To submit an application or for further information, go to www.informationneeds.org. Non-foundation community partners may participate, but they must partner with a qualifying community or place-based foundation. The application deadline is February 27, 2012.

Knight Foundation program directors will host a Web-based live chat at noon EST on February 8, 2012, to answer queries from foundations. The live chat will take place at www.informationneeds.org.

Susan Patterson, Knight’s community director in Charlotte, North Carolina, writes about the challenge, including past winners, on the Knight Blog.

Foundation leaders who want to learn more about supporting media and information environments in their own communities can attend the Knight Foundation’s fourth annual Media Learning Seminar, February 20-21, 2012, in Miami. Registration is open until February 1st.

The Community Information Challenge is one more way that the Knight Foundation is supporting the information needs of communities.

Related posts:

1. Knight, Local Foundations Partner on Community Information Needs
2. National Contest to Fund Local Information Experiments
3. News Leadership 3.0 — LIVEBLOG Mar 1-2: Community foundations, media/tech experts explore local info needs

The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri is seeking applications for its 2012-2013 class of Reynolds fellows. RJI is seeking proposals for eight-month fellowships that would leverage the university’s technology, research and experimentation to advance innovative ideas in journalism. Thye application deadline is January 15, 2012. More information on the Reynolds Fellowship can be found here on RJI’s website.  Previous RJI fellows have included Spot.us founder David Cohn, NPR’s Matt Thompson, former Seattle Times executive editor Michael Fancher, Block by Block Community Journalism Summit co-founder Michele McLellan, and CircLabs partner and Media Giraffe Project director Bill Densmore.

Credit: meedanphotos on Flickr, CC by 2.0

The Nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism Innovation brings together two Harvard University programs with considerable expertise in all things journalism and digital media-related. This new fellowship will support one really smart and talented individual to work at Harvard University for the 2012-13 academic year “on a specific course of research or a specific project relating to journalism innovation.” The Nieman-Berkman fellow is a joint appointment and will be both a Nieman fellow and a Berkman fellow for the academic year. Application deadline is February 15, 2012.

Related posts:

1. New Round of Knight Community Information Challenge Now Open
2. Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?
3. Technology & Innovation Roundtable: danah boyd by Kristie Wells

By Tom Stites

Maybe we’ve been looking for models in all the wrong places. To find the elusive secret to making web journalism sustainable in community after community, maybe we need to take a peek behind the curtain into the secret sector of the economy.

For years now, people have been trying to devise business models for online community journalism that are both sustainable and replicable, but the usual sectors aren’t delivering: Only a few isolated for-profit sites are generating enough advertising revenue to support themselves while producing the original reporting that’s so crucial to civic health and democracy; on the nonprofit side, there are nowhere near enough philanthropic dollars to support enough sites, at least not for long (see part one of this series). And the idea of public-sector news publishing gets tangled up in the First Amendment.

It’s common to think these three sectors are all there are, but there’s a fourth — the cooperative sector — which future-of-journalism efforts are just starting to explore. U.S. co-ops take myriad forms and represent $3 trillion in assets, $500 billion in revenue, and $25 billion in wages; they include 7,794 credit unions and 864 utility co-ops that distribute electricity over 75 percent of the nation’s land mass. Few people know that co-ops are such a significant and healthy slice of our otherwise ailing economy — the U.S. government doesn’t keep statistics on them and, because co-ops are structured to build community wealth rather than investor wealth, business journalism largely ignores them.

What’s magic about co-ops is that for a long list of industries they offer stable and replicable business models that work in economic settings too arid to support for-profit models — the kind of situation many communities are experiencing with journalism after five grim years of plummeting newspaper advertising revenue that’s led to drastic cutbacks in original reporting (see part two of this series). Now that the news ecology has turned from verdant to desert-like, particularly in less-than-affluent communities where the majority of the U.S. public lives, might co-ops grow the hardy cactuses that journalism needs to thrive again?

Judging by experience in other countries, the answer is yes. Long-established reader-owned co-ops publish newspapers in Italy, Germany, England and Mexico. A worker-owned cooperative is creating an ambitious city-by-city set of news sites across Canada that combine to publish a national weekly newspaper. Also in Canada, listener-owned co-ops operate radio stations.

But to date there are no such co-op journalism efforts in the United States. (Despite their names, the Chicago News Cooperative and KOOP radio in Austin, Texas, are standard nonprofits. The Associated Press is a cooperative, but a producer co-op owned by the news organizations that it provides with state, national, and foreign news.)

Disclosure: The Banyan Project, which I lead, is building a reader-owned co-op model that’s designed to scale massively, the way depositor-owned credit unions and shopper-owned food co-ops have scaled community by community, coast to coast. Banyan has chosen Haverhill, Massachusetts — a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper has devolved into an under-resourced weekly and whose radio station has shut down — as its pilot community. As a news desert, Haverhill has very little focused coverage of issues facing the community or of life-issue reporting that its people can use to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Presuming that the pilot thrives, Banyan envisions scaling with each added community site run by its own democratically run co-op with hundreds of local member/owners; a federation would provide the co-ops with turnkey licenses for sophisticated software and other centralized services.

If other co-op approaches are being planned in the U.S., I’ve not discovered them — but there are many other possible approaches, such as the worker-owned co-op being developed in Canada. I’m cheering for lots of social entrepreneurs to jump in and cultivate their own ideas. The Citizen Media Law Project, part of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, wants to help all comers — it is researching the legal issues that journalism cooperatives will face and will post its findings on its online legal guide.

Recent events are making co-ops less of a secret: In 2009 the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives published a comprehensive study of co-ops’ role in the U.S. economy; more than 700,000 people moved their accounts from major banks to credit unions in response to the Move Your Money campaign inspired by the banks’ just-rescinded fees for use of debit cards, and the United Nations has proclaimed 2012 the International Year of the Cooperative. Co-ops are more common in Europe, where the form originated more than a century and a half ago, and in less developed countries where economic deserts are more common; worldwide, more than 1 billion people are co-op members.

Cooperative firms are fundamentally different from other business organizations. They are neither investor-owned businesses nor nonprofit organizations, although the IRS grants tax-exemptions for some forms. Community-Wealth.org, a project of the Democracy Collaborative, based at the University of Maryland, offers this definition: “A cooperative can be any business that is governed on the principle of one member, one vote.”

So the cooperative view of capital differs quite a lot from Wall Street’s. For example, the International Cooperative Alliance has established seven principles that include concern for community; many co-ops pursue the triple bottom line of financial soundness plus positive social and environmental impact. In this era of rampant deceptive business practices, says Tom Decker of the National Cooperative Business Association in Washington, a significant source of co-ops’ strength is the trustworthiness inherent in their democratic and accountable structure.

This is also an era of rampant mistrust of journalism, so co-op news sites’ trustworthiness has the potential to add value to what they publish. Further, the co-op form allows, or rather demands, that news coverage decisions arise from the what a community’s people need rather than from today’s dominant approaches: finding ways to sustain legacy news institutions or designing Web models to conform to various ideas about what technology seems to demand. The web is inherently collaborative — just as co-ops are — and at the local level this creates the potential for civic synergy that could add still more value to co-op community journalism.

###

Cooperatives arise as a bottom-up response to market failure: It’s a lot of work to start a co-op, so if for-profit businesses were providing needed goods and services at fair prices, why would people go to all the bother? Without economic deserts, there would be no co-ops, but over time there has been no shortage of deserts and there is no shortage now.

The Wisconsin study reports that the great boom in credit unions came, no surprise, in the Depression, after widespread bank failures created a credit desert. That’s also when electric utility co-ops came on the scene, with a boost from the Rural Electrification Administration, a New Deal effort. In the 1930s, cities were 90 percent wired but 90 percent of rural homes were not — investor-owned utilities shunned the high cost of wiring rural areas. Co-ops filled the void.

In today’s struggling economy, Decker says, co-ops are on the rise. The scarcity of reliable child care and home health care are arid zones that are inspiring co-ops to form. “Worker-owned home care cooperatives,” the Wisconsin report says, “are emerging as a way to both address high staff turnover and to improve the quality of home care services provided to the elderly and disabled.” Decker reports a rise in worker co-ops in other fields as people come together to invent livelihoods for themselves in a time when jobs are so scarce. He also estimates that as many as 300 food coops will form in 2011, many to meet demand for a coherent supply of local food that supermarkets don’t supply. “Local,” he says, “is the key.”

Now, news deserts are proliferating and the need is great. It may be that co-ops will be the only new journalism business model that can take root in current market conditions. May many species of news cactuses bloom.

Previous posts in series:

• Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism
• Layoffs and Cutbacks Lead to a New World of News Deserts

Tom Stites is president and founder of the Banyan Project, a pioneering a new model for Web journalism as a reader-owned cooperative. He was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Photo of banyan tree by Jeff Stvan on Flickr.

Related posts:

1. Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism
2. Layoffs and Cutbacks Lead to a New World of News Deserts
3. Seeking sustainability: The business of nonprofit journalism

By Tom Stites

Here’s a challenge: Name a straightforward two-word phrase related to journalism that you can enter in Google and get only one result.

Stumped? Try “news desert” — one, and only one, direct hit.*

Now check Wikipedia. “News desert” comes up entirely empty — but “food desert” gets 3,400 words. Any why not? Hunger is a crucial issue, and “food desert” provides a vivid frame that elicits a mental movie of hungry people crawling over arid dunes in search of an oasis for sustenance.

Frames matter. They determine how an issue is understood, driving this understanding into the language and thus into people’s thinking about what actions to take. One proof of the power of “food desert” as a frame is that a Google search yields thousands of direct hits — including links to serious actions people have taken, including the Agriculture Department’s food desert locator and to Food Desert Awareness Month.

But isn’t it also a crucial issue that a huge part of the American people, the less-than-affluent majority, is civically malnourished due to the sad state of U.S. journalism — and that the nation’s broad electorate is thus all but certainly ill informed? It has long troubled me, and many others, that an issue so central to democracy has such a peripheral role in the discourse about journalism’s future, which tends to focus more on crowdsourcing, Twitter and Facebook, aggregation vs. original reporting, how AOL is faring with Patch, and search engine optimization. These are important topics, but perhaps an energizing frame like “news desert” can widen the aperture of thinking about journalism’s future and sharpen the focus on people’s and democracy’s needs — on journalism as public good.

Elites and the affluent are awash in information designed to serve them, but everyday people, who often grapple with significantly different concerns, are hungry for credible information they need to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Sadly, in many communities there’s just no oasis, no sustenance to be found — communities where the “new news ecosystem” is not a cliché but a desert.

The Chicago journalist Laura S. Washington introduced me to the desert frame, and she credits a South Side community organizer for originating it. Washington used it in her remarks in April when she and I were members of a panel called Journalism and Democracy: Rebuilding Media for our Communities at the 2011 National Conference for Media Reform. Suddenly a movie was running in the little screen in my mind: The protagonists were losing sleep on a hot night, worrying over life issues they might be able to resolve if only they had the right information — but there was no news oasis in the landscape of their lives, so they just kept tossing and turning. I couldn’t see if movies were playing in the heads of the hundreds of people in the hall listening to our panel, but they clearly got exactly what Washington meant.

So I’ve been using “news desert” in conversations and presentations over the last six months. It never fails to communicate powerfully.

“Gee,” a community leader in Haverhill, Massachusetts, said when I used it. “That sure describes us.”

Haverhill is a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper and community radio station folded years ago and whose sole weekly is withering — and it will be the pilot city for the Banyan Project, a web journalism startup I lead that’s designed to sustain itself while serving communities and publics that other media tend to ignore. News deserts are places whose economies cannot sustain any established business model for journalism, for-profit or nonprofit, and Haverhill exemplifies one kind: municipalities whose news institutions have failed or faded as advertising has dried up and can no longer come close to meeting the information needs of the community and its people. Many rural communities fit this category as well.

Demographics rather than political boundaries define other news deserts categories. In a speech at the Media Giraffe Project’s 2006 Conference, I laid out how metropolitan newspapers across the land tailor their coverage to serve readers in the top two quintiles of the income distribution, ignoring the quite different information needs of everybody else — and that was before the five-year newspaper ad revenue nosedive caused widespread layoffs, further shriveling the supply of original reporting that is the bedrock of journalism’s public good. I didn’t have the news-desert frame back then, but when it comes to life-relevant original reporting it’s clear that it describes where the less-than-affluent American public tends to live.

Minority communities in big cities tend to be the most arid news deserts of all, a point Washington made in her NCMR panel presentation and in an In These Times essay. (A Chicago blogger’s item calling attention to her essay is the source of that one and only Google hit.) Washington’s desert phrase was a bit different.

“We live in a communications desert,” her essay begins. “How can this be, you say? Our 24/7 news cycle delivers…millions of words, bytes, video clips, posts, emails and tweets…Yet paradoxically, in this ‘revolutionary’ media age, our cities are parched for information and news coverage with context and quality.”

She cited foundation-funded research aimed at assessing the news needs of low-income and minority communities on Chicago’s West and South Sides. Low-income respondents in an 800-person phone survey were less connected than others on every measure tested. People told focus groups that they read Chicago’s dailies but found little that resonates with their lives.

And it’s not just the newspapers. In a speech in June, FCC commissioner Michael Copps cited a study that shows that black or Hispanic populations have fewer Internet-only news sites. “If the majority of hyperlocal sites are taking hold in affluent areas that can support advertising,” he said, “have we really dealt with diversity and competition, or have we just moved media injustice onto a new field?”

Laura S. Washington

Desertification is on the march, claiming more and more communities as newspapers continue to wither and few Web efforts manage to replace more than a fraction of the original reporting that newspapers have abandoned (see Part I of this series). There are fresh examples from week to week and from coast to coast, but none is more vivid, or sadder, than the dramatic increase in aridity that newspaper readers in San Francisco Bay communities are surely experiencing right now.

The Bay Area News Group, which had been 13 dailies published by the Denver-based MediaNews chain, last month cut 34 newsroom positions across the group and combined five of its titles into two; in total, more than 100 employees lost their jobs. In one stroke, three papers died and the 10 survivors were all wounded. Readers will find the papers less reflective of their communities — they’ll have local news sections and most will have familiar nameplates, but their general news, sports, and comics pages will be more uniform. And, with the shrunken staff, original community reporting, which has been drying up for years as newspapers laid off reporters, will become even more parched.

Eric Newton, now senior advisor to the president of the Knight Foundation, was managing editor of The Oakland Tribune 20 years ago. In a posting to the Knight Blog, he recalled that he’d supervised a staff of 130 full-time journalists; after years of attrition the newsroom was home to only a dozen reporters — and this was before the newest cutbacks.

Newton recalled that Bob Maynard, The Tribune’s revered late publisher, had referred to the daily newspaper as “an instrument of community understanding.” Newton added, “We need some new instruments.”

Next Post:  Might the elusive Web journalism model be neither for-profit nor non-profit?

Previous Post: Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism

Tom Stites is president and founder of the Banyan Project, a pioneering a new model for Web journalism as a reader-owned cooperative. He was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

* In addition to the single direct hit for “news desert”, Google also turns up 55,698 false positives, with “news” ending one phrase and “desert” starting the next. And, ironically, 48 hours before this piece was posted, my friend Doug Muder added a second, quoting me.

Desert photo by Maartmeester on Flickr. Photo of Laura Washington by Karen Kring.

Related posts:

1. Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World
2. Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?
3. Finding a new model for news reporting

Adam Thierer

Adam Thierer’s most recent op-ed (“Thinking about the Future of Informed Communities and Journalism”) in his Technologies of Freedom column on Forbes.com is worthy of note– and not just because it mentions the work of the Knight Commission and the related series of eight white papers published by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program. Adam, who is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, authored one of these white papers, Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action, which was released earlier this year.

Incivility and outrage seem to be the fashion for a lot of public discourse these days. As we prepare to enter an important election year, Adam’s essay is especially notable, for two reasons. First, he brings a thoughtful approach to the big questions addressed by the Knight Commission, which are all the more significant as the country prepares for an election of major importance.

• Do we, as citizens, have access to the right sort of information to make informed decisions for our communities and the broader public sphere? And,
• Do we, individually and collectively, have the knowledge, skills and capacity to take action based on that information–action that benefits individuals, families, communities and the state of our deliberative democracy?

Second, his essay reflects the open-minded, democratic spirit and values that the bipartisan group of commissioners — 15 men and women from diverse personal, professional and political backgrounds — adopted as they went about investigating these questions. He recognizes that, even though people may differ on the best policies for promoting freedom and prosperity in the Information Age, the big questions are worth asking and discussing and we all benefit from the exploration and experimentation taking place. It’s the same sentiment that Adam brought to his white paper when he wrote,

There is no one-size-fits-all, best approach to designing high-quality local online hubs. A thousand flowers are blooming in today’s information marketplace and that is a wonderful thing. The more experimentation, the better at this point. But we should not assume that a hub model that works well in one community will automatically work for another. …Our primary concern should be underserved communities.

It’s easy for those of us who live in areas of relative affluence and information abundance, with a staggering array of information and communication services literally at our fingertips, to forget that there are still millions of Americans who do not have access to the technologies of freedom, or the resources to learn how to use them effectively for personal, commercial or civic benefit. Much of our civic discourse is moving to digital platforms, noisy spaces with new rules of engagement. We cannot sustain a healthy democracy with citizens who are forced into second-class status by an information divide. Adam is correct that the key to creating an informed, engaged citizenry in this new environment is maximizing the opportunities for information to flow and for people to acquire the skills they need to use it effectively.  The white papers offer a selection of specific steps and policies for a path toward a brighter future of informed communities and journalism.

Related posts:

1. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities
2. Mike Fancher: Contemplating the Future of Local Journalism
3. Measuring Informed Communities at the Free Press Summit

Barbara Cochran

Barbara Cochran, the author of “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive,” has a featured blog post on the Huffington Post front page today making the case for the continuation of modest federal funding for public media. The op-ed, “Why Federal Funds for Public Broadcasting is the Right Decision,” is especially timely as today marks the start of new leadership at NPR with Gary Knell taking the helm of the national news organization after a successful tenure at Sesame Workshop.

By any objective measure, under Knell’s leadership Sesame Workshop was remarkable successful in becoming more local, more inclusive and more interactive. Sesame Workshop and its signature program, Sesame Street, expanded to deliver locally, culturally relevant educational programming to children in over 20 countries around the world. Sesame Street’s diverse characters and storylines have been praised for a strong ethic of inclusion, with ethnic, gender, disability and economic diversity and equity dealt with in straightforward, sensitive and nonthreatening ways. In digital media, Sesame Workshop is a leader in developing games and educational content that take advantage of the array of digital technologies and mobile platforms that are available.

More local, more inclusive, more mobile — now it’s time to see if Gary Knell can do for Main Street what he did on Sesame Street. I wish him well.

Note: NPR’s new CEO Gary Knell is hosting a Twitter chat today, December 1, at 3:00 p.m. ET to respond to listener questions. You may tweet your questions to @NPRgaryknell with #nprCEO.

Related posts:

1. Cochran: Local Public Broadcasters Shouldn’t Lose Funding Because of Problems at NPR
2. (De)funding Public Broadcasting in New Jersey
3. FCC Announces 2nd Future of Media Workshop

Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide is a guide for adopting civic innovation strategies to spur the development of news and information environments that address real community needs.  Civic leaders, elected officials, motivated citizens, community-based organizations and others can use this guide to understand how to integrate useful practices for assessing and building engaged, informed communities—communities with the civic capacity necessary to deal successfully with today’s many economic, social, environmental and political challenges. (Download PDF or Read Online)

*Watch related Roundtable Discussion*

Author Richard C. Harwood sets forth a set of assessment strategies that go beyond merely counting the information assets that exist in the community. While high-speed broadband, news websites, social media and local online hubs are important for expanding opportunities to participate in public life, in order for these technologies to be truly transformative communities need to create a receptive environment where citizens engage more fully with the spectrum of information and knowledge providers that contribute to the health and stability of a community: schools, businesses, libraries, nonprofits, other organizations and each other.

Harwood proposes a set of nine strategies, governed by four guiding principles, to help people in a community take effective action toward improving their information ecology. The paper also includes a checklist for getting started.

Among the key elements of his nine step plan are the following:

• Engage the community early on and focus on core community needs. Being in the community and hearing people talk about their community can yield valuable insights that lead to refocusing existing efforts, creating new types of content, developing new networks of partners, and building a more useful information infrastructure.

• Actively cultivate boundary-spanning organizations and groups.  Public and commercial media, community foundations, public libraries, and local United Ways are among the groups that bring people together across dividing lines, incubate new ideas and spin them off and reflect the aspirations and concerns of the community. These intermediary organizations should play an essential role in assessing and building healthy information environments.

• Tell the community’s story of change. Told well and over time, such stories can help a community create a “can-do narrative” about its ability to tackle change and invite people to step forward.

• Ensure enough entry points for people to engage. There must be sufficient “on-ramps” for people to participate in the information environment and community life. Technological on-ramps like high-speed broadband are important, but so are a variety of cultural and social access points.

Together, Harwood’s nine strategies and four guideposts will allow communities to focus on building information environments, engaging the community and taking action on what matters most.

This paper is the eighth paper in a series of white papers focused on implementing the 15 recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The white paper series is published by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Richard Harwood is the founder of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation.

Related posts:

1. Roundtable on Assessing Community Information Needs
2. Assessing Community Info Ecosystem and Needs in Southern Vermont
3. Updated: Measuring the Information Health of American Cities

The fruits of this ongoing conversation were on display in Phoenix, Arizona this week, where a broad range of stakeholders representing journalism, business, academia, government, nonprofits, philanthropy and the public gathered to discuss the recommendations in the Federal Communications Commission’s staff-level report, Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age, and to announce consensus and progress on key recommendations in the FCC report.

The FCC report, released in June 2011, examines the current state of the media landscape and found that, while new technologies and other innovations have created an expansive and rich media environment, there are important gaps in the areas of local accountability reporting and universal access to broadband opportunities that must be addressed.

Monday’s field event at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication provided a platform for showcasing a wide range of sensible policies and innovative new initiatives designed to strengthen news and information gathering that meets the needs of citizens, communities and democracy. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Commissioner Michael Copps participated in the event. Their remarks and the statements of other participants are available here.

Highlights of the event announced by the FCC include:

Consensus on basic framework for broadcaster transparency:

• Jonathan Blake, representing six major local television station groups, said that while some details remain to be worked out, in general the FCC report’s recommendations on disclosure and transparency “will serve the public interest.”
• Coriel Wright of Free Press said that the disclosure recommendations are “both important and necessary.”

Journalism School initiative:

• Chris Callahan, dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University announced a new initiative from the nation’s leading journalism schools, funded by the Knight Foundation, to move forward on recommendations of the Report. Journalism schools will hold events and produce detailed research papers to advance various recommendations.

Targeting federal ad spending at local media:

• Jason Klein, President and CEO, Newspaper National Network representing more than 9,000 print and online publications, expressed support for a proposal made by local television stations that existing federal advertising spending be targeted a local media, saying, “The federal government spends advertising dollars for necessary public purposes, and can better obtain value by shifting some ad spending to local media. It’s a smart strategy on a number of levels…and a development that should be encouraged.”

• Representatives from 34 local online news organizations in a letter presented at the event said, “[G]overnment spending on local online news enterprises could be, in a relative sense, far more beneficial than legacy spends. Even modest advertising revenue will permit us to expand news coverage, create new journalism jobs and better serve our local communities.”

The Knight Foundation announced other initiatives it will fund to advance the recommendations in the FCC report, including:

• A Knight-funded effort that will support the FCC report’s author Steven Waldman to study emerging media issues and explore implementation strategies for the report’s recommendations as a visiting senior media policy scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
• A Knight Foundation grant to encourage debate and action around the report’s major recommendations, through a series of events and research papers hosted by at least 10 leading universities. The series is in partnership with Carnegie Corporation of New York.
• Help in planning for the creation of “state C-Spans” in all 50 states – as recommended in the FCC’s report – through a meeting of the National Association of State Public Affairs Networks at the Newseum.
• A task force headed by the Council on Foundations to make recommendations to the IRS about potential tax changes to remove obstacles to non-profit media innovation.
• A partnership with GuideStar, Grantmakers for Film and Electronic Media (GFEM), Ford Foundation and the Foundation Center to develop reliable metrics on media philanthropy, so that people can know what’s funded in their communities and foundations can evaluate the field and level of funding.

Read the Knight Foundation press release here.

Michael Fancher identified additional roles that for-profit enterprises, nonprofits, universities, businesses, government, foundations and others can play in strengthening local journalism in his June 2011 white paper, Re-imagining Local Journalism, in which he identified five key areas of strategic importance for local journalism:

• For-profit media organizations must re-invent themselves to extend the role and values of journalism in interactive ways.
• Not-for-profit and non-traditional media must be important sources of local journalism.
• Higher education, community and non-profit institutions can be hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.
• Greater urgency must be placed on relevance, research and revenues to support local journalism.
• Government at all levels should support policies that create an environment for sustainable, quality local journalism.

As the Knight Commission report notes, “The bottom line for local communities is that people need relevant and credible information to be free and self-governing.” The participants in the Arizona field event recognize this essential fact and are working to make it happen.

Related posts:

1. 2011 Knight News Challenge Winners Announced
2. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities
3. How Will Comcast Ruling Affect the Information Health of Communities?

A Tipping Point for Journalism

by Michael Fancher

The long-awaited Federal Communications Commission report on the state of America’s news media landed with a big thud, sort of like the Sunday newspaper of old hitting your front porch.

Initial reactions to the recent FCC report have uniformly praised its exhaustive diagnosis of the problems facing local news reporting. But there also has been disappointment that the report didn’t offer remedies.

Can that really be a surprise?

American journalism is at a tipping point. The Internet has disrupted the business model that underwrote local news for more than 100 years. The Great Recession made matters worse, resulting in local newspaper and television newsrooms dramatically cutting staffs and other news resources. Another economic shock would hit the media like the tornado that devastated Joplin. Little would be left that we could recognize as local news coverage. If remedies to this were obvious, they would be working by now.

So, I sympathize with the FCC working group that produced the report, “Information Needs of Communities.” I was on the writing team for the 2009 Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, which was an impetus for the FCC work. The Knight Commission also offered no easy answers for local news, but it did make a counter-intuitive assertion:

Journalistic institutions do not need saving; they need creating.

click here to continue reading.

Related posts:

1. Mike Fancher: Contemplating the Future of Local Journalism
2. Of the Press: Models for Transforming American Journalism
3. Time to Rethink Education? Think Journalism

Leading-edge thinkers in both fields have come together recently in several different venues to explore answers to this question. The early feedback on these discussions is that this is a worthwhile topic to discuss at a critical time for both institutions.

In April, Journalism That Matters convened a ground-breaking “Beyond Books” conversation among journalists and librarians at MIT’s Center for Civic Media. JTM’s Biblionews website is full of ideas for connections to explore, including information on pilot projects that are underway since the gathering at MIT. There is also an inspiring 7-minute video of the conference produced by the very talented Jacob Caggiano that describes what journalists and librarians can do together.

What’s possible when librarians and journalists meet? a video report from the “Beyond Books” event at MIT hosted by journalismthatmatters.org

Bill Densmore and Mike Fancher, who along with Peggy Holman are key leaders directing JTM’s fantastic work on innovating journalism at the local level, brought the discussion to the annual conference of the American Library Association, held in late June in New Orleans.

Mike presented his newly released white paper, Re-imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World, as part of a panel discussion on effective partnerships between libraries and journalists that create opportunities for local news and civic engagement. He also outlined how libraries are addressed in several of the other white papers on implementing the broad set of recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, a theme we will explore in future blog posts.  Mike was joined on the panel by Nancy Kranich, founder and leader of ALA’s Center for Public Life and ALA’s civic engagement membership initiative, and Annie Anderson, who heads the LibrariUS initiative at American Public Media. (Due to travel delays, Bill did not make it to New Orleans for the panel.) The two-hour session on “Competing in the Information Marketplace II: Strategic PR partnerships — Journalists and Libraries,” was hosted by the Library Leadership and Management Association.

Mike’s key takeaways from the ALA discussion, summarized on the Biblionews website, include ideas that resonate with the Knight Commission’s Informing Communties report:

Librarians see civic engagement as an important element in what they do and how they make their case for public support. Civic engagement helps democracy, but it also has economic benefits to communities.

Digital literacy is a core competency of libraries. It needs to be actively advanced and promoted.

Institutional inertia could be a barrier in some library systems. Students are being trained for a new library culture, but the needed cultural change may come slowly in some systems. (This is a great topic to explore for libraries and journalism.)

People are excited about early results from LibrariUS, a partnership among the American Public Media Public, the ALA and its Public Library Association division. Attendees offered several ideas and examples for extending it.

Several people spoke glowing about their experience at the Biblionews conference at MIT in April. Two items stood out: 1) the JTM methodology for bringing together people from different backgrounds and disciplines; 2) the use of information technology to capture the experience immediately and permanently. The librarians were particularly interested in the second item.

The library community is ready to move ahead; bringing journalists along may be a tougher challenge. (That’s my view, not the librarians’.)

Higher education needs to be a partner.

Among ideas raised by others in attendance were the possibility of libraries helping to map local news and information ecosystems and new ways to extend the Public Insight Network’s partnership with the ALA and its Public Library Association Division (described in the JTM video).

Related posts:

1. Finding a new model for news reporting
2. Libraries+Local News=Civic Engagement
3. Going on the record: Civic engagement is for journalists, too!

The five key strategies for re-inventing local journalism include:

1. For-profit media organizations must re-invent themselves to extend the role and values of journalism in interactive ways.
2. Not-for-profit and non-traditional media must be important sources of local journalism.
3. Higher education, community and non-profit institutions can be hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.
4. Greater urgency must be placed on relevance, research and revenues to support local journalism.
5. Government at all levels should support policies that create an environment for sustainable, quality local journalism.

In particular, Fancher calls on leaders of local print and broadcast media to spearhead the creation of regional and local collaborative news networks that meet the information needs of their communities. These interactive news networks are part of a broader set of strategies for re-inventing local journalism that are aimed at addressing the need for media policies that foster innovation, competition and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism and envision new roles for universities and community institutions as hubs of journalistic activity.

Fancher served for 20 years as executive editor of The Seattle Times. Under his leadership, The Times won four Pulitzer Prizes and was a Pulitzer finalist 13 other times. Fancher serves as co-convener of Journalism That Matters Pacific Northwest, advises other local journalism projects and is vice-president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government.

Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World

A White Paper on Recommendations 1 and 3 of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy

by Michael R. Fancher

Download PDF | View on Scribd | Comment

Executive Summary

Introduction
The Challenge
The Opportunity
Information Needs of Communities—A Case Study
Strategies and Ideas for Action
I. For-profit media to extend journalism in an interactive way
II. Not-for-profit and non-traditional media as sources of local journalism
III. Higher education, community and non-profit institutions as hubs
IV. Greater urgency on relevance, research and revenues
V. Government support for sustainable quality local journalism
Who Should Do What
Conclusion
References

Appendices

What the Knight Commission Report Says About Local Journalism
What is Happening to Local Journalism
About the Author
The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program

Related posts:

1. Re-imagining News & Community in Pacific Northwest
2. Layoffs and Cutbacks Lead to a New World of News Deserts
3. Mike Fancher: Contemplating the Future of Local Journalism

The authors note:

“Much has changed in media and communications technologies over the past fifty years. Today we face the dual problems of an increasing gap in access to these technologies between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and fragmentation of the once-common set of facts that Americans shared through similar experiences with the media. This white paper lays out four major challenges that the current era poses and proposes ways to meet these challenges and boost civic participation.”

The four challenges explored in this paper include keeping newspapers alive until they are well, universal access and adequate spectrum, providing quality information to citizens in communities, and creating a vibrant public square.

Related posts:

1. Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action
2. Creating Online, Public Accountability for Government
3. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Here is a sampling of some of the award-winning projects, as described in the Knight Foundation’s news release:

The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce: To experiment with a new funding model for local journalism, The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce will bring together 10 to 15 community leaders and media innovators in Detroit and two other cities to provide $1,000 microgrants to innovative journalism and civic media projects. By encouraging pilot projects, prototypes, events and social entrepreneurial ventures, the News Taskforce will encourage a wide swathe of the community to experiment with creative solutions to their information needs.

Associated Press’ Overview Project: Overview is a tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or freedom of information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read. There are good tools for searching within large document sets for names and key words, but that doesn’t help find stories journalists are not looking for. Overview will display relationships among topics, people, places and dates to help journalists to answer the question, “What’s in there?” The goal is an interactive system where computers do the visualization, while a human guides the exploration – plus documentation and training to make this capability available to anyone who needs it.

Adaptive Path’s iWitness Project: To bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media, iWitness will create a web-based tool that aggregates user-generated content from social media during big news events. Whether a parade or protest, election or earthquake, iWitness will display photos, videos and messages in an easy-to-browse interface. Created by a premier web design firm, iWitness will make it easier to cross-reference first-person accounts with journalistic reporting, opening up new avenues for storytelling, fact-checking and connecting people to events in their communities.

Media and Place Production’s Zeega Project: To help tell rich multimedia stories, Zeega will improve its open-source HTML5 platform for creating collaborative and interactive documentaries. By using Zeega, anyone can create immersive, participatory multimedia projects that seamlessly combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio and maps from across the Web. With this grant, Zeega will expand their experimental prototype to work on Web, tablet and mobile devices and pilot a series of collaborative and interactive documentary projects with news organizations, journalists and communities across the globe.

 The Miller Center Foundation’s The State Decoded: The State Decoded will be a platform that displays state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen. While many state codes are already online, they lack context and clarity. With an improved layout, embeddable definitions of legal terms, Google News and Twitter integration, and an open API for state codes, this project aims to make important laws the centerpiece of media coverage.

Matthew Ingram writes about the ”data as journalism” theme running through many of this year’s winners in, “When big data meets journalism” at GigaOm.

Learn more about all of this year’s winners here.

Related posts:

1. New Round of Knight Community Information Challenge Now Open
2. Re-imagining News & Community in Pacific Northwest
3. Progress Announced on Key Recommendations of “Information Needs of Communities” Report

Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans, Blair Levin, Former Executive Director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative of the Federal Communications Commission and currently Communications and Society Fellow at the Aspen Institute. The paper analyzes how to diminish second-class digital citizenship by assuring access by all to broadband services. Universal Broadband author Blair Levin rigorously and repeatedly engaged the broadband community and other, more general audiences from Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas, Nevada.  His in-person debates were reported in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and in the PBS space.

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action

Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

Re-

Assessing Local Information Needs: A Practical Guide

Related posts:

1. Aspen Institute to Advance Recommendations of the Knight Commission
2. Groups Advancing Knight Commission Recommendations Submit Comments to FCC’s Future of Media Inquiry
3. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities

Click to download PDF

Today the FCC released the findings of its inquiry into the Future of Media, a project begun in early 2010 in response to the Knight Commission. In a report over 450 pages long, author Steve Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities inspect the shifting media landscape and lay out how relevant policy and regulations can be more “in sync with the information needs of communities and the fluid nature of modern local media markets.” The central issue at hand, the report states, is the shortage of “local, professional, accountability reporting”.

The report early on explains the origins of the study and its relationship to the challenges posed by the Knight Commission’s Informing Communities report:

That sense of the vital link between informed citizens and a healthy democracy is why civic and media leaders grew alarmed a few years ago when the digital revolution began undercutting traditional media business models, leading to massive layoffs of journalists at newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV stations. Since then, experts in the media and information technology spheres have been debating whether the media is fulfilling the crucial role envisioned for it by the Founders. In 2008 and 2009, a group that was both bipartisan (Republicans and Democrats) and bi-generational (“new media” and “old media”) studied this issue at the behest of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The group, the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy…posed a bipartisan challenge to the FCC, whose policies often affect the information health of communities. The chairman responded in December 2009 by initiating an effort at the FCC to answer two questions: 1) are citizens and communities getting the news, information, and reporting they want and need? and 2) is public policy in sync with the nature of modern media markets, especially when it comes to encouraging innovation and advancing local public interest goals?

The Knight Commission’s series of white papers has been moving into action the recommendations of Informing Communities. Later this month a white paper by Michael Fancher will offer actionable steps on the issue of local journalism and community information needs.

Read: The Information Needs of Communities: The changing media landscape in a broadband age

Related posts:

1. Waldman Appointed by FCC to Explore Knight Commission Recommendations
2. Knight Commission Report Presented to CPB Board
3. Knight, Local Foundations Partner on Community Information Needs