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Journalism’s Hybrid System
Last week, Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Journalism Needs Government Help.” As Bollinger argues, evidence is mounting that there simply is not enough private capital from traditional revenue sources such as advertising, subscriptions and philanthropy to pay for the quality journalism our communities need. Slowly but surely, people are conceding that there is a role for carefully crafted public policy that will foster a new age of innovative, diverse, local and hard-hitting reporting.
Critics paint opinions like Bollinger’s as advocating for another “government hand out” or “giving up on the free market.” Nowhere in Bollinger’s essay, or in reports from the Knight Commission, USC Annenberg School of Journalism, Columbia University, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, does anyone argue for replacing the commercial media sector with a government-funded monolith.
We need to focus on strengthening our current public media system and reimagining an even more robust non-commercial journalism sector in America. Our nation needs both. Advocating for one is not a dismissal of the other.
Indeed, Bollinger spells this out expertly. “American journalism is not just the product of the free market, but of a hybrid system of private enterprise and public support,” he writes. “We should think about American journalism as a mixed system, where the mission is to get the balance right.”
This is not about asking the government for a hand out or giving up on the marketplace; it is acknowledging that American media has always had both commercial and non-commercial media. For too long, we have neglected the role of the latter and put all our emphasis on the former. As our commercial media sector struggles with the economic realities of the day, and many “news” outlets give up on hard-hitting journalism, public media and nonprofits are rising to fill in the void. There is room for both. Indeed, there is need for both.
Everything Old is New Again
I have spent a good deal of time recently looking at two new trends in journalism - the tendency toward journalism collaborations, and the increased emphasis on community engagement. Obviously, neither of these ideas is "new" in the sense that they’ve never been tried, but the rate at which they are being adopted is a clear sign of some fundamental shifts in the way reporting is done.
Recently, however, a few bits of information came my way and reminded me that everything old is new again.
Community Engagement, Commenting, and Sharing
Some of the hottest debates at conferences I have attended recently have been around how news organizations can build affinity with their audiences and deepen their engagement with local communities. A key part of this debate surrounds policies related to commenting and how to encourage (or restrict) sharing on social networks.
These seem like contemporary debates, brought on by recent advancements in technology, but then a non-journalist friend sent me this note:
I'm reading "A Short History of the Printed Word," by Robert Bringhurst, and I just came across something you might find interesting:
"The first American newspaper was not attempted until September 1690, when Publick Occurences Both Forreign and Domestick was published in Boston by Benjamin Harris. It was small in format, 6 X 9 1/2 inches (15 X 24 cm) when folded, and consisted of four pages. The third page was left blank in case the purchaser wished to write in a news bulletin before passing it on."
So, basically, the first newspaper in the U.S. was designed to encourage community participation in journalism. And it's not hard to imagine that blank page being used for "commenting," too. Sort of like internet journalism.
I couldn’t agree more. Even though the technology has changed, the impetus is the same. Jay Rosen may not have coined the term “the people formerly known as the audience” until a few years ago, but clearly the publishers of Publick Occurences understood the value of crowdsourcing and made space for people to be a part of news creation.
Journalism Collaborations
At the recent Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT, I led a discussion on journalism collaborations. Scott Rosenberg, the co-founder of Salon, captured the tone of the conversation well: "There is a professional transition in the field from an environment where competition was the dominant mode of interacting with other organizations to an era where dividing labor and sharing might serve the public better."
Indeed, I have been trying to capture evidence of this shift in my ever-growing inventory of journalism collaborations, and this summer I’m working on a few case studies. However, it was recently brought to my attention that collaboration was a key element in launching the New York Times.
Matt Schafer, fellow researcher, writes:
In 1848 a political organizer by the name of Thurlow Weed suggested to New York banker George Jones and New York politician and journalist Henry James Raymond that an endeavor of “journalistic collaboration” could have great advantages for the city of New York. In 1851, Jones and Raymond’s collaborative effort created The New York Times.
Obviously, the newsroom collaborations we are exploring now are of a different nature than this, but the fact that the New York Time’s founders thought of their endeavor as even remotely collaborative is interesting. In developing the idea for the Times, they each brought specific resources and talents to the table that made the it a success. That’s one of the defining principle regarding how we talk about collaboration between newsrooms today.
In thinking about the rise of new newsroom collaborations it is useful to think about how a newsroom itself functions. Journalism is seldom done in solitude. Journalists, sources, editors, copy-editors, printers, web-designers and others work together to see each piece through. In thinking about what lessons we can learn from these new journalism partnerships across organizations, we should also be aware of what we can learn from the collaborations that happen within newsrooms as well. They are just as messy, complicated, and rewarding as many outside collaborations.
Aggregation – Journalism’s Oldest Profession
Finally, earlier this spring I was at Harvard Law School for a conference on the legal and policy debates shaping journalism. Josh Benton from the Nieman Journalism Lab gave a fantastic talk on the history (and future) of aggregators. The role of news aggregators is, of course, another ongoing debate within journalism. Some argue that aggregators help bring context and clarity to the 24 hour news cycle, while others claim that aggregators are little more than leeches getting rich off of other people's work.
Benton reminded us that, in fact, journalism is the original aggregation. Journalism has always been about pulling together information from diverse sources and helping make sense of it. More specifically, Benton pointed out that in the early history of the press in America, postal rate policy allowed newspapers to exchange copies of their papers with those in other cities at no cost. Why? Because it was key to the distribution of news. Papers would regularly "cut and paste" news from papers around the country into their local editions, aggregating the news of the nation and reprinting it locally. Benton also offered many other examples of how aggregation in its many forms has been a part of journalism in America. Watch the whole video here.
Community engagement, commenting, sharing, collaboration and aggregation. These debates are as much about the history of journalism as they are about its future. It’s worth looking back as we move ahead. There are lessons to be learned from the past - both in how these ideas were implemented at the time, and in what has changed since. We are undoubtedly facing uncharted territory as we imagine journalism in the digital age, but the fundamental values that inspire our concern for the information needs of communities and democracy remain the same.
Journalist Attacked at G20 Summit
In 2008, Free Press reported that numerous journalists were arrested at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. while attempting to report on the event and related protests.
Now it appears that journalists are encountering violence and intimidation once again, this time from riot police at the G20 Summit in Toronto. Watch this video from The Real News journalist Jesse Freeston, who was punched by a police officer while trying to cover the demonstrations.
The increasingly militarized system of silencing the voices of demonstrators and journalists covering these stories is disturbing. Police intimidation, arrests and violence toward journalists is simply unacceptable.
What are the rights of journalists covering stories in public places? Who can be called journalists anyway? And why is journalism still important? Listen to this podcast to hear more about this discussion, and tell us your viewpoint in the comment section below.
A Subtle Victory for Policy Interventions in Media at the FTC Workshop
The Federal Trade Commission's final workshop on changes in the media business, “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?," ended with the sense that only limited policy recommendations would come out of the session, at least in terms of recommendations by the FTC.
Yet in a larger sense, the convening of publishers, industry analysts and academics revealed a surprising development: a growing consensus that some public policy intervention in media is not only possible, it's already happened.
The event began with a defense of the policymaking process from the Federal Trade Commission, which was attacked from some quarters after the release of a “discussion draft” (PDF) of possible policy recommendations, a compendium of ideas they've heard in three separate events so far (full transcripts of those hearings and audio archives are available at this link).
Steve Buttry’s blog offers a good summary of the reactions to that draft. Besides first amendment concerns, the chief criticism was that the proposals included were focused on how to preserve the business of the newspaper industry. Buttry points to this comment from Jeff Jarvis:
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If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit from news that is newly opened to the opportunity of collaboration and greater relevance. Instead, the document is written wholly from the perspective of the companies and institutions of the industry.
FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz defended the agency’s role in setting public policy, describing much of the criticism as coming from the "far right" and "far left,” and denied the charge that the commission is overly focused on preserving incumbent media companies. “These policy hearings have always been more about the future of journalism than saving the past,” he said.
J. Thomas Rosch, an FTC Commissioner, with a Republican background, backed him up at the podium, dispelling the idea that the Commission has endorsed any policy at this time, including changes to anti-trust and copyright. “The authors of those articles and blogs don’t know the agency and they misdescribe what the agency has done.” His presence appeared to signal bipartisan cooperation at the agency.
Leibowitz indicated which policy proposals are not likely to be embraced by the FTC in its final report: an exemption of anti-trust laws (as large media companies have proposed) and proposals to impose taxes on cell phones and electronic devices. “Taxing anyone to subsidize journalism is just a non-starter,” he said.
Other proposals seemed still to be under consideration. These included recommendations for a “hot news” doctrine to allow media companies to claim short-term copyright on facts they report, an increase in funding for public media, and a variety of proposals to “lower the cost” of reporting.
John Sturm of the Newspaper Association of America threw his support behind hot news, but Barbara Wall of Gannett stopped short of pushing for it “at this time” content to watch how the question plays out in State courts. (Interestingly, over at a Digital Capital Week event occurring simultaneously a representative of USA Today, the national Gannett paper was expounding on the value of a partnership the paper has with Fark to aggregate the content of others.) Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge spoke out the most strongly against hot news, saying, “What we're talking about is a restriction of free speech." Rick Edmonds, an industry analyst with Poynter, sounded unconvinced that the government should intervene.
Nearly every speaker noted that government intervention in the media is, in general, not a popular idea among those employed in the news industry. Yet most conceded permissible exceptions that would foster innovation and competition and give media businesses a hand in building new business models or repairing the old ones. In this sense, the argument for policy intervention won the day. As the New America Foundation’s president Steve Coll explained, policies are already in place that affect public media, and those policies are antiquated and inadequate to meet the current challenges. Making the case against public policy interventions today, he said, “means making a case for the status quo.”
Joel Kramer of MinnPost urged a change to the tax code to clarify that nonprofit news sites like his qualify for tax-exempt status on the basis of their journalism. None of the speakers disagreed, though Heerad Sabeti, an expert in benefit corporations, cautioned that B corps and L3Cs are “nascent and untested” corporate forms that were “not designed with journalism in mind.”
Dan Gillmor, a self-described optimist, grimaces at most forms of policy intervention. He argued for a content-neutral approach through the preservation of net neutrality and funding the provision of universal broadband access, and laying miles of dark fiber that would “light up with journalism.”
Jan Schaffer of J-Lab proposed funding small, scrappy media startups, while Vivian Schiller argued for an increase in funding for a retooled Corporation for Public Broadcasting that would fund local and regional journalism with “deep collaboration” with other local, non-NPR and -PBS outlets. (Kramer was skeptical about the collaboration, saying Minnesota Public Radio does not allow its nonprofit competitors to purchase underwriting.) Joaquin Alvarado suggested that the successful ITVS model used by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund long form documentaries might provide a model for additional media funding in the future.
A discussion of reducing costs through opening up government generated enthusiasm as well as some observations that deserve further consideration. James Hamilton, a Duke University economist and professor of public policy [disclosure: he’s also my Master’s advisor], noted his fear that the data.gov movement to open up databases of public information misses the data needs reporters most often face: the piles of “unstructured data,” email correspondence and public records that officials are often reluctant to give up. Wading through this information would be much easier if the government would make available to journalists (and the public) the auto-scanning, data-mining software it is already producing, for instance, for the Department of Defense. Paul Starr of Princeton made one of the few concrete proposals suggesting that perhaps funds could be found for media via "spectrum usage fees". The economists in the room, Hamilton and Harvard professor Susan Athey, endorsed varieties of behavioral advertising.
Alan Bjerga, President of the National Press Club and one of the few working journalists on the panels echoed this concern about FOIA: He argued that the “mythology” of the lone journalist toiling for the truth obscures the reality: “The bad guys will have lawyers that will bleed your organization dry.”
The ongoing tension between optimists and pessimists continued, with a debate (at some times talking at cross-purposes) about whether there is “market failure” for news, and which kind of news. Wall blasted the “pirates” who claim to aggregate but actually steal articles whole-cloth, while Richard Gingras of Salon.com argued that he sees a Salon headline in GoogleNews as “a gift.” (See also Dan Gillmor's post following the event.)
Some spoke up for the particular threats to local news – the lack of town hall and school board coverage in places outside of New York and Washington, D.C. Some pointed out the lack of ethnic and age diversity among participants, an unfortunate fact not at all unique to this particular event. Joaquin Alvarado of American Public Media noted that there was not a single venture capital firm present. His observation is a reminder that news coverage isn't the only thing changing in today's media landscape; participants in the news-gathering and policy-making processes are also evolving.
This post by Fiona Morgan was originally published by the New America Foundation.
Five Media Policies the FTC Should Support
Over the last year, the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating the role of public policy in helping to meet Americans’ information needs. This week, the FTC will hold its final hearing on finding policies that could reshape our media system for the better.
In preparation, the FTC released a “Discussion Draft” that outlined the various policy recommendations submitted to the agency for consideration. More than 2,000 citizens have filed comments, and many organizations submitted recommendations. FTC staff have been deployed to journalism-related events across the country to gather information and ideas percolating in those communities.
The Discussion Draft is just that – fodder for a discussion – and the FTC has not endorsed any of the ideas. The agency is looking for input on which policies they should recommend and how those policies might be implemented. As I have noted in earlier blog posts, now is the time for dialogue, not knee-jerk reactions that too often miss the point and misrepresent the goals of this proceeding.
We should be encouraged that the government is taking seriously their role in shaping our media system. Public policies - often made behind closed doors - have been a core component of our 4th Estate in America. In the past, no one worried about postal subsidies, spectrum licenses, tax credits - even though they were implemented with little or no public input. Right now, the government is owning up to their role in creating both the problems and the opportunities facing media in America - and they are giving the public a chance to weigh in.
In that spirit, Free Press is suggesting five policies we believe that the FTC should support in it’s final report that would help build a media system that fosters innovation and supports a forward-thinking approach to the future of news.
1) Invest in Broadband deployment and Safeguard Net Neutrality: This recommendation was missing from the FTC’s Discussion Draft, but is perhaps one of the most central media policy issues of our time. As more news and information moves online and employs innovative digital tools, it’s essential for both journalists and citizens that we achieve universal Internet access. Equally important is ensuring that no news organization be censored by government or Internet service providers. Thus, even as we work to expand broadband, the future of news and innovation also depends on instituting strong Net Neutrality protections.
2) Expand America’s Public Media System: We need to re-imagine the role of public and noncommercial media in America. For too long, our politics and policies have treated public media as a second-class alternative to the mainstream media. We only spend $1.35 per capita on public media in federal money, where leading nations spend 70 times as much.
NPR and PBS are consistently ranked as the most trustworthy news sources by people across the political spectrum, and the audience for public media has been on the rise year after year. NPR and PBS are pushing innovative journalism projects across platforms on shoestring budgets, and could be doing much more to fill in the gaps being left by commercial news if they had sufficient funding.
At the same time, community media centers like Low-Power FM Radio stations and public access TV are giving local people the tools to be journalists and are producing deeply local reporting. Likewise, the new noncommercial, multiplatform news websites appearing across the country have gotten more attention than funding, leaving their sustainability in question. Smart policies could support and expand these new ventures.
3) Uphold and Enforce Antitrust Laws and Media Ownership Limits: Too often in debates over the future of news, people neglect to acknowledge the role media consolidation has played in creating the media crisis we face today.
Under intense pressure from Wall Street, big media companies took on enormous debt to purchase more media holdings, but then when they couldn’t pay off the debt, they began gutting newsrooms and even closing entire newspapers. Because of this, the quality of news and the number of diverse viewpoints in a given community has deteriorated.
Relaxing antitrust laws or media ownership regulations will not fix the news industry any more than tying two rocks together will make them float. Media consolidation is a failed strategy, and only props up failing business models at the expense of the public interest.
4) Change Tax Policy to Encourage Innovation and Investment in Journalism: Who would have thought our tax code would have such a bearing on the future of news? Our tax code gives very little clarity about the IRS’s view of news organizations as charitable entities, especially if they also want to accept ads, and gives even less guidance on the formation of hybrid organizations - newsrooms that have qualities of both for and nonprofit entities. If we want to foster innovative funding models and expand noncommercial news, we need clarity on some of the pressing questions raised during the FTC’s inquiry over the last year.
Tax changes could also directly encourage new investment in news through programs. David Westphal and Geoff Cowan at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism have outlined the wide array of tax credits already in place for traditional news orgs. Why not undo some of those, and put better policy in their place? Tax changes could encourage media conglomerates to break up their holdings and put those outlets in the hands of local people, diverse owners and/or new innovators.
5) Encourage Government Transparency and Access to Government Data: The FTC Discussion Draft dedicates significant space to policies that could help journalists gain access to government information and lower the costs for access to that information. The use of government data has driven innovative journalism efforts from DocumentCloud and EveryBlock, to the data centers at the Texas Tribune and California Watch.
The FTC should continue to push for policies that would encourage greater access to government data and information.
As the FTC brings its study to a close and prepares its policy recommendations, we encourage the agency to put journalists and communities first, to emphasize the future of news, and to develop policies that promote innovation and protect the First Amendment. These are major public policy areas, full of nuance and complications. We commend the FTC for conducting an open process and acknowledging the role public policy has always played in shaping the American media system.
San Francisco Public Press in Big Print
The San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit online news organization, is about to launch a pilot print edition. In an era where other newspapers are shrinking in size, the SF Public Press is going big – with 28 full-size broadsheet pages full of news and features – with no paid advertising.
In this week's Media Minutes, SF Public Press Director of Operations Lila LaHood talks about why she thinks print is still important. She also hints at some of the creative ways the paper will be telling the news. The audio and the transcript can be found here.
After the interview with LaHood, Executive Director Michael Stoll gave his take on the many innovations happening in nonprofit journalism in the Bay Area and across the country.
Public Policy and Journalism Innovation
Over the weekend the journalism tweetosphere and blogs were abuzz with rumors of a government plot to freeze journalism in time by propping up a range of failing business models at the expense of new innovation in news. The document that set off this flurry of digital doomsday warnings was a “Discussion Draft” of possible policy changes released by the Federal Trade Commission team working on their future of journalism initiative and the announcement of a June 15th roundtable discussion where the draft will be debated.
For the past year the FTC has been examining how laws related to copyright, antitrust, advertising, and tax status could be changed to ensure that our communities have access to the news and information they need. Along the way it has sought public input and has heard from thousands of people (Free Press members submitted over 2,000 comments last fall). Now it is preparing its report and seeking feedback on its draft.
After reading some of the responses to this draft, however, you would think the deal is done. In fact, while the document may illustrate some bias (which I will address below), in most cases it simply restates the pros and cons of the policy recommendations that people submitted. This is clearly an agency that is still trying to figure out which side of these issues it will come down on.
I’m afraid that a knee-jerk reaction to some (admittedly troubling passages) in this document may have led to people throwing the baby out with the bath water. The main critique of the document was best summed up by Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at CUNY and editor of Buzzmachine.com, who argued that the FTC wants to protect journalism’s past at the expense of journalism’s future.
“The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do,” Jarvis writes, “and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.” Jarvis acknowledges that the FTC does not endorse any of the policies it is considering in the Discussion Draft, but that the tone and perspective from which it is written is troubling to him. Jarvis notes, “it’s the document’s perspective that I find essentially corrupt.” This “tone and perspective” argument was later echoed by Steve Buttry.
To be fair, there are elements of this document that are troubling. When I saw proposals like an expansion of “hot news” and possible limitations on “fair-use,” I was concerned (Update: To be clear Free Press and SaveTheNews.org have not taken a position on copyright issues, but we acknowledge it is very tricky. We are committed to the rights of writers and the creative community to protect their work, and be paid fairly for it, but also understand the vital role of fair use and the very real questions raised around copyrighting news and facts). Similarly, when I saw the discussion of relaxing antitrust standards for news organizations (an idea the Department of Justice has roundly dismissed), I took pause.
However, I was encouraged that the FTC was looking into changes in tax code that might allow for new kinds of hybrid newsrooms and could foster creative partnerships between for-profit and non-profit newsrooms. Indeed, of the 35-page document:
- Eight pages focus specifically on innovative new non-profit and hybrid models: The FTC had a robust debate at their second hearing about how current tax codes, restrictions on nonprofits, and credentialing have limited journalism entrepreneurs ability to think outside of the box about how to structure newsrooms in new ways.
- Five of the pages focus on promoting an expanded public media system in America. While Jarvis focuses particular scorn on the idea of a device levy (like that which funds the BBC and other international world class public media systems), there are a range of suggestions in the document for how American could expand its investment in noncommercial media.
- Six pages examine how to promote government transparency and give journalists more access to government data. Alexander Howard covers this section well in his post here.
Undergirding the responses to the FTC Discussion Draft is a false argument that government should not be involved in our media. Government has always and will always influence how our media system is shaped. The question is not “if,” it is “how.” When many of the smartest minds working on the future of journalism promote the notion that the government should just “Get off our lawn,” they take themselves (and many others) out of the debate, leaving it up to the corporate lobbyists in Washington DC to decide what the future of journalism will be.
I don’t need to recount the vast array of ways – both positive and negative - that government has supported the development of America’s free press in print, over the air, and online. David Westphal and Geoff Cowan at USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism have done that exceedingly well here. Instead of looking backwards, I want to look ahead.
I agree with Jarvis that we need to foster and bolster “journalism’s disruptors,” and not prop-up old business models. And there are ways to accomplish at least part of that through smart, creative government policy. We have been arguing for the past year that any journalism policy must:
- Protect the first amendment,
- Produce quality news coverage,
- Provide adversarial perspectives,
- Promote public accountability and engagement, and
- Prioritize innovation and experimentation.
To that end, we have advocated for key policies currently in motion like Net Neutrality, broadband deployment, the Local Community Radio Act, and more as well as an expanded public media system that fosters innovation and is more diverse, inclusive and platform neutral. Other ideas we have proposed include:
- A journalism experimentation fund (like DARPA for the news or an expanded federal version of the Knight News Challenge),
- A journalism jobs program that emphasized training in digital tools and strategies (similar to the work the Poynter Institute is doing),
- Federally funded research and assessment surfacing and sharing lessons learned from experimentations around the country (an NSF for news)
These are all ways that government policy could help support the emerging news ecosystem (both market driven and non-profit). Jarvis’s concern that his remarks at the FTC hearing last fall were not adequately represented in this document may be fair. But given that he summarized his own argument as “stay out of our business,” is he really surprised?
While I am concerned with aspects of the Discussion Draft as well, I think we should all be stepping up to give the FTC our feedback and help shape the next version of this document, rather than simply casting stones and drafting conspiracy theories. It was designed to spark discussion, and it has done that, but those with concerns should be sure their points are part of the public record. The deadline is June 15th – here’s the link: http://public.commentworks.com/ftc/newsmediaworkshop.
*Thanks to Matt Schafer for help with this post.
Journalism Collaborations: Lessons and Questions from the Field
On the last day of the Journalism Innovations conference earlier this month, a group of journalists gathered around a table at the University of San Francisco to talk about struggles and opportunities related to new kinds of media collaboration. The group was a diverse mix of new and old media including Salon, Mother Jones, San Francisco Public Press, Spot.Us, The San Francisco Chronicle, California Watch and others. The conversation was part storytelling, part Q&A, and part troubleshooting.
At first, people were most interested in sharing their experiences with collaboration and describing the projects they were working on currently. However, before long the conversation took on a much more critical tone and the results were a fairly frank assessment of new news collaborations and some initial lessons from those on the front lines of this work.
Here are a few of the key takeaways:
1) Knowing Who’s in Charge
It seems contradictory to the idea of collaborations, but every successful collaboration – whether it was a one-to-one partnership or a project involving 15 different newsrooms, benefited from a clear understanding of who was buckstopping it. For some, this meant having one project lead, for others it meant having a clear understanding of who was the point person at each partner newsroom. Interestingly, in most cases this person was most important, not as a decision makers, but as a facilitator. They helped manage communications, ensuring everyone was on the same page, tracking the various distinct pieces of work, mediating and predicting conflicts, etc…
2) Content is King, Collaboration is Queen, but Communication is Everything
Early in the session, David Cohn of Spot.Us quipped that “Content is King and Collaboration is Queen,” but what became clear through the discussion is that the most important part of collaborations was communications. Partnerships rise and fall on how well those involved can communicate. Participants noted that this was in part about the culture of the newsroom, part about an openness and willingness to share information as a story is developing, and part a logistical question about tools such as listservs, shared Google documents, wikis, etc. Everyone agreed that these details are at once the most important and most difficult part of collaborations. Hence, as noted above, having a liaison to manage communications is so important.
3) Different Challenges, Different Benefits: Public Collaborations and Newsroom Collaborations
Those in the room tended to be engaged in two distinct kinds of collaborations. The one we spent the most time talking about was editorial collaborations between newsrooms and journalists. However, at the end of the session we also began digging into collaborations with the public. Interestingly, both kinds of collaborations can be a response to dwindling resources and the desire to cover an issue better than any one person or organization could do alone. However, these two kinds of collaborations present unique opportunities and challenges. For example, the group talked about how crowdsourcing questions can give a newsroom incredible reach or breadth about an issue (such as parking rates across a city), whereas newsroom collaborations can help take a story deeper than it might have otherwise gone, by drawing on different expertise across organizations.
4) Further Questions and Next Steps
We only scratched the surface during this brief Sunday morning discussion, but everyone agreed there’s a need for more exploration of some of these and other issues. A few of the other questions that were raised include:
- What stories lend themselves to collaboration, and what don’t? One participant noted that collaboration is a type of strategy, not the only strategy. There are some stories (stealthy, sensitive stories like “mafia investigations”) that don’t lend themselves to open collaborations. Similarly, there are some stories that are best covered from a multitude of competing viewpoints. However, more could be done by looking at what kinds of reporting and stories have been most and least successful as collaborations.
- Can we always serve our audience and serve our collaborations equally? This question sparked a series of other questions: What are the different opportunities in collaborating around shared distribution versus shared writing? And related to that, how does editing by committee potentially water down a piece? As each outlet cultivates its audience and engages its communities do collaborations with other outlets risk producing content that isn’t relevant for your audience?
- How are collaborations different at newsrooms where partnering is in the organizations DNA versus at legacy media outlets? Many of the participants reported very different experience and expectations when partnering with new online newsrooms versus traditional print publications. Both kinds of collaborations were useful, but presented very different benefits and challenges.
One question no one discussed at the session was how we fund collaborations and how we negotiate the rocky shores of joint funding for projects. Some organizations sell their stories to their partners, others have a “prenuptial agreement” before any work is done together. Some foundations like funding collaborations that can expand their reach, others want to fund projects that are contained and easy to brand and evaluate.
Skyping in from Guatemala where she is building a citizen journalism website, Kara Andrade told the group, “What we really need is more case studies of what’s happening and what’s working.” Here at SaveTheNews.org we are going to be doing just that this summer. We’ll be building on the inventory of news collaborations I have been collecting, to answer some of these questions as well as look at how we can measure the impact these new collaborations are having on the state of local news and information.
Measuring Informed Communities at the Free Press Summit
We talk a lot about the digital divide, the lack of local news coverage in communities across the country, and how this absence of information affects civic participation, quality of life and ultimately our democracy. We are facing a growing information divide that is leaving more and more people with less and less access to the basic information that helps them make choices about their jobs, families and communities. We have to have a national approach to the challenge of meeting these information needs.
But first we have to answer a few core questions: How do we define the information needs of communities, and how do we measure them? What metrics should we use and what tools do we need? Are communities receiving quality news and information? A panel at the Free Press Summit delved into these questions because understanding our communities information needs is essential in shaping the policies and solutions we fight for in our quest for a better media system.
We have a good foundation to build upon. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy developed some overarching categories for defining an informed community, but they admit, "No one has developed a system for measuring the quality of a local community’s information environment." The Federal Communications Commission based their Future of Media & Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age project on the Knight framework. As part of this project, the agency encouraged citizens to weigh in on the state of media in their communities. As of earlier this week, there were only about 100 communities represented in that forum. These projects are important foundations, but we need to get much more granular data on how communities define their information needs as we seek to develop innovative solutions.
Measuring Media, Organizing Impact, and Driving Directions
At the Summit, media activist and author Jessica Clark, from the Center for Social Media at American University, set the stage by discussing a new report, “Investing in Impact," which lays out “five needs and five tools” for measuring media’s impact on local communities and issues. They are:
- Needs: Shared categories of impact assessment; the ability to track stories across platforms; methods for analyzing shifts in public awareness and behavior ; more sophisticated audience demographics; and, a new kind of metrics beyond eyeballs and clicks.
- Tools: A unified social media dashboard; a social issue buzz tracker; model formats for communicating outcomes; common survey tools for audience assessment; and, a suite of tools that track the growth, health and effectiveness of networks.
Ellen Miller, the executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, suggested that trying to discern communities need and how to measure them from conference rooms in D.C. might be ineffective, and steered attendees to the Sunlight Foundation’s recently launched PublicEqualsOnline.com. The project is a distributed citizen network designed to help foster local leaders and activists to fight for transparency and open data at all levels of government. Miller emphasized the incorporating government data as a core part of assessing a community’s larger information needs.
For Joaquin Alvarado, of American Public Media, the question was less about how we map the information needs of communities, and more about how we give people the driving directions they need to meet community information needs through locally rooted solutions, collaborations and public policy. He said that while we need to get the big picture of community information needs, we also should acknowledge that a lot of people already know there is a problem, they just don’t know how to respond. We need to give people clear directions, and simple actionable and achievable next steps to engage them in the day-to-day work of making big change. Alvarado pointed to recent efforts at American Public Media to prototype six different campaigns aimed at providing these kinds of “driving directions to people in Detroit, to engage them in covering their community.”
At this point, folks throughout the room chimed in, describing a litany of projects rooted in similar questions around identifying and responding to the information needs of communities. Here are some takeaways:
- EconomyStory is seeking to give people better information on our ever shifting economy;
- The Alliance for Community Media is trying to map the national network of public, educational and governmental TV stations around the country;
- The Aspen Institute and Knight Foundation are building on the Knight Commission report with an expanded site and updated blog;
- Native Public Media has mapped the media ion native lands and reservations;
- The National Center for Media Engagement is collecting a range of data on their master public media map; and,
- The New America Foundation is creating community media ecosystem profiles of targeted communities.
There was clearly a charged energy in the room as people shared their various projects and made connections around each other’s work.
Next Steps: Curate, Collaborate, and Create
There was a good deal of discussion about how we can better collect, collaborate and organize the distinct projects that are underway to combine all this data and better provide a holistic vision of the state of the media. However, as people described their projects, it was the differences between them, not their similarities, that really sparked the conversation and moved us more deeply into some of the vital questions about how we measure informed communities.
A number of people referred back to Ellen Miller’s earlier point about the need for communities to examine and articulate their own community’s needs, and argued that there are two distinct layers of context that we are grappling with:
- How do we manage and coordinate the work going on at the organizational level across organizations to respond to the crisis in community information needs? People agreed that we should create a central communications tool to track these different projects and create a clearing house for the findings.
- How do we create tools and help communities assess and address their own information needs? People were less sure about what the tools should be and how to undertake the organizing effort needed to foster these community assessments. One participant pointed out the difference between mapping the information infrastructure of a community (the number of schools, libraries, newsrooms, etc…) and actually measuring whether people are indeed informed, and employing information to make positive change.
Those in the room interested in working on these issues signed up to keep the conversation going, if you want to join the discussion and take part in future meetings, drop me an email.
Free Press, Allies and Citizens Tell FCC to Reshape Media for the Better
Friday marked the public’s last chance to file comments with the Federal Communications Commission’s Future of Media initiative, and people didn’t hold back from telling the agency they want a better media system.
This proceeding represents an ambitious yet critical undertaking by the FCC to examine the news and information needs of communities in light of economic and technological shifts in the media industry. The agency is reviewing media laws that shape everything we see, read and hear, and asked the public to weigh in.
On Friday, Free Press submitted 9,000 petition signatures to the FCC from local citizens calling on the agency to put the public interest first in any new policy decisions the emerge from this proceeding. In addition, nearly 1,000 Free Press members and allies submitted in-depth individual comments to the FCC through our website.
Free Press also joined the New America Foundation, Media Access Project and more than 20 local media justice organizations to submit formal comments to the FCC. Our comments encompass four broad areas for the Commission to consider:
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(1) The information needs of communities and whether they are being met;
(2) The trends and challenges in the provision of news and information;
(3) FCC-specific policy recommendations to increase transparency and accountability of media, as well as to promote access to diverse sources of information; and,
(4) Policy recommendations that fall outside the FCC’s regulatory jurisdiction, but that are nonetheless an important component of a holistic approach to the crisis in media.
Below is an excerpt from the executive summary:
Information Needs of Communities:
While it is true that most people now have access to more information than at any previous time in human history, it also unfortunately remains the case that race, gender, income, education, geography, age, disability, and sexual orientation all continue to unjustly shape Americans’ opportunities. Many communities, both of identity and geography, have never been well-served by existing media outlets and infrastructure.
Communities of color and native and rural areas have often been excluded from access to robust infrastructure and emerging technologies, and the issues affecting them have too often been unexplored by professional journalists. New technologies are creating opportunities to address that, but technological change alone will not create equitable representation or access.
We determined that despite the proliferation of new technologies that have the potential to enhance access to information, by and large the information needs are not being met. In particular, the unevenly distributed nature of the "digital revolution" and the lack of local information equality have a negative impact on both health and economic well being of communities.
Trends and Challenges in the Provision of News and Information:
The digital revolution has upset old business models – particularly those of the advertising-reliant variety. As a consequence, there exists a looming – though not certain – market failure in the production and circulation of publicly relevant news, especially at the local level. Traditional media are scrambling to maintain balance in the new environment, but have been slow to adapt. However, while there is much cause for concern about the ability of the new media environment to meet the needs of a democratic society, there are also innovations currently underway in newsrooms.
While many are in their infancy, they hold the promise for enhancing both production of information as well as engaging communities and individuals in creative new media endeavors. Additionally, new journalistic and civic engagement ecosystems are sprouting up in local news markets across the country, but these systems are emerging in a halting and uneven fashion. As has been widely noted, many of the newest digital media outlets do little or no original reporting. What’s worse, practices of “digital redlining” and the consequences of the migration of legacy news organizations to suburban markets have the potential to replicate patterns of clustered “information paucity” that existed in the pre-digital era.
FCC policies can enhance the availability and diversity of information:
The FCC has a legitimate interest and important role to play in promoting a vibrant Fourth Estate. Historically, the FCC has sought to foster not only a substantial quantity of, but also quality of information, as well as access to information by promoting competition, diversity and localism.
We suggest a number of FCC actions, many on existing proceedings that would preserve or enhance the production and availability of news and information. Moreover, none of these policy recommendations involve any foray by the FCC into content regulation. In particular, we recommend that the FCC:
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• Maintain local media ownership limits, and prevent any contractual circumvention of the FCC’s media ownership rules;
• Protect the open nature of the Internet;
• Increase transparency and accountability of local media through reformation of the sponsorship identification rules, and
implementation of enhanced reporting requirements and online public file requirements for local broadcasters;
• Act on a still extant Petition for Inquiry into the use of misinformation and hate speech in media;
• Conduct additional information collection and analyses on broadband and media ownership data; and,
• Support policies that encourage provision of and access to public and government access channels.
The Government's Role in Development of a Healthy Media Ecosystem:
FCC policies alone cannot save journalism. In some cases, important potential solutions will fall outside the FCC’s regulatory ambit. Thus, we also discuss broader policy shifts that could support a healthy information ecosystem, including:
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• The government's role in supporting public and noncommercial media outlets and infrastructure, including new funding models for public media;
• Incentives to encourage private sector production of media;
• Ways to enhance public engagement with information;
• Encouraging anchor institutions, such as schools, universities, and libraries, to support community information flows and provide media training; and,
• The importance of media literacy training in preparing citizens to use media in democratic life.
Download the full comments and leave your feedback in the comments section.
