II: Not-for-profit and non-traditional media

II. Not-for-profit and non-traditional media must be important sources of local journalism

The potential for new sources of local journalism is breathtaking. Consider this insight: In the past five years, J-Lab has funded 52 news startups with $900,000 in micro grants. During that time, J-Lab received 2,734 proposals for these grants.

In total, J-Lab has tracked $143 million in grants to news projects since 2005. Jan Schaffer of J-Lab told an FCC hearing in April 2010 that new digital entities cover daily happenings in their areas and do watchdog reporting. “They are expanding the definition of news and the idea of ‘objectivity.’ And, they are building stronger communities with active, engaged citizens.” They are making a difference, she noted, “Voter turnout has increased, empty ballot positions have been filled, new players are occupying local offices, wrongdoing has been exposed, issues have been unpacked—all because communities have news they did not have before.”40

These newcomers include:

• Hyper-local news sites, some launched by citizen volunteers or “citizen journalists” and others started by independent professional journalists

• New metro news sites, usually with a small paid staff

• Statewide investigative news networks

• University-led community news sites

• Soft advocacy news sites

Schaffer said a small hyper-local news site can go live with as little as $1,000, a free WordPress blog and a handful of volunteer reporters. J-Lab gives grants of up to $25,000 over two years to launch sites, enough to give them a presence that, in most cases, leverages more support. Larger metro sites with paid staffers need $400,000 to $1 million-plus a year to start. Some have larger annual budgets. All are experimenting with hybrid models of support: a combination of grants, donations, memberships, sponsorships, ads, events and some licensed content.

Schaffer said, “While charitable foundations have jump-started many of these sites, almost all need either public or philanthropic support to bolster their attempts to survive. With the oldest of these new sites now about five years old, they are also able to articulate what kinds of support they need—not only to continue robust reporting but also grow their operations with new technology as well as business and development help.”

Michele McLellan at the Reynolds Journalism Institute amassed a smart, comprehensive body of knowledge about the new news ecosystem. Included in her work is a list of more than 100 promising community news sites, which is especially helpful because it sets out criteria for evaluating sites as well as “broad categories to help us see the new media landscape more clearly.”41

An extensive survey of 66 of the sites provides meaningful insights, including these findings:

• Seven in 10 said they are greatly or somewhat optimistic about making their sites sustainable; none said they were not optimistic and only one said “somewhat unoptimistic.”

• Fifty-six percent of the sites said they operate as for-profits, and half of those said they made a profit in the previous year. About a third of the sites are non-profit.

• Most of the sites are relatively young. More than half launched less than two years ago; more than a third launched within the last two to five years.42

McLellan concluded her fellowship by convening Block by Block, a community news summit to help identify what publishers of news startups need. A number of constructive, workable ideas emerged from this September 2010 workshop:

• Create a more granular typology of sites that will make it easier to define success and appropriate revenue sources as well as to connect publishers with support resources.

• Develop metrics beyond page views to reflect levels and ranges of community engagement.

• Gather community publishers in an online network where they can share questions and answers.43

There are not yet clear paths to sustainability for emerging media, but the chances of success will be greater if efforts are targeted at meeting specific information needs of communities, if results are measured and if capacity is built through networking and shared resources.

A. Map and measure changes in the local news and information ecosystem

Thinking of news and information as an ecosystem creates a dynamic sense of what the public needs and how those needs might be met. The Commission said:

Communities lack good tools to assess the quality of local information ecologies. There are no widely accepted indices for comparing different communities’ ecologies or determining whether information flow within a particular community is improving or degrading. Communities need measures of both kinds. If activists, policymakers, and the general public had more concrete ways of describing, measuring and comparing the systems of community news and information flow, it would be much easier to mobilize public interest around community information needs.

In Recommendation 5, the Commission called for developing quality measures of community information ecologies and studying how they affect social outcomes. In terms of local journalism, this suggests the need to map and measure what is happening. What news resources are being lost? What is being created? What information gaps can be identified and how might they be filled?

Among the many ways to answer these questions, the New America Foundation launched a Media Policy Initiative to build on the findings of the Knight Commission. Work to date includes case studies of five communities that are effective templates for creating an overview of the information resources of communities.44

Another way to visualize the news ecology was demonstrated at “Re-Imagining News and Information in the Pacific Northwest,” a January 2010 gathering in Seattle that was organized by Journalism That Matters, a national journalism collaborative. Participants provided URLs for news and information websites in the Northwest, and these were mapped to show the extended network through a technique called co-link analysis.45

These maps were created by Richard Rogers, director of the Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam, and director of the Govcom.org Foundation in Amsterdam. Rogers explained that all URLs of attendees were crawled and outlinks were captured on maps. Rogers said the placement, as well as the size, of nodes on the maps are significant. Size of node is based on quantities of links given and received, and placement is determined by strength of ties (i.e., of all ties, which ties bring nodes closest together, according to quantity, in a standard network analytical sense?).

Coming out of the JTM session in Seattle, the Washington News Council, an independent forum for news ethics, developed a Washington News Directory. It presents yet another way to identify, categorize and map news entities throughout the state.46

Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) launched the News Frontier Database (NFDB) which it describes as “a searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country. Featuring originally reported profiles and extensive data sets on each outlet, the NFDB is a tool for those who study or pursue online journalism, a window into that world for the uninitiated and, like any journalistic product, a means by which to shed light on an important topic.” CJR says it plans to build the database into the most comprehensive resource of its kind.47
B. Index news resources to identify needs and opportunities

Often new journalism ventures flow from what the creators want to do, more than from the actual needs of communities. Startups will be more successful, and communities will be better served, if the strategies for new endeavors address unmet information needs. Indexing news resources can help foundations target funding and help would-be content providers find sustainable opportunities.

Community organizations can work with communication, journalism and business departments at colleges and universities to understand how well local news media are meeting information needs. Various methods are emerging that can serve as models for local action.

The Knight Foundation and Monitor Institute have launched a “Community Information Scorecard” project, initially piloted in the three communities of Macon, Georgia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and San Jose, California, to help local leaders take action to improve information health. The Toolkit builds upon the Knight Commission’s eight-point checklist of ingredients that healthy communities have (see Appendix I in the Knight Commission report). While the checklist is broader than just local journalism, the data gathering in the pilot projects included a key-word analysis to assess the quantity and diversity of journalism in each pilot community.48

A critical element of the Toolkit, as demonstrated in the pilot communities, is the selection of local advisors to provide insights and feedback. Local leaders were selected from five critical areas:

• Public Sector: Mayor’s office, county office, chambers of commerce, emergency services coordinators, public transportation center, library, etc.

• Private Sector: Business leaders’ council, Internet service providers

• Non-profit Sector: Community foundations and community centers (serving the elderly, immigrants and youth) focusing on economic development, immigrant services, cultural life, and health care

• Media: Local news organizations, public media providers

• Academia: Journalism schools, school district representatives

Looking more specifically at local news, Esther Thorson of the Missouri School of Journalism recommends conducting an informal content audit that examines what media is available in the community and how well it performs. Students can assist with data collection about coverage topics, such as politics, crime, development, business and government.49

Thorson and Eric Newton of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation developed a checklist that looks at legacy news channels and start-up media, as well as other information flows that affect how well communities function and solve problems. This information can be the basis for developing resources and partnership to fill coverage gaps.50

C. Measure the social benefits of local journalism to better understand what works

While experimentation in local journalism abounds, there is too little shared learning and knowledge. Measurement of the social impact of media grants is mostly anecdotal.51 Developing better measures of the social benefits of local journalism would enable better decision making and stimulate greater investment.

The Internet is awash in information about the emerging news ecology, including some very good attempts to track and make sense of what is happening. MediaShift and IdeaLab, both hosted at PBS.org, are outstanding examples. J-Lab: the Institute for Interactive Journalism, offers wonderful insights through its Knight Citizens News Network and J-Learning, a how-to guide for hyper-local community media. The Knight Digital Media Center demonstrates the power of partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Other sources of encouragement for and insight about innovation include competitions such as the Knight News Challenge, Knight-Batten Innovation Awards, J-Lab’s New Voices, and the We Media Game Changer Awards, as well as forums such as “Seeking Sustainability,” an April 2010 Knight Foundation roundtable discussion with 50 people representing 18 non-profit news organizations.52

Despite all of the information circulating about local journalism initiatives, this chaotic landscape is moving too fast to create much synthesis. The most dedicated observer cannot hope to keep up with all of the activity, much less see trends and make good sense of what is happening. There is too little learning, especially from failures. And, there is too little public engagement in the conversation about where local journalism is headed.

A commitment to new tools and platforms for digital networking and shared knowledge would help. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and Code for America are using open source methods, cutting-edge technologies and smart people to improve government transparency. They could be models for creating new tools and building new platforms for journalism networks that are about content, context and community.

Participants in the Knight Foundation roundtable on sustainability of nonprofit journalism ventures expressed dissatisfaction with tools for measuring audience participation and engagement online. Several were interested “in analyzing non-web metrics: the social return-on-investment from a piece of investigative journalism, the community value of the organization, the progress it makes toward its information mission and so on.”53

The Knight Foundation and FSG Impact Advisors, a non-profit consulting firm, have released a primer to help practitioners and funders measure the online impact of information projects. Based on reviews of 15 websites funded by Knight, the primer offers a six-phase evaluation process that can be used for any information project. It includes suggested metrics for reach, penetration and engagement, as well as questions for analyzing the metrics and aligning them to site goals.54

D. Create metrics for the Social Return on Investment in local journalism

In his book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky makes the case that people are terrible at predicting their own behavior in response to a new medium. He writes:

Because we are so lousy at predicting what we will do with new communications tools before we try them, this particular revolution, like the print revolution, is being driven by overlapping experiments whose ramifications are never clear at first. Hence creating the most value from a tool involves not master plans or great leaps forward but constant trial and error. The key question for any society undergoing such a shift is how to get the most out of that process.

Shirky adds, “What matters now is not the new capabilities we have, but how we turn those capabilities, both technical and social, into opportunities. The question we now face, all of us who have access to new models of sharing, is what we’ll do with those opportunities.”55

Developing methods to measure the Social Return on Investment (SROI) in local journalism might provide useful insights to this process of trial and error. It could lead to a more formal and useful body of knowledge and provide a common vocabulary and definitions for the social value of local journalism. It could help innovators and funders more systematically evaluate priorities and results. It could clarify and shorten the paths to sustainability. Eventually, it could lead to the development of technology tools to help journalism content providers generate and track the social benefit of their efforts.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) should request proposals for research to measure the social capital produced by investments in local journalism. This work would not be for the marketing of commercial products, but to enhance the social value and lasting impact of journalism in service to local communities. The resulting research could have broad application to other areas of SROI methodology.

Such an undertaking fits the purpose of the NSF as an independent federal agency, which includes advancing national health, prosperity and welfare. The NSF has the structure to solicit and evaluate proposed research, as well as to fund the most promising ideas. A program of this sort would support the Knight Commission’s call for “new thinking and aggressive action to ensure the information opportunities of America’s people, the information health of its communities and the information vitality of our democracy.”

This endeavor likely would generate further proposals for measuring growth in media ecology and their effect on connections and trust among civic networks, as well as civic engagement. Promoting public engagement is one of the three key goals of the Knight Commission.
E. Build capacity by funding networks, collaboratives, infrastructure and technology

Philanthropists and foundations should recognize the centrality of journalism to their ability to achieve their missions. Without abundant, credible journalism, stories do not get told. Problems and solutions are not brought to light. There is a growing sense that some foundations are beginning to recognize the problems in the journalistic ecosystem because they increasingly cannot get their messages out to the public.

For example, Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative

Reporting (CIR), says that when he started appealing to foundations in 2008 there

was a common response: “We’re not going to fund media.” Some of those foundations are now funding CIR, he says, “but others feel strongly that it is not something they understand or want to support. The attitude is changing, but slowly.”56

A March 2010 report of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media asserts that philanthropy “has yet to meet the challenge of keeping pace with the growth and influence of media.” Among the report’s recommendations:

• Foundations should acknowledge the prevalence and impact of media.

• Funders should support the development of new networked media production and distribution systems.

• Funders and grantees alike should utilize and advocate for open technology.

• Funders should collaborate to create a comprehensive platform for information sharing.

• The impact of media grantmaking should be measured, and the field should undertake new efforts to do so.

• Funders should recognize that media reinforces their mission.57

Stimulating new local journalism requires funding not just for individual projects, but also for networks, collaboratives, shared infrastructure and open source technology.

One example is the Investigative News Network (INN), a non-profit consortium of watchdog news organization throughout the U.S. The effort was launched in July 2009 with the “Pocantico Declaration,” a statement of the “urgent need to nourish and sustain the emerging investigative journalism ecosystem to better serve the public.”58

By 2011, the INN had grown to 51 non-profit, non-partisan news organizations. Its focus is sustainability, back-office support, technology, editorial collaboration and “community and audience activation.” It is funded by grants from eight foundations.

Other examples of news networks funded by foundations:59

• The Hawaii Community Foundation is funding a statewide student news network, in partnership with PBS Hawaii, to provide original reporting on television and the web.

• New Era Colorado Foundation is funding NewEraNews.org, a collaborative experiment with articles written by foundation staff, interns, guest bloggers and young people.60

Collaborative entities may well become a powerful vehicle for advancing journalism in service to communities. This is especially likely given the need for synergy among established and emerging news outlets, as well as the desire for public engagement.

An example of a local collaborative is underway in Philadelphia, where the William Penn Foundation launched a series of targeted investments intended to establish an independent journalism collaborative. The idea emanated from a J-Lab report the foundation commissioned, which found a steep decline in public affairs reporting by traditional news organizations. The report also said Greater Philadelphia has a rich pool of non-traditional newsgathering operations, but they are diffuse and fragmented. The report itself is a form of mapping the local news ecosystem.

Among the purposes of the Philadelphia journalism collaborative is to strengthen ties among these emerging news producers, to fund experiments with content delivery, audience engagement and collaborative investigative news projects.61 In December 2010 J-Lab announced that the William Penn Foundation had approved a $2.4 million, three-year grant for the collaborative, to be centered at Temple University.62

Previous Page | Next Page: III: Higher Education and nonprofit institutions