After I wrote a series of articles for the Huffington Post on the promise of a mission-based news room L3C and the struggles of Chicago’s nascent news blogosphere I was invited to serve on a committee hosted by the Chicago Community Trust. With our input, the Chicago Community Trust in conjunction with the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation decided to develop a seed fund to fortify the city’s emerging news streams.
I was fortunate to land some consulting clients later in 2009 that lined up my work life squarely with my passion. That passion, to bring journalistic writing standards to the web and to bring the Web’s innovations to newsrooms – has absorbed my life for the past 20 years. I’ll be writing about that in columns to come.
One of my new clients was Andy Shaw, former Channel 7 news reporter and new Executive Director for Chicago’s Better Government Association. Together we developed a strategy and series of proposals for the BGA’s online presence. The other client is LISC-Chicago, whose anti-poverty and community development work is stretching the boundaries of community based multimedia. LISC-Chicago is also working in partnership with other news rooms like that of the Chicago Reporter and Catalyst to build a hyperlocal news bureau.
It was a year ago [March 31, 2009] that the Chicago Sun-Times declared bankruptcy and I was on a Chicago Tonight segment discussing the future of news in Chicago, the L3C mission-based newsroom and the state of the Sun-Times newsroom. Much has happened since then. The Sun-Times was bought by James Tyree and a group of investors. The Chicago Tribune unveiled its Chicago Now blog group. The Chicago News Cooperative, a “possible” news co-op and “maybe” L3C was unveiled. And Geoff Dougherty’s flagship NPO newsroom, The Chi-Town Daily News, closed its doors.
I have traveled extensively researching new media trends and surfacing ideas. I am still at it. There is more to come. And I am excited to share.
News of a Chicago Social Venture Forum at University of Chicago from long-time colleague Linda Darragh at Booth.
In 2010, Chicago Booth teamed with the Foundation Source to launch the first-of-its-kind Social Venture Forum, which aims to offer private foundations new opportunities and techniques for social enterprise investing. Foundations learn how to further their social mission while generating financial return by deploying philanthropic capital in innovative ways. If your social venture seeks funding, we encourage you submit an application to the Chicago Social Venture Forum. Please see the application and rules (PDF). All submissions are due to Erika Mercer [ Erika.mercer AT chicagobooth.edu ]by September 20, 2010.
Interesting post by Dan X. O’Neill on using FourSquare to record where you go and what you do. Counter to what Dan suggests here certain aspects of my life are so private I would not think of putting them on Foursquare – i.e. a visit to my gynecologist — for instance.
As I read Dan’s post I felt some pushback – perhaps generational and gender based — against answering the question “where have you been.” How about you?
I was, however, thinking about transparency on the Web and feeling my personal edges around my
reputation” when earlier today I was testing Unvarnished, which says it is a “Truth in Reputation” tool.
Choosing my Unvarnished “reviewers” felt different from choosing my “reviewees.” I found that I wanted my reviewers to be people who I see as having some amount of “prestige” in their work, whom I feel have a good personal brand and are willing to experiment on the Web – my peeps with brand clout. In selecting my reviewees I tended to select folks whom I know well, who are experimenters in the Web or start-up worlds and whom I know well enough to say something about.
Unvarnished is not the first reputation-ranking tool on the Web, by the way. But the fact that is plugged into both Facebook and LinkedIn reinforces its likelihood for longevity. Whuffie anyone?
To get me talking ask me about: Would you like to hear my idea about how new technology could be used for measuring wealth as it is created and circulated in neighborhoods? And how the collected metrics could be translated into a driver for foundation investment.
I’d like to build a newsroom delivering information for specific communities of interest. Foundations would fund it in part with investments. The return they would expect would be decided by metrics of community wealth and community connectedness.
The online dots are quickly connecting. Gov2.0 entrepreneurs are building a strong backbone for a hyperlocal new stream. And much of the innovation is seated here in Chicago.
Many Chicago alderman are signed up for SeeClickFix. We are forming new communication channels on the Web for talking to our governments, creating a crowd-sourced complaint system and measuring the quality of government’s response to our complaints and requests for service. [I've embedded it here on my website - so give it a spin.] More to come on the feedback systems that could drive all this.
I haven’t talked with OutsideIn for a while but I see that the creators of the conceptual framework of the Emerging Ecosystem of News Delivery have a robust stream of information coming in from news blogs.
There’s no formula for bringing all this together and making it all work like a well-oiled machine. But – as was evident from a panel on models for news and the optimistic viewpoint of Steve Rhodes about revenue models at Chicago’s Community Media Workshop last week, we have many reasons to look brightly to the future.
We also have the “Big” thinkers now stepping forward and touting tools for getting the information you want, many of which James Fallows outlined in this June piece in the Atlantic Monthly. Give GoogleNews a spin – you’ll like it. Even the New York Times Magazine is taking notice of the plight of New Journalism Entrepreneurs in this May 10 piece by Andrew Rice “Putting a Price on Words.” It’s something I first noted in a ChuffPo post last year.
At this rarified high level of information exchange online, there’s much going on front stage and behind the scenes. There are more moving parts than can be counted.
I was reminded last week that all this blue sky can quickly go gray from the clouds cast by the lack of online access for underserved communities. Committed community news activists and journalists (no longer news-room bound) gathered in Detroit for “Create or Die” an open space on Journalism that Matters.
That’s a conversation that is continuing at a higher pitch and urgency June 24 at “From Blueprint to Building: Making the Market for Digital Information,” which Bill Densmore calls an action congress for trust, identity and Internet information commerce serving newspapers and beyond. Trust is our currency on the Web, and we’ve made much progress defining that since Pierre Omidyar made his first discoveries on eBay. Now even Omidyar has gotten the news bug and has launched Honolulu’s Civil Beat. Densmore hopes his “Blueprint” will dot the “i’s and cross the “t”s on the next phase of online trust. We’re hopeful and we will see.
As the Chicago News Cooperative continues to explore the idea of the low-profit limited liability, or L3C, business structure, the Pt. Reyes Light in Marin County says it is taking the plunge and will become a mission-driven newsroom.
As Steve Yelvington explained so well in this presentation last year at the University of Minnesota Economic Models for News, journalism has never had a business model of its own. My thinking is that it is about time it does, as I explained at Community Media Workshop panel last month. That’s why I am continuing to follow and braid the threads leading to a social enterprise news stream.
It can’t be long now before this all comes together, and when it does it will be in several robust forms that will provide access to volumes of information we’ve not had access to before. And it will be up to a diversity of journalists to do the job of helping to create, vet, sort and distribute these streams.
Hold on for a wild ride.
Follow Sally Duros on Twitter: www.twitter.com/saduros
Free Speech TV will provide the space, equipment, and crew for you to conduct your interview and report directly from the People’s Media Center in Cobo Hall. FSTV will promote your story on Facebook & Twitter in real time, your video stories will be archived (so you can access them after the event, and all content is shared, so you can embed the video feed into your social network and onto partnering Web sites.
Bonnie Gross, Outreach & Member Services Manager for Free Speech TV, says they have spots available for reporting at the Forum. If you’d like to contribute to the reporting please contact Gross at bonnie@freespeech.org or cell 415. 531. 9078. In your email give a quick one liner on what you are planning to cover or attend.
“We will be covering plenary sessions with C-Span-like coverage,” Gross said. Free Speech TV is interested in “Any workshops that journalists think will translate well on TV.”
Gross said: “We have 13 journalists as part of our editoreial team. I have slots that we are looking to fill of about 10 minutes long.” All the content generated will be shared and you can get an embed code from the Free Speech TV.
For those of you who were in Detroit last week for Journalism that Matters, I thought I would share the link for the Mobile Neighborhood Tours I just helped produce here in Chicago.
Produced by community leaders, LISC-Chicago Mobile Neighborhood Tours are — I believe — the first community driven and created media of this kind.
To date, you can only see them in your smart phone. Visit this address in your phone’s browser:
tours.lisc-chicago.org
Our sell copy reads:
“A project of LISC’s Chicago Community Showcase, our Mobile Neighborhood Tours connect visitors with the exciting futures of Chicago’s neighborhoods. Whether an ethnic eatery, a local landmark building, an historic site or a place where the future is being planned and birthed, our destinations have been selected through the collective wisdom of the community that values, preserves and creates them.”
Here’s some training to help you do it. This announcement doesn’t have a deadline for applying.
REQUEST FOR APPLICATIONS FOR JOURNALIST TRAINING “Reading between the Lines: Unraveling Illinois Redistricting” June 17 & 18, 2010 If you need additional info, contact Terry Pastika, Executive Director, Citizen Advocacy Center. tpastika@citizenadvocacycenter.org Phone: 630.833.4080
The online dots are quickly connecting. Gov2.0 entrepreneurs are building a strong backbone for a hyperlocal new stream. And much of the innovation is seated here in Chicago. […]
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For nearly two decades, newspapers have been challenged to evolve into knowledge-based organizations capable of adapting to the innovations of the Web. Instead of progressing, they've been traded as chits in a greedy money-grab game by short-sighted media conglomerates. […]
Our emerging newsrooms will be staffed in part by a generation of newshounds -- yes, journalists -- who've taken on the task of news delivery through the Web on their own. […]
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