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Create or Die Project Awards Announcement

On the last day of the June 3-6 Journalism That Matters event in Detroit –  – we hosted a half-day session for pitching projects.

To further the experiment, thanks to the generosity of Time Inc.’s Assignment Detroit and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, the JTM-Create or Die organizers invited participants to submit proposals for seed funding. We are pleased to announce the outcomes.

Our criteria:

  • Initiatives experimenting with innovations in news and information by and/or for diverse communities
  • Experiments that don’t tend to receive traditional foundation funding
  • Proposers who attended the Detroit conference

Five teams made requests.  In the spirit of helping many flowers bloom, we have provided all of them with some support.

The Recipients:
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Newswire21.org plans DC bureau, as JTM alum ramps up

Submitted by Tom Murphy on Wed, 06/16/2010 – 1:06pm

Newswire21.org, a new nonprofit startup that aims to reinvent the wire service from the ground up, is looking for writers and editors in the DC area to help start our Washington bureau. If you’ve ever wanted to help start a cool, new news service, this is your chance. Those who volunteer to help get N21 started will earn preference in hiring when we receive funds to offer jobs.

We’re looking for experienced journalists who recognize the media world is changing and want to swim with the tide instead of against it. Newswire21’s mission is to blend the passion of community-based citizen reporting with the best practices of traditional journalism, creating a complete local, national and world report that can be offered to web sites at minimal cost. Think of it as a wikipedia of news that is run as a cooperative led by experienced journalists. Your participation could be full-time or as little as one day a week.

We’re currently seeking seed grants that would allow us to offer salaries, and we hope to be financing our own growth after just two years. Newswire21 was a finalist for the Knight News Challenge competition, but has not yet received funding. Even so, we’ve already conducted a promising pilot project in the San Francisco Bay Area in collaboration with the San Francisco State Journalism Department, the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism, the SF Neighborhood Empowerment Network, Spot.Us and others.

Based on that success, we plan to expand nationally by fall, blending a professional news report — world, national and local — tailored to the 21st century needs of new media (hence our name – Newswire21).  Existing wire services employ a 19th century business model designed to help newspapers reduce staffing costs. That model makes little sense today and leaves thousands of web sites with few affordable options to bring world and national news to their readers.

Founder/EIC Tom Murphy will be in DC to interview participants on Jun 21-22.  Murphy has more than 30 years experience at news companies like The AP, Bloomberg, RedHerring.com and MarketWatch, where he was the founding managing editor. If you’d like to set up a meeting, or just want more info, please contact Murphy atInfo@Newswire21.org.

Audience (formerly), Business Models, Curriculum, Events, Home Page, JTM News, Seattle, Technology

What questions do you have?

The first full day of JTM/PNW was possibility day — a series of conversations about questions. Here are some of the topics:

  • Can open government online help sustain the new news ecology?
  • How can we create sustainable freelance in an increasingly decentralized newsroom?
  • What is possibility, solution journalism and how can I do it?
  • Do we respect the audience and, if so, how do we show it?
  • What can academia do for the “new news”?
  • How can journalists support community and remain fact-based, truth tellers?
  • How can we pay for city hall beat reporters and Olympia gavel-to-gavel coverage?
  • How can technology better serve journalism?
  • Can you survive the new “free” economy?
  • After the crash, how can we re-connect local audiences with journalism that isn’t hyper-local?
  • How is journalism different with the tool is a Wiki?
  • How do we ensure that the new news ecology is infused with diverse voices?
  • What should journalism be in the 21st Century? What should community be?
  • What aspects of traditional media journalism need to be preserved and what should be jettisoned?
  • Can issue advertising be leveraged to support new forms of issue journalism?
  • How can I sustain my local blog and sustain it as a business?

Today we move into anwsers.

Events, Home Page, JTM News, Member News, Seattle

mind stretched open – eyes wide

Submitted by jamesian on Fri, 01/08/2010 – 3:56pm

I was the host of a session that I did not want to host.

(cue music from Twilight Zone) because someone came up to me and asked, “Will you host a session>”

First surprise.

His name is Lion, and he has a scientist’s education but a philosopher’s questions. Why do people fracture into pro and anti-science?

Because of his leadership, we had about seven people who could not stop talking. My role as facilitator was easy.. they talked and talked and talked.

Thanks to the JTM group for bringing this new process in and helping us accept that the right people are there at the right time.

I learned something new.

Second surprise.

Events, Home Page, JTM News, Member News, Seattle

Look Who’s Coming to Journalism That Matters/Pacific Northwest

Submitted by Mike Fancher on Thu, 01/07/2010 – 8:41am

More than 200 people are registered to attend Journalism That Matters/Pacific Northwest, which opens today at the University of Washington.

For fun, I arbitrarily categorized how the participants described themselves in biographies they posted on the JTM site. Nobody fits neatly in any one category, so I picked the description that seemed most central to the person’s work.

Here is a breakdown:

  1. Civic activists / Community representatives 42
  2. Educators 23
  3. Online journalists 21
  4. Students 14
  5. Newspaper 12
  6. Radio 11
  7. Television 10
  8. Technologists 9
  9. Organization representatives 8
  10. Filmmakers 7
  11. Targeted publications 7
  12. Entrepreneurs 6
  13. Freelancers 6
  14. Public and Media Relations 6
  15. Business representatives 5
  16. Photographers/visual 5
  17. Media Reformers 4

I’m delighted that the largest category is made up of people who don’t produce journalism themselves but who care about it enough to attend this gathering. After all, the convening questions for JTM/PNW include:

How can the press and the public help each other? What’s possible now? How do we activate new forms of civic and public engagement?

*******

Comment

arbitrary categorization

jamesian's picture
Submitted by jamesian on Thu, 01/07/2010 – 9:17am.

Dear Mr. Editor:

The filter you applied to this group is interesting… it is that sort of filtering that you, as a newspaper journalist, did every day. But how would someone else have labeled this crowd?

The key sentence is “I picked the description that seemed most central.”

I’m not complaining, just pointing out that style of thinking. What’s wrong with people not fitting neatly into categories? What other ways are there to filter the data?

Sally James
James Writing
http://www.nasw.org/users/sjames