Information Needs of Communities – A Case Study
Information Needs of Communities—A Case Study
Seattle, Washington is a microcosm of the changing local news and information ecosystem. It suffered substantial losses in mainstream journalistic resources, and experienced an infusion of emerging media.
Notably, the Greater Seattle area lost two daily newspapers:
- The King County Journal, a once robust newspaper serving multiple suburban newspapers with daily editions, closed in 2007.
- The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the city’s oldest newspaper with a history dating to 1863, stopped printing and went to online-only in 2009.
Those newspapers and the Seattle Times, the city’s surviving daily, all lost money every year through the past decade because of decreasing print advertising.
Almost 60 percent of the newspaper journalism jobs that existed in Seattle in 2001 were gone by 2010. That is about double the percentage lost nationally during the same period.
Experimentation, collaboration and engagement provide useful prisms for viewing the activity that is occurring in that void.
Experimentation
Hyperlocal news sites abound in neighborhoods and communities throughout the Greater Seattle area. A Washington News Council database shows about 90 place-based news and blogs sites just within the Seattle city limits.10 Twenty-one of these are “KOMO Communities,” a Fisher Communications network of hyperlocal neighborhood websites begun in 2009, which includes additional sites through western Washington. It operates in cooperation with KOMO TV 4 and KOMO Newsradio.11 Most of the other place-based news sites are independent operations or small networks, such as Next Door Media, a network of 10 news sites and a regional portal serving the North Seattle area.12 Experiments supporting these sites include Seattle-based local technology innovators, such as Instivate and Datasphere Technologies, which offer hyperlocal web technology and sales solutions, such as providing sales teams and self-serve ad technology.
Perhaps the most noteworthy experiment is the decision by the Hearst Corporation to stop printing the Post-Intelligencer in March 2009 and to become the nation’s first newspaper to switch to an online-only publication. Two years later, the site is serving about 4 million readers each month, about the same number as when the newspaper was printing. Its staff of about 20 people generates news content that is augmented by media partnerships, content from the community and curated content in partnership with other media.13
Former print journalists have launched online news sites in recent years, including sites devoted to coverage of investigative stories, government coverage, “social justice journalism,” technology industries and the high-tech economy.
The Seattle Times won the 2010 Innovator of the Year Award from the Associated Press Managing Editors for its use of digital and social media in covering the shooting deaths of four police officers and for partnering with neighborhood blogs in its Networked Journalism Project. The police shooting coverage also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for breaking news.
Seattle clearly benefits from a robust technology sector that infuses the local news and information ecosystem with innovative ideas, leading-edge people and endless spin-off and startup businesses. The list of names starts with Microsoft and Amazon.com, but now includes MSNBC.com, Expedia, RealNetworks, Newsvine, Evri.com, Intersect.com, Corbis, Getty Images, Zillow.com, Trumba.com, Picnik, Razorfish.com, InfoSpace, Starwave, Classmates.com, and the list goes on.
Collaboration
Local news collaboration in Seattle involves many forms of networking, including content sharing, co-creation, distribution and promotion. Examples include:
- Legacy media working together and with emerging and ethnic media
- For-profit, public and non-profit media working together
- Ethnic media sharing content and capacity building
- Mainstream and minority journalism associations working together on training
For example, the Seattle Times is partnering with some 40 news websites. In addition to neighborhood sites, the partners include sites devoted to topic areas such as open government, local health, gardening, hiking, cycling, boating, Seattle history and even beer news. The project began with a grant from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, but grew well beyond the initial expectations and funding.14
In addition to the ongoing coverage resulting from these partnerships, the Times utilized a different form of partnership to produce a special report on the area’s homeless families, “Invisible Families: The Homeless You Do Not See.” The project was produced as part of a fellowship through Seattle University, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Fellows included the Times, journalists from three other media organizations and two freelance journalists.15
InvestigateWest, which is funded by various foundation grants, has collaborated with more than 20 national and regional media partners to distribute its work. Rita Hibbard, executive director and editor, says the major lesson learned in the non-profit startup’s first year was the value of collaboration. “It meets so many goals. It does not re-create the wheel. It preserves and expands resources. It gets the important work to broader audiences. It allows regional projects with broader impact to be done.”16
The Seattle Times and KING 5 television announced in October 2010 that they had formed a partnership to build and manage a local, online advertising network. The announcement said media sales teams from the newspaper and television station would work with community blogs and other niche online publications to sell ads on their web pages and share the corresponding revenue as part of the “beLocal Ad Network.”17
An inspiring ethnic media collaboration is Sea Beez, a “hive for hyperlocal ethnic news.” Dr. Julie Pham, founder and director, says it focuses on building capacity. Sponsors are the City of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods and New American Media, which also supports “Beez” in San Jose, Los Angeles and New Orleans. More than 30 Seattle area ethnic media outlets have participated in the program, which includes forums, workshops, citizen journalism and developing a common website so that participating media outlets can share news content and gain wider readership.18
Other collaborations include:
- The formation in the fall of 2010 of a Seattle Chapter of Hacks and Hackers, which brings journalists (hacks) and technologists (hackers) to share insights and demonstrate civic-minded projects
- A partnership between Crosscut.com, a non-profit online news site, and the Seattle Foundation to improve public awareness of philanthropic needs and opportunities (funded by a $185,000 matching grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation)19
- A global health journalism collaboratory to foster more and better coverage of a growing story in Seattle20
Public Engagement
Much of the thinking about the future of local news takes place in a journalistic echo chamber with little public involvement. For the past year, Journalism That Matters (JTM) has been trying to change that in Seattle. JTM, a national collaborative that brings together journalists and the public, hosted a gathering at the University of Washington with the theme “Re-Imagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest.”21 Over 240 people attended, including citizens, legacy and emerging media journalists, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, educators, students, technologists and public policy experts. More than a year later, nine initiatives are still progressing, including the following:
- Journalism That Matters Pacific Northwest Collaboratory, an ongoing initiative to encourage experimentation and collaboration to improve the news and information health of communities in the Pacific Northwest
- Puget Sound Civic Communications Commons, an effort to enhance civic engagement in neighborhoods, communities, the non-profit sector, government and business—including a pilot project to create a “journalism commons” as a clearinghouse of information and engagement on journalistic needs and opportunities in the Northwest
- Public Eye Northwest, an independent non-profit entity “to boost digital civic literacy, build community news creation capacity, and best practices in voluntary government transparency”
- Online Media Guide, a project under development by the Washington News Council as a means of mapping the state’s news and information ecosystem
- Seattle Digital Literacy Initiative, which aims “to help empower youth in our region as educated consumers and critics of—and producers and participants in—today’s complex media landscape”
- The “TAO of Journalism Seal,” also developed by the Washington News Council, aims to encourage news sites to gain public trust through Transparency, Accountability and Openness
Even with all of this experimentation, collaboration and engagement, a New America Foundation case study of Seattle’s news ecosystem describes it as “a digital community still in transition.” The report concluded:
However, despite the relative vibrancy of the media scene, and even with all its demographic and other advantages, it is unclear how much of this innovation is sustainable. The local web is littered with websites that are no longer updated, and few of the startups boast anything like the journalistic firepower or profitability of the papers of the past. We applaud the efforts of these startups but are skeptical that many will sustain if their benchmark of success is profit alone. Moreover, much development is still needed for Seattle’s information environment to reflect the diverse perspectives of traditionally less-covered minority and financially disadvantaged communities. In short, though the media landscape in Seattle has many green shoots, few conclusions can be drawn about its longer-term future.22
With all of its advantages as a city that is civically engaged and technically savvy, Seattle still must work hard to become the kind of informed community envisioned by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.
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