Blogically Thinking

Observations and Learnings from J-Lab's Jan Schaffer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Let’s Count the Ways…

Posted by Jan Schaffer

Friday, January 23, 2009

The first U.S. forays in citizen media began in earnest only in 2004. Now, as 2008 comes to a close, we need to stop referring to citizen journalism as a monolithic phenomenon and pay closer attention to the many ways it’s evolving.

While we’re at it, let’s stop fretting about whether citizen media makers, as I like to call them, are good enough to be called “journalists.”

Many just hope to let people in their communities know what’s going on, so let’s not require them to be members of a tribe they don’t much want to belong to.

This year, you can really unpack a wide variety of citizen media niches. They all add value in different ways. There is:

• The increase in micro-local news sites founded by people trying to fill a news void in their communities. This is where J-Lab does most of its work. Baristanet.com is well known, but take a look at NewCastleNOW.org in Chappaqua, N.Y. It’s just a year old. Or JDLand.com, the 2008 Knight-Batten Citizen Media Award winner.
• The creation of local or citywide sites founded by former journalists. These include MinnPost.com in the Twin Cities, the St. Louis Beacon and NewHavenIndependent.org in Connecticut.
• Attempts by conventional media to attract user-generated content. Take a look at CNN’s iReport.com, MSNBC.com’s First Person, the Chicago Tribune’s TribLocal.com.
• The rise of national and international sites, such as NowPublic.com, that solicit and publish citizen photos, video and some articles from around the world. Some have attracted venture capital.
• The participation of smart people as bloggers in sites like HuffingtonPost.com.
• The aggregation and curation of Third World bloggers to counter non-existent media or government-controlled media. Look at GlobalVoicesOnline.org and its Rising Voices mico-funding arm.
• And the emerging use of mobile phones and text messaging to report on crisis hotspots. Mobile pioneer Ushahidi.com was a winner of this year’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

What are the definitions of “news” in these various models? What are the differences in ethical sensibilities? What are the clues to the future of journalism? With the launch of this blog, J-Lab hopes to weigh in, now and then, to share what it’s been learning.

Most recent entries

• First Read: Follow the Breadcrumbs
• Old freedoms ring true for new media
• Nerds, news and neat stuff
• New Media Transparency Challenges
• Meet the New Media Makers
• Let’s Count the Ways…

Monthly Archives

• October 2009
• September 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• Complete Archives

Blogroll

• Vin Crosbie: Digital Deliverance
• Dave Cohn: Digidave
• Rob Curley Internet Punk
• Ken Doctor: Content Bridges
• Jonathan Dube: CyberJournalist.net
• Doug Fisher: Common Sense Journalism
• Amy Gahran: Contentious.com
• Dan Gillmor: Blog
• Jeff Jarvis: BuzzMachine
• J.D. Lasica: Social Media
• Michele McLellan
• Susan Mernit
• Online Journalism Review
• Howard Owens
• Mark Potts: Recovering Journalist
• Jay Rosen: PressThink
• Steven A. Smith: Still A Newspaperman

Feeds

• Blogically Thinking Feed
• J-Lab Web Site Feed

E-Learning Portals

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
J-Lab is a center of American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C.

Subscribe to J-Lab's RSS feed (What is RSS?)

Print this page | Site design by Hop Studios