Blogically Thinking

Observations and Learnings from J-Lab's Jan Schaffer

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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