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Independent New Sites: The Pendulum is Swinging Both Ways

2012-02-15T20:54:16+00:00

Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Blogically Thinking

The appetite for starting up independent news and information websites seems to be as keen as ever and the ideas for new projects are quite creative.

J-lab just finished vetting some 227 proposals to fund women-led startups. There were a ton of sharp ideas. And I recently vetted hundreds more clever news-technologies and social-media ideas for this year's SXSW Accelerator.

That said, we're entering a period where the pendulum is swinging sharply both ways – delivering shakeouts as some sites go belly up and expansion as other sites open satellite operations in the indy news space.

In recent months: BayCitizen, having lost its major funder, is looking to merge with the Center for Investigative Reporting. Rockville Central, after starting as a website then moving to Facebook, went dark. The citizen journalism site, MyMissourian.com, shut down. The once-robust NewWest.net went silent for some months and has returned with no fresh content.

Several of the hyperlocal partners in J-Lab's Networked Journalism project have flagged in the frequency of their content but, at the same time, new sites have launched in those communities. (Stay tuned; a final report is coming soon.)

Of some 1,200 sites in J-Lab's database of community news sites, about half are now inactive. Most often, sites fold as a result of their founders' life circumstances – new jobs, new responsibilities – rather than failed business plans.

Still, there is growth: Steady producers like West Seattle Blog and Davidson News have launched affiliated sites. Small networks like Main Street Connect and Hamlet Hub have added sites. And, of course, Patch, for now, is still in the picture.

There are some clear-cut indy models:

Sites run by solo entrepreneurs or mom-and-pop operators that are generally hyperlocal in focus with tiny staffs.
Statewide watchdog sites, often focused on state capitol issues. There are several newcomers in this cluster: Oklahoma Watch, Iowa Watch, Nebraska Watch, Maine Center for Investigative Reporting; they join more mature sites such as iNews, VTDigger and Texas Tribune.
University-led news startups. These include the likes of Neon Tommy and Intersections SouthLA, both at USC-Annenberg, or GrandAveNews at the University of Miami.
Niche sites. Coming on strong are topic-centric sites that focus on such things as:

Public education, such as the Public School Notebook in Philadelphia.
Health, such as C-Hit, Fair Warning, or Health News Florida.
Arts and culture, such as Nola Vie, Oregon Arts Watch, theartblog.
The local tech community: Technically Philly, Silicon Hills News.

While there is much talk of a "business model" for these entrepreneurial news sites, the best models seem to involve multiple, micro streams of funding.

This can include grants, if the site is nonprofit. But it also includes ad sales, sponsorships, donors, subscribers, syndicating content, selling video, consulting, training and events, among other things.

For a small hyperlocal site, sustainability can be had on revenues of between $100,000 and $200,000 a year – enough to pay the founder, maybe a staffer, a commissioned salesperson, and maybe some freelancers.

The most successful sites have a founder or leader who has developed skills to either sell ads (and close those deals) or write good grant proposals and develop relationships with their funders. They update content frequently and grow audiences by providing trustworthy news and information.

However, some funder fatigue is creeping into the nonprofit arena. This has less to do with the merits of what these news sites are producing as it does with competition from other social safety-net needs. In recent months, some indy news initiatives have lost funding or received fewer dollars from long-time sponsors. At the same time, some funders are struggling to figure out how long of a runway they should be offering these startups.

As the year progresses, I think there will be more content sharing within community news ecosystems, growing content syndication efforts and greater comfort level among legacy news organizations to link out to news coming from other places in their communities as news outlets collaborate to amplify their individual efforts.

But there will also be retrenchment along with growth: More sites will go under; more sites will expand.

Serial startups are the hallmark of many entrepreneurs. It appears that media startups are now maturing into this space.

Women News Entrepreneurs Get Creative

2012-01-05T17:17:03+00:00

Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Blogically Thinking

The latest crop of women news entrepreneurs who received J-Lab support in June 2011 are showing remarkable ingenuity and initiative in raising revenues, developing partnerships and making presentations.

These four women were selected to receive $12,000 awards funded by the McCormick Foundation. You can read about their work in some of their newest blog posts here and think about applying for a 2012 award yourself.

The deadline is Jan. 27, and this year the awards will increase to $14,000 in start-up funding. Four awardees will again be chosen.

Consider Laura Lorek, founder of SiliconHillsNews.com, a tech-news site for Austin and San Antonio, Texas. She has tapped into her region's rich infrastructure for entrepreneurs, initially by taking classes at Tech Ranch Austin, which offers various programs to support startups. She got accepted into Startup Texas, a partner of the White House's Startup America. Startup Texas offers online seminars and discounts and is helping Lorek to develop her "pitch deck," a series of slides about the need for her site and her plans for supporting her new venture. She was invited earlier this week to pitch her site online by Startup America, an initiative by the Obama administration to jumpstart entrepreneurship.

Lorek is looking for $100,000 from angel investors via AngelList and is about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise another $15,000. So far, she is the only woman in the country to launch one of the growing breed of regionally-focused tech news sites.

Catharine Mulbrandon, founder of VisualizingEconomics.com has reached her Kickstarter goal of raising more than more than $14,000 to publish her Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States. Since last June she has been invited to make several presentations about visualizing data, including one last month to the Congressional Budget Office. She has made other presentations at The Big Picture conference in New York City and at one of the monthly Creative Design lectures in Brooklyn. She has also managed to snag one of five scholarships to attend SXSW in Austin in March. To help juice her ideas, she has signed up for co-working space at Mission50 in Hoboken, N.J., which has shared workspace for entrepreneurs.

Kelly Kline, founder of Inside Women's Basketball, just sealed a deal to merge with another women's basketball site, Full Court. The founders of each site will each invest $12,000 in the merger and will be 40 percent partners, leaving a 20 percent stake for another investor.

Berkeley grad student Bo Hee Kim has targeted the school's RichmondConfidential.org site as the testing ground for her mobile prototype for hyperlocal news sites. She is now working with a developer to redo the back end of the site in HTML5 to accommodate some of her planned features for the mobile platform.

To find out more about how to apply and eligibility guidelines, join our web chat at 1 p.m. next Wednesday, Jan. 11 at www.newmediawomen.org/site/nmwe_livechat.

What will 2012 bring for the media?

2012-01-04T17:42:30+00:00

Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Blogically Thinking

Here are some of my thoughts on what will happen in the world of journalism this year as well as my wishes for what I think should happen.

Overall, I think "news entrepreneurship" will enter the lexicon in major ways. Entrepreneurial ideas will be informed by a new sense of urgency over the impending loss of original journalism generated by both new and old news entities.

More entrepreneurial news sites will launch, be they community news sites or statewide and national watchdog sites.
Some news startups, however, will go out of business – victims of funder fatigue and failure to diversify revenue streams. The idea of serial entrepreneurship, so worshipped in Silicon Valley, will become a less-coveted reality in the news ecosystem as some startups doing original reporting are forced to shutter operations for lack of support.
Journalism schools will recalibrate their convergence curricula to embrace media entrepreneurship, working to train students to launch and sustain media ideas.
Social networking options will continue to provide robust outreach opportunities as well as listening posts for news creators.
Some less-enterprising regional newspapers will go out of business or go digital-only, having failed to create a product their audiences want to read or buy.
Information and opinion will be freely available. Enterprise, explanatory and investigative journalism will be prized commodities.

Here are a few things I hope will happen:

Some enterprising news outlets, hammered by recurring downsizing, will abandon their anemic all-things-to-all-audiences approach and finally begin to design strategic portfolios of focused value-added coverage (six to eight topics) they can own – and that people might actually pay for – relinquishing the rest to aggregation or partnerships.
Smart collaboration and networking among media partners will be the new normal. Check out some ways this can work in J-Lab's new report on the Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Awards.
Audience engagement will amp up. In some cases, we'll see a return to face-to-face engagement. In other cases we'll see some innovations for audience participation. These efforts will add to the drives for "open-source" and "transparency" and will better elicit enduring engagement with news consumers.

Enterprise Reporting Awards a “Home Run”

2011-12-15T16:38:16+00:00

Posted To: Press Releases

Washington, D.C. – Fourteen media partnerships awarded $5,000 apiece a year ago to produce a single enterprise-journalism project ended up producing hundreds of pieces of content and far exceeded expectations in terms of impact.

The $70,000 awarded to the winners of the Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Awards leveraged $96,000 in additional funding. The journalists produced more than 300 stories, blog posts, videos, podcasts, searchable databases and interactive maps.

The resulting journalism influenced the city's broadband plans, prodded responsible redrawing of City Council districts and produced an interactive power map of the city's 29 boards and commissions. One project tracked a schools-turnaround initiative and reported irregularities that led to the resignation of the city school superintendent. A major investigative project documented how one in every five properties in the city was tax delinquent, owing $472 million in back taxes.

"By any measure, the Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Awards were a home run," said Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab, which administered the awards funded by the William Penn Foundation. "This is a replicable model for jumpstarting stories that journalists know need to be done. As important, the media partnerships meant these stories were co-published in many media outlets."

The report tracked 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. The results are outlined in a report J-Lab published today, available in hard copy and online.

Jeremy Nowak, president and CEO of the William Penn Foundation was pleased with the outcome. "We were interested in seeing what happened if enterprising news organizations had the resources to focus on under-reported topics. The results have been outstanding.

"We learned about how a cash-strapped city still can't effectively collect the taxes it is owed; how neighborhood politics subvert sound economic development strategy, and the challenges of turning around the lowest-performing schools.

"Most of all, we learned that a new generation of public-interest journalism is being hatched in new venues."

Some of the most robust collaborators in the enterprise projects were the city's entrepreneurial news startups. 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 the state of public affairs reporting. You can read that April 2010 report here.

One of the recommendations was to incentivize with $5,000 enterprise reporting 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.

Today's report details the outcome of that experiment. The award winners called their media collaborations successful and expect them to continue. While the awards called for the projects to be completed within six months, the report says this was "too rugged" a timeline, especially for the more ambitious projects.

The report emphasized that it would be an "overstatement" to say that the $70,000 in award money funded all the journalism that resulted. All the projects benefited from countless hours put in by editors, multimedia producers, graphic artists and others not covered by the awards.

"There was collaboration and stories that normally would not get done did get done," said Tom Ferrick, founder of the Metropolis news site, which spearheaded two of the projects.

The report recommends greater adoption of set-aside funding for collaborative enterprise reporting initiatives. "We believe mainstream media companies, universities, foundations and others can – and should – replicate programs like the Enterprise Awards and set side $50,000 to $100,000 a year in greenhouse funding to start them," Schaffer said.

About William Penn Foundation: The William Penn Foundation, founded in 1945 by Otto and Phoebe Haas, is dedicated to improving the quality of life in the Greater Philadelphia region through efforts that foster rich cultural expression, strengthen children’s futures, and deepen connections to nature and community. In partnership with others, the Foundation works to advance a vital, just, and caring community.

About J-Lab: J-Lab is a journalism catalyst for igniting news ideas that work. It funds pilot projects, awards innovations and shares practical insights from years of working with news creators and evolving news ecosystems.

New Funding for Women Media Entrepreneurs

2011-11-17T21:15:01+00:00

Posted To: Press Releases

For release: Contact: Jan Schaffer
Nov. 15, 2011 202-885-8100

Washington, D.C. – J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University has been awarded $250,000 from the McCormick Foundation to fund eight innovative women-led news startups over the next two years.

Under the grant, eight winners (four in 2012 and four in 2013) will each be given an initial $12,000 to launch their ideas. The winners will receive an additional $2,000 in the second year if they match it with $2,000 from other sources.

The deadline for 2012 proposals is Jan. 27. See the proposal guidelines and apply here: http://www.newmediawomen.org/site/proposal_guidelines/

The McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs initiative is part of a unique effort to address issues of opportunity and innovation, recruitment and retention for women in journalism. To date, 14 projects have been funded since the program started in 2008. See them at www.newmediawomen.org.

Next year’s awardees will be the first group required to raise a small match. The change is designed to encourage women entrepreneurs to reach out for advertising, donations, sponsorships, events and other revenue streams that can help make their ventures sustainable, said Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, which administers the project. The matching dollars will be awarded as soon as winners document the match.

“Sustainability is the lifeblood of innovation,” said Clark Bell, McCormick's Journalism Program Director. “We look forward to seeing more of our women media entrepreneurs survive and thrive.”

NMWE grant funding is available for news websites, mobile news services, apps or other ideas that offer interactive opportunities to provide news and information locally, nationally or among a community of interest. These can be solo ideas or team projects spearheaded by women. Early beta versions of projects are eligible to apply.

The application fee is $25. Awardees will also be required to blog at least once a month for the newmediawomen.org website. Under the grant, women media entrepreneurs will showcase their work at a daylong summit.

The McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs initiative is a project of J-Lab, a center of American University’s School of Communication. J-Lab is a journalism catalyst that funds new approaches to journalism, rewards innovations, researches what works and shares practical insights with news creators and news gatherers.

The Robert R. McCormick Foundation is committed to fostering communities of educated, informed and engaged citizens. Through philanthropic programs, Cantigny Park and museums, the Foundation helps develop citizen leaders and works to make life better in our communities. The Foundation was established as a charitable trust in 1955, upon the death of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The Robert R. McCormick Foundation is one of the nation's largest foundations, with more than $1 billion in assets. For more information, please visit www.McCormickFoundation.org.

No One Way to View Hyperlocal News Sites

2011-10-27T17:17:28+00:00

Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Spotted...

In the world of hyperlocal news, what a hyperlocal venture looks like is as undefined as the formula for achieving success (translation: profit). Those were twin takeaways at this week's Street Fight Summit 2011 in New York.

Representatives from four large media companies occupying the hyperlocal space –Warren Webster, president of Patch; Carll Tucker, CEO of Main Street Connect; Rick Blair, former CEO of the Examiner; and Gary Cowan of Datasphere – were asked whether the size of a local news site matters in terms of geographic area covered and number of unique visitors to the site.

For Patch, Webster said, scaling up was important. The others didn’t answer the question directly.

“It’s not right to think about hyperlocal as homogeneous,” said Cowan, whose Datasphere owns some 1,300 sites. “The local blogger has a different focus than a company trying to create a media brand from the ground up.” Patch, with 870 sites across 24 states, was an example of the latter, he said.

When Main Street Connect started, Tucker said he believed size mattered. He thought that having a certain level of coverage would attract advertisers. Now, he maintains 52 hyperlocal websites in three areas, Fairfield, Conn., Westchester, N.Y., and central Massachusetts. To generate revenue, large regional accounts such as hospitals, Realtors, and car dealerships are his best bets, he says. One of his three areas or “pods” is making a profit, but he didn’t elaborate.

The key to sustainability is not so much size as it is bringing in revenue and eventually turning a profit, many speakers at the summit said.

Making that clear were those who spoke about their failed ventures. A major mistake was trying to scale up too fast. “It just showed we could lose money in more places,” says Mark Potts, founder of Backfence, which folded in 2007.

Several summit speakers suggested that revenue and profit are likely to come through providing a mix of content, daily deals and location-based services. They referred to this as the “coming convergence of hyperlocal.”

The role that journalists should play was up for debate. Would it help if journalists solicited daily deals? Should they sell ads?

Michael Shapiro of The Alternative Press in New Jersey, which has been accepted for membership by the New Jersey Press Association, says some journalists on his staff want to sell ads, and he’s considering allowing them to do that in communities that they don’t cover. He currently has an ad sales staff. Leela de Kretser of DNAInfo in Manhattan says in her community, it could be difficult to recruit journalists to work for the site if they are too closely linked to advertising.

Where the market has gotten crowded with local news sites, competition has followed. Debbie Galant, who launched BaristaNet in 2004, has recently felt competition for advertising from Patch. BaristaNet lost a regional car dealership account to the big corporate player because the dealership was lured by increased exposure on more sites.

However, competition can force sites to work harder and the reader benefits, says Shapiro of The Alternative Press. He points out that independent sites have an advantage because site operators live in the community and sit on crucial boards. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Working with other media outlets is important, too. Ted Mann, CEO of SnipSnap and formerly of Gannett’s InJersey, encourages a site to pursue as many partnerships as possible as a way to grow an audience, not necessarily bring in money.

For instance, the Journal Register Co. is seeking to partner with local blogs, says Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement and Social Media.

GoLocal, which started with a site in Providence, R.I., has a great partnership with ClearChannel radio, says CEO Josh Fenton. One of its reporters is on the air every morning. It’s a win-win, as the station benefits from the reporter’s expertise and the site gains exposure.

The ability for sites to break news also helps them stay in the forefront. “When the mayor of Providence fired all the teachers, Fox and Friends wanted our reporter on air because we broke the story,” says Fenton.

ARLnow in Arlington, Va., a locale known for childless, transient young professionals, has been able to counter the conventional wisdom that hyperlocal sites typically flourish where people own homes and raise children. Editor Scott Brodbeck credits the site's breaking news coverage.

“We cover every breaking story that we’re awake to cover. It’s what people like about us. And we’re cited by every media outlet,” says Brodbeck.

The Alternative Press is so sure of the value of covering breaking news that it is putting together a breaking news team to cover 14 towns, Shapiro says.

While news sites focus on content, bringing in revenue could come by helping small businesses navigate the Web and social media channels. Some have already been working closely with local merchants. De Kretser said DNAInfo’s sales team meets with local businesses and walks them through packages they offer. The site is working to put out a guide to every single business in New York City.

There was general agreement that forums, whether online or offline such as Street Fight’s summit or J-Lab’s News Entrepreneuring 3.0 workshop are crucial to finding ways to survive in the hyperlocal space.

“Media entrepreneurs need to be an open-source community and share the lessons they’ve learned in blogs and conferences,” Buttry says.

The Courage to Innovate for the Future of Journalism

2011-10-26T15:19:56+00:00

Posted To: Workshops & Training > Speeches

Event Date: October 26, 2011 at 4 p.m.
Location: Miller Learning Center, U-Georgia, Athens, GA.

By Jan Schaffer
McGill Lecture
University of Georgia
Oct. 26, 2011

Thank you for having me today. It is an honor to be speaking at a lecture named for Ralph McGill, the "conscience of the South." I think McGill’s valor in writing editorials that challenged racial segregation exemplifies some of the courage that today’s news entrepreneurs are demonstrating as they try to re-imagine journalism for our future.

Despite all the handwringing about business models, we are in an exciting time for journalism. It is being re-invented in very entrepreneurial ways, day in and day out.

People who have new ideas about how to make news and information happen are acting on their ideas: They are launching new websites, new partnerships, new apps, new ways of engaging with audiences.

As I see it, the way the news ecosystem is evolving, journalism – and the democracy it supports – is becoming a tale of smaller and smaller organizations that are having bigger and bigger impact. Some of the traditional news organizations that have been around for decades will be gone. Rising in their place are small news start-ups, statewide investigative sites, nonprofit news sites, new data applications, journalism-school news initiatives, information-rich NGOs, and even soft-advocacy sites. For instance, sites that cover public schools from the point of view of advocating for good schools.
Journalism schools that not so long ago focused on “convergence” are now zeroing in on "entrepreneurship." J-school programs are springing up all over the country to support startups and journalism innovations.

I do believe that journalism needs to be re-invented. And I hope that traditional news organizations will allow more oxygen for new ideas to be launched inside their news organizations. I also hope they will have the courage and grace to accept new ideas from news creators who are not members of the journalistic tribe. Some of that innovation means that legacy journalists may have to leave their comfort zones that allow them to do journalism on autopilot. Instead, they will need to experiment with new kinds of stories, different story frames, and ideas for collaboration and engagement they have not traditionally embraced.

I want to leave you with two lists today. One is my crystal ball for what I see happening in the not-so-distant future. And the other is my wish list for the future of journalism.

The last couple of years have seen amazing activity. There are new delivery platforms, with some news organizations moving to digital-first ideas and online-only publications.

There have been a striking number of media mergers – Huffington Post with AOL, the Daily Beast with Newsweek, Yahoo with ABC.

There has been unprecedented collaboration that has upended the fierce competition that marked the journalism I grew up in. We see Pulitzer Prize-winning startups like Pro Publica giving away data and partnering on stories in the normal course of business. We see the Texas Tribune offering its content to other media around the state. We see the Washington Post running stories from Bloomberg Media. Collaboration is the new normal. And I think it is a good thing because it exposes readers to a richer menu of stories and amplifies news beyond narrow silos. As important, it liberates journalism organizations to focus on a discrete portfolio of subjects – areas where they can add the most value for readers.

As I look ahead, I like to think of the media ecosystem as an elevator with journalists telling stories from very different heights – from micro granular news to the grand master narratives. Let’s call them the 5,000-foot-view, the 500-foot-view, and the 50-foot-view stories. For instance, the 5,000-foot level includes explanatory journalism, enterprise stories, coverage of big national and international issues. I think we will be OK there: We will continue to have strong national news organizations telling important stories that affect all citizens.

Major news organizations like the New York Times have exhibited enormous creativity in amplifying its print content with robust blogs, stunning interactive news opportunities, specialty publications and more.

I also think there has been tremendous courage to innovate among local news entrepreneurs who are generating the close-up, or 50-foot, view of community news. There are some 3,000 local news startups that have launched around the country over the last six years.

Activists or creative technologists are jumpstarting some of these sites. Traditional journalists who have left their newsrooms as a result of buyouts or downsizing are launching others.

Many of these professionals still want to do journalism, and as they survey the media landscape, they are identifying gaps they can fill. Rather than taking a non-journalism job, they are embracing the risk of launching an online news startup from scratch. Braver yet, many are investing enormous sweat equity to make a go of their enterprises. Some are going without salaries for the first several years of their startups. Some are taking out second mortgages on their homes. Others they are living on one income – that of their spouse turned "angel investor" – as they build up their enterprises.

Moreover, they are courageously forcing themselves to learn the kinds of new skills that traditional journalists might disdain: ad sales, bookkeeping, grant writing, marketing, community engagement – and in some cases writing code. At the same time, they are trying to provide quality content and earn the community’s trust. Will they succeed in the long term? I hope so. Many sites, like NewHavenIndependent.org in Connecticut, are paving the way and the oldest of these sites is now going on seven years.

J-Lab has been in the forefront of jumpstarting some 90 pilot projects. And I am pleased to report that most of these new efforts are doing an important j¬ob of trying to fill the gaps in news coverage and hold public officials accountable. To be sure, they don't yet have the resources to replace everything that is being cut back.

Where I have the deepest concern is at the 500-foot view level. This is where we need more courage to allow new acts of journalism to happen. This is where urban, regional and statewide stories are covered. It is also where news coverage is challenged as metro dailies trim staff, cut news hole, shrink their distribution areas and erect pay walls. I worry that their innovations address their needs more than their consumers’. And I worry that they are not keeping pace with the innovative ideas of entrepreneurs now sharing their news landscape.

At the same time I am heartened by the rise of online metro news sites offering robust journalism: Such initiatives as MinnPost, VoiceofSanDiego, the St. Louis Beacon and the Texas Tribune are charting promising paths for our future.

The courage to think out of the box has been the hallmark of the journalism innovators who have won J-Lab's Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. I would like to tip my hat to the vision that emboldened startups like the Sunlight Foundation, which is inventing new tools for data, interactivity and transparency. To Storify, which has enabled seamless narratives to be constructed from tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos and other elements of social media. A nod to Ushahidi for using mobile phones and texting to crowdsource crisis information. And to PolitiFact, which is making possible new ways for holding politicians accountable for their positions and statements. We must be grateful for these new ideas, even though many don't come from traditional journalism organizations.

A hats off, as well, to the B-to-B (business-to-business) journalism enterprises, such as Bloomberg Government, which covers government's impact on business. These efforts are managing to find paying audiences for deep-dive content.

As I look into my crystal ball for the future, I see cause for delight and cause for concern:

By the end of the decade, I think we are going to see statewide watchdog/accountability news sites in every state. They will be clones of California Watch, Oklahoma Watch, VTDigger, Florida Bulldog, and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. They will provide original content for media throughout their territories.
I think we will have new tools and apps that will make data libraries easier to maintain and search and interactive stories easier to produce.
I think we will see the launch of some of some new national news organizations. It wouldn’t surprise me if the likes of the BBC, Reuters or Bloomberg created an online national news site – one that would help supply those 5,000-foot-view stories.
I think many more local news sites will launch (the 50-foot view) and we’ll figure out new and nontraditional ways to quantify the “success” of these startups – looking at engagement, impact in their communities and their prospects for sustainability.
But, sadly, I also think we are going to lose some daily metro papers – those who are now providing the 500-foot view. Some will go online only. Indeed, a top executive at the Dallas Morning News predicted recently that in just three years the news organization will no longer be printing newspapers seven days a week.

Other urban newspapers will fold altogether, unable to bring in enough revenue to produce a product that is meaty and meaningful enough for people to pay for.

It is painful to see how the portfolios of regional and metro newspapers are shrinking. They do little national and international news – buying most of it from such wire services as the Associated Press and others. They no longer have enough feet on the street to cover hyperlocal news – and, as we see, others are rapidly taking up that challenge. Arts, cultural affairs, restaurant and movie reviews are now flourishing in new online outlets. So what are metro papers left with?
Sports, to be sure, although you can get sports coverage on ESPN and elsewhere. And they cover stories about City Hall and local government – although often that involves coverage of a city that many of their suburban readers don’t live in. They also provide episodic enterprise and investigative stories. I worry that that is not enough.

The recent report on local news by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Internet and American Life project chronicled divergent trends.

While more Americans rely on local television for news, it is primarily for three topics: weather, breaking news and traffic. Conversely, people relied on local newspapers for a wider range of subjects – 11 out of 16 areas – but the overall audience is smaller.

But chillingly, while people said they counted on newspapers to cover a range of topics, a surprising 69 percent said that if their local paper no longer existed, it would not have a major impact on their ability to keep up with news and information about their community.

To be expected, 79 percent of Americans who are online said the Internet is their second most relied-on source of information on 15 of the 16 topics surveyed.

The study also found that print newsletters, online listservs and word of mouth were important ways for people to learn about their community, especially news about schools and events.

How many of you have robust neighborhood listservs? If only someone would invent a Storify-like platform to scrape the best news off of those.

So now for my wish list – where I think courage could impact the future:

I wish for more collaboration among news organizations. It would reduce the inefficiencies of having so many journalists cover the same news at the same time. And it would allow news organizations to deploy some of these resources to break new ground on uncovered topics.
I wish that metro and regional newspapers would take a cue from some of the statewide news startups and aggressively focus on just five or six subject areas that they know they can own. This would mean relinquishing the rest to other suppliers and partners. It would take a lot of courage to do that, but it could provide discernable added value if readers found deep and consistent coverage of key topics and aggregation of the rest.
I wish individuals in more states would replicate the Vermont Journalism Trust, a collection of interested people who have organized themselves to be stewards of good journalism. They are now helping to support and raise money for the excellent VTDigger news website.
I wish the IRS would create a new nonprofit category for journalistic startups to smooth the uncertainties of the application process for entities seeking to become 501-c-3’s. This would help bolster information flow in communities.
I wish foundations and others would fund one-off enterprise reporting projects that could be shared with many media makers on many distribution pipelines.
Finally, I wish local public radio and television stations would move quickly to develop and expand some serious journalism chops so that they can be more robust providers of local news – beyond talk shows and websites organized around their program schedules. This is starting to happen in some places.

Innovation is more than a process. It is a journey, albeit one that has to move quickly with the current speed of change in the news ecosystem.

It means you take certain risks. Some ideas will succeed; others will fail.

We should celebrate and share our successes and pick ourselves up from the failures and move on to the next thing. There are ideas waiting to happen – if we have the courage to make them happen.

Thank you very much.

University of Idaho Oppenheimer Media Ethics Symposium

2011-10-24T15:29:31+00:00

Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Blogically Thinking

Rules of the Road:
Navigating the New Ethics of Local Journalism

Keynote Address: Oppenheimer Ethics Symposium
Statehouse Auditorium, Boise, Idaho
Oct. 20, 2011

Thank you for having me and thanks to Douglas and Skip Oppenheimer and the many other media and civic sponsors of this symposium.

I come to you today filled with a lot of optimism. This is an exciting time for journalism. It is being re-invented before our very eyes, day in and day out.

People are not only re-imagining how to make news and information, they are acting on their ideas: They are launching news websites, new partnerships, new apps, data libraries, and new ways of engaging with audiences. And they are figuring out new rules for these activities. The way the journalism ecosystem is currently evolving, the future of journalism – and the democracy it supports – is becoming a tale of smaller and smaller organizations that are having bigger and bigger impact. Some of the traditional news organizations that have been around for decades will be gone. Rising in their place are small news start-ups, statewide investigative sites, nonprofit news sites, new data applications, journalism-school news initiatives, and information-rich NGOs.
J-Lab, my center, has been in the forefront of jumpstarting some 90 pilot projects, including about 70 news sites around the country. And I am pleased to report that most of these new efforts are doing a quite a responsible j¬ob of trying to fill the gaps in news coverage and watchdog public officials. To be sure, they don't yet have the resources to replace everything that is being cut back. And their long-term sustainability is still uncertain.

But the rise of these smaller news outlets has planted a variety of novel minefields in journalism's ethical landscape. The rules for stepping around these minefields don’t always lend themselves to the hard-and-fast do's and don'ts that helped establish a fairly straight-and-narrow path for the journalism of old and gave us things like the SPJ Code of Ethics.

For one thing, there are all kinds of new people – not just professional journalists – creating content and much of that content has a lot of journalistic DNA. They include so-called civic catalysts, community volunteers, creative technologists, computer programmers, nonprofit groups, and what I call "soft advocates."

What do I mean by "soft advocates"? I mean news sites like the Catalyst in Chicago or the Public School Notebook in Philadelphia that are doing real journalism on local school districts, but they also have a point of view. They are very much rooting for good public schools.

In addition to new people producing news, there are also new definitions of news that differ from how we traditionally defined a news story in the past. In particular, some of the people who are launching news sites never got the memo that conflict is a common element of many news stories. And, horrifying as it might be to traditional journalists, some will go cover a town meeting and report what happened in chronological order. Interestingly, readers don't seem to mind.

Finally, there are new kinds of content, including citizen contributions, social-media input, crowd-sourced information and something called "sponsored content." More on that in a minute.

And, of course, the ethical issues around the impact of search engines has made many journalists pause before they act. If one of the ethical aspirations of journalists is to do less harm, we must be mindful that every news items – from Big-J to Small-J journalism – has a forever afterlife in the Google cloud.

Watching all this happen, I saw an opportunity to start a conversation about ethics in the new ecosphere. I got a grant from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and hired Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon and recently named editor-in-chief of Grist magazine. I gave him some topics to probe and sent him off to report. He delivered really authentic exploration of actual dilemmas some of these news entrepreneurs are confronting. We published it as "Rules of the Road, Navigating the New Ethics of Local Journalism". To be sure, we know this field is very much a work in progress.

The dilemmas, however, offer a great window into an emerging journalism landscape that is being shaped by these new realities:

• The threshold for news is lower – whether you are CNN or a hyperlocal news site. Misdemeanors, not just felonies, constitute news. And incremental developments are the scooplets that news outlets now crow about.

• Stories unravel in real time. Editors post updates as they come in rather than wait for a fully baked story.
o A post on a local news site might read: We hear there is an accident at 3rd and Main Streets. What do you know about it?
• “Google juice” makes micro news have a macro afterlife in search engines.
• Ethical decisions are as open to community feedback and comments as the stories themselves.
• Attachment to the community is valued more than dispassionate detachment.
• Traditional notions of objectivity are bumping up against aspirations to advocate for the good of the community.

The pioneers of new local news sites are grappling with the tensions between running a business and serving the public, between telling collective truths and protecting individual privacy, and between witnessing events – and even sponsoring events – and advocating causes.

The good news is that most entrepreneurial news startups are embracing traditional values of professional journalism – accuracy, fairness, independence – while engaging in seat-of-the-pants improvisation.

In some cases, I would assert that they have stricter ethical guidelines than many mainstream news organizations.

For these journalistic pioneers, you will hear little about issues of political candidates' keeping their personal lives private or about suppressing the news at the request of public officials.

When plagiarism surfaces – as it did last week with the case of Politico reporter Kendra Marr, who resigned after reports of similarities between her stories and reports published elsewhere, including the New York Times – it ignited a conversation in an Online Journalism Review article about how the speed of web journalism is creating a "breeding ground for ethical lapses."

Instead, here a taste of some of the new dilemmas:

Photos: Journalists traditionally have been concerned about whether photos were too shocking or gruesome to be published. Now, for some local news sites, photos are tied to questions of invasion of privacy. Consider this: You might rush to photograph a traffic fatality and have it online long before next-of-kin are notified, as Howard Owens, founder of TheBatavian.com in Batavia, N.Y, did a while ago.

His photo of the car that had a passenger who died clearly showed the license plate. He recounts in “Rules of the Road” what happened:

"I got blasted by a reader whose daughter drives the same kind of car with a license plate that also begins with the same three letters. She called her daughter in a panic," he said.

But when the lady sitting next to that woman saw the photo, she was devastated. She wasn't a member of the immediate family, but she knew whose car it was.

So, Owens' epiphany? "Maybe in the future, I need to be mindful of obscuring the license plate, or just waiting another couple of hours," he said.

Fairness: Too few voters have a good sense of candidates running for local offices. At best, they might get a biographical paragraph or two in a local voters guide. Many voters say they don’t feel they have enough information to cast a ballot.

So what if one candidate buys an ad on your news site, and his challenger doesn't? Do you turn down all political ads, just to even the playing field? Do you compensate by going out of your way to cover the candidate who did NOT advertise? How do you avoid perceptions that you are not favoring the candidate who DID advertise?

This was the conundrum for Glenn Burkins, founder of QCityMetro.com in Charlotte, N.C. (also known as the Queen City): "Every time I sat down to write about that campaign, I knew in the back of my mind that one candidate had given me money and the other one hadn't. And I didn't like that at all. I can honestly say that I didn't do anything different because of that. But out in the community, I heard speculation that I was favoring the Republican."

Police arrests: Some of the most serious ethical minefields involve daily police-blotter information.

It used to be that a police story to made the newspaper or the nightly newscast if it was a felony. The crime was significant: Somebody died or did the killing. Weapons, force, fires, mayhem or missing persons would register as news.

In the emerging local news ecosystem, simple misdemeanors can make the threshold for news – particularly in smaller news outlets. So we are talking about domestic disputes, driving a car under the influence of alcohol, teenage drinking, even an 18-year-old involved with a 17-year-old could be classified as a sex offender.

Some news outlets publish all the names of people arrested in a community. Some even run the mugshots on their websites.

A few entrepreneurs feel their readers have a right to know what kinds of police activities their taxes are funding. They view this making the conduct of public officials more transparent.

But many of the site publishers we interviewed are adopting a stricter standard, even if their local newspaper doesn’t. They are saying: Wait a minute: What if the charges don't stick? Or the person is not convicted? What if the police got it wrong? If we can't follow every case through the courts, they say, we don't want to report it.

Some site editors may report an incident, like speeding on Main Street, but without a name. Others draw the line at only reporting crimes of significance. Still others won't report the names of anyone under 18, even if their competitors do.

"You really have a responsibility to follow cases through the court system," says David Boraks, founder of DavidsonNews.net in North Carolina. "And what the heck, I'm not going to follow all the speeding tickets."

Said Liz George, one of the co-editors of Baristanet.com in Montclair, N.J.: “We do really have a lot of Google power, and we don't want to use it to ruin somebody's life."

Business and Advertising: The digital age is fundamentally transforming how journalists finance their projects. It's important for new startups to be sustainable, and it's also critical that they maintain the public's trust.

Most startups are supporting themselves by getting grants or donations, selling ads or sponsorships, by holding events, syndicating content, and sometimes by doing web and social-media consulting for businesses in their community.

Nearly all have very clear rules barring pay to play. But it's difficult when the same person wears two hats: where you are the journalist as well as the ad sales person. Small advertisers in communities sometimes expect that they can buy an ad in exchange for a story.

But most news sites say they won't forfeit credibility or independence for a few hundred dollars. (And thank goodness most of the ads on their sites don’t cost much more than that.)

You're not going to ignore a story about an advertiser if it's important to the community, but you are not going to shill for your advertiser, they said. Says Baristanet's Liz George: "That's the decision you make all the time editorially: When it is story-worthy and when is it crossing the line?"

Sometimes sponsors will fund reporting on niche topics, like education, health or the environment and site publishers work to be transparent, much like NPR, about those sponsorships.

Site publishers are also employing some creative ways to tell readers: "And now a word from our sponsors." To finesse publishing something on their website from a sponsor, they might tweet it out or put it on their Facebook page.

Site operators have to work very hard both at being transparent and educating their advertisers and readers about support.

Commenting: To know or not to know the identity of who is posting comments on your site is an area where site operators disagree. Some site operators are fine with anonymous comments and leave it to the community to alert them if people are posting inappropriate or offensive comments.

Others will only post comments after they moderate them first to ensure civil discourse. And still others require people who post comments to identify themselves, either by name or email address. In truth, this is a more stringent policy than many mainstream media sites have.

Scott Lewis, CEO of the six-year-old VoiceofSanDiego.org, says that over time they developed a policy requiring people to disclose their full names to comment on the site and all comments are pre-reviewed: "Search engines tend to pick up comments as if they were content on their own, and if you have something there that is an out-and-out falsehood … it'll be there in the record, somebody will come across it and cite it somewhere."

Objectivity: The notion of creating balanced, impartial accounts has long been steeped in the ethos of journalism. But the conventions of he said/she said journalism or scorecard journalism – who's up and who's down today – seem to hold less value to the readers of some of the journalism startups. Moreover, the journalists who are starting up these enterprises usually have lived in the community for a number of years and bring to their enterprise a rich historical knowledge of community people and issues – often more knowledgeable than a new reporter just starting out on a newspaper.

Indeed, in an age when the value of information is enhanced by informed perspectives and interpretations, we find news entrepreneurs embracing positions that advocate for the good of the community. Now this would make traditional journalists squirm with discomfort. But many of the journalism entrepreneurs want their news sites to be OF the community, not just about the community. They want to create community, not just cover it. And key to this is engaging their community in very active ways.

So they may sponsor a float in the 4th of July parade, hold community events, crowd-source developing news stories, and advocate for building good communities.

Says Lance Knobel, one of the founders of Berkeleyside.com in California: "We don't have to pretend to be neutral about having a healthy business community in Berkeley."

"If we can do anything to make Telegraph Avenue less crappy, I don't see that as abandoning our position above the fray. I see that as we've done something great for the city we live and work in."

So, in summing up, I think you'll agree that looking at evolving ethical decisions is a good way to chart where the journalism of our future is heading.

I'll never forget how Maureen Mann described one of her challenges after she helped to launch The Forum in Deerfield, N.H., in 2005. It is one of the startups J-Lab helped to fund.

At times she said, a volunteer reporter for the site would cover a town meeting and they'd get a call the next day from a public official complaining – not that they were misquoted – but that a story quoted what they said, but what they said was a clumsy rendering of what they meant. Ordinary people seldom speak in perfect sound bites and many traditional journalists relish such missteps. Indeed, they will quote them for decades.

Mann, however, said she said she learned to create some space, and some transparency, to let her readers know when a public official wanted to clarity what he meant.

It's inconceivable to me that a mainstream news outlet would allow that.

Doing less harm is a fundamental credo of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics.

From my perch, I think many of the digital journalists occupying the new journalism landscape are working hard to do less harm while holding their communities accountable.

I draw great optimism from that.

Thank you very much.

Co-sponsored by the Idaho Humanities Council, the Idaho Press Club and the University of Idaho School of Journalism and Mass Media. Webcast provided by Idaho Public Television.

University of Idaho Oppenheimer Media Ethics Symposium

2011-10-20T18:46:37+00:00

Posted To: Workshops & Training > Speeches

Event Date: October 20, 2011
Location: Statehouse Auditorium, University of Idaho

Rules of the Road:
Navigating the New Ethics of Local Journalism

Keynote Address: Oppenheimer Ethics Symposium
Statehouse Auditorium, Boise, Idaho
Oct. 20, 2011

Thank you for having me and thanks to Douglas and Skip Oppenheimer and the many other media and civic sponsors of this symposium.

I come to you today filled with a lot of optimism. This is an exciting time for journalism. It is being re-invented before our very eyes, day in and day out.

The way the journalism ecosystem is currently evolving, the
future of journalism – and the democracy it supports – is becoming a tale of smaller and smaller organizations that are having bigger and bigger impact. Some of the traditional news organizations that have been around for decades will be gone. Rising in their place are small news start-ups, statewide investigative sites, nonprofit news sites, new data applications, journalism-school news initiatives, and information-rich NGOs.

J-Lab, my center, has been in the forefront of jumpstarting some 90 pilot projects, including about 70 news sites around the country. And I am pleased to report that most of these new efforts are doing a quite a responsible j¬ob of trying to fill the gaps in news coverage and watchdog public officials. To be sure, they don't yet have the resources to replace everything that is being cut back. And their long-term sustainability is still uncertain.

Finally, there are new kinds of content, including citizen contributions, social-media input, crowd-sourced information and something called "sponsored content." More on that in a minute.

The dilemmas, however, offer a great window into an emerging journalism landscape that is being shaped by these new realities:

In some cases, I would assert that they have stricter ethical guidelines than many mainstream news organizations.

For these journalistic pioneers, you will hear little about issues of political candidates' keeping their personal lives private or about suppressing the news at the request of public officials.

Instead, here a taste of some of the new dilemmas:

Photos: Journalists traditionally have been concerned about whether photos were too shocking or gruesome to be published. Now, for some local news sites, photos are tied to questions of invasion of privacy. Consider this: You might rush to photograph a traffic fatality and have it online long before next-of-kin are notified, as Howard Owens, founder of TheBatavian.com in Batavia, N.Y, did a while ago.

His photo of the car that had a passenger who died clearly showed the license plate. He recounts in “Rules of the Road” what happened:

"I got blasted by a reader whose daughter drives the same kind of car with a license plate that also begins with the same three letters. She called her daughter in a panic," he said.

But when the lady sitting next to that woman saw the photo, she was devastated. She wasn't a member of the immediate family, but she knew whose car it was.

So, Owens' epiphany? "Maybe in the future, I need to be mindful of obscuring the license plate, or just waiting another couple of hours," he said.

Fairness: Too few voters have a good sense of candidates running for local offices. At best, they might get a biographical paragraph or two in a local voters guide. Many voters say they don’t feel they have enough information to cast a ballot.

Police arrests: Some of the most serious ethical minefields involve daily police-blotter information.

Some news outlets publish all the names of people arrested in a community. Some even run the mugshots on their websites.

A few entrepreneurs feel their readers have a right to know what kinds of police activities their taxes are funding. They view this making the conduct of public officials more transparent.

Said Liz George, one of the co-editors of Baristanet.com in Montclair, N.J.: “We do really have a lot of Google power, and we don't want to use it to ruin somebody's life."

Business and Advertising: The digital age is fundamentally transforming how journalists finance their projects. It's important for new startups to be sustainable, and it's also critical that they maintain the public's trust.

But most news sites say they won't forfeit credibility or independence for a few hundred dollars. (And thank goodness most of the ads on their sites don’t cost much more than that.)

Sometimes sponsors will fund reporting on niche topics, like education, health or the environment and site publishers work to be transparent, much like NPR, about those sponsorships.

Site operators have to work very hard both at being transparent and educating their advertisers and readers about support.

Commenting: To know or not to know the identity of who is posting comments on your site is an area where site operators disagree. Some site operators are fine with anonymous comments and leave it to the community to alert them if people are posting inappropriate or offensive comments.

Objectivity: The notion of creating balanced, impartial accounts has long been steeped in the ethos of journalism. But the conventions of he said/she said journalism or scorecard journalism – who's up and who's down today – seem to hold less value to the readers of some of the journalism startups. Moreover, the journalists who are starting up these enterprises usually have lived in the community for a number of years and bring to their enterprise a rich historical knowledge of community people and issues – often more knowledgeable than a new reporter just starting out on a newspaper.