Nieman Journalism Lab

Beyond Lehrer: Some optimism in Miami around foundations helping fill community info needs

Posted: 15 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST

Editor’s note: If you heard about this week’s Knight Media Learning Seminar in Miami, it was almost certainly because Knight paid journo-fabulist Jonah Lehrer $20,000 to be its closing speaker. (Knight realized after the blowback that that had been a pretty bad idea.)

But there’s also something to be learned from the conversations that took place before Jonahgate. Jonathan Groves, an assistant professor at Drury University, is working with the Community Foundation of the Ozarks to develop community-news initiatives in Missouri; here are his takeaways. Disclosure: Knight is a financial supporter of Nieman Lab.

The #infoneeds epiphany came on the second day.

About 400 people gathered this week in Miami at the Knight Foundation’s Media Learning Seminar, its annual gathering of community foundations to talk about community information needs. They, along with representatives from nonprofits, libraries, and other community groups, wanted to discuss the information gaps left by a dwindling press corps.

Among those sharing stories were John Mooney, a longtime journalist and founding editor of NJ Spotlight, and his foundation partner, Hans Dekker, president of the Community Foundation of New Jersey.

Mooney spoke passionately about his desire to commit journalism, covering his state capital and holding government accountable at his nonprofit news site. Dekker, whose foundation manages the finances for Mooney’s project, provided a candid counterpoint: Foundations want to see results. They want to affect the public discourse. They want sustainable civic engagement. Dekker:

The journalists don’t know the business model. We don’t know the business model. We don’t come out of journalism. I think all of these projects are feeling their way on the model. And so there’s not a pattern to follow that’s easy. So we have a lot of conversations at the board level about who our audience is. Who are we writing for? How can we monetize it? How can we make this more sustainable?

And sometimes, I think, the journalists hear that as: We’re in their business too much. And they’re journalists, and no one should tell them what to write. And there’s a lot of push and pull on those issues.

It’s no longer just up to journalists to satisfy these community information needs, especially in this disrupted media landscape. Engaging a corps of committed citizens through the support of institutions like community foundations is critical to success. (Knight believes that enough to commit another $9.5 million to it this week.)

The stories shared in Miami showed the interest in new forms of information sharing, ones that blend amateur and professional content — models that could become sustainable with a mix of events, memberships, foundation support, and advertising. “We need more informed and engaged communities,” said Noah Erenberg, of the Community News Commons public-media project in Winnipeg, Manitoba. “It creates more caring and giving communities.”

Journalists are not an island

So often at journalism and future-of-media conferences, we see impressive investigations, brilliant data journalism, dazzling interactive graphics and platforms. We hear stories of national news organizations pushing pageviews into the millions through SEO and audience analysis. We marvel at creative coders developing new forms of storytelling and transforming the traditions of journalistic presentation.

But for many communities outside large urban areas, the voice of Cali Brooks, executive director of the Adirondack Community Trust, better reflects the community-information reality:

It’s a media desert where we live. Information is limited. It’s often inaccurate and often biased. I want you to picture being in your car and push “scan” on your radio as you drive from town to town. In our area, it just goes around and around. That’s what it’s like where I live. Our neighbors need a connection. They needed to hear from the outside world, and they needed to hear from one another and be able to talk in a safe and trusted place.

Her foundation joined with North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y., which at the time had a limited audience and sparse resources. Their project invested in reporting, doubling the news staff from four to eight and adding 11 journalist apprentices who worked with the organization during the first year to provide greater coverage of the region. (As with many of these partnerships, Knight provided external support.)

The result, according to Brooks: Online users of North Country Public Radio increased 74 percent. Its Facebook page, with more than 2,900 fans, has become a forum for community conversation. And its reports — including a recent series on the prison economy — have been making their way to national outlets.

Other foundations have linked with public broadcasters as well. The Greater New Orleans Foundation invested in its local NPR affiliate to help the station expand its programming to include news coverage. The foundation has also worked with The Lens, the local nonprofit news site, on coverage of the city’s expanding base of charter schools after The Times-Picayune cut back its publication days.

“It’s really had an impact on our poorest citizens that would go to coffee shops, convenience stores, perhaps barber shops, and read the paper that was passed around,” the foundation’s Josephine Wolfe Everly said of the T-P’s changes. “You know, half of New Orleanians make less than $35,000 a year. So things like a newspaper subscription and certainly Internet access are really luxuries.”

The Greater New Orleans Foundation’s efforts aren’t just content-related. It has been talking with the Ford Foundation about a municipal broadband network, and it is collaborating with The Times-Picayune on a digital-access initiative.

The Central Carolina Community Foundation also discovered access to be an issue in its region. Its solution: Invite millennials to train older community members how to use technology and the Internet to access information. What the foundation discovered is that older citizens also mentored the younger generation — on how to evaluate information and bring context through history. “We do have the ability to bring people together and leverage their strengths,” said JoAnn Turnquist, the foundation’s leader.

The power of narrative

Throughout the conference, it became clear that the adage “content is king” was being revised to “narrative is king.”

Winnipeg’s Erenberg — who calls himself the “convener” of Community News Commons — told of a story contributor who was riding public transit in September when the driver suddenly stopped the bus. The passengers watched in amazement as he stepped off the bus, removed his shoes and handed them to a shoeless man on the street. The story, shared online at Erenberg’s site, went viral and became a major draw. More than 150,000 visitors checked out the post, and major new outlets soon connected with the driver for interviews. “The power of the story is something we need to appreciate,” Erenberg said.

The best stories don’t always originate with professional journalists, and foundations are developing platforms to make community storytelling easier. The Denver Foundation and the Piton Foundation teamed up to create Floodlight and Colorado Data Engine, two open-source platforms that allow community members to craft their own stories.

One Floodlight story tracked the success of the Whittier neighborhood in Colorado, which transformed an overgrown park area that had been used by gangs to hide guns into a community garden. The foundations encourage such storytelling through local community events called “story raisings,” where people learn to tell stories effectively and share their storytelling successes with others, said Rebecca Arno, vice president of communications for The Denver Foundation. “It was so exciting to see all of the technical stuff that we’d done really come to life in the work of real people,” she said.

Again and again, that theme emerged: It was not just technology connecting people; it was people connecting people.

Emmett Carson, of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, told of working with KQED in northern California to develop forums asking people what kind of community they desired. About 7,000 participated online, but another 800 — a quarter of whom said they had never participated in an open meeting/dialogue before — came out in person to attend live forums.

Nonprofit news startups, too, depend on community events to engage the public. The Texas Tribune regularly incorporates public discussions and festivals into its news activities; in fact, 19 percent of its revenue comes from events, editor Emily Ramshaw said.

Said NJ Spotlight’s Mooney: “Social engagement is also going out to folks and inviting people into conversations and asking them to invite their friends.”

From startup to sustainability

Unfortunately, the antijournalist Jonah Lehrer and his $20,000 speaking fee dominated conversation about #infoneeds; to focus on him is to miss the point of the gathering. Miami was a place of inspiration and encouragement, of possibility and promise.

At the conference’s outset, Alberto Ibargüen, Knight’s president and CEO, reminded everyone of the lean-startup imperative: Solve problems that people actually have — to create something real.

To that end, IDEO’s Fred Dust encouraged information designers to study their communities from the viewpoint of community members, in context. Don’t ask what they want; they’ll only tell you what they think they want. Instead, build empathy. Watch people, and discern what they need and want. Only then will solutions emerge that will engage communities.

Over the course of the two-day conference, we heard about successes and failures, startups and hiccups. As is the case with most innovations, the lessons from successful ventures are not perfectly portable to other communities. Or as The Texas Tribune’s Ramshaw put it, what works in Texas might not work elsewhere.

But the conversation in Miami points to a blended future that requires us to think more broadly than traditional notions of journalism to meet community information needs. People from across the spectrum, beyond journalists and mass-communication scholars, are grappling with this dearth of accurate, reliable information plaguing so many of our towns and cities. If we all work together, regardless of our professional backgrounds, perhaps we can plug this drain on democracy.

Photo of the author at the conference by Knight Foundation used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Jonah Lehrer’s lucrative apology, and two differing hyperlocal strategies

Posted: 15 Feb 2013 07:00 AM PST

jonah-lehrer-knight-cc

“It wasn’t worth $20,000, but it was classic Lehrer. And what a troubling thing it was to watch.”

A well-funded apology: Six months after he was caught fabricating material and resigned from More about
The New Yorker
at EncycloThe New Yorker, disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer gave his first public apology this week in the form of a speech at a Knight Foundation seminar. You can read the full text of the speech here, and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon summarized the scenario well: Lehrer acknowledged his fabrication and plagiarism, apologized, and explained how he’s going to try to rectify the problem in the future. That only served to make his detractors (which is, right now, everyone) even angrier.

Several critics were incredulous at Lehrer’s assertion that a series of procedural safeguards would be enough to keep him from fabricating again. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici called them “the methods of the technocrat, not the ethicist,” and Slate’s Daniel Engber said a set of procedures can’t solve Lehrer’s staggering arrogance. Poynter’s Craig Silverman delivered this point most forcefully, arguing that his plan is built to stop unintentional error, not the deliberate deception that Lehrer won’t come to grips with. “Until Lehrer is willing to face himself without props and aids, he'll continue the pattern of self-deception and public deceit,” he wrote.

Others had different concerns: Psychology professor Christopher Chabris said Lehrer’s fabrication was tied to his fundamental misunderstanding of science. Wired’s David Dobbs asked why he hasn’t apologized to his colleagues, friends, and editors, while NYU grad student Rachel Feltman chastised Lehrer for tarnishing journalism’s (and especially science journalism’s) public perception. British journalist Kevin Anderson spoke for many of his colleagues when he said Lehrer deserves to never work in journalism again, and Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan made a more thorough argument for plagiarists and fabulists like Lehrer to be blacklisted from professional journalism. There was a dissenting voice in all of this, as the Los Angeles Times’ David Ulin said we’re betraying a bit of our sanctimony in our response to Lehrer.

After the talk, one key detail emerged that intensified the anger against both Lehrer and Knight: The foundation paid Lehrer $20,000 to give the talk. Said Forbes’ John McQuaid, “Before today, I didn't think you could prostitute a ‘I throw myself on the mercy of the court of public opinion’ statement. I was wrong.” Amy Wallace of Los Angeles magazine wondered how Lehrer’s friends and advisors let him think taking money for a speech like this was a good idea. Taylor Dobbs of Scientific American (among others) challenged Lehrer to donate the pay, and Lehrer wouldn’t comment to Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici when asked about whether he would do so.

Of course, giving an admitted fabulist and plagiarist $20,000 for a 40-minute talk and Q&A didn’t reflect well on the More about
Knight Foundation
at EncycloKnight Foundation (disclosure: Knight is a financial supporter of Nieman Lab), either. Gawker’s Max Read castigated Knight for giving Lehrer the money, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard said he hopes news organizations have a higher standard of professional re-admission for Lehrer than Knight did. Knight’s CEO, Alberto Ibargüen, initially defended the foundation’s decision to bring in and pay Lehrer to Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post and Erik Wemple of The Washington Post, but the foundation later said it regretted the decision. Jim Romenesko pointed out that fabulist Jayson Blair was also paid (though much less) to talk about his fabrications, and published an email from Blair questioning the wisdom of Knight’s decision.

“Young singles care about who is hot in a hot bar. They don't care about the kid's soccer match, the school budget, the town hall meeting.”

Patch and Nextdoor’s hyperlocal strategies: More about
AOL
at EncycloAOL made news a couple of times this week — once for buying the tech reviews site gdgt, and once for a better-than-expected quarterly earnings report that sent its stock price shooting up and had paidContent’s Jeff John Roberts praising its retooled ad strategy. Business Insider’s Henry Blodget pointed out the bizarre ongoing source of AOL’s profit: Its ostensibly antiquated dial-up business.

But the aspect of AOL’s report that grabbed the attention of journalism watchers was the revenue figure for its hyperlocal news project, More about
Patch
at EncycloPatch. As Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici reported, Patch’s approximately 900 sites brought in $34 million last year, less than AOL CEO Tim Armstrong had predicted. Armstrong attributed the shortfall partly to Hurricane Sandy and partly to an emphasis on cost-cutting as opposed to increasing ad sales. Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch (also an AOL site) gave some more detail about AOL’s plans for deeper local advertising partnerships.

Entrepreneur Bernard Lunn explained why the human-powered Patch experiment is so important to cracking the hyperlocal news nut, contrasting it with the recently departed More about
EveryBlock
at EncycloEveryBlock. At the same time, a new entrant into the hyperlocal field — Nextdoor — made a splash this week by announcing it had enlisted renowned venture capital firm Greylock Partners as an investor. As Fast Company and The New York Times explained, Nextdoor is a private (real names only) neighborhood-based social network that serves both a neighborhood watch and neighborhood Craigslist function.

Mathew Ingram of GigaOM contrasted Patch and Nextdoor’s approaches to community information, praising Nextdoor’s high barriers to entry and its fundamentally social orientation. “Instead of starting with the news and then trying to add social-networking aspects later, Nextdoor started with the social networking side,” he wrote.

Drones, secrecy, and self-censorship: The debate over drone strikes came to the forefront in the U.S. late last week thanks in part to two media reports: More about
The New York Times
at EncycloThe New York Times and More about
Washington Post
at EncycloWashington Post revealed the location of a U.S. drone base in Yemen, and NBC’s Michael Isikoff reported on a leaked memo making a legal case for strikes against U.S. citizens. In the case of the former, the Times and Post had actually known about the base for more than a year, but had agreed to keep it secret for now.

In large part, both papers received not praise for breaking the story, but criticism for waiting so long. The Guardian explored some of the arguments on both sides of the decision, quoting one journalism professor who called the decision to withhold the information “shameful.” The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald said this is part of a pattern of subservience and self-censorship on the part of the media: “Time and again, one finds the US media acting to help suppress the newsworthy secrets of the US government rather than report on them.” In addition, the Times’ own public editor, Margaret Sullivan, concluded that this case didn’t clear the bar to justifying honor a government secrecy request.

The Times’ David Carr was more sympathetic to the media in the drone debate, arguing that it has served relatively well as a site of public discussion on the issue and that it’s instead Congress that has been strangely unconcerned about the media’s drone revelations. In making his case, Carr cited a new study (PDF) by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about the media’s drone coverage. Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, meanwhile, said the drone news showed the value of leaks to democracy.

When sources fight back — with data: New York Times journalist John Broder and the electric car maker Tesla got in a fascinating spat this week over Broder’s review panning Tesla’s network of charging stations. Tesla charged Broder with falsifying information in the review, which Broder countered, and Tesla hit back with records from the car’s log data of his test drive. Broder came back with his own point-by-point rebuttal.

There was a lot to sort out here, and it’ll probably take a while before we reach any sort of conclusion. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan gave an initial review of the competing claims, while Rebecca Greenfield of The Atlantic wasn’t convinced by Tesla’s data. Techcrunch’s John Biggs looked at the role of data in these disputes, and tech blogger Dan Frommer saw Tesla’s data-backed rebuttal as a shift in the balance of power between companies and news organizations. “Many brands have established themselves as credible publishers. And why shouldn't they be? They almost always know their industries better than the reporters covering them,” he wrote. Engadget’s Tim Stevens, meanwhile, noted that auto journalists need to get used to the idea of being watched closely when they do reviews, just as tech journalists are.

Reading roundup: There were several other stories to watch this week:

— The media conglomerate Time Warner was reported to be talking about selling much of its Time Inc. magazine division — magazines like People and InStyle, but not Time, Sports Illustrated, or Fortune — to the magazine publisher Meredith. Peter Kafka of All Things D noted that Time Warner was talking about putting its magazines up for sale last year, and The New York Times’ David Carr looked at what’s behind the sale.

— A few paywall tidbits: The currently paywall-free Washington Post is polling its users on various paywall options, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal dropped their paywalls for last week’s winter storm, the Times closed one of its easiest paywall loopholes and announced good news regarding its paywall numbers, and paidContent’s Mathew Ingram proposed a few ideas for building paywalls around people, rather than content.

— Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism profiled four small newspapers around the country as success stories with new business-model experiments. Rick Edmonds of Poynter, Jeff Bercovici of Forbes, and Mathew Ingram of paidContent all summarized the lessons for news organizations well.

— The Journalism Interactive conference on journalism education and digital media was held last weekend, and you can find tons of helpful ideas and tips from it with Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams’ Storify and College Media Matters’ Dan Reimold’s comprehensive summary.

— Finally, a few bits and pieces to check out: Breaking News’ Cory Bergman argued that the next big journalistic disruption is coming from mobile media, the Lab’s Ken Doctor wrote an insightful analysis of The New York Times’ ability to stop its revenue decline, MSNBC’s Ned Resnikoff explained how class affects who gets into journalism and what we see as a result, and Iowa Ph.D. student Dave Schwartz proposed a personalized breaking-news Twitter feed.

Photos of Jonah Lehrer by Patrick Farrell/Knight Foundation and of a MQ-9 Reaper drone in Afghanistan (2009) by David Axe used under a Creative Commons license.

YULI AKHMADA

Sabtu, 16 Februari 2013