Illuminations Blog, JTM News

The Weekly Illumination — Issue 18

Welcome to the the Weekly Illumination, a JTM newsletter offering a quick look at the week in journalism with a focus on what’s working in today’s news ecology. In this week’s Illumination we’ll share a long list of tips we found over the week, take a look at First Look Media, and explore how the social web is impacting the way news is delivered.

Hangout with JTM-Alum Dave Cohn on Wednesday

The next installment of our February Hangout series will feature a conversation with David Cohn, the founder of Spot.Us and Director of News at Cir.ca. David will join us February 19th at 11am Pacific Time to talk about the lessons he learned launching his first startup and to share with us a new model for handling information that Circa is pioneering. Last week’s Hangout featured a conversation with Evelyn Messinger, another JTM alum. The guest for our final installment this month will be JTM Board Member Linda Fantin who will be discussing the Public Insight Network. I encourage you to RSVP to this week’s event, but everyone is welcome to attend any of the Hangout‘s on the day of the event.

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JTM Co-founder Peggy Holman has written a pair of articles looking at the roles that naturally develop during times of change. The Seapoint Center for Collaborative Leadership published Change your Story, Change Your Organization and JTM has published Stories for Navigating Change.

Another Look at First Look

The Intercept is the first of several publications rolling out from First Look Media. Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill launched The Intercept on February 10 to focus on national security issues and to continue the ongoing reporting generated by the Snowden leaks. Jay Rosen, an advisor to the company, wrote about the digital magazine’s launch on his blog and journalism.co.uk has a breakdown of who’s now working for the new company.

Tips and Tricks

The Social Web’s Continued Growth

It’s clear that Facebook and Twitter are a major way that people find the news content that interests them, but a new column by Felix Salmon for Reuters explains the depth of this paradigm shift. As Salmon explains, Facebook accelerated the unbundling of news online as people increasingly relied on their friends as curators and less on the front pages of publications. People are also relying less on Google searches to find the news that’s interesting to them, The Atlantic reports. Now Buzzfeed, a news outlet born on the social web, is even getting people to share its advertisements on Facebook, and some foundations will even make donations to nonprofit news organizations to encourage more social sharing.

Odds & Ends and Odd Ends

Jobs of the Week

The Internet Cat Video Festival is hiring a Coordinator.

The Freelancers Union is looking for a senior writer.

ThinkAdvisor has a position available for a social editor.

NBCUniversal is hiring a senior data visualization editor.

There is an opening available at the Georgia Perimeter College for a part-time journalism instructor.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hiring an Operations Director

Illuminations Blog, JTM News

Spacebridge: Google Hangouts circa 1983

On Wednesday, February 12 at 11 a.m. Pacific time, Journalism that Matters will host a hangout with Evelyn Messinger to discuss using technology to engage people in public conversations. Please join us.

It’s a common belief that the Soviet Union did not begin to crumble until Mikhail Gorbachev took power and instituted the Glassnost policy in the mid 1980s, but perhaps the first cracks in the USSR developed a few years earlier as part of a rock festival that JTM-alum Evelyn Messinger played a role in bringing to life.

On May 28, 1983, at the US Festival that Steve Wozniak produced in a remote spot just outside the sprawling reach of Los Angeles, festival participants attended a panel conversation conducted over satellite video between people in both the USSR and America. Though the panelists were celebrities and intellectual luminaries, the program incorporated questions from regular Americans and their Soviet counterparts.

Branded as Spacebridge, the hour-long program ripped away at cultural preconceptions. The participants soon saw each other as fellow human beings as they quickly united over a fear of nuclear war and a love for sports and music, which would culminate in an international concert simulcast in both countries.

“I would like to say that today, you’re not only talking about the fact that we can talk to one another, we’re actually doing it,” said Evgeny Velikhov, a panelist in Moscow who is credited as an academician. “We conquered a very terrible enemy and at the same time another enemy arose who unfortunately is still here with us. This is nuclear weaponry. Sometimes it seems to us that these are muscles. Actually they aren’t muscles. This is really a cancer and we have to perform an operation as quickly as possible to liberate ourselves from this cancer.”

Messinger would go on to help produce about 20 more Spacebridge programs over the years leading up to the 1991 dissolution of the USSR, and she has continued to focus on using technology to catalyze conversations across different communities throughout her career.

“In the beginning it was really hard to get them on U.S. TV, but you go to Moscow and it was a sensation,” said Messinger. “The idea that we would allow Russians to speak on American television was just crazy.”

None of the spacebridge programs aired on national television in America until Phil Donahue hosted “A Citizen’s Summit” in 1985. While filming the first of two spacebridges Donahue hosted, a group of protestors picketed outside the Seattle television studio.

“They have this phrase ‘all new ideas start out as heresy and end up as orthodoxy,’ and that’s exactly what happened.” said Messinger.

By 1987, Peter Jennings began hosting “Capital to Capital,” a series of spacebridges for ABC News featuring members of Congress and Soviet leaders. The five-part “Capital to Capital” series focused on issues including international security, the environment and human rights.

“I’d have to say that this played some part in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union,” said Messinger. “I got totally hooked on this stuff thinking, ‘Wow! We can change things.’”

In 2003, as webcams and high speed internet grew in popularity, she adapted that technology in a live interactive television program for Link TV called SNAP.

More than three decades after the first spacebridge connected citizens of the USSR with people in America over a satellite connection, it’s now possible for anyone with a laptop and a high-speed connection to join a video chat with people all over the world using a tool like Google Hangout.

Last year Messinger and a handful of her colleagues received a grant from the National Center for Dialogue and Deliberation to launch Real Dialogues.

What “if you could set up a way for people to know that they could go into a facilitated conversation when something happens?” she said. “What I had proposed was to set up and test an ongoing office-hours of google hangout.”

Although they still haven’t yet realized Messinger’s vision of regularly scheduled office hours with a facilitator over Google Hangout, Real Dialogues did host two Hangouts last year on the topic of raising the minimum wage. She said that while those Hangouts were successful, it wasn’t easy recruiting people who were interested in the topic and wanted to participate.

“I’m a TV producer so there was nothing in any of it that wasn’t what I already knew to make things work,” said Messinger. “There is the technical prepping. … The persistent problems are audio. You can fix the video pretty easily but audio is hard to explain to people.”

Beyond the technical issues Messinger said there are always concerns around how guests will behave and the risk that they will be disruptive. During her tenure in traditional television this issue was usually alleviated through the use of a green room or staging area where a producer would briefly interview the guest and make sure they’ll make a positive contribution. This isn’t necessarily quite as easy to accomplish using Google Hangouts.

When it comes to audio problems, it’s sometimes helpful to insist people use headphones, and Messinger said that on some occasions she’s actually sent headphones to her guests to ensure quality audio. Other times the best approach is to judicially mute the audio of whomever isn’t speaking.

Though the initial topic of the minimum wage was decided by the group because it seemed to be a hot topic at the time, it was no longer on the top of people’s minds by the time they were able to schedule the actual Hangout. Instead of pre-selecting topics for discussion, Messingeer is hoping someday to transform the project into one where people can jump on a Hangout immediately after major news breaks.

“I would still like to find a way to let people decide,” she said. “You could just let people talk and I don’t know what might come out of it. Movements might form. There’s a big disempowerment of citizens right now, there’s a real paradox.”

Even though the news is now interactive and readers can leave comments and even engage with the newscasters over Twitter, the power she witnessed with the spacebridge broadcasts remains elusive, Messinger said.

“The ability to engage is greater than anyone could imagine 20 years ago but the voice of the people is much much weaker than it used to be. The voice of the people keeps getting eroded further and further away,” she said. “It’s this sort of thing that could lay out the template for how citizen engagement could actually become a real ongoing force in political change.”

In the News, Journalism News, JTM News

Will FCC Chair Tom Wheeler Fight for Net Neutrality?

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Although often ignored and rarely understood, the FCC will be playing a powerful role in determining the future of the Internet following a court decision to strike down net neutrality. While experts in law and media are still grappling with what will come of the decision, it’s become clear that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has now been granted tremendous power.

Wired compared Wheeler to Frodo, and I guess the ring is the way the media-industrial-complex seeks to rule over the Internet. But clearly Wheeler is not a common hobbit of pure heart, and it’s unclear how his past life in both the television and tech industries will influence his responsibilities as chairman.

So who is Tom Wheeler, and how will he lead the FCC in transforming the rules that govern how people and corporations can use the Internet? No one knows for sure what will define Wheeler’s FCC, but the man may have revealed some clues earlier this month when he attended a town hall forum in Oakland, California.

Wheeler’s tenure with the FCC began last November, and the commission has met only twice since he became Chair. His wikipedia page is almost bare, and the only substantial biography of him available on the Internet can be found on the FCC’s own Web site. Although Wheeler’s significance wouldn’t be fully realized until the Court of Appeals would publish its ruling the following week, just his decision to attend the attend the January 9 forum showed promise.

The town hall was organized by Voices for Internet Freedom, a collaborative effort between Free Press and the Center for Media Justice, and it was the first town hall that Wheeler has joined as FCC Chairman. Next week the Illuminations Blog will examine how these groups came together and were able to convince Wheeler to participate.

“I was a typical Washington player,” Wheeler told the packed auditorium. “My goal now with my new job and my new responsibility is to learn by listening, is to take in the kinds of data points and information and passion that I heard tonight and say ‘OK, what are you going to do about it?’”

Based out of Oakland, with staff in both Chicago and New York, the Center for Media Justice works to “create conditions that strengthen movements for racial justice, economic equity, and human rights.” It’s executive director Malkia Cyril has worked closely with Free Press in the past and the two groups joined together in 2010 to create Voices for Internet Freedom to focus specifically on issues surrounding equitable access to the Web.

In bringing Chairman Wheeler to Oakland, the coalition was able to raise awareness to issues that are often ignored by the media’s coverage of the FCC. Issues such as the high cost of prison phone calls and threats to the nation’s universal lifeline program, which provides phone access to low-income residents, disproportionately impact people of color — and those living in poverty  — and garner far less coverage than net neutrality and media consolidation.

Most of the two-hour town hall event consisted of local residents giving testimony to Wheeler about their own issues that could benefit from FCC intervention. Organizers said it’s been more than five years since an FCC board member had participated in a town hall, and both local leaders and lesser-known residents quickly lined up to seize the chance to voice their grievances.

The most common issues people raised related directly to the needs of Oakland’s working class community. Several people called on Wheeler to expand the lifeline program to include wireless broadband access. The lifeline program already includes some cell phone providers but does not include access to wireless data. More than one individual also called on Wheeler to drop the requirement that applicants provide the last four-digits of their social security number to access the service.

The high cost of prison phone calls was another issue raised by more than one participant. One woman spoke to the $3,000 she spent in phone calls to stay in touch with her incarcerated son, and Lisa Rudman, the executive director of the public radio program Making Contact, described how these high phone rates hurt people on both sides of the prison’s walls.

Other major issues were raised during the testimony, including health concerns surrounding wireless technology, rampant media consolidation, the lack of media owners and managers who are people of color, and the dire need to maintain net neutrality. It became clear that the digital divide and obtaining reliable Internet access is still a problem in cities like Oakland.

“At this point in history, more than any other point in history, the networks that connect us are the networks that define us, and its not just our economics, it’s not just our commerce, it’s our culture, it’s our individual lives and that makes the job of the FCC incredibly important and I take it incredibly seriously,” said Wheeler. “I’d love to sit here and say ok, it’s all solved but I can’t do that and you wouldn’t believe me if I did anyway.”

But some say that that the FCC chair did just that when he posted a blog responding to the Court of Appeals decision.

“Now that the Court of Appeals has ruled on the Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Order upholding the Commission’s authority to act under Section 706, I want to provide a further insight into my oft-repeated statement that I am pro-open Internet,” said Wheeler. “The key message is that the FCC has the authority — and has the responsibility — to regulate the activities of broadband networks.”

Although it does appear that Wheeler’s correct that the law still does allow the FCC the authority to regulate the Internet, he neglects to point out that the court explicitly rejected the way in which his predecessor Julius Genachowski sought to create such regulation. More importantly, it’s widely believed that the FCC rules governing net neutrality were actually designed to fail a legal challenge.

Still, the fact that Wheeler took part in the Oakland town hall is a clear indication that he is at least willing to listen to the needs of the community and his responses to their concerns suggest that his alliance may be to the American people and not the corporations he once served.

“The idea of lifeline for broadband is a legitimate concept and we’ve got to figure out how to make it work,” said Wheeler. He also vowed to continue the fight for regulations governing the cost of prison phone calls.

“There has been a set of values and the relationship between consumers and the networks that serve them and those values are not just going to go poof because someone has come up with a new technology for delivering those messages,” said Wheeler. “Those are the challenges that we’re going to be fighting.”

But it’s important to note that although Wheeler has clearly positioned himself as an advocate of Internet freedom and net neutrality, it is not just the free flow of ideas that he is professing should be protected but the market itself.

“How do you make sure that the values that we’ve come to expect, the kind of things that you were talking about today, apply going forward in the new network technology on behalf of consumers, on behalf of competition, on behalf of the kinds of things that I was hearing about tonight,” said Wheeler. “Why in the world is anybody ever going to subscribe to your service if they can’t make a 911 call? Why in the world is anybody going to ever subscribe to your service if there’s some kind’ve preferential service given to somebody else? Why is somebody ever going to subscribe to your service if they can’t inter-connect with other networks?”

Illuminations Blog, JTM News

The Weekly Illumination — Issue 15

Welcome to the the Weekly Illumination, a JTM newsletter offering a quick look at the week in journalism with a focus on what’s working in today’s news ecology. In this week’s Illumination we’ll explore the New York Times redesign, new tools for social networks to do reporting and offer a few of the best tips posted online this week.

New York Times New Look

The New York Times redesign has been described as subtle, and it’s true that I can barely notice the differences on the home page, but the minimal design of the article pages feels like a major departure to me.

Jeff Jarvis offered a mostly glowing review of the redesign for The Guardian, but suggests that the Times should’ve taken a personalized approach to curating the news. He also teased that the Guardian is deep into its own redesign.

But the big news is the introduction of native advertising, a move that left Andrew Sullivan comparing the Times to Buzzfeed. The first campaign the New York Times launched is one with Dell computers, and the newspaper went out of its way to highlight its sponsored status. In fact, an article in Adweek suggests that the Times may have gone too far in labeling the content as advertising.

“If, at the end of the day (and whether publishers and advertisers want to admit it or not), native advertising is meant to trick readers into thinking it’s actual editorial content, the Times’ overt labeling might seem to defeat the purpose,” writes Lucia Moses for Adweek.

Tricks of the Trade

News Tools

The Knightlab has launched Untangled, a set of tools to help reporters analyze social networks. The service lists a number of tools to examine how people are connected to each other and is curating stories produced using its tools. Another useful tool to help journalists navigate social networks is Pipl, which can be used to help verify the identity of account owners.

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When JTM-alum David Cohn launched Spot.us crowdfunding hadn’t entered the lexicon and the best way he had to describe his new start-up was to call it Kiva for journalists. A few years later Kickstarter was raising millions to finance blockbuster video games and movies and Spot.us was on life support. Now the Guardian is launching a new crowdfunding endeavor for journalism called Contributoria and Cohn, who is now at Cir.ca, has tweeted his interest in the project.

Odds and ends & odd ends

Another look at First Look

First Look media, the company financed by Pierre Omidyar has announced its this past week. Bill Gannon, who has worked as the editor of Entertainment Weekly and taught at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, participated in an interview with Jay Rosen, another member of the First Look team, to discuss the role Gannon envisions holding at the new company.

Glenn Greenwald also shared new details about his own involvement with First Look Media after one of his supporters sent an e-mail expressing concern about the new project.

Jobs of the week

Billionaires, a Bloomberg publication, is looking for an editor.

St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is now hiring someone to chair its new media convergence department and to teach multimedia journalism.

NBC News has an opening in its investigative unit for a supervising producer.

KJRH-TV in Tulsa, Oklahoma is looking for a multimedia journalist to join its investigative unit.

The Missouri School of Journalism is seeking an assistant professor to teach magazine writing on a temporary basis.

The deadline to apply for a Nieman Fellowship is January 31.

JTM is looking for freelancers to write about successful journalism initiatives and is paying up to $250 per story.

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The Illumination is a curated collection of stories about journalism innovation, notable job opportunities, grants and updates about Journalism that Matters. It is distributed to e-mail subscribers, through the JTM Google Group, and posted to the Illuminations blog.

Illuminations Blog, JTM News

Hack the Hood with Oakland Local

On Friday, January 10 at noon Pacific time, Journalism that Matters will host a hangout with Susan Mernit to discuss Hack the Hood and Oakland Local’s other initiatives.

If a news outlet is going to serve the community it must serve the community. Though the sentiment seems obvious — and is true by definition— it is a principle that Susan Mernit and her team at Oakland Local have truly taken to heart.10448905056_8683371a6b_b

Since its 2009 launch, Oakland Local has published a wealth of original reporting while aggregating additional content and showcasing reader submissions. The site is one of two major hyperlocal news sites that serve the 400,000-person city located six miles east of San Francisco.

The other, Oakland North, is one of three hyperlocal sites run by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and focuses on the primarily wealthier neighborhoods in the northern part of the city. But Oakland Local has from inception sought to tell stories from every community including the poorer neighborhoods in East and West Oakland where the rate of crime continues to haunt the city’s reputation to outsiders.

The reporters and other contributors to the site comprise a diverse group that strives to be representative of a city where one quarter of its inhabitants are black, another quarter are white and another quarter latino. This diversity is demonstrated by the breadth of stories featured on the site. The remaining quarter is comprised of people identifying as Asian and those of mixed-race backgrounds, according to the 2010 census.

4894096506_1808dfce0e_bFrom coverage of the city council meeting, to the violence in the streets, to the rampant gentrification caused by the newest tech boom that’s pricing thousands of people out of San Francisco, Oakland Local seeks to tell as many stories from as many perspectives as possible.
But the people behind Oakland Local are doing more than telling stories. After establishing themselves as a news outlet, they began exploring how they could further serve their community.

“What can we do to help people in Oakland get jobs and get better jobs? What do we know that can support economic development?” asked Mernit at the time.

The answer turned out to be Hack the hood, a partnership between Oakland Local, The Center for Media Change, and United Roots Oakland. The program trains low income youth in multimedia and other tech skills who then apply that training to build web sites for local business and nonprofits in their community.

“The most important purpose of the project is to help the kids get skills,” said Mernit. “Most of the kids we dealt with had no soft skills. They didn’t understand how to look someone in the eye and shake their hand. They never had a job where they had to do that.”

9677009438_c9de1d12dd_bNot only do the students learn these highly marketable skills, but the program also introduces the youth to people working in the industry. Some of the students even had a chance to meet a Facebook employee from East Oakland.

For young people whose only exposure to real economic success are stories of the drug dealers, pimps, rappers and ball players from their neighborhood, I’d imagine that meeting someone from their neighborhood who is making enough from a legitimate career in order to thrive in the Bay Area could be quite inspiring.

“I think that the people in tech who responded to our requests for help really do understand the process of digital inclusion,” said Mernit. “People who work in tech in Oakland were really supportive of this project.”

The youth who participate are also paid for their efforts.

“We’re in a poor community,” said Mernit. “We respect their need for money— and their time.”

During the past summer the 18 students involved in the program created a total of 70 web sites and helped get these local merchants listed on social media.

Although this initiative would at first seem like an ingenious way to create new local advertisers who would otherwise have no reason to advertise on the web, it turned out that such an endeavor wasn’t actually practical.

“We thought about that,” said Mernit. “But we think local advertising is really broken so we haven’t expended efforts to get these local businesses up on Oakland Local. These businesses are pretty marginal.”

The site hasn’t given up on the advertising model, however, Oakland Local continues to run banner ads from several local businesses and the organization has a third site that may prove to be a solid revenue generator.

Oakland Local has partnered with the Kapor Center for Social Impact to create Live Work Oakland, a new site focused on the city’s burgeoning tech industry. The site includes technology-related news and prominently features a map of tech-related initiatives based out of Oakland along with a directory of the organizations included on the map.

In addition to that site, Oakland Local also has a program that combines in-depth reporting on Oakland schools with a variety of student-driven storytelling.

“A lot of it is driven by trying to find a sustainable business model,” said Mernit. “There’s just a giant self-limiting factor in trying to grow the ad base.”

But with so many projects linked together, Oakland Local hopes to become increasingly attractive to advertisers as it puts focus on expanding that revenue stream in the new year.

“We haven’t started to do that yet at all,” said Mernit. “That’s what we have to do toward the end of Q1. We’re still very much in the planning stage with all of that.”

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On Friday, January 10 at noon Pacific time, Journalism that Matters will host a hangout with Susan Mernit to discuss Hack the Hood and Oakland Local’s other initiatives.

Disclosure: I have previously contributed stories to both Oakland Local and Oakland North.