Home Page, JTM News, Projects

Projects supported by JTM as of September, 2010

Over the last ten years numerous exciting project initiatives have developed out of JTM unconferences around the country. From the Common Language Program, informing Americans of crucial issues of our times, and spot.us which focuses on the public commission of journalists to report on overlooked, yet important community topics, JTM has served as an incubator for innovations in the field of communications.

Journalism That Matters Initiatives

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Known as “collaboratories,”  the following initiatives are projects that have sprung from gatherings and events that JTM sponsors, as well as from individual members. The initiatives are as varied as the interests and needs of the people they serve.

Pacific Northwest

Seattle Journalism Commons: Led by Mike Fancher, former Seattle Times executive editor, this group plans to link journalism projects and initiatives with potential donors.

Online Media Guide: Jacob Caggiano of the Washington News Council is mapping media news and information outlets across the state.

Digital Literacy Initiative: Common Language Project leader, Sarah Stuteville leads this initiative aimed towards teaching students how to become more informed media consumers and  participants.

TAO of Journalism: Washington News Council president, John Hamer, is developing a pledge and seal of transparent, accountable, open journalism for display on media websites.

Public Eye Northwest: Lead by former Seattle Times op-ed writer, Matt Rosenberg, this project is developing a public document database called “Public Data Ferret.”

Global Health Journalism Northwest: Pamela Kilborn-Miller of Connecting for Change Program at the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education,  Dr. Michael McCarthy of the Local Health Guide, and Sanjay Bhatt, president of Seattle AAJA head this initiative surveying the health sector for future reporting.

Microfinance: The  initiative is investigating ways to provide business and micro-finance training for journalists.

JTM Online and JTM Publishing: Headed by Brian Glanz, the JTM web initiative is updating the JTM website, creating an online community site for JTM members and journalists, and developing a potential business platform for the JTM Collaboratory by providing web hosting and other online opportunities for journalists.

JTMPNW Collaboratory: Lead by JTM co-founder Peggy Holman, this group provides support for all the initiatives.

Detroit

The Living Textbook helps seventh grade, primarily Arab American students to tell their stories.  Its focus on young, diverse story-tellers met our criteria well.Principals: Emilia Askari and Joe Grimm.

Operation Promise: College Connection will provide an interactive, multi-media search for Michigan colleges, universities and trade schools which qualify for the Kalamazoo Promise Funding.  It experiments with crowd-sourcing and user generated content.
Principal: Sonya Bernard-Hollins.

Front Street – www.detiptv.com uses the Internet to enable community to take greater responsibility for their own information.  It experiments with TV on the web, working with Black, Arab, Latino, and White communities. Principal: Tim Moore.

The Michigan News Center – www.MichiganNewsCenter.org – is a non-partisan source for issues of public interest, especially investigative reporting that performs a watchdog and accountability role.  It approaches a traditional journalistic role in a new way, with a stated intention to share tools, equipment, and their platform with voices in the African-American, Latino, Muslim, and Caucasian communities. Principal: Steve Wilson.

Red Ink – http://www.make-them-think.org/ – provides public, socially driven and open source software for understanding consumer spending patterns. It experiments with visualization and public accessibility to aggregate data to support economic understanding and better quality social action. Principal: Ryan O’Toole.

Re-inventing Assignment Detroit – Transform Time Inc.’s Assignment Detroit into a multiplatform, community centered vision whose mission is to reimagine the image of Detroit. Principal: Juanita Anderson.

JTM Success Stories

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  • Common Language Project – Kalamazoo
    It’s mission: to engage, educate and inform Americans of all ages on the crucial human issues of our time through innovative and accessible journalism.
  • spot.us – Washington, D.C.
    Community powered reporting – the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics.
JTM News, Miscellaneous

JTM Online

JTM Online is currently being developed to assist JTM members by providing social networking technologies including member profiles, a searchable / sort-able members directory, friend connections, and public and private messaging between members.

Interactive activity streams,

At the social heart of JTM Online are activity streams – one for each member and one collective activity stream for all members. Members can publish updates directly to their activity streams, reply directly to others’ updates, collect a list of favorite updates, recommend others’ updates, and so on. Activity stream updates are also published automatically to mark events such as a member joining JTM Online or two members becoming friends.

Multimedia including photos, videos, and documents can be directly embedded, i.e. viewable within JTM Online, simply by pasting a link into an update from popular sites like YouTube and Flickr. Each activity stream update has its own permanent URL, useful to people and to search engines alike, enabling direct references and a well seen architecture.

JTM Online will enable members to:

  • Have a member profile
  • View all public JTM sessions and the rest of JTM Online
  • Mark activity updates as favorites and build a list of favorites as references
  • Be listed and “discoverable” by others in the JTM members directory
  • Create online sessions to discuss topics
  • Create sessions to organize and develop projects and initiatives
  • Share interests and membership in other organizations

Each online session has its own activity stream, which is both the primary means of communication within a session and a record of all that has occurred in a session. JTM Online members can publish updates to either their own profiles or directly to any session of which they are a member. Each update is given its own URL.

Sessions members can:

  • File share documents, images, audio and video files, and archives comprised of other files.
  • Categorize documents
  • Receive notifications of session activity via email, including weekly digests and receiving an email for every update
  • Create a session events calendar for meetings and other events
  • Track one or more outside RSS feeds, creating activity stream updates automatically for each new item in the RSS feeds. Sessions may thus act as virtual water coolers, created to discuss the items in one or more RSS feeds, or as official, JTM-based representations of outside organizations.
JTM News, Miscellaneous

JTM Services

Supporting healthy journalism

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In the past, JTM’s primary service has been providing the opportunities for journalists and community members across the nation to meet and discover interconnected needs and potentials, supporting creative actions/projects that flow from those interactions.

However, JTM is experimental, network oriented, and fluid, responding to what shows up.

In the Pacific Northwest, JTM has formed the PNW Collaboratory – a collaboration/laboratory that is 1) developing a business plan, 2) actively seeking funding for its initiatives, 3) exploring microfinancing and entrepreneurial educational models to offer JTM members, and 4) creating new website with hosting capabilities that will convene a large cross-section of journalism and media oriented individuals, supplying freemium sites and custom web hosting services.

An exciting model for effecting positive transformational change in the media landscape anywhere in the nation, we hope the Collaboratory inspires people to jump in and use it as a template for getting something started wherever they might be.

Current Services of the JTM PNW Collaboratory

  • Hosting news and information community forums, both face to face and online
    • With a nationally recognized expertise in face-to-face engagement, the Collaboratory will serve its constituency with monthly opportunities to meet and discuss topics of interest.
    • Convene existing journalism and community association leadership to grow opportunities for cross-organizational collaborations
    • Convene initiative leaders quarterly to sustain momentum and find synergies among the efforts
    • Host an online space for learning
    • Provide journalism network website hosting for local projects and blogs
  • Incubate initiatives that improve the PNW news and information ecosystem
    • We begin with the ten initiatives already identified
    • By attending to the needs of the community, nurture new ideas as they arise
  • Be an information conduit for PNW news and information pioneers
    • Through the revamped JTM website
    • With support from the outreach coordinator

Anticipated services of the JTM Collaboratory

  • Articulate a body of knowledge about the emerging news and information ecosystem
  • Through its nine years of engaging the pioneers who are shaping the emerging news and information, JTM has gathered a treasure trove of information.  We shall articulate the patterns contained in that work.
  • Provide microfinance and other funding support for PNW news and information ventures
    • With support from Washington CASH, we shall create a program for supporting PNW news and information
    • We shall maintain a calendar of funding opportunities
  • Provide communication technology consulting services for PNW-based news and information ventures
    • Using the revamped JTM website as a base, use the power of open source tools, including WordPress and BuddyPress to serve emerging needs
    • Utilize nationally recognized expertise in face-to-face engagement and group facilitation to serve emerging needs
  • Support mentoring for news and information pioneers
    • Provide a mechanism to assist self-organizing of those with needs and those with experiences to share
  • Host workshops for news and information pioneers
    • Partner with Poynter Institute, Reynolds Journalism Institute, the University of Washington or others to develop workshops based on the needs articulated by clients
      • E.g., The Art of Engagement for Journalists
  • Provide journalism network website hosting for regional and national media projects and blogs
    • Fremium services for server and hosting
    • Premium services for custom sites
JTM News

JTM Accomplishments

The stories we tell shape our future

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Since 2001 Journalism That Matters has hosted 14 unconferences, inspired hundreds of initiatives across the U.S., and convened more than 1,200 journalists, educators, community activists and reformers. But most important of all, JTM has kick-started a coherent national dialogue, both inside and outside of the newsroom, examining the stories we tell about ourselves and our world, and the way we tell those stories.

By opening up the right questions and providing the opportunity for mainstream and independent journalists to interact creatively with the public and new media pioneers, JTM facilitates new forms and platforms of community storytelling. Among other things, JTM’s dynamic media mash ups have:

  • Helped establish and lead a multi-media reporting seminar for mid-career journalists.
  • Developed a consensus statement on the importance of news literacy (http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Reboot-statement)
  • Started a blog on the future of journalism (http://bcs.blogs.com/rejournalism/
  • Assisted an international/local news service focusing on “positive, inclusive and humane reporting of stories ignored by mainstream media” (http://www.commonlanguageproject.net/).
  • Developed a template for a New Newsroom serving today’s “new news ecology”.
  • Started new university and middle-school curricula on journalism, including working with citizen journalists.
  • Co-conceived a satellite community newsroom in a coffeeshop in Oakland, Calif., run by a legacy newspaper.
  • Offered new insights and projects initiated by industry leaders & shared with readers in columns and blogs
  • Spurred and fostered management shifts including re-examination of beat systems and reporting styles
  • Held training seminars for citizen journalists

Ongoing projects include

__________________________________________

Common Language Project – Kalamazoo
It’s mission: to engage, educate and inform Americans of all ages on the crucial human issues of our time through innovative and accessible journalism.

spot.us – Washington, D.C.
Community powered reporting – spot.us assists the public to commission professional journalists and participate with them reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics.

New initiatives

_________________________

Known as “collaboratories,”  the following initiatives are projects that have sprung from gatherings and events that JTM sponsors, as well as from individual members. The initiatives are as varied as the interests and needs of the people they serve.

Pacific Northwest

Creating Abundant Journalism: Led by Mike Fancher, former Seattle Times executive editor, this group plans to link journalism projects and initiatives with potential donors. See calendar for meeting times and locations.

Media Mapping: Jacob Caggiano of the Washington News Council is mapping media news and information outlets across the state. See calendar for meeting times and locations.

Support for the Collaboratory: Lead by JTM co-founder Peggy Holman, this group provides support for all the initiatives. See calendar for meeting times and locations.

Digital Literacy Initiative: Common Language Project leader, Sarah Stuteville leads this initiative aimed towards teaching students how to become more informed media consumers and  participants. See calendar for meeting times and locations.

TAO of Journalism: Washington News Council president, John Hamer, is developing a pledge and seal of transparent, accountable, open journalism for display on media websites. See calendar for meeting times and locations.

Building on Transparency: Lead by former Seattle Times op-ed writer, Matt Rosenberg, this project is developing a public document database called “Public Data Ferret.” See calendar for meeting times and locations.

Global Health Reporting: Pamela Kilborn-Miller of Connecting for Change Program at the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education,  Dr. Michael McCarthy of the Local Health Guide and Sanjay Bhatt, president of Seattle AAJA head this initiative surveying the health sector for future reporting. See calendar for meeting times and locations.

Microfinance: This initiative would provide business and micro-finance training for journalists. See calendar for meeting times and locations.

Detroit

The Living Textbook helps seventh grade, primarily Arab American students to tell their stories.  Its focus on young, diverse story-tellers met our criteria well. Principals: Emilia Askari and Joe Grimm
Operation Promise: College Connection will provide an interactive, multi-media search for Michigan colleges, universities and trade schools which qualify for the Kalamazoo Promise Funding.  It experiments with crowd-sourcing and user generated content.
Principal: Sonya Bernard-Hollins

Front Street – www.detiptv.com uses the Internet to enable community to take greater responsibility for their own information.  It experiments with TV on the web, working with Black, Arab, Latino, and White communities.
Principal: Tim Moore

The Michigan News Center – www.MichiganNewsCenter.org – is a non-partisan source for issues of public interest, especially investigative reporting that performs a watchdog and accountability role.  It approaches a traditional journalistic role in a new way, with a stated intention to share tools, equipment, and their platform with voices in the African-American, Latino, Muslim, and Caucasian communities.
Principal: Steve Wilson

Red Ink – http://www.make-them-think.org/ – provides public, socially driven and open source software for understanding consumer spending patterns. It experiments with visualization and public accessibility to aggregate data to support economic understanding and better quality social action.
Principal: Ryan O’Toole

Re-inventing Assignment Detroit – Transform Time Inc.’s Assignment Detroit into a multiplatform, community centered vision whose mission is to reimagine the image of Detroit.
Principal: Juanita Anderson