December 15, 2011
Jan Schaffer
What people are saying:
“We learned that a new generation of public-interest journalism is being hatched in new venues.”
“There was collaboration and stories that normally would not get done, did get done.”
This report tracks the progress of an experiment J-Lab designed to see if there were ways to incentivize media collaborations and amplify, beyond narrow silos, the journalism being created by emerging news sites in the nation’s sixth largest city.
Philadelphia has a vibrant media landscape consisting of niche reporting sites, legacy newspapers and an active community of creative technologists. In 2009, the William Penn Foundation commissioned J-Lab to explore the city’s media ecosystem with a focus on public affairs reporting. You can read that April 2010 report here.
One recommendation was to incentivize with $5,000 awards several discrete, in-depth journalism projects that required news creators to collaborate. J-Lab issued a competitive request for proposals and announced the winners in October 2010.
This report details the outcome of that experiment. By any measure, they were a home run and offer a replicable model others can employ to jumpstart good public affairs coverage.
Download the report (pdf)
