are lucky if they can raise enough money to get reimbursed to drive to a town meeting or pay for a babysitter. They are looking to do more than just dispassionately cover their communities. They are seeking to connect and inform people in ways that might help their communities do well. Now, that’s an aspiration that might be out of the comfort zone for some traditional journalists. As important, they feel their efforts are making a difference.
    
I suggest that their activities are really acts of civic participation as much as citizen journalism. And that’s one reason I prefer to call them citizen media makers instead of citizen journalists. Besides, many of them don’t much cotton to the label “journalist”  - some are terrified of it, others don’t respect it..
    
It’s also one reason why many of them are not as focused on making money as their professional counterparts.  Who expects to be paid for being a community volunteer?
    
The good news is they are doing a pretty responsible job. The not-so-good news is that there is no backup when they can’t be there.
    
Can you imagine town leaders demanding to know “where were you?” if a professional journalist didn’t show up to cover one of their sessions?
    
As I look at how the media ecosystem is evolving in communities large and small across the United States, I am more optimistic than pessimistic that citizens will get their information needs met. I also think that traditional journalists will play a smaller - albeit still important - role as the gatherers and disseminators of news.
    
Others, though, will have increasingly important roles to play. They include citizen media makers, but also fact entrepreneurs, creative technologists, philanthropic foundations, universities, advocacy groups and even governments.

In this future, both professional and amateur journalists will need to engage in more than just journalism, however. They must engage in new kinds of “news work” to serve their audiences.  News work? Fact entrepreneurs? Credit goes to Columbia University doctoral student Chris Anderson for these new terms. They help us understand that journalism in the future must involve more than just gathering, validating and writing news stories.  “News work” also requires such things sharing information, facilitating conversations, crowdsourcing, smart curation and aggregation, data mining and data visualizations, commissioning news games, gathering lists and resources and shouting out your good work to others.

It is in this area of news work where there is much experimentation and lots of entrepreneurial opportunities.

So far, we have the advantage of a lot of lessons learned and we have some emerging clues to guide us - if we pay attention to them. Particularly important, I believe, are the clues about what kinds of news and information people want - not only to be smarter about their communities but also to empower them to be active citizens.
    
Many of these clues suggest that while news consumers certainly need watchdogs, they also need guide dogs as well. While they certainly need news, sometimes all they need is good information. And while they want conversation and participation, they also appreciate a level of connection that demonstrates an attachment and some caring about their community - not detached, clinical observations. They want to know about issues, choices and possible solutions. And they’d also like to know where people agree and not just where they are shouting in disagreement.
    
Some of these clues, I believe, tell us that professional journalists need to reexamine some of their old habits, their journalistic conventions, to meet the genuine information needs of their communities. More on that in a bit.
  
For now, we need to keep our eyes on the prize:  Is that prize just restoring commercial journalism outlets to profitability?  Or is it serving the needs of citizens in ways that are valuable enough to engender their support and engaging enough to elicit their active participation? How you address that question, I believe, will chart your entrepreneurial course.
    
As we look at journalistic innovations, to date, there are some common threads to many of the newest ideas.
    
One is an element of filling a need. Many new ideas are simply identifying what’s missing and trying to supply it.  Consider these developments.
  

         
  • Hundreds of hyperlocal news sites have launched in communities that rarely saw a traditional journalist unless there was a major crime or catastrophe.  Citizens just decided to take matters into their own hands. Look at sites like Oakland Local and West Seattle Blog.
    •      
  • New state-based investigative news projects are beginning to supplement diminishing watchdog journalism by legacy news outlets.  Look at the rise in just the last two years of such things as California Watch, Wisconsin Watch, InvestigateWest. This year even saw the creation of an organizing body for these initiatives called the Investigative News Network.
    •      
  • Niche publications are now addressing special interests with a sharp clarity of focus: Politico.com serves the political junkies in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Global Post offers international news and photos. Nieman Lab is giving Jim Romenesko’ blog a run by doing original reporting, not just aggregating links to stories. Indeed, J-Lab has supported a number of niche projects, including StoriesThatFly, about general aviation in Ohio and ChickRX, a soon-to-launch health-care site for young women that is the brainchild of a Harvard MBA student.
    •      
  • New “fact entrepreneurs”- be they the Drudge Report’s Matt Drudge or Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall are unearthing information that keeps professional journalists on their toes.
    •   

Another characteristic shared by entrepreneurs is an element of liberation.  Some of the best news entrepreneurs, to date, have engaged in acts of liberation.

         
  • Citizen journalists have liberated themselves from journalistic conventions and definitions of news either because they didn’t know any better or didn’t like what they saw traditional journalists doing. They are also responding to different needs in their communities.
    •      
  • Professional journalists who have left their old news organizations have been liberated to build new ones from scratch. Look at the Chicago News Cooperative, founded by former Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times editor Jim O’Shea. Pay attention Politico’s sibling, a new Washington, D.C. news site to be launched by Jim Brady, former leader of WashingtonPost.com. Practically speaking, if they want to continue practicing journalism, they have to do it differently.
    •      
  • Spot.us founder David Cohn, is trying to liberate himself from old funding models of journalism with a pay-per-story idea model.
    •      
  • Universities are benefiting from some of these liberated souls. Look at the Boston Globe’s Walter Robinson, whose students at Northeastern University have managed to get more than a dozen Page One stories in the Globe since he joined academia.
    •   

To be a genuine media entrepreneur you need to have a comfort level with moving out of old lockstep ways of doing things and moving into what I call the squirm zone.  You need to follow your gut, your hunches, your values systems and let them lead you to what make sense.  More often than not, what makes sense for you will make sense for your audiences.  This is certainly what citizen journalists are doing.  No one taught them a right or wrong way of doing things.  They are just trying to be fair and accurate.
    
This can be a particularly hard thing to do for professional journalists, who don’t quite have the creative instincts of, say, Wall Street investment houses. We’ve grown up with rules and templates that tell us there is a right way to do things: a right way to construct an inverted pyramid story, one way to be objective, codified standards and ethics. We are somewhat imperialistic in our approach and rather self-congratulating about our value to our readers. We don’t easily validate anyone who is not a member of our tribe.

We embrace definitions of “news” that may no longer match citizen definitions.  We have habits, such as our competitive streak, that are so ingrained, they may be difficult, if not impossible, to shed. We often think our ethics are unparalleled, even though the public keeps telling us they don’t share that view.
    
I say we need to re-examine some of those habits and ask: Are they still safeguarding journalism or might they actually be endangering it?
    
In an entrepreneurial environment, I believe that we can liberate the journalism itself, not just the delivery platforms and the news creators, and re-imagine it in ways that will improve its usefulness to our readers.
    
      Enterpreneurial Phases
 
For me, some of the most exciting journalism ideas got off the ground just six years ago, with the launch of independent, professional news ventures like Voice of San Diego.  Today this nonprofit site does good coverage on a good half-dozen issues with an annual operating budget of a $1 million-plus in grants, sponsorships and donations.
    
Around the same time, J-Lab began funding community news start-ups. We now award grants of $25,000 over two years.
    
We funded 45 of these New Voices projects and have a call for proposals in the field right now to fund another nine. Deadline is Monday. Since we started, we’ve received 1,249 proposals, an eye-popping indication of how readily people can envision meeting news and information opportunities in their communities. 
    
Since then the news ecosystem has given rise to many different developments, including:
  

         
  • Skyrocketing numbers of individual bloggers, several of whom have made names for themselves like Markos Moulitsas of the DailyKos and Andrew Sullivan who writes the Daily Dish.
    •      
  • Eyewitness photos and videos of breaking news, from the London bombings to Hurricane Katrina to the Virginia Tech shootings and the earthquake in Haiti.
    •      
  • The blossoming of community news sites, launched both by individuals and companies such as AOL’s Patch.com.
    •      
  • Traditional news outlets trying to foster citizen journalism, such as the New York Times’ Local sections. 
    •      
  • The rise of respected advocacy news sites, from the likes of the Sunlight Foundation, to the Council on Foreign Relations. In Chicago and Philadelphia, local news sites such as Chicago’s Catalyst report on education while advocating for good schools.
    •      
  • The emergence of statewide news collaborations, such as the Ohio News Organization’s partnership among the state’s eight major dailies. 
    •      
  • And birth of several independent metro news sites. We now have at least 10 sites that have paid staffs providing professional reporting for metro or regional areas. In addition to Voice of San Diego, they are the Texas Tribune, MinnPost, St. Louis Beacon, Gotham Gazette, New Haven Independent, Bay Area News Coop, the Chicago News Coop, CTMirror, and NewWest.net.
    •   

As we begin a new decade, I see at least six important trends that will affect how people get news and information. They include:
  

         
  • The increasing participation of creative technologists in building innovative news applications that expand the definition of “news work.” Last year, the New York Times won our Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism with a body of work built on computer programming skills. They included such things as Document Cloud to read documents online, Word Train to track key words, and Represent to track your elected officials. A special distinction award went to See Click Fix is now being used on numerous local news sites to report on potholes and other issues.   Talk about “news work!”
    •      
  • The rise of statewide news ventures, may of them focused on covering a state capital and many with an investigative bent. These include things like the newly launched CTMirror, NJ Spotlight in Trenton and one about to be launched in Harrisburg.
    •      
  • The growth of more university-based news sites such as Mission Local at Berkeley, Madison Commons at the University of Wisconsin, Fulton Hill News at Virginia Commonwealth, Grand Avenue News at the U-Miami, GrossePointToday at Wayne State and your own South LA Reports.
    •      
  • We will increasingly see collaboration, instead of competition, not just among legacy news organizations, but also between old media and new media makers.
    •   

About six months ago, J-Lab funded a Networked Journalism pilot project that paired legacy news organizations in Seattle, Miami, Charlotte, Asheville and Tucson with five local news sites in their communities.  We partially funded a coordinator and paid each of the news sites $5,000 in thank-you money.
  
I wasn’t sure whether these new media makers would be insulted with our token payments. But the collaborations seem to be cooking.  Seattle Times reports that its partnership has grown from five to 19 and they are about to embark on a regional collaborative reporting project on graffiti; Miami now has eight partners.  Charlotte expects to add more university sites in its region.
    
TucsonCitizen.com, a web-only site, partnered with sports bloggers.  Truthfully, I was a little nervous about this at first. But these five partners are not only beating the local newspaper in town, but papers in Phoenix have now asked to begin trading content. So stay tuned.
    
The remaining trends include: 
  

         
  • The rise of even more metro news initiatives. Consider that four of the existing 10 have launched in just the last six months—Texas Tribune, the Chicago News Coop, the Bay Area News Coop and CTMirror.
    •      
  • Finally, there is growing appetite by philanthropic foundations for supporting community information needs. Foundations once worried about funding projects that might compete with fragile legacy news organizations.  In the last two years, however, they have become so alarmed at the diminishing news coming from downsized local news outlets that they are seeking ways to intervene.
    •   

The Knight Foundation has certainly pioneered efforts to incentivize community foundations to fund news and information projects by offering to match the dollars they pledge.  Now we see the Chicago Community Trust issuing innovative requests to fund ideas from local media makers.
    
J-Lab has now documented at least $142 million in grants going into news projects, large and small, just since 2005. And we’re working on verifying many more. Mind you, this doesn’t include grants to public radio or television, which receive funding for many non-news activities.
    
While journalists give lip service to transparency, not all of the new media makers are so readily transparent about their sources of funding.   Some don’t want to disclose where their grants are coming from because they don’t want others to compete with them for that funding. Some funders don’t want to disclose that they are giving grants to news projects because they don’t want to be deluged with grant requests. They need to get over this because the public has a right to know who’s funding news projects.
    
J-Lab has recently wrapped up a project that touched on three of these trends - the participation of a foundation, the idea of collaboration, and possibilities for a new metro new site. I’ll share our recommendations with you.
  
I was invited by the William Penn Foundation to map media assets in the city of Philadelphia and come up with some media investment recommendations. The foundation has a stellar track record of supporting news projects, including the Public School Notebook, which writes about schools, and PlanPhilly.com, which covers planning and preservation in that historic city. It also has supported election and city hall reporting initiatives involving the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com and WHYY public television and radio.
    
What we uncovered prompted us to recommend a blueprint for a new kind of public affairs news initiative that we think has promise for more than just Philadelphia.
    
We did content analyses of the two daily newspapers and four commercial television stations. No one was surprised that coverage of public affairs issues - such topics as ethics, reform, schools, city council, the mayor and the budget - had tanked in the last three years.
    
But we were surprised to find a rather robust online community - 260 blogs and Web sites. About 60 of them had some journalistic DNA in that they reported, not just weighed in, on news and included several niche sites on transportation, technology, politics and more.
    
We found an entrepreneurial journalism school at Temple University, a public broadcaster on the move, and two interesting data initiatives.  We also found another gem:  a robust and organized creative technology community centered around IndyHall, a collaborative workspace.
    
Between the foundation’s grantees, student journalists covering Philadelphia neighborhoods, and niche reporting sites, there were more than 100 reporters working in their own journalistic silos throughout the city.  But these silos were not well known to all Philadelphians.
    
Was there a way to amplify their good work?  More important is there a way to aggregate the varied audiences for different issues so that city residents collectively could learn about things that were not in their individual interest zones?
    
Here’s what we recommended:
    
We suggested the creation of a new, nonprofit public affairs Web site that, like a Voice of San Diego, would not pretend to cover everything, but would produce original stories strongly focused on six to eight issues - such as politics, city hall, the creative arts and technology communities, regional narratives, the local economy.

But unlike Voice, we suggested that this new site collaborate, or network, with some of the existing journalism efforts. It should curate and aggregate links to the best content and send additional eyeballs their way. 
    
To cement the partnership with these affiliates, we suggested the creation of an Enterprise Reporting Fund that would distribute reporting awards to partners so they could quickly hire a freelancer to pursue a story that needed to turn quickly. And we suggested a back-end support system offering help in such things as payroll processing to ad sales.
    
We suggested pursuing opportunities to license the network’s content to a national news outlet as a way to set a high bar for quality and generate revenues for partners.
    
We especially urged the involvement of the city’s creative technologists, recommending “Pitch-It” competitions that would invite proposals for news applications, fund their development, and test them on the any of the network’s member sites.
    
Will all this happen? The good news is that, after meeting last month, a critical mass of potential partners said they wanted to participate.  So stay tuned.
    
So what have I learned in my journeys through this new media world? Here are a few takeaways.
    
For those wanting to launch community news sites, frequency of fresh content is critical.  It needs to be a daily exercise. Civility is valued and it’s one reason why so many community news sites moderate their comments.
    
You need to build a community before you can monetize it. I believe that our Network Journalism pilot projects will find a way to attract revenue to their content-sharing efforts.
    
Don’t make the mistake of accusing citizen journalists of not being Big-J professional journalists. Their ethical codes might teach journalists a few things or two.  While they aspire to be fair and accurate, they also aspire to do less harm in their communities.  And as they try to seek out truth, they are less focused on “gotcha” quotes - what people said - and more willing to listen to what people meant to say.
    
Finally, and most importantly, I think the changes facing the news industry are not just about the delivery of news, they also involve the fundamental way that people use news and perceive news.
    
New media makers, with their intimate ties to their communities, are ushering in entirely new forms of journalism. From research we released last fall, we found that this journalism is characterized by a deliberate shift in the definition of objectivity, allowing for reports that build on the community knowledge many of these site founders hold.

I see journalism on these local news sites increasingly becoming an act of participation not just an act of observation, even soliciting readers to participate in a breaking story as it unravels.  News stories are seldom framed around conflict.  There is virtually no scorecard journalism.  There is less he said/she said reporting.

Consumers of news on these sites are not only looking to be informed, they are also looking to strengthen their connection and their involvement in their community.

The lesson, I think, for us Big-J journalists is this:  We need to pay attention to these clues because the community seems to find value here. I believe we can still do good journalism, but we should try to do it in ways that turn our communities on, not off.

Thank you very much.

 


 

Published on 02/26 at 03:36 PM
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First Read: Follow the Breadcrumbs

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Laurels to Len Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson for a comprehensive review of developments in the journalistic ecosystem.

Darts for the mile-wide, inch-deep reportage. We all know about most of these developments. So, what epiphanies are to be drawn from what is working? I wish their calls to action were grounded in more specific context to convince people of their remediative powers. Indeed, most of the fledgling experiments they cite are too young to be prescriptive. Nor are their recommendations advanced by a depth of explanation that would engender legislative or regulatory support.

Besides, many of their suggestions have been happening for a while now: scores of news ventures have launched as nonprofits; more than 200 community and place-based foundations have invested in news initiatives since 2005; and the public broadcasting community has already announced plans to expand local news reporting.

If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those “breadcrumbs.” What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of “us,” the news suppliers, and not “them,” the news consumers? I don’t hear from any of those consumers in this report.

The American public has been giving mainstream journalism a steady stream of negative feedback. Most recently, 70 percent gave the press poor-to-failing grades in unpacking the various health care proposals. And while the public still pays homage to watchdog reporting, only 29 percent of those recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said the press gets the facts right.

So how are some of the new media makers addressing this? Many newly launched sites were triggered by frustrations with or vacuums created by mainstream news outlets.

In looking to reconstruct journalism, I’d start not by asking how do we get money for what we’ve always done. I’d ask instead: How do we provide something worth paying for? As a long-time news consumer, I have recoiled at much of what we are rendering as “journalism.”

What if it’s not just the business model of journalism that is broken? What if the way we are doing our journalism is broken, too? How are some of the new media makers trying to fix that?

Some questions that need to be addressed:

  • What if the something-for-everyone, grocery-store model of newspapers no longer meets consumers’ needs—especially in an era of ESPN, Entertainment Tonight, and Bloomberg’s business news?
  • What if some of the old conventions of “good” journalism, those things we do on autopilot, are hampering instead of safeguarding good reporting? For example: most new media makers don’t traffic in “scorecard” journalism; they present fewer false equilibriums; conflict is not the most prevalent definition of “news” for them.
  • How is objectivity being redefined in emerging news sites? It’s not a dispassionate recitation of facts or he said/she said paradigms. A new objectivity informed by a sense of place and stewardship for community is taking root. TPM’s Josh Marshall, for example, is quoted as saying, “We’re not trying to be completely impartial but fair and rigorously honest.”
  • What if just producing “journalism” is no longer enough? What if the public wants more—a scope of “news work,” as project researcher Chris Anderson noted in his recent dissertation, that also includes navigation, aggregation, linkages, access, social networking, crowdsourcing, data mining, visualizations, viral marketing, and transparency?
  • What if the public’s definition of “good” journalism is more than the rewards we give ourselves—the prizes on the wall and scalps on our belts? How would the public define it?

When my organization, J-Lab, convened focus groups of news consumers a few months ago, not one person used the word “democracy” in describing the role of news. They valued information they could trust, and they wanted more connections to their topics or community.

New clues to the content and sustainability of journalism are all around us. They are melding good reporting, a sense of place, a passion for community, and information that adds value. To really reconstruct journalism, we need to follow these breadcrumbs, make sense of the patterns and re-imagine what news and information needs to be for the future—not just how we pay for it.

For more reactions to The Reconstruction of American Journalism, click here.

Published on 10/29 at 02:13 PM
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Old freedoms ring true for new media

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Friday, October 09, 2009

Never before has the idea of a free press meant so much to everyday Americans. It’s not that the country is under siege by a runaway tyrant or that we have rampant corruption or government by secrecy. Rather, the idea of a free press is taking on new meaning in a nation where, increasingly, small towns and rural areas, exurbs and even suburbs have less and less news coming from traditional journalism organizations—particularly news reports that cover their local concerns.

Their regional dailies have shrunk both news holes and distribution zones. Their radio stations carry canned music. Their television stations focus on crime for a shrinking number of appointment viewers. And their weeklies are clinging to their own life rafts.

Metro journalists parachute into surrounding communities to cover a major story and vanish as soon as developments slow to a trickle.

Yet even as traditional news business models flail and journalists fret about the plight of a democracy where the supply of news has been diminishing, the United States is re-inventing the very notion of a free press.

We are beginning to see that we are privileged not only to consume news that is freely reported and published, without fear or favor, by professional journalists; we are also privileged and free as ordinary citizens to make the news we need. To gather it, edit it and publish it. To tap those “go-to people” in our communities to help us identify which civic issues we need to address and to share their knowledge about civic affairs.

New media makers with access to digital media tools are increasingly stepping up to supplement their local news media and plug gaps in coverage with their blogs and community news sites. In the process, they are recruiting longtime civic catalysts as content producers. Now these civic catalysts are discovering that producing news can be as much an act of civic participation as voting.

Indeed, I would assert that media participation is a striking new definition of civic participation.

While no one wants to see traditional news organizations disappear, the newcomers who are doing news work are teaching us that the press can be free whether the journalism is undertaken by traditional news organizations or not. Moreover, where journalists in some countries are constrained by government control, new media makers in the U.S. don’t need handbooks on how to blog anonymously to avoid censorship.

We used to call these new media makers “citizen journalists” or community bloggers. However, in a pronounced trend in this SPJ centennial year, we observe professional journalists, newly severed from their news organizations, joining this new free-press movement. From Seattle to San Diego and Denver to Baltimore, they are launching their own town or statewide news sites to complement or compete with traditional local news organizations.

As these news initiatives take on stewardship roles in their communities, they are garnering philanthropic support.

A new study released in June 2009 by my center, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, found that 180 foundations had awarded at least $128 million in grants to support 115 news initiatives since 2005. Attesting to the trend, nearly 87 percent—or 102 of the 115 news initiatives—launched only in the past 3½ years. They range from hyperlocal to health to watchdog sites. 

None of this would be possible without the mindset of a free press in the United States, an expectation that journalists can freely perform their watchdog role without interference by government. That freedom had always applied to mainstream media and then moved to the alternative press. Now the mantle is being taken up by the news gatherers and so-called “fact entrepreneurs” who are affiliated with entirely new forms of media.

Many traditional journalists shudder at these new media makers, asserting that they don’t have the skills or training to be impartial or to verify information. Other journalists are nostalgic for the old days of Big-J journalism, perceiving that the new media makers are devaluing the role of professionals who are trained to deliver fair, balanced and independent coverage. All these core journalism values no doubt have helped to ratify the soundness of our founders’ decision to ensure that the Bill of Rights contained the First Amendment’s free press guarantee.

Slowly, however, some traditional news organizations are experimenting with how to partner with these new media makers. They hope to add feet on the street, amplify the best of the Small-J journalism and ferret out opportunities for local enterprise reporting.

As we celebrate SPJ’s centennial anniversary, we need to be open to new opportunities to maintain a robust supply of news. We must not only use the freedom we have to report on public life in our old ways, but we also must pursue new ideas for a free and open press. Whether the news comes from professional or amateur journalists, the goal is always the same: to hold public officials accountable for serving the public and to hold citizens accountable for being good citizens.

This article originally appeared in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Centennial Book, which was recently mailed to SPJ members. Order your copy here.

Published on 10/09 at 02:20 PM
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Nerds, news and neat stuff

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Friday, September 18, 2009

What imaginative stuff the winners showcased yesterday at this year’s Knight-Batten Symposium and Awards for Innovations in Journalism. The awardees again serve as a beacon of hope for an otherwise beleaguered news industry.

Heat Maps
Center for Public Integrity in “Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown?” built heat maps to cluster lending activity using tools from Palantir Technologies.

Page Trackers
ProPublic’s ChangeTracker used Versionista to highlight changes to the WhiteHouse.gov site. It provides the date of the last change and highlights what has been added or removed with side by side comparisons.

Document Uploading and Document Reader
The Times’ Document Reader made use of Scribd’s and DocStoc tools for turning word documents or powerpoints into web documents. It is drawing on work of Knight Challenge winner Document Cloud.

Debatinator
The Time’s Debate Analysis Tools made use of Debatinator software.

Many of the ideas honored are springing from crackerjack programmers and self-described “creative technologists,” now seated in many of today’s newsrooms.

Said Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive Newsroom Technologies at the New York Times and creator of the award-winning ‘Document Reader,’ “If you take a technology approach to a journalistic problem, you come up with new ways to tell a story.”

For Ellen Miller- whose Sunlight Foundation is making data openly available on a huge array of things, from government contracts and grants, to lobbyists, to congressional bills, and even to words used most frequently in the Congressional Record- open records serve a vital role in the emerging ecosystem. “Technology is not a slice of the pie of what we do, it’s the pan,” she said.

Among the trends that surfaced this year:

  • Lifting the veil on information. The winners built ways to track changes on government Web sites, fact-check assertions in presidential debates and mash data sets. “Transparency is the new objectivity,” Miller said.
  • Making up-to-the minute data accessible and easy to visualize and use. See (and soon search and annotate) documents on the New York Times’ “Document Reader.” Learn what single words surface in constituents’ minds on Election Day through the Times’ “Word Train.” See the Twitter feeds that give insight to how ordinary people are experiencing the Great Recession in “Living with Less.”
  • Helping citizens track what their elected officials are up to. With the Times’ “Represent” feature, you can track New York state and congressional officials by such things as their floor appearances and their Twitter comments.
  • Engaging in collaboration and open sourcing instead of competition. The source codes for winners like ProPublica’s ChangeTracker and the Document Reader are intended to be available to all. “Could we put together a recipe so any reporter could do this?” asked ChangeTracker developer Scott Klein.

Many of the winners had future aspirations for their projects. Andrei Scheinkman envisions a way to let his “Represent” project track not just office holders but also candidates vying for office.

Another aspiration is to lobby for government agencies and elected officials to make their data available online in ways that foster automated access.

What do you get when you start mashing the data collected for Patchwork Nation’s 12 voter typologies with such things as the location of Whole Foods stores?  More nuanced understanding of how people outside the orbit of Washington, D.C. are reacting to and processing changes in the country.

“People in these communities understand there is a fundamental change going on,” said Dante Chinni, the site’s founder.

Check out some of the tools used to build the winning applications in the sidebar.

Many of these creative technologists realize that they are not just building tools for citizens. Things like the Times’ “Debate Analysis Tool” “was quite useful for our own reporters in house,” said its creator Andrew DeVigal.

Even participatory blogs like Vaughn Hagerty’s MyReporter.com, which collects and answers questions from readers of the Star News in Wilmington, N.C.,  gives journalists a “real-time window in our community and what [people] are interested in.”
One insight from the judges: The citizen media sites in this year’s competition were meaty and well-done. But it’s looking like people now know what it takes to publish a good community news sites.  Believe it or not, they’re not so innovative any more.

Published on 09/18 at 03:16 PM
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New Media Transparency Challenges

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Since June, when J-Lab released “New Media Makers,” its new study of grant-funded media projects, we’ve tracked another $7.5 million awarded by foundations to support or jumpstart news and information initiatives around the country.

Confirmed grants now total nearly $135.7 millions since 2005, up from $128 million reported in June.  This funding went for 322 grants to 125 projects in 19 states and it came from 206 foundations. The vast majority, more than $65 million, have gone to 11 investigative reporting initiatives; six of those have only launched since 2005. Indeed, at least 102 of the projects we’ve tracked to date have only come into being since 2005. Funding to public broadcasters was not included in this particular study.

Tracking and confirming this activity, however, has given us a taste of the transparency challenges emerging in the new media ecosystem.  In short, it ain’t easy to figure out who’s funding the new content generators, even as they become increasingly important sources of news.

With established news outlets cutting newsgathering and news space, these new media makers are helping to ensure that important developments in their cities, regions and states get covered. And philanthropic foundations, deeply concerned about the role of information in a democracy, are stepping up to support more and more non-profit news ventures with grants.

So what’s the problem? Simply put, nonprofit organizations such as many of the new media ventures are not required to disclose their individual contributors to the public - only to the IRS via Schedule B of their 990 tax returns.  The exceptions are private foundations, which are required to disclose their grantees, and 527 political organizations, which are required to disclose their contributors.

With legacy newspapers, it was easy to see where most of their money came from. You could look at the classified and display ads, which used to account for the majority of their revenue, or you could listen to the commercials in the case of television news. And if the companies were publicly held, more information was available.

Some of the most respected new media makers do place a high value on transparency.  Ask the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting or the Investigative Reporting Workshop who is funding them, and they readily supply a list of funders, amounts and dates. We applaud their willingness to disclose the sources of their support.

But not all of the new media makers are happy to share the sources of their funding. More than once we were told: “We’re not at liberty to disclose our funders,” said Tom Regan, who has been collecting data for J-Lab. Some receive support from anonymous donors; others want to guard their donors’ identities for competitive or other reasons.

J-Lab has spent a great deal of time and shoe leather tracking news reports, online databases, and confirming grants with the nonprofit news initiatives themselves.

But sometimes it’s like peeling an onion. Consider San Francisco’s Tides Foundation, a highly valued incubator for non-profit wannabes. It acts as a fiscal agent channeling grants to projects that are not able to take grants directly. The Tides Foundation lists all these grants on its 990s because Tides is legally the one making the grant, but the money is really coming from other funders. And Tides’ policy is not to divulge where that money comes from.

J-Lab urges new media makers who want to be regarded as credible news outlets to seize the moment to set high benchmarks for transparency. Add a page on your Web site and list the sources, amounts and dates of your funding.  Foundations can play a critical role here as well: Consider not donating to news ventures unless they make public their funding sources.

To be sure, advocacy and political points of view are more commonplace in the new media landscape. So just tell it like it is.

For the new media makers, letting the public know who supported your efforts to cover the news is not just an exercise in fair play. It’s a key component in making sure that your news coverage is not seen as front for a hidden group of donors who might have a particular political or advocacy agenda.

Published on 09/02 at 10:26 AM
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Meet the New Media Makers

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Is it important for news to survive - or news organizations? See today’s New York Times for a sampling of opinions.

Many news organizations are going to fail this year. But I believe local and regional news vacuums are going to be filled - and filled robustly. Why? Because J-Lab is already seeing the various ways that hyperlocal news start-ups are creating news Web sites for communities that have little or no available media. When communities are not being covered, people are starting to gather and report local news themselves.

J-Lab will soon introduce you to these New Media Makers in a major video toolkit. You’ll meet the people launching these projects and hear them talk about their ethical dilemmas, the civic impact of their efforts and how they fit in a new media ecosystem.

Some of these New Media Makers are amateur journalists; some are professionals. Some sell ads, others receive grants, and others work as volunteer journalists.

You got a taste of their thinking today from Ed Fouhy, who helped J-Lab produce and narrate these videos. In today’s Times, he liberally quotes the people we interviewed for our videos.

For many of these New Media Makers, an opinion blog is not their aspiration. “We’re trying to produce what used to be a newspaper,” said Christine Yeres, managing editor of the J-Lab funded NewCastleNOW.org in Chappaqua, N.Y.  “I think we get the readership that we do because ... it is professional. It’s been gone over very carefully.”

It is on this new terrain that old journalism values - accuracy, independence, and objectivity - are combining with new journalism conventions. Where Big-J journalists excel at covering communities from the outside-in, many of these New Media Makers are crafting the models for how to cover communities from the inside-out.

“Sometimes, we want to be the New York Times and sometimes we want to be the church bulletin,” says Susie Pender, Yeres’ co-editor.

Deerfield Forum founder Maureen Mann knows that some people will disagree, but “I’m proud of that” thinking, she says.

What I see happening around the country raises, for me, a fresh question: Are we dealing with more than broken business models for Big-J journalism?

Is the journalism broken, too?

(Want a copy of New Media Makers when it’s ready?  E-mail news@j-lab.org.)

Published on 02/10 at 12:07 PM
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