David Cohn, 2010-2011 FellowThis is a summary of the event that took place at the Reynolds Journalism Institute on April 17th-19th made possible by the Knight Foundation and RJI.
To begin I want to express thanks for the opportunity to organize this event. As I explained to the 30+ participants, this event was in part to be juxtaposed with the Aspen Institute Roundtable that took place in August of 2010. At that event were heavy hitters such as Dean Singleton, the president of PBS, CPB and NPR along with the Executive Editor of the Washington Post and the lead council for News Corp. It was a fantastic event but throughout it all, I played a bit of an outlier. The best example was that several times a recommended action basically boiled down to "let's lobby congress." This is indeed a good action to take, but it wouldn't have been the first thought that crossed my mind.
At the RJI event we discussed four recommendations from the Knight Commission Report with the goal to come up with ideas for implementation. In other words how to go from the idea phase to execution.
For this event I gathered other folks who, I believe, would have been outliers at the Aspen Institute Roundtable. Individuals who are not necessarily at the centers of power, but who are creating their own centers of power. Individuals who have experience working on the ground building or managing projects and endeavors that are being built from the ground up.
Broad analysis and themes
There were a few themes that surfaced through the 1.5 days. One that was underlying throughout it all, as Michael pointed out and later was echoed by several participants, was a general lack of reliance on journalism/news institutions. There wasn't any 'bashing' of institutions but the majority of solutions proposed didn't rely on existing infrastructure to accomplish goals. Many of the ideas imagined building something from scratch or using the momentum of understood cultural norms rather than the weight of known brands/institutions.
As one of the participants put it "There are small solutions to each recommendation that just needed to be done and not talked about."
On the opposite side of things, there was a re-occuring theme about a reliance on community institutions ranging from barber shops to libraries. A general theme was to "work with anchor institutions [in a community] bring the journalism to the people, don't bring the people to the journalism."
In addition to this, media literacy was discussed throughout the day, specifically the means by which individuals could get quality out of the quantity. It's worth noting that it became a hang-up for almost every discussion I observed at some point.
At the end of the event several participants referred to it as a 'idea hackathon' which I take to be a fancy word for 'brainstorm' which is what it was intended to be.
Obvious wins
Without a doubt the individual attendees were engaged. The best proof of this was, funny enough, that there were almost no tweets on the first day. Instead of keeping their noses buried in computers waiting for an opportunity to tweet, as is the case at many events, the participants spent the entire day in rigorous conversations.
The second day was a nice transition and allowed for a healthy backchannel conversation during the presentations.
"Tuesday morning was quite redeeming. I came away inspired, and I feel like we nailed down a number of solid recommendations. Microphones and the seating arrangement made me feel like a capable baller." [Daniel Bachhuber]
Another obvious win was for the Reynolds Journalism Institute. I believe this was a good opportunity for RJI to dip its toes into a different community and also exposed a new community to RJI, an organization they might otherwise not be aware of.
Specific recommendations
At the event we discussed four recommendations from the Knight Commission Report with the goal to come up with ideas for implementation. In other words how to go from the idea to execution phase.
Media Education
1. While the majority of the conversations were constructive one group spent a fair amount of time expressing an initial frustration with the current model of student journalism. In their own words: "What you are seeing is large grants to Universities to create innovation and community news initiatives lead by people who, frankly, have not been at the cusp of innovation in the newsroom or startups for a long time."
Their final recommendation took the form of a "Report for America" program. A year-long intensive fellowship for post-undergraduate students of various academic disciplines. It would have a matching process between students and startups. "Fund people that want [to be part of the process] with those that are [already part of the process]. Small organizations could make a list of what they need and be matched with students that can meet those needs." Their theme: Instead of funding for innovation, "fund people that want with people that are."
2. The second group focused on the middle school and high school level. They decided they were not likely to create new "media literacy" classes and it would be a failed attempt to try. But media literacy is probably already a part of many teacher's current curriculum. Thus, create a two-year program to network teachers already integrating media literacy into their curriculum and highlight the best work being done. A network would include an online community for these educators to connect, exchange ideas, best practices, create a free central online resource that showcases the best of their work using video, teaching guides and other resources. Help these teachers become a community. They'll be relatively atomized. But through a network we hope to create case studies, lessons plans and plug-and-play tools (handouts, games, excercises) that could be used in various classes (history, social studies, etc). Offer incentives for teachers to take part and get recognized for their work.
Note 1: An important side note: This is not DARE for media literacy. It should not be a scare tactic, which is often the tone that media literacy takes.
Note 2: It would seem to follow that the innovating teachers will, generally, also come from the resource-rich areas. What works for those innovators might not work for a teacher in another community because the second group of teachers and administrators will be less familiar with the technology, as will the students and parents there.
3. Adopt a Wikipedia Page (instead of adopting a class hamster or highway) - Have high school classrooms adopt a relevant Wikipedia page and update/monitor them for an academic year.
4. Talking specifically about journalism schools: Remove the academic Journal part of journalism. Replacing the form - same amount of time and care of scholarship - but scholarship as engagement with community - as opposed to publishing into a journal.
5. The last group created a potential curriculum that they would like to see in action at the middle school / high school level. It would include both consumption and production, as the two are inextricably linked in any media fluency program (they specifically preferred the word 'fluency' over 'literacy' because it articulates the connection between consumption and production).
A five part media fluency program:
1. Put tools in the students hands (use tools they already are familiar with).
2. Students use a community center (library) to find and research a problem.
3. Work to turn information into a presentable form, perhaps working with media professionals/producers (media community).
4. Work with business/design/graduate student community to brand, design and publish material.
5. Teachers/schools reflect on the whole process and how it was received.
New Sources of News
An overarching discussion for this topic was how to get quality out of the quantity of news sources. Part of the discussion may have been framed too much by the reporters' frame of mind. As one participant put it "We're looking for tools to make sense of existing networks so reporters can more easily find better sources, and ask the right questions."
1. An X-prize for reporting based off the Netflix Challenge: "If the Netflix challenge is any indicator of the way these challenges can motivate…. collaboration naturally happens among the top people who care the most about the project. An on the fly community of practice emerges with the right push."
Caveats: This won't work for every question - you need a clear metric of success so you know when to reward the person/group who ultimately pulls it off. You also have issues with marketing and rewarding collaboration.
2. A related "challenge" note: DARPA Red Balloon Challenge. DARPA had a competition where they scattered red balloons around the US and told people to find them. A team from MIT won the competition in 9 hours - it freaked everyone out. Many other industries aside form the news industry deal with the challenge of finding reliable sources really fast - the military is a big one and we can adopt techniques they've spent a lot of money developing over to journalism.
3. Source analytics dashboard (this is from the view of a reporter or a coop of reporters).
To develop a rich social analytics tool to provide newsrooms an efficient way of examining a source's online connections and content. How is this different from PIN? PIN's info is restricted to what people offer about themselves. We're combining that with social network analytics and a database of sources where reporters can log their interactions with them. Think Rapportive.com but for reporters.
4. Coverage LeaderBoard -- aka The Void Finder
Create a means for municipalities to see the demand for the data that they should be releasing. Note: Model Local Open Government Initiative.
Add on: Interoperability. Communities shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel.
5. Awesome Foundation for News: The Awesome Foundation is a collective of people who pay $100 a month to be a member. Once a month the collective (50 people for example) take proposals on how the $5,000 should be spent (a city art project, buying books for the library, etc). This would be a model like this for news. Fifty people in a city pay in $100 a month and at the end of every month they'd get proposals for investigations that they would vote on and commission. In many respects it is a 'reverse spot.us' - in that the proposal doesn't come to the entire public - it comes to a group of people that have already committed money to fund something.
6. Create a CPR for breaking news. An information protocol. We are taught from a young age if we're on fire to "stop, drop and roll." Is there a media protocol? Can one be created? Related: Can we anticipate the social graph of a disaster in the same way Facebook anticipates the social graph of planning an event?
Left over: Create an authenticated, secure openleaks model for specific verticals. A more concrete suggestion building on this is to....go Beyond theWiki
Diversity in the news
Some of our recommendations really center around the collaboration between existing news outlets. The underlying theme: Find existing community information providers that are already thriving, but need support for capacity building in order to expand their reach and apply a generous layer of News Challenge technology. This mimics the underlying theme behind one of the media education recommendations: Don't fund for innovation, fund people who will be matched to work with where there is need.
1. Breakout idea: The CAT Signal (Community Action Team) was probably the break out idea of the day. The group behind it didn't want their session to end, they were having a lot of fun exploring the idea. They even registered a domain and created a Twitter. C.A.T. - Community Action Network.
"Within a narrow test-case neighborhood or town, create a networked coalition of civic groups that will respond to a one-time-only request — a C.A.T. signal — granted to all residents. The scarcity and direct action will increase buy-in and solving problems will grow involvement. Yes, there is a website. Peep the slides here. Our rather smilingly self-indulgent trumpeting brought quite a bit of interest in the idea."
Notes from the C.A.T. Team: A test case would actually be pretty simple. Pick a community organization (a rotary club, YMCA, etc) and give each member of that group a C.A.T. Signal. Each member can only use it once. When one member uses it, the entire group agrees to come together to help.
2. Discussion on the Information Toolkit: Many folks found the Information Tool Kit to be a fantastic development. Their first immediate suggestion is to develop a software solution to use the assessment guide instead of just a PDF Download.
There was discussion of adding a layer of questions to the toolkit to reveal other ways the community might be undeserved (food access, health, transportation) and find trends. This would enable finding more communities based on trends that have undeserved media needs without necessarily having them go through the info tool kit assessment. Another way to quickly identify communities without going through the PDF assessment could be scrapping wiki pages to identify areas that meet a specific population size but lack a number of media resources.
Finally: Another addition would be to make an individual version of this on top of the community assessment ie: a Nielsen rating system for everything that goes in my eyes ears.
Online Community Hub
This recommendation may have proven to be the toughest. It incorporated bits of every conversation earlier in the day (education, sources of news, diversity) and took them one step further. There was also some contention around the wording of this recommendation "to ensure that every community has at least one online hub." Finally - it was generally agreed that the heavy lifting would be in rural and smaller communities.
1. Identifying communities information needs: A new index: Something similar to the Standard and Poor's Index. A community information index which would be shared and spread. Just as many communities tout their home price index or uses an index to cite and tackle problems, these ratings would have validity and meaning. If a city is lagging it will face accountability. If it's succeeding it could be hailed as a place where companies want to move (if there is an 'early adopter' index then Silicon Valley might rank the highest - hence it is a center for technology companies).
The information index could turn into a real market value and could be pushed forward by a for-profit company or professional operation. A polling operating might want to offer this index as a service. It would require a lot of work and there is disagreement if a company would be interested or if it would pay off. But political, real estate and other operations would appreciate a community information index.
2. The Webabago: Using partner anchor institutions for promotions, credibility and location, launch an initiative of rurally-focused mobile internet-connected computer centers that offer (1) computer access, (2) media literacy and (3) media production training for an online hub that starts with a community calendar and moves toward news coverage. This is an expansion of rural book-mobiles and university extension services, as recommended by the Knight Commission. The foundational assumption here is that we cannot develop online hubs without in-person hubs first. The name "Webabago" hints at a mobile unit that is already a food cart, ice cream truck, etc. Some unit that already brings a community together.
3. Local government publishing dashboard: Create a low-cost or no-cost open source toolkit of services that can be provided to local governments to create workflow and publish relevant data, information and local news. There are concerns around transparency, but this is a start.
4. Like Davis Wiki, local wikis can help smaller communities develop their own institutional memory and essential hubs. Chris Amico’s ideas of what an online hub is.
Weaknesses
If an event like this were to take place again some or all of these weaknesses would need to be addressed.
1. The first was time constraints. This was a jam packed 1.5 days. The first full day was dedicated to discussion. The second half-day spent reporting back. A little more time would have allowed for a third step and perhaps less of a stressed schedule on the first day.
Potential third steps could have been
(a. Swapping of project leads. Passing recommendations from one group to another in order to scrutinize the ideas from a different perspective.
(b. Further prototyping. Some of the groups did get to this last stage, providing slides, concrete examples, etc. One group even went so far as to register a URL: http://www.catsignal.org/
2. Breadth: I purposefully kept the conversation very broad. I thought it important not to try and influence the direction of recommendations or the conversation, but to allow people and individuals to direct their own recommendations organically from their own conversations. As one participant put it "you can't make a cocktail with a full bar."
Other constraints that the participants suggested would be to have the conversation around implementations that would require little to no money (under $150,000 for example).
In the end, I don't think the broad scope was so much a weakness as a path that the discussion was based upon. One could organize events like this around all kinds of constraints and that would fundamentally change the course of the event. With that in mind, this is also another way to understand the weakness of time already mentioned above ie: we only have time to pick one constraint.
3. Intimacy with Knight Commission Report.
While links to the Knight Commission Report was sent out to all the participants their level of intimacy with the report was still limited. Perhaps with more time and pressure they would have been more comfortable with the material. Despite the instructions to start with the recommendations and think forward about implementation much of the conversation still circled around the recommendations. As one attendee said " ....yet discussions always seemed to reference the difficulties involved with helping people find and judge quality news and information, along with significant challenges such as the lack of Internet access in rural and isolated communities."
In other words, a lot of time was spent acknowledging the challenges that have already been expressed in the recommendations. This is important and perhaps required to put forth any implementation, but future gatherings should find ways to jump directly into the conversation getting past discussing the merit of the recommendation itself.
4. It was a diverse group in every way but two. There was an intentional bias for a younger crowd. The majority of folks came from a 'journalism' background. We could have benefited from getting more people who are approaching these issues from outside the framework of a 'journalist.' Alas - about 5 of the individuals I had originally invited who would have served that purpose were unable to attend. Still, I think we can look at this as a positive if future events like this take place. From an anthropological perspective it would be interesting to have a similar event with various other groups ie: majority technologists, majority teachers, etc and see if language, bias' change as a result.
Conclusions
I consider the event a success on several fronts. It was a fun and stimulating event for the individuals and it also created some tangible ideas and thoughts, many of them wouldn't be hard to implement or prototyped in a relatively short time-frame. While there were some weaknesses (noted above) it was far more valuable than many other events I've been to. As somebody that has attended roundtables at Aspen and Washington D.C. (J-lab) and elsewhere and more panel-esque discussions than I care to count, I do believe that having a focus or goal to create tangible recommendations or ideas ready to implement is of value both to the Knight Foundation and also the individuals and culture of innovation that Knight has been a leader in fostering.
Other Media of the Event
Blog posts
Columbia Journalism Review
Christopher Wink
Kim Bui
Andre Natta
Lauren Rabaino
David Herrera
Video interviews with almost half of the participants
http://www.youtube.com/user/digidavid#g/c/2BCAAF191D20DC6F
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