Is Your Local News a Supermarket or a Farmers Market?

In a recent post, John Robinson, the former editor of the News and Record in North Carolina, compared newspapers to grocery stores. He writes:

Newspapers once proudly said they were like a supermarket — they offered aisles upon aisles of choices. […] Rather than a grocery store, the paper should be more like one of those specialty shops with fewer choices but only the finest items that you’re not going to find elsewhere.

I’ve long been interested in the parallels between the rise of the local food movement and the debates about the future of local news. There are important lessons to be learned for how advocates for local food have built new infrastructure and economies around local products.

Robinson’s comparison got me thinking – what is the right analogy for news? If the metaphors we use help shape our understanding of what is possible, then how might models and metaphors from food production and distribution help us understand what’s working, or not working, in the news?

Below are some initial thoughts:

Three Ideas: Testing Legislation, Newsroom Archives, and Technology Playgrounds

I took advantage of my holiday time off to catch up on my Instapaper read later list. As I read I try to tweet out the best articles, or key ideas I’m grappling with, but some pieces demand more than a tweet (but less than a full blog post). Here are three articles whose ideas I’m still mulling over and that I think deserve more attention.

Washington Post – Stop guessing whether a bill will work. Instead, test it.
Political reporter Dylan Matthews proposes a federal agency dedicated to running experiments on public policy proposals before legislation is adopted. The idea here is to test what will and won’t work in the real world and bring that research to bear on political debates. While I like Matthews’ idea of testing legislation, I also wonder how this might be built into solutions journalism that would be dedicated to helping us address wiked problems. This idea also seems like a powerful way to counteract the trend of hindsight journalism. It may not be an either/or, I’d like to see both governments and news organizations taking up some of these ideas and challenges and adopting a model of creating legislation that looks a bit more like agile development and participatory community planning.

Reporters’ Lab – Creating a newsroom ‘answer machine’
I’ve long been deeply interested in how news organizations can better leverage their archives to help serve the public, add context to current events, and drive new traffic to their site. Tyler Dukes’ proposal for using news organizations’ archives to help create a newsroom “answer machine” is superb, while not without its challenges. He focuses on how this type of project could help improve reporting but I can see wonderful applications of this kind of app in politics and education as well. For another great project focused on better using media archives be sure to check out the recently launched Pop Up Radio Archive.

Designing for Diversity – Designing Creative Technology Playgrounds for Families
I have been thinking about the role of play in my own work as well as in the lives of my two sons. My life has been animated by a healthy tension between my fascination with technology and my affinity for wilderness and the outdoors. Where these two passions intersect is in the realm of play and exploration. Whether it was dismantling kitchen appliances and putting them back together or building wilderness shelters and treehouses, I loved to make things and engage actively in the world – both natural and manmade. I want to nurture that same passion in my sons, regardless of what their interests are – music or machines, art or airplanes, trees or technology – I hope they’ll approach it all with playfulness and a sense of wonder. This post, a summary of a discussion at MozFest in London, touches on some of those themes.

The Best Online Storytelling of 2012

This post is more of a provocation than an actual end of year “best-of” list. So I’m relying on you to help me fill in the gaps.

Inspired by the New York Times’ recent Snow Fall project, I asked my followers on Twitter to send me examples of the best multimedia journalism of 2012. I was looking for the kind of stories that could really only be told online because they brought together a diverse range of elements including some mix of text, video, audio, data and interactivity all in one package.

Here are the stories I’ve collected so far (in no particular order), but I know there are others. Add your favorite examples to the comments section.

New York Times – Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek
Stunning for both its design and how the elements worked together - text amplifying images and video, and video bringing life and depth to the narrative. Here is a great post about how they made Snow Fall.
http://projects.nytimes.com/2012/snow-fall-preview

Symbolia – A Newly Launched iPad Magazine of Graphics Journalism
Symbolia combines illustrated works of journalism with interactivity, audio and more. CJR described it as combining “the rugged hand-drawn texture of a 90’s zine with the investigative vigor and left-leaning politics of Mother Jones.”
http://www.symboliamag.com/

Frontline – A Perfect Terrorist: David Coleman Headley’s Web of Betrayal
Made possible using new video editing and interactive technology from Mozilla, called Popcorn, Frontline took the documentary to the next level.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/labs/i/perfect-terrorist/

California Watch – In Jennifer’s Room
Poynter described this multimedia, living graphic novel as a powerful way to address tell a challenging and emotional story of abuse.
http://californiawatch.org/node/18695
(CIR’s Cole Goins also recommended their mapped report on wait-times at veterans offices: http://cironline.org/reports/map-where-veterans-backlog-worst-3792)

NPR StateImpact – Boomtown
Boomtown is like an audio slideshow on steroids. The StateImpact team creating an engaging report that didn’t end at one website but branched out across a range of platforms and partners.
http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/boomtown/

BBC – Superstorm USA: Caught on Camera
Made almost entirely of crowdsourced cell phone footage, this stunning documentary was a huge undertaking in combining critical journalism with massively distributed user generated video.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p122s

Cartoon Movement / Susie Cagle – Down in Smoke
Cagle’s cartoons are layers of journalism stacked and juxtaposed, creating powerful accounts of moments in time. Cagle uses Thinglink to layer audio over her images.
http://www.cartoonmovement.com/icomic/44 

Building a Civic Layer On Top of the Social Web

In Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, he documents how the Internet has help people accomplish amazing things by leveraging the power of new networks and connections. “We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action,” he writes, “all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.”

However, most of the examples of social and political change that have been amplified or catalyzed via social media are episodic, not lasting (which isn’t to discount their importance).  This is in part the nature of social media. The same velocity that makes social media campaigns and memes so powerful, also makes them, for the most part, short-lived or best suited to making immediate change.

As we spend more and more of our time and energy on social networks – recent stats suggest that almost 20% of all time online is spent on social networks with the average person spending 7 hours on Facebook a month – I wonder how we can build a more consistent civic layer over the new digital public square.

From Instagram to Open Journalism: Towards Public Space Online

Instagram’s Terms of Service changes are the most recent in a long string of events that remind us of the deal we make when we embrace a “free” commercial platforms online. As one person put it – if your aren’t paying, you are the product, not the customer. Plenty has already been written about the changes, what they may or may not mean, and now Instragram is going back to the drawing board and revising at least the framing if not the rules themselves.

However, rather than wait for Instragram to get it right (or perhaps wait to be disappointed when the continue to get it wrong), perhaps we should think about making something different. Maybe it’s time to get serious about creating more community-driven noncommercial public space on the web.

Building a Stronger Foundation for Press Freedom and Accountability Journalism in a Digital Age

Today I’m part of an incredible team launching a new project focused on strengthening nonprofit news and accountability journalism.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is unique in its scope, its substance and its style. The Foundation is rooted in the idea that, while the structures of journalism are changing, the critical role of journalism in our democracy is not. It will fund critical and cutting edge work by nonprofit journalism organizations, transparency and watchdog groups and independent journalists.

This project builds on some of the key threads I’ve been working on and writing about for years and addresses three key problems head on:

A Solutions Journalism Response to Gun Violence

Today on Twitter I asked “What would a journalism dedicated to helping communities solve complex social and political issues look like? Who is already doing it?”

What would a journalism dedicated to helping communities solve complex social and political issues look like? Who is already doing it?

— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) December 16, 2012

This, to me, is the question we face as the nation tries to not only come to terms with the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, but also look ahead at how we can respond. Already we are seeing demands for a national conversation about gun violence, for new gun control legislation, even for a repeal of the second amendment. On the surface all of these seem like simple solutions, but in reality they are composed of a complex and interwoven web of policy, beliefs, and culture.

In a post from a year ago Jonathan Stray asked a similar question about journalism and problem solving. He observed that “The modern world is built on a series of vast systems, intricate combinations of people and machines, but our journalism isn’t really built to help us understand them. It’s not a journalism for the people who will put together the next generation of civic institutions.”

At the time he was writing about the global financial crisis, but the quote above could just as easily apply to violence in America. His post sparked a conversation about solutions journalism, a theme he returned to earlier this year. “I see the solution journalist as responsible for the process of public discussion by which problems are defined and turned into plans for the future. This is the moderator’s role.”

At times like this, we need good moderators of public debate, we need caring facilitators of challenging conversations, and we need newsrooms that can create space for communities to talk to each other. I’m not talking about online comments on newspaper websites, I’m talking about a much deeper form of community engagement.

Hearts and Fists: A Parent on Loving, Fighting and Gun Control

Bill Maher is wrong. It’s as simple as that.

In a Facebook post hours after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, the often provocative talk show host wrote, “Sorry but prayers and giving your kids hugs fix nothing: only having the balls to stand up to our insane selfish gun culture will.”

And Maher wasn’t alone. In the hours that followed the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary I saw that sentiment echoed across the web. “Stop being sentimental and starting fighting,” people seemed to be saying.

I’m a parent of young children, one of which is almost in elementary school himself. My first response when I heard about the shooting was to hold my family close and tight. In that moment I never wanted to let go.

Support Journalism That Matters – Tweet Your Giving

If you believe in nonprofit journalism, it is time to support it. And if you support nonprofit journalism it’s time to go public with that support.

Tweet @jcstearns: Tell me what journalism nonprofits you donate to and why. Then tag it #give4news.

I’ll choose two of my favorite responses and will donate to those newsrooms as well. Plus I’ll give those two people subscriptions to one of two great nonprofit journalism magazines – Orion Magazine and Mother Jones.

(Also, please consider a donation to a group that fights for press freedom – more on that below)

We are at an exciting moment when it is now possible to imagine nonprofit journalism becoming a much more prominent part of America’s media ecosystem. But to make the leap from start-up to sustainability we need to step up our support for nonprofit news and encourage others to do the same.

Other than donating to their public broadcasting stations, for the most part people are not used to donating to support the journalism they get in their inbox or their mailbox, in their Twitter stream or via their Facebook wall. That has to change.

Nonprofit journalism comes in all shapes and sizes: all-volunteer local community radio stations, data driven government watchdogs, big investigative newsrooms, online streaming operations and more. What they all share is that they can’t survive on grants alone.

Foundations have helped to jump start nonprofit journalism but communities are going to be what sustains it over the long haul. Let’s start now.

(Nonprofit journalism also faces a range of threats – from first amendment battles to jumping through hoops at the IRS – if you want to fund the fight to defend and expand nonprofit media consider a donation to Free Press. At Free Press we work every day to fight for the public’s rights, for policies that support quality journalism, and to ensure all people have access to an open and free Internet.)

Use this link to tweet now: Tweet Your Giving

Why I Work For Better Media

I believe that people have a right to demand better media, a responsibility to fight for better media and the capacity to help create better media.

And I believe this fight is critical to every other issue we care about, from education to the environment, but it is also critical to our democracy. If we believe in a government of the people, for the people and by the people, we need a media that can help make that possible.

At Free Press my work is focused on fostering press freedom, protecting public media, supporting nonprofit journalism and fighting media consolidation. Those are grand aspirations, but on a day-to-day basis a lot of the work I do is inspired my by two sons.

Facebook Copyright Hoax is Another Example of Why We Need Digital Literacy for Data and Privacy

Facebook users are up in arms about their privacy again. And that would be a good thing, if it wasn’t sparked by a hoax. For days now my Facebook stream has been filled with copy and pasted posts about “new Facebook guidelines.”

The New York Times and Wired have good take downs of the hoax, but for me this is yet another example of why we need an expansive digital literacy campaign focused on helping people understand how their personal information is used online, and how they can better control their privacy.

I make that case for such a campaign – and for why I think Facebook and others should help pay for it – in the post below. This was originally published by PBS MediaShift two weeks ago.

We Need a ‘Truth’ Campaign for Digital Literacy and Data Tracking

by Josh Stearns

Earlier this year, Bill Diggins, a marketing executive at Verizon Wireless, revealed a chilling fact about how much information the company collects about its customers. “We’re able to view just everything that they do,” he told a crowd at the Paley Center in New York. “And that’s really where data is going today. Data is the new oil.”

We know that companies are collecting enormous amounts of data about us every day, on and offline. Retailers track our purchases and make detailed predictions about our life events. Cell phone companies regularly hand over detailed phone logs to government agencies. Social networks collect volumes of data from every click. Political campaigns follow our web browsing. And, on top of that, we have seen a dramatic increase in government surveillancein the United States over the last decade.

For the most part, people have no idea the extent to which they are being followed and watched, analyzed and targeted, bought and sold. Now, more than ever, we need a national digital and data literacy effort on the scale of the anti-Big Tobacco ‘Truth’ campaign to address the escalating privacy and security issues facing citizens and their data.

Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Data

In an important post called “Big Data is our generation’s civil rights issue, and we don’t know it,” Alistair Croll argues, “Data doesn’t invade people’s lives. Lack of control over how it’s used does.”

In the post, he looks at the ways that our personal data can be used against us. Data predictions are already being used to guess people’s age, gender and race. It isn’t hard to imagine how this data could lead to discrimination in pricing, loans, and more. The threat of digital redlining is very real.

He concludes, “Governments need to balance reliance on data with checks and balances about how this reliance erodes privacy and creates civil and moral issues we haven’t thought through.”

Most of the debate over personal data has centered on Do Not Track, which is in part a technological fix and in part a policy fix. While important, Do Not Track only tackles part of the problem and wouldn’t address information you provide on social networks (like the kinds of data that contributed to this heart-wrenching story) or the data your credit card, cell phone and other companies collect about you.

While I think legislation will be both inevitable and necessary, it will be a long time coming. Changes in technology are developing faster than social and cultural norms can adapt. What’s needed right away is a massive digital literacy effort that can fundamentally shift people’s understanding and relationship with their personal data.

Digital literacy isn’t just about how to use a computer securely or how to tweak your Facebook privacy settings. It is fundamentally about how we communicate online and move through the world. In her white paper on digital literacy for the Knight Foundation, Renee Hobbs wrote that there is a growing recognition that “we must work to promote people’s capacity to simultaneously empower and protect themselves and their families as everyday lives become more saturated and enmeshed with information.”

Big data is a double-edged sword, with huge potential and equally enormous pitfalls for everything from health care to home loans, education to the economy. Whether this data is used for us or against us largely turns on how we control what data we share and how it’s used. At its core, this is a problem of attention and awareness.

Creating a National Digital Literacy Campaign

You have likely seen the bold, inventive tactics and advertisements from the “truth” campaign, which works to educate people about the heath risks of smoking and the tobacco industry’s long history of misleading and manipulative effort to sell cigarettes. They have employed a range of clever,aggressive, guerilla marketing efforts to raise awareness about smoking.

Perhaps most interesting is that the truth campaign got its start through funding from Big Tobacco itself. When the cigarette industry settled a landmark lawsuit being brought by 46 states a small portion of that settlement was set aside to start The American Legacy Foundation, the parent organization of the truth effort.

As more and more companies get rich on our data, why not ask them to fund a new national media and digital literacy campaign? This could be achieved through a new tax on those companies that collect and dissect personal data. However, I think companies actually have a pretty strong incentive to participate without legislation.

Voluntary donations to start a digital literacy campaign could be much less costly than legal fees or lobbyist bills to fight back the kind of lawsuits and legislation we are starting to see emerge. In addition, helping set up such an effort could help build trust with users, and head off misinformation about their services that currently spread like wildfire. If done right, the campaign could also increase broadband adoption, which would benefit these companies.

In its National Broadband Plan for America the Federal Communications Commission actually calls for the launch of a national digital literacy corps to “organize and train youth and adults to teach digital literacy skills.” At the time, the FCC believed it was critical that America “ensure every American has the opportunity to become digitally literate.” Given the priority   has placed on digital literacy, such a campaign could be developed as a unique public/private partnership that matches contributions from companies with funding from the government and foundations.

Digital Literacy for Civic Agency

We don’t need to start from scratch. There is already a sizable network of people and organizations working on media literacy. Between non-profit groups, schools and social networks themselves, we have a powerful infrastructure for conducting this kind of campaign. With the right funding, a dose of strategic communications, clever campaign tactics, and more coordination, we could make digital and data literacy a critical part of the conversation about media and technology in America.

A massive, broad-based digital literacy effort could have huge benefits for our nation. Beyond helping people better control how they share their data, it could encourage more people to use new digital tools to become active media makers and smarter media consumers. It could help people debate and better understand our fundamental freedoms in a digital age. And a moredigital savvy workforce will help protect against the cyber-attacks on government and industry that are escalating every year.

However, perhaps most importantly, we need a digital literate citizenry. More and more of the daily details of democracy are moving online, from registering to vote on Facebook to watching a livestream of the school board meeting. If information is the lifeblood of democracy, we have to ensure that citizens understand how to foster more healthy media habits. And if data is the new oil, citizens need the knowledge, tools and agency to control how their lives are being mined.

Curation, Creation and Participation: What You Need to Know About the New Storify

What are the atomic elements of journalism? The story? The article? The interview? The beat? The tweet?

Storify was created as a platform to weave together incredible stories from the diverse and scattered pieces of the social web. But as it has developed, it has become as much about those social elements, as the stories that are told with them. With its relaunch and redesign today, that transformation is nearly complete. The question is, like the person who could not see the forest for the trees, will people lose site of the stories in the stream of social content?

Rethinking Curation

The new homepage of Storify pulls together the most interesting bits of social media from around the web and lets you quickly see what people are saying about them, add them to your own story, or comment on and share them yourselves. I first noticed Storify heading in this direction when they introduced the ability for people to like, share and comment on any individual element in a person’s story a few months ago. In so doing, any element of a story could become a story in and of itself.

Networks Versus Institutions: Lessons from Occupy Sandy and the Red Cross

In the title of her post at Slate Katherine Goldstein asks “Is Occupy Wall Street Outperforming the Red Cross in Hurricane Relief?” It’s a provocative question, but the article doesn’t really go very far in answering it. While it provides a glimpse of the tremendous effort and coordination behind Occupy Sandy, it doesn’t really provide any evidence with which to compare Occupy’s effort to the Red Cross’s work.

I’m not on the ground in New York so I’m in no position to assess the tactics or impact of either group, and as Andrew Katz argued on Twitter, it may be “Unfair to pit Red Cross against Occupy in a ‘who’s helping more’ debate. Similar priorities, diff abilities.” However, I’ve watched as many of my friends have headed out to help with Occupy Sandy and connected to other self-organized grassroots relief efforts around the city. What Goldstein’s post raises, and what I have witnessed online, is how fundamentally the way we respond to disasters is changing.

Nate Silver, the New York Times, and the Challenge of Being Your Own Disruptor

Earlier this week I wrote about longtime public broadcaster KCET merging with the independent, nonprofit online and satellite news org, LinkTV. I believe a key benefit for KCET is bring a great, global web savvy team into their newsroom. More and more we are seeing longtime news organization bringing outside innovation in-house.

However, the tension between the New York Times Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, and one of their leading election year stars, statistician Nate Silver, shines a spotlight on the difficulties of bringing in innovation from the outside.

Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog is licensed by The New York Times. He also writes for the Times on occasion but is still considered a kind of contract or freelance employee. In August of 2010 when Silver announced that FiveThirtyEight was moving to NYTimes.com he called the relationship a partnership. The terms of the agreement were for three years, so time is almost up.

As many have noted, Silver’s method of analysis and prediction has disrupted and contradicted the long time pundits who peddle in horserace politics. This, and the fact that his predictions have been leaning in Obama’s favor, have made him a target for partisans and pundits alike. This debate has been covered extensively.

However, this controversy has now spilled over into his own host organization, and is raising questions for all news organizations who want to “disrupt themselves.”  This is a debate we need to be having, but it shouldn’t devolve into picking sides. Changing institutions from the inside out is incredibly challenging work, but incredibly important.

The Missed Opportunity of Newspaper Endorsements

Research, both scholarly and anecdotal, suggests that newspaper endorsements make little difference in the minds of readers. This fact led Edward Morrissey at The Week to argue that “Newspaper endorsements are at best meaningless anachronisms, and at worst damaging to the newspapers themselves.” Given this, Morrissey asks, why do it?

However, what if, instead of scraping the newspaper endorsement we re-imagined it? Could we make it work better?

Over the past week the New York Times endorsed President Obama for a second term and the Des Moines Register endorsed Governor Romney, the first time they have endorsed a Republican since Nixon. The endorsements were very different in tone and style, but they had one thing in common: There were no links in the web version of either editorial.

While the reticence of some newspapers to link, especially to articles outside their own archives, has been well documented I think the lack of links in most, if not all, newspaper endorsements is a missed opportunity.