“Citizen Media: J-School Entrepreneurial Ventures”
August 4, 2006
San Francisco
Lew Friedland
Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Keith [Graham] to my left was saying that the Star Tribune would be smart to buy the Daily Planet – not that I’m predicting. [Audience laughs]
JEREMY IGGERS: Not for sale! [More laughs]
LEW FRIEDLAND: But actually that’s the starting point in my presentation. The Madison Commons is a commons model that grew, in many ways, as an experiment out of the civic and public journalism movement. I think most people in this room are probably very familiar with civic and public journalism so I’m not going to say virtually anything about it other than that it was a highly successful movement. Research conducted by Sandy Nichols at UW for her dissertation demonstrated that more than 50 percent of all newspapers tried civic or public journalism over its roughly 12-year-long official run. When they did it, they did it seriously, but of course the point is that the plug was always pulled at some point. Some editor, some company, some new budget or some new sale caused all these wonderful projects to at some point fade or disappear – not all, but many. And that was the problem that we started with.
Civic journalism, we felt, did not belong to the newspapers that did it, it belonged to the citizens and communities with whom it was done. Those citizens and communities were partners of civic journalism, but they were often unacknowledged partners. They had an ownership stake, but that ownership stake often was not recognized and truthfully honored.
So we began to ask ourselves what other model would continue the very best of the civic and public journalism movement but would put this on a different basis, like the Daily Planet, which we see as a sister project, a very important and interesting one.
What would make it possible to continue doing a different kind of citizen oriented civic or public journalism that would still draw upon the excellent resources of the mainstream newspapers? The daily report that the Star Trib puts out is essential to the life of that community and I am under no illusion that it can or should disappear or that these kinds of distributed journalism efforts that we’re all talking about tonight will replace them. They ought not to, but these efforts are complements and I think they’re complements in several ways.
One is that they are not owned by the news organizations. We will proceed and do our work regardless of what the news organizations do, and I think that’s very important.
The Madison Commons is essentially a model of the distributed journalism domain in a local community.
Before I go any further I just want to acknowledge Chris Long. Chris Long is the project coordinator of Madison Commons and probably, including me, the single most essential person making it work. Much of what you see here is his own hard work and handy work. He’s a graduate student at UW-Madison.
The program was, of course, launched by the journalism school at UW. It was launched as a specific kind of experiment in community and civic journalism that included a strong citizen journalism component.
It’s, I think, unique in another sense in that because it’s a journalism school project we can try different things in both journalism and research in journalism education. I’m not going to talk a lot about the research component, but this is an experiment in building a new civic media ecology, and that offers all of us who are doing research in political communication and communication democracy a chance to learn about what works and how it works, and most importantly how it can be sustained over time. What sorts of changes ripple throughout a community media ecology? How is that robust civic media ecology sustained? That’s one of our central research questions in this project.
But the practice of the Commons project is in some ways more simple and in other ways much more complex than that, as you might imagine.
The Commons is really a partnership among a number of different organizations. It’s originally a partnership that was born from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It is at the heart of our undergraduate education; we teach our students about this kind of journalism. It’s taught in our advanced reporting classes and we teach a form of community journalism – Cheryl Gibbs from Miami of Ohio, in some sense one of the seeds of this group, from a civic reporting exercise that Cheryl passed on to me many years ago in which students do a kind of civic beat reporting, and this grew and grew and grew – so that’s become the core of one part of our undergraduate education.
Most of our advanced reporting students were given a neighborhood or they chose a neighborhood and that becomes their beat for an entire semester. In some cases they’ve gone on with me as independent study students or for and independent advanced or graduate course and have done it for an entire year. They report on that neighborhood from the inside out, they get to know it, they do issue stories, they do profiles, they do individual profiles and neighborhood profiles, and they essentially become the – not experts on that neighborhood because the experts are the people who live there – but journalistic conduits for the expertise that resides in that neighborhood. They help to bring voice to it and they publish that work on the Commons.
We have a new faculty member, Sue Robinson, who is joining us this year from Temple.
We are hoping to incorporate this work into our master’s program as well so that this kind of community and civic reporting will become a hallmark of the kind of master’s training that we do. We think this is essential to the mission of the journalism school but also to a new kind of journalism training.
The world that we’re all going to be living in is going to be a world of mixed models. Of course many of our students will still go on and work for the Wisconsin State Journals or the Star Tribs or, hopefully, for the New York Times or the nightly news, but many of them will be working in much more complex, mixed-media, mixed-model domains. We want to be able to begin to give them that experience immediately, now, so they begin to live and breathe what it means to be a community-based reporter as a central part of their journalism training, not as a coincidental, “by the way,” “over here,” kind of problem in reporting.
The other central core of this project was it was a partnership with the community itself, so you see here the neighborhood planning councils. Madison has three neighborhood planning councils – we worked with two and now we’re working with all three – to organize the project, so we were partners.
Larry Kirkman from American University asked us about this yesterday. We were partnered with these community organizations from the get-go. We knew that we could not do this project without them, nor did we want to do it to them. We wanted to do it with them. They were partners from the get-go and they had ownership.
The only thing that would make this commons model succeed was the possibility of establishing strong, robust, community-based partnerships, which is actually still sort of a dirty word in journalism and mass communication but it’s more a form of community organizing, really.
You go out and you establish partnerships and relationships and you sustain them over time and that means that you have ties and obligations, and sometimes those ties are constraining and sometimes they’re messy, but that’s part of what you live with when you do a journalism project like this.
We decided to concentrate on the East Side and the South Side. The East Side is predominantly working class – hip working class, that’s a Madison category that’s kind of a hard one to explain. The South Side is the place where working class and minority folks predominantly live. So we decided to partner initially with the East and the South metro planning councils because it was central to us to have underrepresented voices up front in the process of building the Commons. So those were central partnerships from the get-go.
The neighborhood planning councils were central partners not only in providing content but also in helping us to recruit our citizen journalists.
We have a specific kind of approach to training citizen journalists.
In addition to training our own journalism students who write and report for the site, we also train our citizen journalists and we offered a series of workshops that Chris and I taught. Initially we did three sessions and one of the main sources of feedback we had was that wasn’t enough. Even though these were all working people in one form or another, they said, “We want more sessions.” One of the main criticisms was, “We want more time,” so Chris and I revised the curriculum. We created an eight-week curriculum with one week face-to-face then one week online, which taught the basics of reporting.
I want to say something, very briefly, about those basics. Chris and I, in formulating this project, believe very strongly that there is a core of reporting. I heard somebody laughing in the Daily Planet Video when Doug McGill said that we’re custodians of fact, and there was a kind of “ha ha” from part of the room, and we actually believe that citizen journalism, much as traditional journalism, also has core obligations, not to the norms of journalism per se – not the kind of professional allegiances that many of us would have or teach – but as citizens to do reporting that is truthful and accurate. So Chris and I really begin all of our sessions by stressing the need for fact-based reporting that’s based upon verification.
Many of our citizen journalists are activists. Not surprisingly, they have interests that they bring to the table, and that’s OK. We don’t say, “You must separate fact and values strictly,” as you might in a more formal reporting context – some of us would, some of us wouldn’t, but we won’t have that debate here. But we do say it’s OK to have interests and values, but it’s very important to understand the interests and values of others, talk to all of the people involved and report on what they say factually and accurately so we can address those core values of journalism in a citizen journalism context.
We teach people the skills of interview and we think that interviewing is a core citizen journalism skill and, frankly, I think it’s a neglected one.
Sometimes in the blogging world – and we’ve had this experience in Madison – people write stories before they’ve talked to anybody. This happened to us. When we went online there were several bloggers who wrote about what we were doing without ever really trying to contact any of us or ask us a single question and they got almost the entire story wrong. It wasn’t particularly maligned, but it was wrong.
This was striking to us, that somehow in this new world these people didn’t feel like they had to actually talk to anybody before they wrote a story, and we thought that was wrong. Even in this new world of citizen journalism, talking to people before you write about them is a fundamental obligation, so we teach that as well.
We also teach the core in a fairly stripped down way. We teach a journalism curriculum in eight weeks. It’s not always easy but we teach people how to structure narratives, tell a good story from the beginning to the end and so on – skills that most people in this room are familiar with.
The other thing that we do, which is one of the things I’m particularly proud of, is that because we do believe we’re in partnership and trying to build a civic media ecology, just like we’re not trying to do citizen journalism to citizens, we’re also not doing it to or against the mainstream media. We want them to be our partners, and we were surprised – initially we partnered with the smaller daily newspapers like the Capital Times in Madison, which was very friendly, but the Cap-Times is the smaller and more liberal and progressive paper, so it’s no problem for them to do an experiment because what’s the cost? But almost immediately the Wisconsin State Journal, the mainstream, more conservative morning daily came to us and said, “Hey, how come we’re not included, too?” So unlike the Minneapolis experience, they wanted to buy in.
When I get back to town we’re going to be sitting down and meeting with the new vice president of the leading CBS affiliate in town that wants to know how they can partner with us.
Of course we’re partnering with community papers, as well. We’re working with papers in the south and the north side and the east side, training their journalists, as well as reaching out to ethnic papers and alternative radio. As well, we’re working with the local cable access station.
The relationship with the daily newspapers is particularly important for us because we take from the dailies freely, and I think that’s a unique situation. We have a strong foundation of trust. We take their content without any restrictions as long as we don’t alter it – and that’s one that we proposed, they weren’t even that insistent. Occasionally we shorten it, but rarely. Usually it’s whole cloth. And they take our work and they publish it in the back page of the Metro section of the Sunday daily, which has given us, as you can imagine, a large exposure, again, helping to create a healthy and robust citizen media ecology that flows through the entire cycle of the daily report on the community. Of course ours bubbles up from below, theirs comes from above, but there’s not an opposition here. We need both sides of that.
We do have an online curriculum. We’ve stolen liberally in order to put it together. One of our projects, among many, is to rewrite it and customize it more. But of course it’s there for anybody who wants to draw from it. This is actually taken from elsewhere, so you’ll see a range of resources that we’ve pulled together in our citizen journalist bootcamps, and I can tell you more about that if you want now.
One final point, the site is based upon two principles of organization: The first one – fairly obvious by now I assume – is the neighborhood principle of organization. Very rapidly we expanded to 31 neighborhoods. We have reporting from 31 neighborhoods in Madison, and on the left rail you can see all the neighborhoods we cover – there’s actually more than that now, it’s up to 31 – and what you see here is neighborhood profiles. This is actually an issue section, which aggregates all neighborhood profiles, but you can also click on the left rail and see the Marquette neighborhood, for example, and see all the news that’s relevant to the Marquette neighborhood regardless of the source, whether it comes from below or it’s published in the daily papers. So we’re printing a daily report for every neighborhood that is as complete as it can possibly be. At the same time you can also see that we’re taking on, for example, development sprawl as a major issue. We’re going to be trying to launch a new, more robust citizen reporting initiative on development in Madison. So all of the development stories that have been done, regardless of source, whether they’re in the daily papers or at the grassroots, citizen journalism-generated level, are here.
We’re also developing another layer – a really grassroots layer – that will be incorporated in the fall, we hope, which is from neighborhood newsletter writers. We’re running a series of workshops and we expect to have 100 to 200 neighborhood newsletter writers from across Madison that will have a more direct posting access so they can begin to just pump a lot of lower-level, non-reporting neighborhood information onto the site.
It’s a work in progress. As you can see, one of the biggest problems is it’s not as visual. We think the design is good – we like the design – but we also know that we’re grossly lacking in visual elements and other effects.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you edit content before it goes on the site? If not, who is responsible for problems with the content?
LEW FRIEDLAND: We do edit content. I’m glad you asked that. When you are a J-School you actually can do things because you have people like Chris [Long] and many of our other grad students around. Chris was the director of new media for C-SPAN and also was an editor at Newsday so we happen to have a pretty good line editor coordinating the project, as well as a developer of new media. So it’s not a fluke that it looks the way it does.
We do edit citizen content, but we do it very very lightly. It’s very important for us to have voice come through so we don’t edit for voice. We don’t want our citizen reporters to all sound like journalism students. I do edit our journalism students; that’s another story. But we want our citizens’ voices to come through.
We do fact checking and accuracy checking as you would expect. Obviously there are some things – as in any story – that get looked at more closely than others, but that’s true in a daily newsdesk as well. So we do check them and we do take responsibility.
I want to say one thing about the libel issue, and this is a unique aspect of doing this in a university, and particularly the University of Wisconsin, which has a strong tradition called “The Wisconsin Idea” that’s more than 150 years old, that we serve the citizens of the state of Wisconsin. It’s a civic ethic. When I went to the university lawyers and I said, “What are my libel coverages,” they said, “If this isn’t an example of The Wisconsin Idea, I don’t know what is,” and so we’re covered for libel under the university umbrella, or at least that’s what our lawyer told me.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Does your partnership with newspapers and the city preclude or hinder critical articles about them?
LEW FRIEDLAND: No, not at all.
It’s interesting that you ask that. Not in the least. We’ve done critical stories on the neighborhoods that neighborhoods haven’t liked, but which were factual and we determined that they were factual.
One story was on crime in a South Side neighborhood, and the story was written from the perspective of residents in that neighborhood. The quotes were accurate; people said there was fighting and noise and drug dealing going on out here. That wasn’t the only story we did on that neighborhood but it was an accurate reflection of what was going on from the standpoint of older residents of that neighborhood, and the neighborhood association president, who’s at some level a collaborator of ours, I guess, in principle didn’t like it. We said we were sorry, but we were looking for positive stories too. We’re more than willing to entertain counter-balancing facts with factual information, but we also are keeping what we think is a proper ethic.
Madison Gas & Electric, for example, offered to sponsor us, and we’re desperate for money just like Jeremy [Iggers of Twin Cities Daily Planet] – in fact we’re hoping he succeeds so he can give us some – but I didn’t take the MG&E sponsorship because we were doing environmental stories on the East Side and I thought that might have been a conflict of interest. I could have used their $5,000, but Chris and I made an editorial decision that, at least at this point, as much as we needed that $5,000, we couldn’t do it.
