because so many of the people speaking today are doing exactly that. And we get to hear about it,
common thread in these projects is that organizations, reap the benefits of content sharing, while maintaining a high level of autonomy and editorial independence.
A local ongoing and separate collaboration that we looked at in the report is between Charlotte Morrow, and the Julie progress both in Charlottesville, Virginia. And here, Charles both tomorrow began as a newsletter focused on education issues, and the daily progress is the area's legacy printing paper. The progress began to print. Tomorrow's education stories when they downsize. And now, hundreds of stories later, They're still involved collaboration has been huge mutually beneficial
taxonomy and editorial independence. Taxonomy and editorial independence,
editorial independence
autonomy and editorial independence.
And next model, ongoing, and
ongoing project, creating or producing the content together.
Usually, these types of collaborations have regular editorial meetings or calls,
and most successful in this model have a project manager, who oversees the collaboration
where all the partners may have been sending a report. Now just wonderful collaboration also allows reporters to gain insights from other geographical locations or topic areas, They wouldn't have had access to working alone.
Our economy and editorial independence autonomy and editorial independence autonomy and editorial independence, dependent.
While we were researching collaborations in this model we found several that began with a grant, usually from Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And then they decided to continue after the grant funding. They agreed upon an amount that each partner would pay, and that was working for the collaboration manager and for other resources.
And we see in the report that this is a promising path forward for collaboration to begin within an initial branch, and want to continue after
the final model is ongoing and integrated
editorial independence,
ongoing collaboration, more organizations are sharing resources at the level of
the organization.
This model is not yet very common but we do see it as a really innovative way of addressing some of the challenges about local media landscape.
Editorial hiring and promotion decisions are made, completely independently, but they share an ad network, a proprietary platform, or accounting services are sometimes.
Collaboration is using this model of fine that sharing back office services creates efficiencies and allows them to hire professionals to do this work, which are usually not strong students
and editorial independence,
economy and editorial independence,
undergoing an integrated collaboration or not for the faint of heart. You have to be willing to cede control of major aspects of the operation.
Those were taking the funds to find
this ongoing income creating ongoing integrated
temporary and separate
ongoing, and Co creating
marks anime and editorial independence.
And with that, I will introduce our panel. Our moderator will be the center's director Stefanie Murray. Murray.
So now that involves, come with me this far, I've got just a bit of a confession to make. This talk is not going to be about city Bureau, we're going to talk about power. Yours. Our hours, collectively, and how we use it.
What we mean
is that
power is the ability to produce the intended effect. Power is the ability to employ force. Power is the ability to cause or prevent controversial opinion maybe in a roomful of journalists, but in journalism. Another word for power and impact
as journalists, we have a lot, sometimes talk around it, we sometimes need objectivity. But what we do as journalists is influence and change society for better or worse.
Fortunately, power is infinite. Better repeat this a few times so I want to just unpack it a bit and take a step back.
Eric Lew writes about this in his book, you're more powerful than you think. A lot of power versus Power concentrates, as does powerlessness, as does impact. The second is that power justifies, so it creates narratives to explain why the people who have power should keep that power.
We have this third law. There is no limit on the amount of power, citizens can generate.
I want to
unpack. Say impact is another word for power because impact is the ability to reduce intended effects.
When your story prompts the pothole to be fixed, or a financial audit of the government or the mayor defined for corruption, or the President be impeached, someone working on. That's, that's impact right there. Engagement is a growing field in journalism that many of us here at practice I've been hearing a lot about it's been really loving the conversations I've been hearing. The core tenants of engagement can be described in many ways, but one of my favorites is that is build friendships with people, formerly known as an audience
engagement can lead to a variety of positive outcomes like social media engagement with the different questions or comments at your events between the newsroom, and the public, among many, many others quipping, however, is about agency is about providing access opportunities for participation and production. Equipping is about teaching and learning. It's about exchanging skills and
resources.
It is a redistribution of power between institutions individuals. And it scares the hell out of people in power, flipping is recognizing that there is no cap on the amount of power. People can create.
Recognizing that power, people already have, and providing access to resources that build power.
The difference here is pretty reporters that equip your community causes the mayor to be fired for corruption to get fixed for the fans in the local government. In the process, frustrated and experienced can be created between your new stories.
So, once you propose a more unified vision for journalism here
as journalists, we are great at informing, we are getting much better at engaging and but we have a ways to go. In a perfect, but I believe that journalism that strengthens democracy will do all three. So,
drafting.
Drafting
Drafting. Don't just engage
Purefoy and I'm the racing place editor at Callaway
today but
yeah I'm just going to give you a bit of a story about our collaboration is a five year old magazine and media organization headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, devoted to journalism and storytelling that illuminate the unsettled dominant narratives pursues justice and liberation and stands in solidarity with marginalized people and communities across the south, and today I'm going to talk with you a little bit about one of our collaborative projects with a writer who's currently incarcerated on death row in North Carolina.
Four years ago a format scale wide approach to our team about a writing workshop in this facilitating with death row prisoners at Raleigh Central Prison. One of the participants a while may have already written a memoir, and was seeking an opportunity to write more for the public. He wanted to write about the problems with the education and parole policies in North Carolina's prison system. While was sentenced to death in 1999 and 21 years old. He told me that prison was where he, when he decided to pursue his education as he goes through the decades long appeals process to be released from prison in North Carolina did not have access to publicly funded education. The general prison population they are deemed unworthy of such privileges. The resources are considered wasted on the other 140 Men currently on death row, Lyle is one of the only prisoners who has attained an advanced degree while incarcerated 2016 aesthesis Galloway, he said, quote, to be something more than the poison of prison air that lethal combination of hatred, bitterness and ignorance that rots mind, body and soul.
Believe that for granted, he faces another possibility life without parole, simply another way to make prisoners disposable.
Everyone execution is still.
Hello. Hi. I am so glad that you are here. Collaborative journalism summit, I am Stefanie Murray, I'm the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, and I'm so grateful that you are joining us today for our fifth symposium, examining and celebrating how collaboration in journalism can help us better partner with and be in service of communities around the entire world. So during this year's summit I want to note briefly we are offering Spanish interpretation. So if you hover over your screen and click on the little world at the bottom where it says interpretation, you can change your audio to Spanish. So I know many of you here with us today have been to previous collaborative journalism Summit, and if that's you, thank you. We're so glad that you're back. If this is your first time with us. Welcome. I hope that you feel comfortable and that you will learn a lot over the next three days together. So this is our second year in a row, as a virtual conference last year we pivoted rather quickly. And, my God, what, what, a year it's been since we were last together, and I want to acknowledge that. If this past year did not show us that collaboration, must be a backbone of the media industry going forward, then I'm not sure what would, many of you here have run, or you're part of journalism collaborations, especially those that have happened over the last year to 18 months that have been very impactful on your communities, you know, in this very chaotic and challenging time, you have worked together to make it work through a global pandemic in the United States through a national reckoning with systemic racism through natural disasters, through an insurrection here in the US, all the while working long hours, or being furloughed or laid off or taking care of sick family members, you've some of you've probably lost loved ones and I'm so sorry for that. Others are struggling with mental health. It has been a lot. But over the next three days together. I really hope that we can focus on the good work that we can do together. When we collaborate around the world and talk about how we build partnerships in partnership with communities. So a lot to talk about together over the next three days. We have about 350 people who have signed up for this year Summit. And we have more than 80 individual speakers. As always we have a very busy schedule with back to back to back sessions and we're going to try as best we possibly can to keep everything on schedule. One thing that you will notice about the summit. If this is your first time you should notice this, if you have joined us before you may have noticed this too is that you're not going to hear from folks who are running news companies, you don't typically invite top senior level media executives, most of the folks who are going to be in the space with us, or people who are doing the work, or people who are on the ground, their reporters their editors their project managers, because we think that's the best way to learn from each other, to learn from the people who are actually doing the work. So there won't be a lot of pontificating, but we'll be talking about a lot of process. And, you know about how things get done, how things fail sometimes. And how we learn from that, you know, we've also worked to make this conference, this conference a more welcoming and inclusive and equitable environment over the last five years that we've done that. This year we adopted elements of the speaker, writer, that was introduced in early 2021 by the putting an open news and thank you for that. You can read about our commitments to creating a safe equitable and inclusive space at collaborative journalism that org slash commitments, and that was in everyone's registration information as well. So a couple things to note one commitment we made was to gathering respectfully gathering speaker and attendee demographics and sharing that information publicly. So I can let you know today that we ran through our numbers and 48% of our speakers said they identified as a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA community, and 38% of our attendees said the same.
Additionally, our conference has always had a code of conduct that we adopted thanks to inspiration from source content open news, you can find that also on on our commitments page, and at any time if you feel unwelcome or uncomfortable or bullied or harassed, please you can reach out to any of the CCM staff team, or on that commitments page there's a phone number and an email address, you can call, text or email us and we will do our very best to make sure that we help you in whatever way we can. So I want to thank our sponsors. The center has built its program in collaborative journalism on a shoestring budget piecing together money as best we can with help from some funders including Rita Allen, over the years, but it's these folks on the screen, who have made this year's conference possible so I'd like to thank them individually. First, I'm very grateful to the Knight Foundation, they are the sponsor of today day one of the collaborative journalism Summit. Thank you to the North Carolina. Local news lab fund. This is the second year in a row that you have sponsored us. Thanks to the Facebook journalism project to American Press Institute. You've been a great sponsor for years. The Lenfest Institute for journalism. Thank you. The John s night journalism fellowship program at Stanford. Thank you, Jay S K education NC with us last year and again this year. The Diedrich College of Communication. The O'Brian fellowship and public service journalism at Marquette. The Center for Public Integrity. Blue Lena is much foundation. The Reynolds journalism Institute jornalismo collaborative Oh, and of course our home base, the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. So I also want to thank and very briefly introduce our staff, some of whom you may see over the next three days and some of whom you will see mostly in the chat, or in your email. If you have a question. So first, thanks to our assistant director. That is Joe Amditis, the man behind the scenes. Thank you also to Betsy, Abraham, our project manager, and our speaker wrangler for this year Summit. And thank you to Denise Shannon, who has our event planner and who has been working on the administrative and financial side of our summit.
Thank you all.
So next, I would like to turn it over to Dr Keith Stadler, who is the Director of the School of Communication and Media here at Montclair State University, Keith would like to say a few welcoming remarks to the conference, keep.
Thank you so much, Stephanie and greetings and welcome to all who have joined this wonderful event. You know, as we are hopefully coming towards the end of one of the most challenging periods, certainly in all of our lifetimes, I think the work that's done by all of you and certainly by Stephanie and her team at the Center for Cooperative Media has reinforced the need for collaboration and cooperation in a way that that has been truly a kind of a parent and so, so thank you for spending the next few days with us for as much time as you're able to do so, you know, we think a little bit about collaboration and cooperation. That is so near and dear to what happens in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State, our school which is relatively new, but what we like to think quite, quite effective is home to now over 1200 Students studying and fields from journalism to film to television to sports to comp studies and others and soon to be advertising and animation, and while they exist in these disparate silos as we like to say in academia, we've learned quite adeptly often following the lead of Stefanie and Joe and all the people at the Center for Cooperative Media, how to effectively work together and understanding the the changes in the media ecosphere that make our codependence more important than ever. One of the things that we do at the school is every year we host a collaborative focus project where we take on an issue of social importance. This year it was racial justice, we've done climate change we've looked at immigration, and we, we allow our school members, faculty, staff and students to work together using their various skill sets to create content stories and campaigns that help address issues of great social importance so much in the spirit of this conference and certainly the Center for Cooperative Media. We increasingly recognize how important we are to each other in in ensuring that we are helping the next generation of storytellers and those that are the currency and truth, knowledge, and excellence. I just before I turn it back over to Stephanie, I would like to thank so many people who have made this possible first and foremost as Stephanie so well articulated, all of the sponsors who have contributed to this event in so many different ways. we know that it's a competitive landscape and and there are a lot of people that, that, that need and deserve funding and We're truly grateful that you share some of yours with this important cause. I'd like to thank all of the attendees who are here, near and far and certainly I know we have a large international audience as well. You're giving of your time and certainly you know if there are two commodities that are, are very valuable and finite time and money are obviously the top of those lists so thanks to those of you who have attended and we'll make this conference richer by your presence and your collaboration. I'd like to thank all of the the partners that work with the center throughout, you know, throughout the year and and work with Stephanie and her team to to activate all of the, the great ideas and certainly the Center for Cooperative Media is nothing without the partners and all the, the organizations that that help to, to kind of to to make the work that they do feasible and possible. And lastly, I would absolutely be remiss if I didn't, congratulate and thank Stephanie on every one of the Center for Cooperative Media, I know you know everyone who has worked very hard Joe certainly on this conference. It's, it's tireless work, and, and we truly appreciate it and it is a true treasure to have in our school and we are thankful that they, that they've, they've chosen Montclair State to be their home and so we think it's a, it's a rich symbiotic relationship. We look forward to the work that they do this week and certainly in the years to come. With that I will turn it back over to Stephanie, thank you so much for letting me speak everyone and enjoy the next several days and I hope it's rich and rewarding for everyone.
Thank you, Keith, thank you so much. We're very grateful to have a home here at the School of Communication and Media, so we appreciate all of your support. So now I want to talk about a few side activities and other fun things that we're offering to help you enjoy this year Summit. So to start off with you probably may have noticed already, but we will have a panelist who will be silent very busy. we've brought back Derrick dent to do graphic illustration again at this year's summit and we will again share all of his drawings, after the event is over so you can take a look and download them. Second, we want the chat to be active I just posted there. Introduce yourself, we want to see who's here, share anything you'd like about your work and who you are, please use the chat as much as you feel comfortable. Over the next few days to share your comments, ideas, anything that you want about what's happening, but if you have questions, please use the q&a box. So we're going to use the q&a box to help get questions to the folks who are speaking, that's how our hosts and all of our moderators will take questions and pitch them to the panels that you'll be seeing over the next few days. So I mentioned earlier the interpretation in Spanish, if you have any issues about that you can direct message any one of the CCM members, and then also thanks to otter. We have live transcription. So you can click on the live streaming link at the top of your zoom window, or we can also drop that link in the chat, because it's easier for you to access it that way, then also to bring some fun, we have brought back the Zoom bingo cards. So you can click on those links you can open them download them, it's a fun way to follow along, we try to spice them up a little bit for this year. We also of course have a collaborative music playlist. We have community awards, which are new this year, so we'll start to start dropping that link in the chat fairly soon. We want you to nominate people for different award catteries categories, and we've got one open award category two, we're going to give all the winners 500 $100 each, and we'll mail you that gift card next week. And then we have daily meditation sessions which I am really excited about with Dullea Jones of the Texas observer who joined us last year and will be back this year to help us relax and center ourselves a little bit. We're also using Padlet to run an asks and offers board so we did this last year and folks loved it. Please log into this Padlet, if you've got a job that is available if you're looking for a job, if you just want to collaborate with someone else, and you have something to ask or something to offer login, drop it there. At the end of the day today, we are going to bring you up on stage, you don't have to but we're going to welcome anyone from our from our community here today to come up on stage and pitch what you want to pitch your ask what you want to ask the entire audience, and this is sponsored by blue, Lena. So that should be great. And if all this as you dizzy, no worries. We have a dashboard for you. So, you see it on the screen now, we're going to drop a link in the chat. This has everything we just mentioned, So you have your one stop shop, collaborative journalism.org slash dashboard will get you anywhere you need to go over the next three days, so we hope that is helpful. Also share what you're seeing on social media, use the hashtag collaborative J or I've seen some folks using hashtag CJ s 2021 Both are awesome. We just want you to share what you're seeing, so we can spread. What we're learning to other members of the journalism industry who might not be with us in this space today.
So
with all of that. Now we're going to talk about the state of collaboration. So every year at the collaborative journalism Summit, we have kicked off with a discussion about what what's happening, what is the current state of collaboration, as it relates to the journalism industry. And we're gonna do that again this year. We've done a couple of videos in the past but this year I will give you a presentation, we'll also drop another link, that'd be a lot of links in the chat to a Medium post that we just published that goes into more depth on what I'm going to talk about in just a moment here. And if you have any questions for me. Go ahead, drop them in the q&a and I'll get to them as soon as I am done talking.
So let's take a look.
So as I mentioned, every year we do the state, the 2020, the state of collaboration. This is the 2021 state. So first of all, what's happening, what's happening out there. There are four key things we've identified, and part of these four things came from our research with the community. Our community of collaboration managers, we asked them, What do you think the current status. This is also drawn from things that we've seen, by studying and watching what's happening in the space watching what you're all doing. So we're going to talk about the pandemic, we're gonna talk about how standalone collaboratives are continuing to grow. We're gonna talk about funding and we'll also take a look around the world at different global efforts. One thing I'll note is that you know a lot of what we're going to talk about here is US based, so I just want to note that because a lot of our work has been focused in the US, although that's changing, and you're going to hear more about that actually later today. So pandemic effect. This is the first thing. So, I mentioned this when I opened the summit. A few minutes ago that the pandemic really showed us the power of collaboration, and there were many, many new partnerships, launched to help address information need gaps that became obviously clear when COVID-19 began to ricochet around the world. One collaboration manager said to me, it showed her that this is essential work. So that is something that I think will, you know, continue to, to help folks in media understand that working together is part of the future. Additionally, the pandemic made collaboration easier for some people because of the rapid shift to remote communication. So as many collaboration managers on this call probably know, getting collaboration, getting collaborative partners to work together is, is, is not easy, we had a session this morning it started an hour before the summit where we gathered a lot of those folks to talk about exactly how they do it. It's not easy, but the really rapid shift to remote communication and forced adoption of tools and really leveling of the playing field, you know, Everyone was at home. Everyone was with, with their families, quarantined and we were all figuring out how to communicate, and you know how to talk to each other from these isolated spaces. So the next thing I'll talk about is what I'm calling permanent or semi permanent efforts or standalone collaboratives. So in the United States we have continued to see the growth of these permanent or semi semi permanent efforts where there's a nonprofit formed or an entity formed, whose sole mission is to help advance collaboration and collaborative reporting. We've seen the announcement of gosh if I counted I didn't count but it's more than a half dozen the United States and you're gonna hear about several of those today. And more over the coming days, and I know that there are more on deck. And so that's something that we are that's you know a current trend that's one thing that's continuing to happen and of the ones that I know that will launch and the ones that are under discussion. I think you'll probably see another four to 10 launched in the next year as well. Those standalone organizations often employ their own project manager. They're doing some fundraising together, and they're also going a little bit beyond reporting to, which we'll get to in just a moment. So funding, we've talked about funding in the state of collaboration, I think every state of collaboration. And it's always one of the first questions people ask me, so how do you fund this. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has long been a funder of collaboration in the United States. I think 11 years now, the Knight Foundation has also funded collaboration in different aspects, over the years. But recently, especially in the last 12 to 18 months we've seen some other big names join the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Google and Facebook are all joining, and that will probably continue and expand.
So I also want to touch on global efforts. So, as I said a minute ago. A lot of our focus has been studying United States based collaboration, although we are now working in other places around the world to study what's happening outside of our borders, global and cross border collaboration has become really essential over the last decade. And that's thanks in part to organizations like the OCCRP and IC ij, both of whom will present at this year's summit also gi Jn and I FCJ and forbidden stories and other networks that exist to help promote and help execute cross border work, and that's going to continue. Part of, you know, that has grown in part because of issues with press freedom also technological changes. And a lot of coordination on fact checking and misinformation which has led to other efforts, Europe and Latin America have both been the hotbeds of collaboration that we're seeing more work in Africa, and importantly more work in Asia to, you're going to hear from Patrick fuller with the penguin reports shortly, which was a collaborative effort across Asia. And we're seeing more of those. Also there's fact checking misinformation efforts in Asia, as well as some investment recently by the Judith Nielsen Institute specifically in support of supporting collaborative work in parts of Asia. So that's a huge place to that, to watch and and see collaboration grow. So what's next,
what's next.
So we think that this part of the industry will continue to grow and it's getting more sophisticated, it's maturing, which is great. We're not, you know, deciding if it's okay to work together anymore. And we have a lot of our processes somewhat figured out, and now we're doing things that are most sophisticated together. I think that's going to lead to more hires more partnership opportunities. And as you know we said a minute ago, one of the current trends is these standalone collaboratives that is going to continue and there will be more of them, too. I talked about funding so that grant seeking that collaborative grant seeking or collaborative revenue pursuit will continue, and will accelerate, I mentioned some of the big names and funding that have invested in this space. I expect that we'll see more Community Foundation's regional funders and local funders, step up. Hopefully that's not just a wish, because I've been hoping for that. But I do think we're gonna see that come to fruition more so over the next few years, and that's being led in part by organizations like ai n, which has done a fantastic job in working together with its members and pursuing funding to support their collaborative work. Vanessa della Touray mentioned to me that she thought that we would see more collaboration on the business side and especially organizational changing dei work, and I think she's spot on. We look at efforts like Maynard opennews And O N A is collaboration with vision 25 as an example of this. Additionally, as cohorts like table stakes or the Facebook accelerator, have been successful, you know, that's a form of collaboration, and it's mostly been on the business side and we expect that that will continue and grow. Collaboration has been going upstream in the reporting process. So by now most of you probably know how to do a temporary separate project where it's going to be a one time thing we're all gonna report on the same topic, we're going to publish at the same time and maybe share each other's stories. We're going further off the ideation process, and then co branding and marketing will get better, beyond just a tagline. There will be more efforts to showcase that this is a collaboration. Because don't forget, early research from cross check in France, show that the audience trusted information more when they knew it came from so many people. So I just want to say thank you to wrap this up to our collaboration manager community, including Heather Bryant Dana Castor care Magnuson Eric Marsh, Carrie Michelle Jean Sohn Sandra Sobota Bridget Thoreson and Vanessa de LaTorre for their input on this presentation, and you can read more at medium comm slash Center for Cooperative Media, or our collaborative journalism web site. So that is a state of collaboration, I'm excited to see any questions that you have and any, anything that you'd like to share or add to that, I'm very happy to add your comments to my Medium post too. So with that, I would like to turn it over from a two way video now, from one of our sponsors, so education NC sponsored us last year and sponsored us again this year, and they have a few words they'd like to share. So with that we will get that video going for you.
It's an exciting time in North Carolina, you know, I grew up in Raleigh, and I recently came back to my hometown paper and news organization because of all the change that is happening in local media, all the experimentation and a lot of that is just going to be driven by young people by black people by Latino people by LGBTQ people.
Specifically, there are lots of opportunities you have radio stations like Wi Fi you have newspapers like the news
and observer in the
show that have, you know, a public media, television stations as well as our commercial
television stations. Every organization is a media organization, because they're tweeting they're on Instagram, they're in a whole host of social media they're telling stories to their employees or telling stories to their communities. And so, if you have a passion for telling stories start writing, write anything, write letters write emails right. Many students want to work on the desk, they see the glitz and glamour and the lights
and everything and think is fascinating and it is, but there's also
power behind
the camera, and being able to make those decisions and come to the table, have a seat at the table and participate in editorial discussions
work right now, whether that's a campus paper whether that is doing some freelance work for local news organizations, write report, and get edited
your students, your local media. So what are they covering, how are they covering those things. And what can you learn about the organizations from their approach to news coverage is really important to know the organizations that you want to
be a part of, definitely get internships, and it is difficult now because of the pandemic, a lot of internships are virtual probably all of them, but try to shadow people who are doing what you want to do. The
power of the spoken word, the power of the press, is that you want to evoke change and to make sure that black voices like ideas and ideas of people from across the diaspora in America is heard, than we need your voice in North Carolina.
Thank you.
Thank you education NC we've been very thankful for your support.
So, with that,
let's start our opening session which is collaboration as a key strategy, why the local media Association, chose to focus on collaboratives, and we're going to take a deep dive into Word and black. So I'm really excited to welcome to the stage our host for this conversation, Shana black, who's with black girl media in Cleveland, and an LMA board member who will host today so Shana, all yours.
Thank you so much, Stephanie. Hi everyone, welcome to this session of collaboration as a key strategy, why local media Association chose to support collaboration. As Stephanie said I'm Shana black from Black Girl media here in Cleveland, Ohio, and we are in for a great conversation today with local media Association, and some folks from Word and black. So today we're going to have Andrew RAM Sami, the chief content and collaboration Officer of local media Association, Nick Charles, the managing director of the collaborative word in black. Francis Draper, Francis Tony Draper, excuse me, from the afro, and I believe sunny Messiah Giles, the publisher of the Houston defender if you guys are here. Come on, on, come on, and welcome to the stage, and let's hear a little bit about what local media association is doing so I'm going to toss it over to Andrew first, and he can tell us what's going on with local media Association and collaborations. Andrew, are you there.
Yes, I'm here. Thank you, Shana, and thank you, Stephanie and thank you for everyone for joining us today. Like Shana said my name is Andrew M Sammy I'm the chief content and collaboration officer with LMA new to the organization but very excited to be in this role, and today we're going to talk specifically about why LMA has decided to invest in, in five collaborative specifically, and then we're going to do, like, like she said a deep dive into work in black, which is one of our five collaboratives, focusing specifically on the black press black media and everything that's happened in the world. So with that, I will get started on on our presentation but yes you know why, why do this, why do this work and I think if you would agree with me. It's probably the first time that you've seen someone's name and their title having the word collaboration officer and this in their name, and several months ago when I did join the organization, Nancy Lane our CEO of LMA stressed the importance that collaboration is a way forward. And I'm proud to be one of the few people in our industry to have this title, but I hope to see this title even more. I think it's a title that will continue to grow and expand and evolve and expand specifically as how LMA views, its role, a little bit about LMA. We are two organizations we are an association, and also a foundation, so the association is here to support the industry and the trade. The foundation is here to be able to fundraise and be able to do a lot of support mechanisms to the industry as a whole and many who are on today's collaborative call and session, have been recipients of LMA and LMS funding, especially last year around COVID-19, but really our goal is to make sure that we have a healthy future for local media and journalism, which we believe is very strongly tied tied to a strong democracy. And the only way that we can really do that and we all know this firsthand, is by reinventing business models for news. We all know about the news deserts that continue to sprout up around our country. It has been a very challenging time for the news industry. We know about the continuing downsizing the layoffs the buyouts and all of that. And we think that there's a strong role for LMA to play both on the nonprofit side, as well as in the for profit and commercial side, so that's one of the unique things about LMA and Lnf that I that I was very much attracted to the organization, that it wasn't just solely about ensuring that nonprofit news media remain healthy and vibrant but that all news media remain healthy and vibrant and we will talk about later, how we do have a mix of both those types of organizations working with LMA and LMS to ensure a healthy future. With that, you know, it's, it's important to talk about our strategic pillars here at LMA and LMS, and I think everyone would agree that the four things that we're focusing on are the the kind of the ways forward and the ways that we need to think about our future. So first and foremost like I talked about before is business transformation. And in our business transformation projects we have a variety of different things that we're doing everything from reader revenue with JNI labs, the branded content project which is teaching organizations to be able to sell branded content and we've seen great success over a million dollars that's been raised in the last year, through the branded content revenue has been generated through that our digital club, headed by penny Reardon. Our Crosstown data journalism project, as well as our innovation missions as well LMA is definitely committed to the sustainability for publishers of color, and I'm leading our DNI initiatives, specifically around our fund for black journalism, our Digital Transformation Lab, and our night CMS project. And then earlier this year going into last year Frank munchie launched our journalism funded by philanthropy Lab, which has been to great success we're on target to being able to these groups will have been raised will raise, by the time we're done with this project over $2.25 million, which is strictly funding, supported by philanthropy. Our lab for journalism funding. Our COVID-19 local news fund which again, many of you recipients of last year. News fuel and fiscal sponsorships, we are getting into specifically which is our which are organizations that are coming to us seeking Fiscal Sponsorship. And then industry collaboration. We have, you know five collaboratives that we're currently working on right now. So, when people come to LMA and LM F, we show them this, this, the slide to show them our strategic pillars, so they have a clear understanding of where the organization is going where it's headed. And we believe that these are the four things that will lead the industry and continue to transform the work that we do.
And speaking of Industry Collaboration, you know, why did we decide to do this and why did we head in this direction. Well, I think our CEO has said it best. That going it alone, is no longer a strategy, and that local media organizations are stronger together. I think everyone would agree that being out there by yourself, is a very lonely process. And sometimes you know you need to be able to lean on others, you need to be able to learn from those experiences you need to be able to glean from what's working and what's not. So, you know with LMA being an organization of over 3000 members. We saw that as a unique opportunity. And I think in particular, everyone would agree and it sounds like you know I keep on saying this, everyone would agree right in the spirit of collaboration that 2020 was a year, unlike anything other that we've seen so between COVID-19 and the awakening and or reawakening on race in America. Collaboration is going to be key and important and that starts from the very top, with our CEO and the support of our both of our boards. So we do have five collaboratives that LMA is a part of that we manage that as amplify Ohio with Shana Black is a part of that three publishers out of Ohio two black publishers and one LGBTQ publisher coming together to do reporting, and some business transformation around health stories around health just announced covering climate which is being led by Frank Mangum newsrooms from around the country talking specifically about the challenges, issues and opportunities and reporting on climate coverage. The Oklahoma Media Center, which just today we announced that the local media foundation will be awarding 12 stipends to participants in the Oklahoma Media Center, and this is going to be a first wave of funding OMCS 2021 Innovation Fund. This funding is made possible by in as much foundation which is provided $100,000 To start the Innovation Fund, and we are executing this program to design and test new business models, as well as finding new ways to engage in, and reach diverse audiences in Oklahoma. Solving for Chicago, which is being led by Sam chokey, and then word in black, which we will talk about more in specific later as we move on. So all five collaboratives really have the same goals right which is journalism meeting business transformation. And we know that there are lots of collaborations that are out there that are focused on the journey of journalism, we completely agree that that is an important thing. But my experience has been and I think a lot of people's experiences have been to is that when collaborations first started and I remember running some collaboration several years ago, many of those collaborations don't exist today. Many of those, those organizations that were in those collaboratives don't exist today. And one of the reasons why that they don't exist, I think, is that they had not focused on the business side, so we want to be able to create create great journalism, while at the same time, generating revenue and audience for all of our partners, and each one of our collaboratives have distinct opportunities to be able to do that. So, I want to be clear about this. A lot of times collaboratives are painted with a great brushstroke and everything's working out and everything is going dandy, but I think that's an unfortunate it's not the necessarily the best way to look at it, we look at these as these collaboratives as really experiments and I jokingly say that if you were to board, Get on board on one of these planes, before you would enter the cabin of the plane on the outside of the door the word experimental or experimentation would be put on. And the reason why I want to focus on that is that not everything works, that it is a test, right, so we are testing a couple of things to our national collaboratives developed around a specific topic or issue. Right, so we have our climate, covering climate collaborative, as well as work in black which is focusing on racial inequities, and then three our regional collaborative plays, ranging in size from three media partners with amplify Ohio to more than 25. So, the, the size and scope of each one rate varies, also the amount of money that's being invested into them varies too. So we are hedging our bets in in our, in the best ways possible to ensure the best outcome in terms of success.
So early lessons, I'm sure, and we, you know, Stephanie mentioned we had a call earlier today with some collaborative managers. Collaboration is hard. It's a lot of hard work. I think we will, you know, as we see working with publishers, from small to large, and everything in between, you know, working on a collaborative one. You know when you start out, is there a shared sense of purpose, is there a shared sense of understanding of what the collaborative is going to achieve, and in many of our collaborative collaboratives are we, they will become stand alones where they will become either for profit or nonprofit entities by themselves. So we look as our role in LMA as being the kind of instigator the agitator the bacteria to provide the platform in the space where these collaborations, come together, but our hope is that down the road that they create some form of sustainability, where we're no longer needed, but we are out there fundraising and seeking funds on their behalf. We are working to manage their editorial projects and all the things in between, to ensure that they're as successful as possible, but it is hard, it is hard work. It is so you know, things that, that you would not think that would come up, come up and collaborations to me are kind of like mini accelerators, where you begin to see what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are and then to be able to come in between with the delta of how to be able to fill in on those gaps. So, some early lessons that we have learned at LMA is that working with, you know within a collaborative that publishers and the organizations that you're working with, have to have buy in from the top, that has to be the CEO, it has to be the publisher, it has to be the editor, because it's, it requires a lot of time and a lot of energy. We like to spell those agreements out in mo use, which we use to be sure that both we LMA, as well as publishers that are involved in our collaboratives have a clear understanding of the responsibilities of a lot of parties. But then again, While you have that great document as a starting point, there are things that do come along, that, that do change and sometimes you have to go back and make amendments so on several our on our projects we have gone back and made amendments to our Mo use, and having a dedicated project manager, we think, is a must have. It doesn't mean that necessarily has to be a full time person, but all five of our collaboratives currently today either had have at a minimum, a part time manager which is doing 20 hours of work up to a full time dedicated resource project managing that so we think that's a key and important role, And again we talked about this earlier today in a previous call about the role of what that project manager is, it is a hard roll, it is a unique role, but it is the glue to making sure that collaboratives are successful. So early results. We have raised over $1.5 million from the funding community to support these five collaboratives. And it's important to stress that LMA and LM f is not. We are not a foundation in the typical sense. And I like to think of us as a development foundation, meaning that we go out and develop these ideas and concepts, and we try to then seek the funding, and we've had a lot of particular interest around where to block again which we'll talk about later on but we ourselves are not funding these projects directly, we are out seeking funding funds for these organizations. More than a dozen training sessions have been conducted, including private NCI audits through Google. In the cooperatives themselves to have, have been have been afforded themselves the opportunity of training that LMA has been able to directly provide them and hopefully Sonny and Dr. Draper will talk about that work. And then over $275,000 in stipends have been paid to our media partners via our journalism projects. So the funding that we are raising or going is going directly back out to support the journalism, of these collaboratives. So with that, you know, we're going to talk about Word and block and we and we have a really great presentation to show you, but before we do that, I'd like to show you a video that we put together last year, in conjunction with a voting project that word in Black took on just prior to the election.
I just want to make sure the sound is on
standard not getting any sound you want to do a new Share.
I apologize for that. Let me fix the audio, we will do that again one more time asking me for a password, sorry about that.
This is one for the bingo cards folks for all you out there paying attention, hate your bingo cards.
Alright,
it should be starting now. All right here we go.
Make it go fullscreen.
I call this a special moment in time,
pivotal moments in history often spark words that inspire change and I think that this moment that we're in right here, word in black is really a call to action.
When George Floyd was murdered. And the news came out about Brianna Taylor. And Ahmad, Bree. Given that we were all stuck in the home and watching the stuff on TV, it just set us off, and I think it was a special moment in time where America, the world, not just black people we were paying more attention to the news, and how we were being reflected in the news.
Well, the story of black America has always been told by black newspapers, but in the wake of George Floyd and the unrest that has gone on, all across the United States, the presidential election going on voter disenfranchisement, and the myriad other different things that are going on to black people across this country. The need became ever more present and our stories need to get out more and more. When
I'm black collaborative you know really was sparked out of the movement and the moment that we're in,
what makes word black so unique is that it is a coming together of black newspapers of businesses that are primarily or at least had our start primarily as print products and so we're unique in that way.
This idea
came about where I said Well, you know, why don't we have these 10 leading publishers come together so that we can elevate some of these issues to the forefront of attention, not only just locally, but from a national perspective and given a national platform, it really was born out of similarly as the start of the black press was that others wouldn't speak for us. And so 10 papers 10 black newspapers across the country, some of our most innovative and, and, and creative black newspapers across the country came together to address these disparities and a different kind of way in the 21st century kind of way.
I believe that our publications have the unique responsibility and our position uniquely to share with the world, what all of this means and how to translate all of it.
A lot of times when we see coverage of in the news, it tells us the facts. So who, what, where, when and why and that's important to have the facts, but it's more that we need to know. We don't just need to know what's wrong with the problems or we know that there are problems in America and this problem is specific to black Americans and Americans, but we need solutions.
We are working to not only tell the stories, but to help people find ways to make a difference in their own lives and in the lives of people around them.
We're actually
speaking truth to power, but we're also tell them what our reality is, regardless of what state it is,
I believe that there's a new awareness about the black press and how we bring a unique message, not only to black people, but people who are trying to better understand the black community, the best is yet to come for the black
press.
So with that, I'd like to introduce Nick Charles our Managing Director for worden black. Dr. Francis Tony Draper, the publisher for AF, the Afro and Sonny Messiah Giles publisher for the Houston defender network, Nick.
Good morning everyone, how you doing. Thank you for having us and having me. I think Andrew gave a wonderful presentation. I'm a little hoarse right now. There was a great journalists who once said, It doesn't matter what's happening in America. On any given day, the story is always race, race and race and the black press has always been here to chronicle that reality. And as you saw in the video, the publisher is a very very well aware that what happened in the last 18 months, with the pandemic. And with the murder of George Ford, and the shooting of Ahmed alberi and Brianna Taylor and the countless others that have happened since then, that these issues were here before 2020 And these issues continue to be very much center stage, as we go forward. And I think I was brought on in September, after the publishers decided that they wanted to put together this collaborative, and with funding that Nancy Lane secured through element with Emma LMA, and I was the project manager, and once we had a good sense that this was something that was going to have legs, and that the publishers were committed to. I came on board as full time as the managing director in January, a couple months before we hired Andrew. I think collaborator, as I just said. Collaborations are hard, and they're hard because in our specifically it's a national collaboration, it's not city or state or regional. It's a national and it's national because in a sense that we have all these disparate publishers from California to New York to Texas to DC to St. Louis to Michigan, who are all covering their city and state. but the issues that they are chronicling are not unique to the city and state wherever they are. Word in black is good to try to give as Dr Vaporesso, a wonderful put it you can get the basic news facts, but also to give context to what you're seeing to what you're reading and what you're understanding, and also serves as a traditional platform to the digital sphere that some of these long standing news media are now getting into, you know some of these newspapers go back 100 years. So they've been doing this for a long time. They are part of the communities where they exist they're not just the newspaper. They are institutions, and they're also businesses, we only have one nonprofit in our group. The other nine are for profit organizations. And so what you see with Word and black. At least the national side which will be launched on June 1 We are in a very soft launch right now is content from our publishers of visual content by our publishers for Word and black, and original content produced by the staff of word and black, which aims to give context to all the things that the pandemic. What into sharp relief housing disparities health disparities, the nature of police policing in America, education, we should say that our first two huge grants from the Walton family and from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, came to do work around COVID in education. And we continue to do that work as we continue to do other work. So what am black, aims to let folks know that these news media exist. They are more than relevant, and they're also important to telling the story of almost 45 million folks who don't always see themselves in the mainstream press and definitely don't hear their voices in the mainstream verse I read that I will throw it to Francis Tony Draper, Dr Dre bro.
So good afternoon everyone and maybe good morning depending on where you are. Um Thank you Nick, I just want to talk a little bit about the impact and importance of word and black for the Afro and I think that I'm speaking for the, the other nine of us but Sonny massage owls can certainly speak to this as well. One advantage, I think that we had from the outset, and Andrew, thank you for your presentation as well, is that we knew each other. we are members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, together, but this is the first time we've had an opportunity to collaborate in this way. And so this collaboration is really a game changer for us. And I want to make. Let me define something before I go further. When we say black press, that can mean a whole lot of things we're talking about black owned. Press, we're talking about primarily in when we say that we're talking particularly about those who have started out as print products and many of us still. I think all of us may still have print products, even though we are As Nick said, you know rapidly like everybody else, you know we're transitioning to out on social media and other electronic digital products, but we're talking about black owned press black owned media we're talking about those trusted voices that have been around for such a long time, we're talking about As Nick said those like the afro we've been in existence for 128 almost 129 years Amsterdam News and others. And so, we are those that that's who we are and so we collaborate, this has been a game changer for us both in terms of sharing content, as well as coming together to raise resources together to help to get our message out even further than what it is now and so somebody might say well why this kind of collaboration. This particular collaboration works because a we have common interest. B we have a common business model even our business models are different, but most importantly, we have a common mission to make sure that we get accurate news out, and as Nick and Andrew both said, in the midst of what's going on now, this is an important collaboration, yes collaborations are hard but they do work.
So Tony it's funny,
am I, jumping in at this point.
Okay as you always do.
Okay, I thought I got to Cuba wasn't sure. Anyway, just to ditto what Tony was saying, I think part of the reason the group came together also at the behest of local media association was the fact that we all because we knew each other we understood that there was a need for a central hub of information for our community. From a national perspective to be able to come because of the collective power of the information that each one of us, shared with our audiences. If we push that to a national level, then people could see the interconnectedness of what is happening across the nation, which oftentimes is not understood, nor is there a perspective from an African American perspective, news traditionally in general media covers as they say covers the news, whereas I think when it comes to black owned media, there's more of a perspective of connectiveness, a shared experience that offers a different perspective, and because of that, this national platform of word and black allows people to be able to see the interconnectedness of what is happening. I think just recently people have began to notice that the killing of African Americans by the police is not one dimensional, that it is happening across the country. But what's the context of how it's impacting those communities where those incidences are happening. I think because of word and black now we have a hub where people can come to see that interconnectedness to be able to experience what are the shared experiences, and also to be able to look at possible solutions that if each city or across the country may be implemented to create more of a, I guess you could say, a unified or solidified approach to how maybe we should consider looking at some of these issues more from a solutions oriented, not from a problem orientation.
Okay, so,
thanks to both of you, um,
the great rehearsal.
So, you know we I've seen some questions in our q&a box and, and I want to open it up for anyone that has questions, I think that what you guys are doing over at word and black like you guys are the cool kids of the Elevate table, speaking from me over at amplify Ohio. One of the questions I saw in the chat and I'll send it to you, Andrew. I know you answered it, but people want to know, how can they get involved in wearing black, you know, can they how do they can they become part of it is it closed and they can look to form their own clubs. Is there still room at the word and black table.
So yeah, so I mean the, the structure of the this collaborative specifically, is that the 10 publishers that are involved in Word and black are actually the owners. So while Nick and I can make decisions all day really we go to the publishers and ask them, what is it that they're looking to do what is it that they're looking to achieve and then they can make that decision so for anyone that is interested in becoming a collaborative partner. What I would say is make a pitch. We will then take that pitch to the publishers and then the publishers can decide because you know the goal of this project specifically is to stand up a national news brand. And I was, I will, I will you know probably safe to say that being able to do that alone with 10 publishers is not going to be enough, but we don't make those decisions. Those decisions we make those recommendations. And one of those recommendations that we made in particular to this project was recommending news revenue hub to do our reader revenue strategy and our newsletter strategy, and we took that proposal to the collaborative, and the collaborative ultimately made the final decision so it's one of the things again that we talked about on the earlier call about the striking the balance as being collaborative managers, against the goals and the wishes and the desires of the collaborative. And what we try to do is to best inform that strategy from LMA and then help the collaborative make that decision, but Dr. Draper, you know, sonny. What What are your thoughts about opening up the collaborative and bringing in more collaborative partners.
I think in the future, there's a potential to let people in right now, we're in the fetal stage. I mean it's like we have learned out a walk yet on crawl. So I think that give us some time to get our legs and structure in place and some of the things infrastructure wise we need to have before we start admitting people into the team is just like any other building or team that you're trying to build, you've got to get the core down solid, in order to have a strong foundation and we're still working on that. So yeah, just stay tuned, possibly coming soon.
And Sunny said, Well, we have accomplished so much. I believe because of LMA and LMS support around this, and we, you know, Nick came on board, helped us with our editorial strategy, Andrew has come on board to help us with our overall strategy, and so yes we knew each other, but we've not worked together like this before and I can't believe it's been it's been, what about eight months it's only. Yeah,
I mean it's not even nine months for baby to be born so give us a break.
And we don't want to birth we don't want to have a premature birth. So, this is very true.
So,
so we're working on getting those things, and, and determining even how we're gonna work together going forward. And I think Nick said. We are in an incubator kind of stage, and word Black would be launched to stand on its own two feet as once we, but we haven't even started to pull up yet, so that the short answer is yes. In order for this to be successful, we'll need to have many more people at the table, but we want it to be successful so we want to make sure that we do it in a way that ensures everyone's success,
and I think Tony one of the things that Andrew said, That thing needs to be stressed and anybody who's ever worked with a group knows that is hard work, getting all the different personalities and all the different perspectives to come to agreement, or to agree to disagree. So just think of this as child labor for those of you who have experienced it or those of you have seen it I had Nick over there laughing. This is hard work, y'all, this is not easy.
It's been it's been made especially hard. It's been made especially hard to because this collaborative was launched during the pandemic. That's true right so this group has not been able to sit down in the same room, and that's work that needs to be done because the the structure right the outcome of what we're hoping is that and this is the desire of the group is to establish a for profit, LLC, establishing a for profit LLC with 10 partners currently right now. That's going to be a lot of work to do so. I will say the pandemic has accelerated a lot of things, but also the pandemic has placed a lot of stress on being able to work collaboratives and right now this is literally the venue in which the Collaborative has, has been convening has been through these zoom calls weekly zoom calls the other things that we've also do do is that we have worked groups within the collaborative so we have a news revenue hub workgroup, we have our website workgroup we have tons of workgroup so the amount of time and energy that goes into this and that's why we stress the heart, not that it's, that it's not going to be successful, but there is a lot of time that gets involved in this, so be careful what you wish for, if you want to join the work word and black collaborative because we're going to put a lot of time in your calendar but I also think too there's been a lot of lessons learned, and I think Dr. Draper and Sonny could talk about specifically the lessons learned just early lessons from news revenue how the early lessons on working with Michael Grant and get current studio on the word in black website which right now is v1 We're going to be launching v2 In the next few weeks, which is the hard launch of the site, but could you talk about some of those kind of collaborative learnings that you've been able to glean sending and Dr. Draper specifically from the work that we've been able to do.
How do you want to go first.
So, so one of the collaborative learnings we've learned is how much we don't know and how much we know. So all of us who are on this, this particular webinar. In this session, we know that our industry is constantly changing, even more so than maybe some other industries and so we all are trying to keep up. But there are so many technologies and so many opportunities, especially in our, in our arena. That's why news fuel is so important that we don't know about. And when you are in some of you may be in the same situation, when you are managing when you're operating a smaller news organization, as the R word and black partners are, you know, we're doing a whole lot of things we're wearing a lot of hats and so they're things that we didn't know about things we didn't know to do, but we are learning about those we appreciate all of those learning opportunities and a lot of things that we already knew how to do well, but there are things that we that are ever changing and as Andrew said it takes the people at the top to be at the table, and so we may have collectively, I don't know what do you think Andrew, we may meet 1012 hours a week. Feels like any way, it, It feels like that so the early lesson learn is a it takes time. Right. Not that we didn't and it takes commitment, and it takes, it takes energy. And it's not just something that's new and now I'm excited because I'm in Word and black, no now I'm excited. and then we have a ton of additional work, and it's good. And the reason that is really good is because of the support I think that we're getting from Nick and Andrew and other members of LMA, in addition to the commitment of the publishers. Alright Sunnybank yeah I
think Tony hits on one of the biggest aspects and that was the things that we don't know. But the other piece to it is, and you learn this when working with other teams. Keep in mind we have our own businesses that were operating simultaneously while we're doing this other venture, which, as Tony also said time, energy, you know, commitment, all of that takes away from you have to figure out a way of how do you do that balancing act. But I think one of the other things that it, it showed in this particular group is how important infrastructure is to building this and LMA has provided us infrastructure or at least knowledge of what that infrastructure should look like bringing Nick into the mix, bringing Andrew in the mix, giving us access to the news revenue hub, access to Michael Grant. All of these are components or building blocks that word in Black has to have in order to be successful, and how they interact and engage with each other, will determine the success of our project. And as we're building this, we're learning things at the same time and we're making adjustments. So I think one of the biggest lessons has been be flexible because it's like riding a roller coaster almost, you know you're up and you're down you turn in your and you really don't know when it's coming, but it's all good and it's all exciting, it's all thrilling, but it's scary to.
So thank you for that and I can have one thing
that one of the slides Andrew has, and I think you know, continue with the childbirth. It's twins, you have the journalism. And then you have the business, the revenue and. And one of the reasons, some of these things may not always succeed is because you've done one, but you haven't done the other. And what we're trying to do is make sure that the Journalism which I think is not, I would say easier but it's something that's established the collaboration, particularly around the revenue and the business and and how the collaboration shares in revenue, how the cloud is set up so that people can make sure that everybody feels like they're getting equity, they have equity and are getting an equal say and equal piece of the pie, that's also important. So we have them in the publishers and stuff, trying to figure out okay, we know each other and how are we going to structure this, and then you have the Journalism which is about the mission which is shared, which I think is solid.
And that leads me to one of the questions in our q&a box the question of how do you balance setting up something like a word in black, you know, doing the advertising and revenue sharing for a collab while you're still trying to build your own membership and solidify your individual, you know, companies and communities. So can someone talk about the balance of, you know, are you doing twice the pitching or twice the revenue seeking because I'm in Word of black and we want to bring in Word and black revenue, and then Austin, also my own, like how does that work for each individual company, how are you guys balancing that
it was really interesting that I think many of us are, as you said, you know walking a tightrope to a certain degree from the standpoint of how much, how much resources do we give to our own piece versus word in black, and it is almost like, go back Nick to parenting, and children, but it's almost like you know you, you put in where you needed most, you know, one child may need more support than the other challenge needs at that time. And so you make that adjustment as you go along. But there is a challenge, Shana, when it comes to doing that balancing act, and I'll be honest with you, sometimes things fall through the cracks.
Let me see if I can answer your question a little differently if I, if I understand the question this way. So there are times that you know I'll pitch somebody if you will, just for the afro, because they want the market, they want the audience that I serve, right, but there are other times that, clearly, the person that I'm talking to other company would benefit from a water exposure they're looking for a national exposure, they're looking to be in the cities where we are. And so one of the unique things about Word and black yes we are in 10 different markets. How however if we have somebody to come to us and say, you know, I see that you're in all these markets you're in Atlanta, you're in Detroit, you're in Baltimore in Washington, you're in Houston, UNC Atul. You know I'm probably leaving out somebody but you're in those things, but I really wanted to be in Pennsylvania that at that point we would include someone else in the mix, in terms of if you're talking about revenue generation, but clearly, what I've been doing is I've talked, and so yes we do. People do national buys with Afro as well, but there are times and we may need to add to the coverage in terms of market.
Perfect, thank you. I'm just looking at the time, we have another question from the chat and just for panelists, what advice do you have for the local media orgs and journalists who want to send our community well being in their reporting.
So when you say community well being is is about looking at giving voice to the community, because I think one of the things that weren't in black and also I think that we'll be getting from the DNA of media publishers, is making sure that the voices in the communities are heard. You know sometimes folks parachute in and parachute out from national media, but the Houston defender is in the it's in Houston, and the state of Texas. The africanews is in Baltimore and in the area on DC as is the Washington former. And so the communities I saw a comment the other day somebody was talking about, people talking about, you know, the idea of having a national minimum wage. Well talk to somebody who is actually making $8.50 or $10, and what it means, what it would mean to be making $15. And I think that kind of grassroots outreach or reporting where you talk to people who are feeling it, who know it, who are living it, which is what the, the local publishers that we have here do is important, which I think we build on in white and black, when we get to solutions is that we're talking to the folks, where they're not abstract policies. Police policing is in some kind of political game, this is affecting folks in their neighborhoods in their communities.
Right So make no mistake about it, we're covering our local communities. The video word in black, is that we can post our local story Nick, then takes out. So we're doing all of us are doing educated. Education reporting. Now, in addition to whatever other coverage we're doing and we're doing it from the local lens from our local perspective. Nick is taking what we've written and doing a national story out of that, and then there's a data journalist, that is working with us as well, that may be taking some more of that and then rolling it up so if you can think about our word and black collaborative as, you know, we're doing our local thing, whatever market area we covered, cover, and so then that gives voice, and that's what makes it national we take that it rolls up to a national story, then with some data there. And then, then, then we have that national reach, and our examples are quotes of from Baltimore Washington Houston Atlanta Seattle Michigan or wherever the, the data gentleman's focus is and so that's the beauty of that that we have, we have a both and. But nope, make no mistake about it, we are very entrenched in our local markets.
And so, we are, we are also, let's be honest. You talking about being local locally entrenched issues and national issues are global. We are localizing it to some extent. And we're making folks realize that black folks are not a monolith, because the way that Texas is addressing the COVID pandemic is not the way. New York City, or New York State is addressing it or California or Michigan or ST or St. Louis, Missouri, and so you get a sense of the folks who are living in these communities, how they are being affected by these national global issues, and through the lens and reporting, and editing, from our publishers, you get a true sense of what's happening on the ground.
And I got the impression from your question, that the person might be asking, just get involved in the community get in the community, take some learning journeys, get to know people build relationships, seek to understand. I think often times, the black press has been doing this for ages so it's kind of to me. Funny how the general market is saying, oh we need community engagement, and I'm like women engagements as well long as, but this is something new from their dimension because they've covered from the outside in, we've covered from the inside out, and so it gives a whole different dimension to the contents of community engagement.
So,
Just get out there, get to know the people, and seek to understand absolutely
never question it and you can help because I've seen collaborators working through this. How did you come up with the topic of education, did you, did you come in, did you guys choose that topic or did LMA say hey, we kind of want to focus on that. Can you talk about deciding to focus on education.
It was a real big toss up between education and health. Those were the two big issues when COVID hit. The challenge was, okay, we're dying disproportionately. But the flip side to that was our kids are being impacted because of the digital divide, or the remote learning. And so we placed that emphasis on the education piece, as one of the cornerstones because we felt as though, education is the balancer, it's the opportunity on the door to access. And so as a result we felt as though that's where the emphasis should be and that's where the funding opportunities were at the time. That's true
and we nuanced it because we looked at education through the lens of the impact of young people in this COVID environment. And so it's COVID in education with education being the main topic that we were looking at.
Thanks. Another question is, can you talk about how you get your funding so we talked about all the funding that word in black is brought in and some of the organizations you've worked with, is there a thought process or do we look at how they are community partners, so if there's something maybe in the paper that they've been not good to black employees is that something that you won't take the funding or is that a situation you've even had to address.
Well we haven't had to address it so far but I think that the most of the funding has been to seek foundations, and institutions that traditionally key in, in this particular case on education. I think as we adopt other platforms or issues that will also as you know most audience knows foundations and nonprofits that make these types of contributions, usually have key initiatives that they're going to support, and in this case, I think LMA and Word and black approach those institutions and foundations that we knew funding sources that were interested in education,
and looking to expand those sources of funding that our funding is not solely coming from foundations and institutions but that we do have a reader revenue strategy and leveraging you know a newsletter strategy so that we are diversifying our sources overall, but I think you know, people should recognize that a lot of funding from the journalism world sometime comes from organizations that are involved in conflicts directly with the audiences we're trying to reach. That has been a business model that public media has leveraged for years. Right after the petroleum oil spill. BP became a sponsor of PBS NewsHour, they're trying to improve their news brand so, I think, you know, folks within collaboratives can look at funders within their own communities that have had challenges, issues with specific communities and communities of color, and part of this is a restorative and reparative process, and I don't I don't you know obviously there's the division of the editorial firewall, right, that they're not involved in our editorial decision making processes, but in terms of the business opportunity. Yeah, it's a part of it and I and I think this group has been very eloquent and how its approached it, how it's had very deep discussions, both on the record and off the record with with funders to better understand their goals, as well as the publishers goals so it's a constant balance, but I don't think there's been anything that I've seen thus far, that has been negative or exploitive about where our funding is coming from, you know, the funding world in the philanthropy world is going to be greatly impacted by what happens with Bill and Melinda Gates do work at what organizations do now. These are things that are constantly evolving and changing and I think an element LMA and LM F is in a good position, with its relationships to continue exploring to explore those opportunities and to come from a very grounded place of what it is that we're trying to achieve.
And you know that goes back to Andrews point, long before BP a Philip Morris was sponsoring every arts program in the country. While they were making cigarettes, which wasn't best for anybody's health, you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates is the latest of it, you know MacKenzie Scott, who is now the Walton Mr Bezos, she's been giving millions and millions of dollars HBCUs and other organizations that impact our communities. That doesn't mean that I'm not I don't think Tony or Sonny or anyone's gonna come and say, Hey, you can't write a negative story about what Amazon might be doing to a specific community, because they don't want people to unionize. As in Bessemer Alabama will still run that store. But the reality is they have an outlet like a foundation or philanthropic arm where they're looking to do good works, or support organizations like us that are basically doing good work and when I say good work. Journalism is about information. And that's what we want to make sure that our communities are well informed.
So currently we visit every potential funder we talk about that and what it means, and publishers have the option to opt out, and so if, if a funder says I want 20 stories on something, and one of the publishers says you know what, that's not the kind of story I want to write a run. It's okay. So they have the opportunity to not write the number of stories, once we commit now, we talked about a memorandum of understanding. Once we commit to do it we commit to do it but while we're in discussions, it's you know, we're not monolithic. So, we're still individual businesses, as well as members of the collaborative.
Okay, one last question. Is there a newsletter strategy for working black or white, or explain what your newsletter strategy is. That's from the q&a,
you have to sign up for the newsletter to find out what the newsletter strategy is, um, you know, it's, to be honest it's a work in progress, but I think you're gonna see a very interesting and unique point of view, and a great idea that actually was generated by Nancy Lane our CEO, specifically about how our newsletter strategy is going to be put together. Matter of fact, after this call, after this session, we have a two hour branding session with news revenue hub and Mary Ellen Brown, and I know Sonny and Dr. Draper are excited about that. But I think our newsletter will be unlike anything other than newsletter will be led by by Nick, a great editorial strategy is in place. I don't want to give too much away but I do think that it will have a very unique voice and and I'll leave it at that but you know, definitely go to word in black. COMM And sign up for the newsletter. And we hope that everyone comes along for the ride and I hope that a year from now we come back and we report out on how word in Black has attained its goals achieved its revenue goals which are some big ambitious financial revenue goals, and that how that gets that revenue gets shared. But Nick Draper and Sonny have been great partners and I love working on this project and I know that they've they're equally as excited about the the opportunity, especially when the moment that we're in right now.
So we're getting ready to close but I have kind of a question and then I want you guys to do final thoughts. Andrew if someone is interested in maybe being part of a future collab with LMA or connecting with LMA, how do they do that and then anyone else in our last three minutes or so if you have final thoughts, please feel free to share.
So yes, we're always LMA is interested in having future discussions about potential collaboratives and. And to be fair and honest we have we've had some conversations about potentially a Latino, Latina Latinx collaborative, a queer collaborative as well too. And we're exploring those so if you're interested about potential future partnerships and collaboratives, you can reach out directly to me. Andrew dot ramp Sammy at local media.org and we will take those conversations and then just so everyone knows that this is a process that we go through. It is a process that then gets vetted and then approved by our boards which Sonny is on so Sonny could talk a little bit about that but yeah we're open to that open to those discussions.
I guess that was the throw to me Andrew and I was
like what
are any final thoughts Sonny Any final thoughts. Thank you.
All right,
so I think that my closing thoughts would be we're all interconnected. We want to invite everybody on this webinar to join us from the standpoint of signing up for the newsletter and enjoying the ride with Word and black on this new adventure to provide information nationwide to create a better world for all of us, particularly with the interest in focus on black America.
Dr. Draper, Nick. Final Thoughts
have to go first.
So I'll pick up the ball from from sunny. And so in 1827 when the first black newspaper Freedom Journal was published by John Russ worm and Samuel Cornish they said, We wish to plead our own cause too long have others spoken for us. Well the black press is still pleading its own cause we have the advantage of being able to fill all of our websites and newspapers, with our news but I just want to stress, it's not for us only America will only get better, if all of us have a deeper understanding of who we are, what our perspectives are. You know what we think about certain things. And too often, what is portrayed about African Americans and our issues is not true of who we are. And so I think that this collaborative will help to elevate an amp amplify those things in such a way that as we increase understanding across the country and indeed across the world, then we will have a better understanding of one another, and we'll be able to work together to improve our communities and improve our cities, our state's our entire nation and so I'm excited about the word and black collaboration. I am grateful to LMA for just being the convener, if you will of collaboration, recognizing, as they say they don't want the collaboration, we are charged with that and so those are my final thoughts 60
seconds. We're doing commercial break next
60 seconds is why you should never follow Dr. Draper. So, I just want to say thank you to the publishers themselves. Some of them I knew some of them I didn't I knew all of the, the publications, I worked in mainstream media I've worked for the black press, not the black own press, well have worked for black owned press before, but it's the first time where I'm in the weeds with this and it's really great to see the process and see the hard work and dedication that they have. And as Dr. Draper says there's a direct correlation between healthy and active and successful communities, and good journalism and inflammation, and as long as we can provide those to our communities, our union will be fine.
Perfect. Awesome. So thanks everyone for joining us. I hope you took away lots of good information. Thanks to local media Association definitely follow word and black, and I'm going to toss it over to Amy Kovach Ashley, of the American Press Institute for lightning talks.
See you guys.
Hi everyone,
and thank you to Shana and the whole panel that was amazing. I know from the chat that everyone's super excited about what you all are doing so thank you again for for that great conversation. I am Amy Kopec Ashley I work at the American Press Institute. And just a little bit about the American Press Institute. We're so excited to be here and be a sponsor of the lightning chats and so you know a lot of people are big fans of so we're glad to be here. We're happy to have you here. So our mission is really to help transform news organizations for an audience centric future, and one that serves communities sustainably. We do that in a variety of ways, including through convenings and research and programming, and in a couple of different topic areas including reader revenue accountability journalism content strategy, as it relates to, especially as it relates to metrics and analytics. And then finally, in our work in organizational and cultural change, as it relates to what's happening in news in our organizations and the work that they do for their communities. And in that space we actually emphasize partnerships and collaboration greatly. And those partnerships and collaborations can happen among news organizations which we've heard about here, or between news organizations and civic and community organizations which I think is really another really exciting thing that other folks I'm sure we'll be talking about as well. So just to let you know, we do publish insights and case studies from news organizations on a site called Better news.org. Many of those actually do talk about partnership and collaboration as a key part of how, how those news organizations are changing their practices and there was one that I wanted to just call out particularly because someone. There'll be a roundtable discussion happening on Friday that will be related. In part, we have a recent post by John Marshall. One of my favorite people from W FA and Charlotte, about a collaboration that they are there in the middle of it's a long standing collaboration which I think is interesting and it's not just a one off it's a continued collaboration with Lennar CSEA through their reporter report for America reporter, And I will go ahead and put a link to that specific story in the chat but Don and the leader the at bullied at la noticia will be talking on Friday, I believe it's Friday, someone can correct me if I'm wrong about that particular collaboration as it relates to collaborations going for bilingual or organizations. So please drop into that if you're interested in that. I will also drop in a link to invite all of you to receive updates from when we publish new content on better news.org And hopefully you'll, you'll follow us there as time goes on.
Okay,
so just one second. I'm getting my notes up here my. Okay here we go. So, all of our presenters here actually recorded their videos ahead of time so I'm the only person live, but they are all here. And so if you have questions for any one of them throughout this time please use the chat, and they will try to pop in there unfortunately because of the time we're not going to be able to have everybody speak, because we've got so many things to do here, so please, though, use the chat or the q&a function and those folks will be at the ready to answer questions for you. So, I think I did all the housekeeping things. Joe, let me know if I didn't in chat. Otherwise we'll start here, we're going to start the session with Patrick bowler, who was the co founder and editorial board member of the environmental reporting collective, he helped lead the team that produced the Angolan reports, which is a cross border collaboration that investigated the illegal pangalan trade throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa. And here to tell us more about it,
is Patrick.
I get to introduce you to the Pangolin reports a collaborative investigation by more than 40 Environmental journalists in Asia, Africa and Europe. We documented the illicit trade of pangolins roadside stalls in Cameroon and Nigeria to prisons in transit hubs like Katmandu in Hong Kong to restaurant kitchens in Myanmar and pharmaceutical companies in China, in the Philippines we told the story of how local officials could not curb trafficking, because they feared undermining their chances of reelection by their purchasing electorate in Indonesia we try to trade our leading drug lord, we found overall the ties to law enforcement and drug syndicates rebel groups and corrupt local governments along the supply chain, we concluded that criminal syndicates competes to meet demand, mostly from China. We shared reporting openly and build our data sets to find evidence of smuggling routes, law enforcement loopholes pricing and made that information available to each other, and the public. We offer coordinating supports to two participating newsrooms so that the project would not be too much of a burden on their often scarce resources. This allowed us to make sure that we could meet the reporters needs in terms of security setup scientific expertise and information from other countries. And as a neutral third party we could match reporters from several countries and build trust between them. This was crucial because if done locally this reporting usually runs into political linguistic, cultural barriers and Nepalese reporter would rarely get access to Chinese sources. Likewise, it'd be really hard for Chinese reporter to get Nigerian Customs data, or for a Malaysian reported to have the police contacts in Indonesia that we had. we then shared that reporting on Google Drive and asked everyone to come in and drafts, allowing everyone to correct bias, mistakes, and suggest improvements. We then hired some former colleagues to copy edit the work. We could also fact check claims and encourage reporters to dig deeper when we found contradictions in this way to partnering media outlets benefited benefited from economies of scale at zero or low cost, top notch fair and accurate reporting from their reporters information and compelling visuals from a dozen countries. We shared our reporting the visuals and the data with a Creative Commons license. What will we do differently next time, the effort of collecting link URLs to the almost 100 articles we publish in social media reactions to for our impact reports to donors, made me realize that all of this, the number of links and the likes, they don't say anything about impact. One key outcome was building bridges across borders to empower journalists to tell more stories better. It resulted in several follow up collaborations and provided a model in the region. So that's the lasting impact that's really hard to capture the other was to start conversations more broadly about the reporting, to what extent did we really make people talk about this. I didn't have enough data on that this so we started the wildlife Study Group, a series of online conversations in Malaysia about our reporting, hundreds of people joined them and they opened my eyes on how audiences could experience journalism as a community, at scale. We live streamed the first captive born pangolin, we discussed animal reading conservation and hunting with representatives of the indigenous communities and traditional Chinese medicine with practitioners, and we definitely want to do more of this, the environmental reporting collective continues to do its work. For example, my colleagues just published a fantastic data investigation in Vietnam, they spent two years speaking to wildlife traffickers about the future of illicit trade after the pandemic and analyzed 10 years worth of data. If you're interested in in our work, visit our website investigative dot, Earth, and subscribe to the newsletter, green echoes in English and Chinese. They also run a Slack group for elemental journalists, I have since joined Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty and Network of Public Service newsrooms in 23 countries where a free press is not fully established, including Russia, Belarus, Iran and Afghanistan. We regularly collaborate with other newsrooms and media partners, it's a great team at OCCRP. If you're interested in collaborating with us at Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty do get in touch. Thank you.
Thank you Patrick. That
was wonderful. Next up we have Brett Harley and the new New York news and story collaborative this collaborative network seeks to address information gaps by training and supporting community members in storytelling.
Here's Britta tell
us more about how the collaborative is building a more informed
community
early and I'm here to talk to you all today about the NAACP news and story collaborative, thank you to the Center for Cooperative Media for inviting me to share about this project today. And a big thank you and shout out to the Geraldine R dodge Foundation and the Victoria foundation for your funding support. The North news story collaborative brings together local reporters media makers, content creators and city residents to create different types of media, to make accessible to residents that honors and acknowledges their information needs. And so for the past year, we've been working on the news and story collaborative here in the city of New York, thinking about ways to fill information gaps that we've learned from the outlier media information gaps assessment of the city, and I've also was able to use ground source for different levels of SMS engagement to also understand where folks are getting their news and information and what information that they also may need during the pandemic. What we learned from the outlier media report and what was also confirmed and the SMS engagement that we did with brown sores, the info gap areas that were identified were, food security, a lot of folks really needed to know where they can get food. Another thing that came out of that was rental assistance utilities, lack of economic opportunities, was identified as a challenge, and this still is presenting a challenge here in the city especially during this pandemic. And another thing that came out of that report was a digital divide and virtual learning. And so over the last several months, in a lot of different capacities, we've been working to think about what ways can we fill these gaps are we getting information to folks who most needed, and also it being relevant to their life, and lived experience, especially in a pandemic, and the collaborative also train city residents as reporters, we train them in storytelling media making to amplify their lived experience to also speak to other folks in the community that they are serving. what we learned from our previous resident reporters, they are organizers they are parents, they work full time they're essential workers, and so they were able to talk to different residents their neighbors, their friends, their peers, their network, about this pandemic, at the very beginning of this pandemic, we were having reflections from folks trying to understand this virus this shutdown. These restrictions these curfews from and then what are once a cohort we had different stories come out of that cohort to Ryan's, who's the founding executive director of nj forsthaus, and Tia has theories, hiding in plain sight the neighbors you never hear from tells the story of six people in their journey of re entry back into society and what that has been like for them. The collaborative exists, not only to think about ways to fill these information gaps that are identified by city residents here, but also to be thinking about and creating new ways in which we tell stories, how do we tell stories with care, and how do we give people the tools, who are on the front lines, and sharing information and serving people and advocating tirelessly passionately for their community. For these people, how do we give them the tools for them to tell their stories. And so that is the work that we've been able to do through the New York news and story collaborative with our story lab, in addition to that, we also with free press and Chalkbeat NORC, was able to talk to young people. And so we wanted to create an opportunity for them to reflect, for them to share recommendations, shared their ideas, their concerns and to really center their voice and all of this. I really love doing this work. I've been in New York resident for the last 30 years of my life, my family still lives in the south war. The first house that my grandparents brought on but here we are, about two years later, I'm not just inside of meeting the need here in the community but also bringing resources and tools to people meeting folks where they are in these communities to be able to tell their own stories. And I think that that is the most powerful part about this work, positioning those who are on the front lines, advocating for people every day who are from this community who understands this community, it has a commitment to listening to this community to be able to tell the stories of this community and with this community. And so if you would like to learn more about this project, or if you would like to hear more local stories, or just to learn more about the people who have been a part of this project, shoot me an email on Britt, and knock stories, calm, and you can also visit WW dot knock stories, calm, thank you so much again and it's truly an honor to do this work, and I'm so happy and grateful that I had the opportunity to share with you all today.
Thank you,
Brett That was wonderful, lots of great stuff in the chat. Now we turn to the Midwest where Claudia Fernandez and necessery will have been covering immigration issues for borderless magazine. She's a member of the Institute for nonprofit news. So we're going to turn it over to Claudia Anissa for borderless, and we're also going to hear from Sharon Magallon from the Institute for nonprofit news, to learn more.
Chicago is a city of immigrants. over 1.6 million immigrants live in the metropolitan Chicago area, and nearly 25% of Chicago and speak Spanish
at home,
get Chicago's local media are under serving immigrant populations in the region today. There were over 130 local and national media outlets serving primarily immigrant audiences in Chicago in 2012. Today, just half of those outlets remain. When journalists fail to meet the multilingual information needs of immigrants, the consequences for civic engagement and the health of Chicagoans are dire. During COVID We have seen how immigrants have been targeted by disinformation campaigns in Spanish and other languages, putting whole communities at risk of getting sick borderless magazine is responding to the information and language needs of immigrants in the Midwest, through our multilingual publishing mentoring and training programs, we publish investigations feature stories and asked whole two essays that aim to create a more representative media landscape, that includes the voices and experiences of immigrant communities. But we know we can't do this work alone. That's where translating Chicago stories comes in
translating Chicago stories is a project of the Institute for nonprofit news, a rapidly growing organization of more than 300 nonprofit newsrooms. I NN started a pilot in August to translate members content into Spanish, funded by the field Foundation. The goal was to make more high quality journalism available to the city's Spanish speakers. The initial partners were for Ironmen member newsrooms and a for profit newspaper that publishes in Spanish. I am in contracted with two translators who work on a retainer basis, and others who are called upon as needed. Translation is free to the newsrooms and any Spanish language news organization can use the content with credit. The successful pilot led to a grant from the McCormick Foundation, which allowed us to continue the project through June. This is one of several shared services that I NN provides to Chicago newsrooms. As part of its efforts to test ideas and collaboration strategies in the city.
Since launching in August translating Chicago stories has helped nine local news outlets translate over 100 other English stories into Spanish orderlies magazine coordinates a project and works with two native Spanish speakers to translate the stories. The process starts when a newsroom sends me a story in English. I assign it to one of the contracted translators, and they get to translate and story back to me within 48 hours. I read the story and do a final edit before sharing it with both the newsroom and partner newsrooms for republication I publish it on the ion and website as well. I use a spreadsheet to track how many stories we translated and how many outlets are republishing it. I think one of the advantages of this workflow is that we have a native Spanish speaker both editing and translating to stories. As with any reporting project having that second set of eyes to catch errors is critical. Another advantage is its reliability newsrooms can rely on getting their stories translated quickly and accurately thanks to the program set up, and our contracted team of translators. All of this has helped our local English newsrooms reach new audiences and meet the information needs suffered Spanish speaking communities. One example of impact that our project has had is a story published by borderless magazine in December, about how teachers are doubling as tech help during the pandemic for Hispanic families borderless user project to translate the story into Spanish, thanks to translating Chicago stories, it was picked up by both on ABC on and that Chicago sometimes Spanish language newsletter, helping more than double the number of people who read the story through reporter MIT's Rodriguez was also interviewed by the local PBS station. Under Latino voices show after the Spanish story came out through this works. We have learned that the success of translation projects takes time, it takes time for English newsrooms to incorporate Spanish stories into their or the tutorial workflow. We know that is not enough for them to just translate a story, they also need to publish it in Spanish do Spanish social media posts and make their website, easily accessible in Spanish. It also takes time for news outlets to build Spanish language, audience, if audiences aren't used to coming to your website for Spanish content. It will take time to build their trust, and for them to see you as a reliable source of accurate information in their language. Once they do so. However, newsrooms will have access to a growing audience that may become subscribers or Donners in the future, translating Chicago stories is wrapping up at the end of June, but we are seeking funding to continue this work in Chicago. We know this work is just starting. We can't wait to continue with translating Chicago stories started here.
Thank you all that was really great, I'm super interested in that project myself so I'm and I know others are to see if it can translate, translate to some other localities, thank you so much for all of that. Switching gears here. We are going to talk a little bit about climate change the climate change has never been more or has never just been about melting ice caps, it affects everyone across the world. Climate Central uses science data and tech to produce stories and visuals that show the personal nature of climate change, and what it can what can be done to change it. Here to tell us more is climate. Climate Central writer and researcher, Alison Kabuki.
Hi,
I'm Alison Kabuki, and I'd like to introduce you to Climate Central and what our organization can offer local reporters. Climate Central is a motley crew of scientists meteorologists, journalists, data analysts, graphic designers coders and programmers. We're based out of Princeton, New Jersey, but we've got folks spread out across the country, especially since COVID. We're nonprofit, nonpartisan and non advocacy. Besides publishing original academic research about climate change and sea level rise. We have a number of programs that aim to support local storytelling and reporting on climate change, or climate Matters program sends out a weekly package on a climate change related topic to our subscribers. It's a free service, and if you haven't signed up yet, I suggest you do the weekly release includes graphics data story angles and contact info for experts, we send it to over 1000 TV and digital media meteorologists and over 700 print digital and radio reporters around country. Most of these weekly releases contain localized information for your media market so you can sign up for customized releases, according to your local media, whether it's Albuquerque Philadelphia or Jacksonville Florida or Chicago or Cleveland, Ohio. We cover all kinds of timely topics from our shrinking winters to warmer springs and longer allergy seasons to dangerous high heat and humidity days. We connect climate change with its impacts on communities and individuals, whether it's drought hurting farmers crops and livelihoods, or if it's severe weather, causing billions of dollars in damage and endangering lives. We focus a lot on health impacts, particularly how heat and severe weather are hurting our frontline communities where we know the effects of climate change are falling disproportionately, we can be your link to the scientific community, whether we connect you with our friends and colleagues at NOAA and NASA or at universities around the country. We've worked to create a network of diverse voices, well grounded in the science, who can answer your questions in ways that your audience can understand. We tried to put out information ahead of when climate events might happen so we do a summer package, and this week we put out a hurricane package for those, especially on the East Coast, who will be facing tropical cyclones in the next few months. We've also created a series of Climate Solutions briefs, over the last year for drones to use as backgrounders as our energy system transforms in order to lower carbon emissions. We released reports on solar energy, wind energy battery storage, and next month we're going to send out one about electric vehicles. We explain the jargon, we present the data of where we are now and where we are likely going, and what that means for local communities, including jobs. And we host online workshops where we pile in a number of experts and experienced journalists to help you cover all things climate. You can find all of our past weekly releases and recordings of our workshops in our media library. So the climate Matters program is a bit like a cafeteria, you can take what you like and leave the rest our partnership journalism program is more hands on and collaborative, that's when we partner with a local media outlet and share a byline. The media outlet contributes to the local reporting, including possibly photography and some editing. We contribute whatever else is needed, including data charts, back checking, plus a science reporter and an editor, whether it's print or digital or radio or broadcast or podcast. We can help you craft a feature in a way that puts climate change in an appropriate and accurate context, but that you find the local voices that bring the story alive. Few of the partnerships that we've worked on this year. We partner with an outlet in Columbia, Missouri, to talk about the impacts that warming temperatures are having on allergy season, sending people with asthma to the hospital and driving up healthcare costs. And we partnered with the NBC station in Boston and with nj.com to map out where already scarce, affordable housing is now at risk from coastal flooding. We have some free and easy to use with sea level rise tools on our website, but we can also partner with you to do more in depth analysis of local sites to look at the potential for risk from flood events in the future, and how frequent they may become. That's what led us to a partnership with a local NBC affiliate in Washington DC
this year
where we mapped out the risk to the historic sites along the Harriet Tubman byway. And it turns out that the wetlands and swampy areas that enabled Harriet Tubman, to help enslaved people escape, are now at, you know, at risk of completely disappearing due to human created sea level rise. We are also developing a flood vision tool that will allow us to photograph or film locations and use virtual reality technology, to show how it could be affected by coastal flooding. So don't forget to sign up for climate matters, you can email me directly, and I'll be putting links in the chat during this. Thanks.
Thanks, Alison,
our final lightning talk for today comes from New Jersey and for the last several years, the stories of Atlantic City has been using a restorative narrative approach to tell the stories of the city and its people. We're gonna turn to Christina noble, the project manager of stories of Atlantic City.
Hello, my name is Christina noble and I'm the project manager for stories of Atlantic City. So, what is north of Atlantic City. We're a collaborative project focused on telling restorative untold stories about the city and its people. Simply put, we work on stories and information sharing that inspires hope change and highlight experiences of resilience, despite challenges. We focus on three things community organizing and outreach. Traditional and hyperlocal media collaboration, and we serve as an educational resource. This project is supported by starting university, with funding from JL Dean our dad Foundation, and the NJ local news lab fund at the Community Foundation of New Jersey, a partnership of the Dodge foundation and democracy fund. We also give huge thanks to the Center for Cooperative Media, and free press, who are both crucial to the genesis of this project, and continue to support us throughout.
Well,
what a year it has been, as we know, 2020 and 2021 had been extraordinary, to say the least. From the onset of a global pandemic, to the social unrest and uprising sparked by police brutality against black people in this country, to the hot political scene, our country and our communities resilience were really tested. Working through COVID-19 broad challenges, but it also brought growth, what we thought would be a setback for our rapidly evolving project. It ended up propelling us into an even greater opportunity to engage and connect from Spring 2020 to spring 2021 This is how stories of AC fared by the numbers within a year's time frame, we've worked with 23 media partners and collaborators and 24 community partners and organizations. We hosted 13 interns in our internship program. We gained over 1000 new social media followers and garnered 1000s of views and engagements across all platforms. We produced and were featured in 25 publications, we hosted four virtual store circles, one of which was bilingual, we held 14 storytelling workshops and information sharing events were invited to participate and nine conference and event presentations. We had over 600 participants join us for our events 74 stories were collected from community members via our story bank. We shared 18 resources with our community and 26 local small businesses were highlighted through the work that we did, we also received one award recognizing our engagement in the community. This year, not only were we intentional about the programming we put forth, but we also committed ourselves to building relationships. We continue collaboration with old partners, and we're strategic and creating new ones. We also rooted deep rice as a community, fostering stronger ties with its members across generations. One of the highlights of this year. And one of my personal favorites is our intergenerational storytelling projects and fall 2020 stories of Atlantic City partner with Dr. Christina Morris's media civil rights and social change course and Atlantic City's Golden Circle club. Stockton students interviewed AC community elders about their memories of the civil rights movement, their feelings towards the current Black Lives Matter protests, and their reflections on the history and future of racial injustice and justice in Atlantic City and beyond. During our project launch, we received a phenomenal response. We were joined by folks from across the country, and even one person from Europe. We got such amazing feedback from both participants and audience members. We were requested to host a part to one student stated, the elders taught me a lot about Atlantic City's history, and the people who live in it. I have a totally different perspective on AC. I wish everyone could have the experience I had, we continued this project into spring 2021 with a new set of students and elders. We've begun the scaffolding to eventually expand to other courses and subjects within the past year, we've been developing our methods of information collecting and sharing. We worked on initiatives like our AC community fallen tree. We partner with outlier media to conduct a needs assessment in the city. We collaborated with Atlanta care and the city of Atlantic City for a Vaccine Information panel, and we continue to report on relevant news throughout the pandemic. Recently StoreServ AC was one of 15 New Jersey organizations awarded a stipend to provide additional reporting on how the digital divide is affecting K through 12 students and what solutions could help with the support of the Center for Cooperative Media and the New Jersey's Children's Foundation, we produce two stories surrounding local efforts going forward, to help bridge the divide. Check out all of our latest projects and initiatives by heading over to our website at WWW dot stories of Atlantic City. COMM or by following us on social media. Hope to connect with you soon.
Hello,
My name is Christina.
Thank you Christina and thank you to all of our lightning chat, leaders and presenters. They were amazing and inspirational. Now I'm going to turn it back to Stephanie.
Thank you, Amy. Thank you again to American Press Institute for sponsoring the lightning talks. And as a reminder we have lightning talks every day, so there will be another step tomorrow and another set on Friday. Oh, so now, and also we've made the YouTube link, accessible, so we'll drop it in chat. Now I am really thrilled to welcome to our stage, the LIA Jones of the Texas observer. She is going to lead our collaborative meditation breaks Hi Delia for the next three days together, including this one right now. So we're going to have 15 minutes to center ourselves, and to relax a little bit, and she'll be back on Thursday and Friday to Sofia. The stage is yours.
Thank you so much Stefanie, and thank you all who are attending today. So, my name is Julia I'm with the Texas observer. Right now I'm the director of engagement, where I'm spearheading a year long project looking at the ways in which we can do repetitive journalism across the state of Texas, and a lot of my work, you know, is it has to do with being trauma informed for sure. But I also do a lot of work around my own PTSD right working with a lot of these communities that we come in contact with we have to understand that, especially when when folks who do come from marginalized communities, We do have existing traumas that we also bring into the newsroom, but also, you know a lot of those things are exacerbated when you are in contact with a lot of communities who are facing some of the same things. And so with my own therapist and even in the newsroom that I work in now and even with one of my colleagues as well. We do a lot of breathwork, a lot of EMDR work. Eye Movement Desensitization rehabilitation, essentially, a lot of grounding work and so today what I wanted to do for the first day of our summit is to not only kind of introduce different you know tactics that we can use kind of ground ourselves when we're feeling overwhelmed right when we're writing a story when we're out for an interview or when we just are just feeling overwhelmed with everything that's actually going on in the world
right now,
but also I just kind of want to establish kind of why are we here in this space today. What are you looking to bring back from the summit. What are you, You're looking to actually leave at the summit. And yeah, so to introduce ourselves so I'm going to drop some questions in the chat, and I just kind of want people to shoot away, you know for the next like maybe like five, four or five minutes to answer the following questions. And I wish I had some background music right now like I will be playing some Beyonce and sue them Beyonce music or something like that but I don't have access to that right now, but just shoot away the name, your name, what your org, or who you're with. Are you actually based why you do journalism, what you're looking to bring back from the summit, and looking to leave at the summit.
Oh there's my music Thank you.
In this futile way.
Hi Miss Cheryl, I see that you said hey in the chat. There we go accidentally just sent it to attendees, but thank you so much, Joe
gonna keep it going for about three more minutes. All right, we have some donuts coming in so far I'm gonna just start reading off, please just keep submitting as you go. And I'm gonna just like read these at random, you know, so I'm just gonna have at it so we have Aaron's here from NPR, Boston based in Boston. So you're here to get the news to the people I respect that, and to gain empathy for and gather use use cases from collaborative journalism Orys dope. You have Nisa re borderless magazine in Chicago, I do journalism because I believe stories are powerful and I'm a former reporter and current, Ed, I'm looking to bring back ideas and energy. Let's see Sarah day, a when whisker chin, I believe, from where you really convergence. I'm hoping to learn about better collaborating with community members. A big aspect of journalism that like we not only, you know, have to prioritize but we have to understand a lot of restorative work has to go into that as I read just a few more before we start that grounding work. Who is Wallace Hi Lewis,
how are you
from. Oka Niecy and ino sub party lands, now known as Durham County, North Carolina. I work at croissant, a southern movement media collective I'm excited to connect with others so they're movement journalists and collectively plot on how to build better organizations. You're here to get cocoa from the Netherlands welcome cocoa, And just came to see how us across the ocean are collaborating, instead in pm journalism, I would like to get input on you guys and how are we, how are y'all are doing this shizzle okay Shazam. I am a corporate pm with investigative journalism background,
okay though.
I carry from Dallas repress Dallas Texas Texas up in here. Because listening finding and truth telling. And telling stories makes a difference, looking for insights as Dallas launches a local collab
dope though.
I read about, oh, one more. See, Christina, Deb Tula. I'm on Alon land in San Lorenzo California east of San Francisco. I do freelance writing because the world fascinates me and I live in learn from others and help others,
that too.
All right, well thank you all so so much like this is really dope please keep submitting, if you haven't submitted yet I really want us to kind of like establish that we're here, identify ourselves right. You know established community with each other. But, you know, while we're doing this. I do want to do a really cool grounding technique that I kind of use, especially when I used to be a community reporter and Austin here at the NPR station. So a lot of my job at the time was like as a general assignments reporter, so I was like running around like I was crazy trying to get everything ready for my deadline for all things considered, and there would be moments where I would actually forget to use the bathroom, forget to actually eat lunch, which I feel like maybe a lot of us have some type of experience with because we're basically always trying to feed this monster, while also interacting with a community, you know, at different levels who are experiencing different forms of trauma as well. So one thing that my great therapists. Oh, enjoy you can drop the music if you,
if that's okay.
Thank you so much. So one really cool technique that my therapists, you know, ended up showing me that really helped not only me kind of ground myself and be a little bit more thoughtful and intentional throughout my workday, but also just kind of realize what was happening in my body. So I did this really cool thing where, you know, If I'm overwhelmed, I'll just stop and take about like, maybe like two or three minutes and try to notice something around the room 10 different things that you didn't notice before. So, you know, sometimes I'll notice, oh, there's a tree or a bird that I didn't notice right here or maybe there's lamp that I didn't notice. And as you're like calling attention to these things very intentionally. It helps to kind of like ground you and kind of, kind of set you in the room and kind of pull you away from these different things that are kind of basically beating at you or kind of like pulling you away. As you're like reporting throughout the day. So I want to do that for about, about two minutes now, just take about like, 10 deep breaths. So, inhale and then exhale, and then look around, and notice something. Do that again and I want us to do that about 10 times. And then as we're kind of doing that, you know if folks want to drop things like into the trash chat that they didn't notice before, if they want, you know, to kind of describe what's happening to their body, if they if they kind of want to describe you know, you know, if it's not helping at all. You know we can do that as well to kind of talk about you know, other different techniques that we can also use that I'll also show you throughout the summit as well. So let's take about two minutes to do that. Amy said a dog is snoring.
I love this.
Yes.
Gotta take another minute to kind of wrap this up and continue dropping stuff in the chat Holly was listening to what sounds are around, around them right now that is such a great thing. Yes, I do agree with that. Notice some plants are dying. I just noticed some did some some dying flowers as well because like I forgot to change that water so
bird sounds is sipping on hot tea.
A lot of dog snoring around here I see
a spider, Theresa gullet. And kids are playing in the street.
I just noticed that I was thirsty I didn't even realize that I hadn't actually eaten breakfast and that I actually hadn't drink like water, like until I actually did the looking around and breathing
for.
So since we have about, like a minute left, I do kind of want to wrap it up now. I want you to bring your attention to kind of like your body what you're feeling, what are the things that you need to do to kind of alleviate those things so if you have tension in your shoulders if you have it in your back, if you have it in your chest right like, you know I'm speaking in front of like hundreds of people right now and I didn't realize how much tension I was actually holding on to until like I started breathing and kind of looking around and like stretch, shake it out right, take a bathroom break right take five minutes away from your desk, but what I want these sessions to do is to not only give you the tools to kind of bring yourself back and ground yourself, but I also want this to be an opportunity for you to really pay attention to what's actually physically happening to your body, we can't do the reporting we can't really pour into communities, we can't really do what we you know wish to do here and in the ways we want to transform journalism, unless we're actually paying attention to like our own well being. How our body is performing at the time, and then also just being very thoughtful and intentional with the work that we're doing as well. So, you know, I just want to say thank you all so much. Thank you all for interacting, sorry about that, that little slip up earlier, about not putting those questions in the chat, Joe, the real, the real MVP. And I'm going to turn it back over to Stephanie but thank everybody for joining and I can't wait to do some more sessions here in the next few days.
We have thank you so much. Thank you. I can't wait for tomorrow and Thursday, too. So it's time for a break 15 minutes we'll be back here,
sharp,
we're gonna start on time, we're keeping everything on time it's 215 Exactly, thanks to Leo for getting us right to the minute and we'll see you back here in 15 minutes. Don't leave the webinar, you don't have to. We're gonna play some music, play some slides, just keep it open, step away, see you soon.
I'm a local entrepreneur and Atlantic City resident. I'm here with Allie Nunzia and Mike Rispoli to talk about stories of Atlantic City.
So why Atlantic City, Atlantic City has suffered from what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the danger of a single story. When people think of Atlantic City. They all too often think of just one story, casinos. While the casinos are a part of our story. It's far too narrow, and has led to a limited understanding of our city, both locally and beyond,
Atlantic City is a microcosm of the world, filled with schools where 40 languages are spoken, natural beauty like our free beaches, and a wonderfully rich history that includes a legendary jazz legacy. It is true that we have problems of all cities, poverty, homelessness, addiction, and more. With a population of under 40,000. It means we have an incredible opportunity to be a hub for experimentation to solve the problems that are facing all places, in a very small way. Many of us felt that our stories. The real ones, the messy ones, the important ones
weren't being amplified.
I'm incredibly proud to say that the movement started that night has surfaced and spotlighted previously on important Atlantic City specific stories through the stories of Atlantic City initiative, the work must continue. Because Atlantic City is so, so much more than just a casino city diverse. It is beautiful to have the potential to solve big problems. And once again become a world class city, but only if we change the story.
One thing that we want you to understand is what was missing for you. If your news we're going to ask you to take time out and foster caring genuine relationships with people in the community, you would probably have a challenging time finding a few extra minutes even on your most
well intended day.
That's how people like myself, the non journalists
element,
it's crucial that we encourage
you to identify key partner that already have established trusting relationships
with people in the community. People
know me people know my team and people know that they can trust that. We're here today to point out that not so obvious. The Forgotten folks that have been freezing their family in these neighborhoods for generations. The people that care for their neighbor, even when the city seemingly doesn't to people championing their environment with every part stacked against them. People that promote the human spirit, even when basic needs
aren't being met.
Take some depth of courage humility and vulnerability, not only at sea, but to listen
for what's really going
on beyond the audience beyond the biases that you may have about your own community, we learn when we leaned in a bit more in our own city and that people take care
of other people.
My question to you is can you identify a partner that you might work with as an access to more authentic conversations
in your community.
What we know is that our words
create our world. The stories we tell, and what we tell our children, is what they live into
we're accountable for
better stories that share the fullness of who we are.
It looks really different than when a lot of collaboration is internal. This was something that was led by the community and not the newsroom.
As someone who is a former journalist and is now a community organizer, I think there's a lot of things that journalists are interested in doing collaboration,
organizers,
your successes your community success and if you want to be successful, you need to work with people and get as many stakeholders invested in collective success and justice. Even if you're a journalist, even if you find it challenging and maybe a little uncomfortable. Your future depends on collaborating with the community. We need to stop thinking about the community as a liability. instead, your community is your greatest asset.
You know if anything from collaborations, strengthen in journalism and it makes it more reflective of the democracy that it's supposed to have.
If you're tired of hearing your audience criticize your work, call the community in. If you're tired of feeling overworked, but you don't have enough time to final district stories out there for the community and activate them, and you're tired of feeling that the public just doesn't understand the value of journalism and what you do, call the community and and activate them. What's exciting about community newsroom collaboration is like this, like the stories of landing city project is that the community stops just being news consumers instead their constituents for local journalism. Thank you.
Daniel Purefoy and I'm the racing place editor at Callaway today but yeah I'm just going to give you a bit of a story about our collaboration
is a five year old magazine and media organization headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, devoted to journalism and storytelling that illuminate the unsettled dominant narratives pursued as Jefferson liberation stands in solidarity with marginalized people and communities across the south, and today I'm going to talk with you a little bit about one of our collaborative projects with a writer who's currently incarcerated on death row in North Carolina.
Four years ago, a former editor of Scalawag approached our team about a writing workshop and is facilitating with death row prisoners at Raleigh Central Prison. One of the participants, while may had already written a memoir, and was seeking an opportunity to write more for the public. Specifically, he wanted to write about the problems with the education and parole policies in North Carolina's prison system. While was sentenced to death in 1999 and 21 years old. He told me that prison was where he grew up, where he decided to pursue his education as he goes through the decades long appeals process to be released from prison. North Carolina did not have access to publicly funded education among the general prison population they are deemed unworthy of such privileges. The resources are considered wasted on them. No 140 Men currently on death row, Lyle is one of the only prisoners who has attained an advanced degree while incarcerated. 2016, Miss Galloway, he said, quote, there needs to be something more than the poison of prison, air that lethal combination of hatred, bitterness and ignorance that rots mind, body and soul.
While the appeal to leave death row. Granted, he faces another grand possibility life without parole,
simply another way to make prisoners disposable life without parole is silent execution is still one of Scalloway circulating articles, and is now taught in courses on criminal justice reform at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it's been taught in a writing seminar at Duke University,
collaboration with wild has been fruitful for us. So essays he's written for us has led to invitations for university lectures by activities for major education media outlets like Inside Higher Ed radio and podcast interviews, and most recently, he had an interview with CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT Sanjay Gupta about the impact of COVID-19 and prison.
Carry Scalloway with him to all of these venues, and we see the impacts in our increased traffic to our website and engagement with our overall work.
Every couple of months,
I take a 45 minute drive to Raleigh to visit Lyle in Central Prison. Every time I have to leave everything but my keys and photo ID in my car.
I walked through an automatic door to a room that's empty. Four o'clock laccase detailing the celebratory history of the prison and a long line with Central Prison T shirts, sold as souvenirs to tourists. The elevator takes me to the role of sell room, and I always find loud one of them, briny and ready for a two hour conversation about everything inside, outside, is writing projects
is classes work
before the pandemic shut down all visitation privileges. He told me that the $500 check he received from Scalloway for his last story on how prisons routinely violate freedom of the press was the largest paycheck he received in his life.
42 years old. Collaboration worthwhile and other prisoners, but this is one of the most importantly,
we are committed to paying all of our writers, loud have just realized that pain incarcerated writers in particular, exponential impact on their ability to survive and to keep speaking truth to power.
Thank you. Some great music.
Thanks Joe. And thank you to our previous speakers so the music that you hear is created by Joe Amditis at the center, and it's the music's overlaid with past presentations at previous collaborative journalism Summit. This is the second year that we did that and folks really like it. So thank you all. So next we're going to dive in to COVID 19 collaborations. So I'd like to welcome to the stage, Sumi. Agarwal, the interim editor in chief at reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, who is going to be hosting this session so Sophie, take it away.
Thank you Stephanie.
My name is Stephanie said as Sumi Agarwal I'm the Interim editor in chief at reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, and we are going to be talking to a couple of folks about how journalists partnered in the last year during the global, global pandemic, and the lessons learned from those collaborations and partnerships. I'm sure like many of you, you know we reveal had to pivot very quickly figure out how we're going to move in pandemic. And if you're familiar with our work you know that we tend to do fairly deep investigative stories that take a long time. So speed is not necessarily a skill set that you know our newsroom is particularly great at so we had to make some quick changes. We ended up focusing on doing a lot of engagement reporting and doing call outs to essential workers, and trying to understand what sort of their day to day experience of the pandemic was. We did a graphic novel that featured people from all walks of life, talking about their COVID experiences. You know we tried to dig into the investigative parts of it later in the year, but I'm particularly excited to hear from our panel today about how they approached it because they did some really innovative work around this. And so I will just quickly introduce our panelists and then let them tell us about it. So, Betsy Abraham is a project manager at the Center for Cooperative Media, where she oversees loved and lost an effort to identify every COVID-19 victim in New Jersey. Marina, Walker, Rivera, is the executive editor at the Pulitzer Center, which supports enterprise reporting global issues. Alexis madrigals a writer at The Atlantic soon to be hosted keiki VDS forum, and a founder of the COVID tracking project. And last but certainly not least is Jacqueline Mason, who is a senior investigative researcher and Special Projects Manager at first draft.
So what we'll do is we'll just kick it off, Betsy,
tell us about how loved and last came to be and, and tell us about your work in partnerships.
Absolutely. Thanks so much soon. I'm so excited to be here today to tell you guys a little bit about loved and lost loved and lost is a statewide media collaborative that began last Mouch. It began as an initiative of northjersey.com, and they initially just wanted to, you know, lexan you mentioned, identify, avoid COVID-19 victim in New Jersey. But that was at the beginning of the pandemic and as the death toll began to rise, the Center for Cooperative Media reached out to them to ask if they wanted to make it a collaborative effort, because so many media organizations were doing similar well dividing obituaries, about people who have died. So once the center glitched out to them and they are going to make it a collaborative, we've got to work on creating a website at loved and lost nj.com And basically what we wanted to do was create one central site where anyone could see, just as many people as we had identified, of people who had died in New Jersey. So if you go to our site, it's basically just a long list of names of people we've identified at this point we've identified about 1200 victims of the Coronavirus pandemic. And these are people who lived in New Jersey at the time of death, and it's anyone. You know, immigrants to teach, to poaches. It runs the gamut and age and hometown and occupation. So it's a really just powerful testament to how wide ranging. This disease has been. When we reached out to him to the patent office we asked them if they wanted to collaborate with them and I won't get too into the nitty gritty for sake of time, but basically that collaboration, looked like them promoting our project. One of the main ways we identified with them was having them just promote a submission from somebody have new partners show a submission from the headquater and Google firms, and that just allowed families, just an easy way to tell us about loved ones that had lost and it included details like the prop sense name County, age, date of death and any just personal details they wanted to include and all of that that uploaded to our website. If we knew the organization's about stories about people who had died. We asked them to share that with us as well so we could upload those links onto our website as well. And until reported we just provided a central point of coordination for those needed organizations helping them identify people in their coverage area identification is just one of the toughest things because there is no central database of people who have died of COVID it's just not super easy to find and it's not always mentioned in death notices. So we help news organizations find people in their coverage area, and help identify them, and also if one needed organization or destroyed, we help show that, show that stories. Those stories as well. So like I mentioned at this point we have about 30 media partners who have joined us in this effort. We've identified 1200 names, which we think is a significant having solid 14 months ago but with 25,000 people in New Jersey alone who have died. We have a long way to go. so, the effort continues.
Thanks so much, Betsy, Michelle awesome, everybody has any questions, feel free to put them in the q&a box on the Zoom chat, we'll be leaving plenty of time for questions with the panelists Brina, tell us a little bit about what the Pulitzer Center did.
Thank you so much so me and hello everyone. I had a few slides but I think for the sake of time I'm not going to show them. I am going to tell you a little bit briefly what we do at the Pulitzer Center. My background is in investigative journalism, and a lot of my career was spent on trying to persuade lonewolf investigative reporters to instead collaborate through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for many many years. So when I moved to my new role at the Pulitzer Center about a year ago, the question I was asking myself is what role do funders of journalism and supporters of journalism, have in encouraging collaboration and more equitable reporting partnerships. And as I was asking myself that question that pandemic hit, I hear we were all in lockdown, unable to collaborate or unable to be go places and travel, which is not very different from what I experienced at ICI J when we had a huge data set, and people in place in many, many countries needing to collaborate, and we learn to scale our solidarity scale our tools and change our mindsets and our practices. So at the Pulitzer Center I leaned on that reach experience, And when the pandemic hit, we made two decisions. The first one is that we were going to redirect. A lot of our financial support during the year 2020 and beyond to the COVID story but specifically to underreported angles of the COVID story, raised technology corruption, and more. The second decision we made is that we were going to put collaboration at the core of our grants, so we were going to structure our support, challenging journalists to work differently and to collaborate, we defined collaboration broadly so it could be among freelancers are collaborations of newsrooms collaborations across disciplines disciplines or collaborations with the community and in the grant itself, we ask reporters to spell out how they were going to go about it, who was going to coordinate the collaboration how it was going to go into work, who the local reporting partners, were going to be and how they were going to be acknowledged and compensated. The results were really astonishing we didn't know what to expect, we ended up inundated with almost 600 proposals from more than 70 countries, we were able to support 94 collaborative proposals from dozens of countries around the world, and committed about a million dollars in funding and that is ongoing. Just very quickly a couple of projects that stood out that you can explore. One is called North Carolina News collaborative. This is a coalition of 22 newspapers, they had a study talking pre COVID about working together and stop competing on certain stories that transcended them together with 22 newspapers like covered, two thirds of the state 6 million readers, it only made sense to use to leverage that footprint to collaborate. So they came together during COVID. And what they did is they asked our support to hire a collaboration coach, very smart. Bring them, who brought them all together Mandy lock, kudos to her as surface data on is 48 opportunities for these newspapers to collaborate at this very important time. I'm going to give you an example from a different country, in this case, Venezuela, where COVID was a crisis, upon many other crisis that that country is experiencing. We supported an organization called proto Vinci, which is, I call them the box of Venezuela, they do, world class explanatory reporting, and they did for COVID, but they also wanted to answer a different question how do we reach offline communities with life saving information that the government wasn't providing. So they collaborated with other organizations including Well, one called a booster and a booster there existed pre pandemic and what they did is they reach offline communities in buses. These journalists could go on the buses and tell the stories verbally, they will relate, rather than the stories to to passengers. So during the pandemic buses didn't run wasn't possible so they replaced that with posters, billboards, that his students at universities and journalism schools. Did you know by hand,
they wrote those Bill posters posters, based on the reporting that product Vinci had published on their website, and then the posters were pasted on pharmacies on bus stops, and in other places where those offline communities, gathered. So those are just a couple of examples I'm happy to give more afterwards, three quick things that we learned, I answered the question that I posed myself at the beginning, yes funders to play a big role in encouraging, we, we don't interfere editorially Of course with journalists, but we do play a role in structuring our work so we can encourage best practices and collaboration is definitely one of those. The second lesson we learned is that of course when journalists, test the benefits or quote of collaboration, it becomes second nature. And so in the future we might not need to structure grants for that. For that purpose, and the final lesson is of collaboration really expands and helps newsrooms achieve their diversity, equity and inclusion goals by opening up the game to much more diverse pools of collaborators. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really
COVID tracking project.
Hello everyone. It is really great to be here with all of you,
let me
share my screen as soon as I can. Somebody else is sharing so they would have to unshare their screen. Oh there we go. Okay, we're good now. And I will share away. There we go. Okay. I'm going to present mode here. So I'm here representing the COVID tracking project. Here, it's always strange because I've done a bunch of these talks, but there are 500 people who contributed to this data set we, you know through time had, you know 35 staffers that we funded through philanthropic means you know raised almost $2 million to support this project, and somehow it all started with this, which was a story that Rob Meyer and I wrote on March 6 In which, Rob had come up with the somewhat brilliant idea that if we just went to each state, we, and we saw how many people they had tested, we could compile those things into a spreadsheet that would give us a number of people who'd been tested. At that point, fewer than 2000 people had been tested, we now know probably 10s of 1000s of people already had been infected with SARS COBie two, and it was a, you know, a fairly fast but conventional kind of journalism, the Second Republic your story basically though. I got an email from an old friend of mine from college named Jeff hammer Bakker who'd become a data scientist and he said, Hey man, did you use my spreadsheet to like do this story, at which point I realized that the two. Well, the three of us Rob and I over here and Jeff over there had actually been doing the same thing compiling the this sort of the state numbers into national statistics, because the CDC was not doing so. And at that moment we just realized that we were just going to keep doing this, we thought it would just be a few weeks that we were working on producing these numbers that we weren't seeing from the CDC as a matter of fact, we ended up doing it for a year, and the CDC didn't release any testing numbers for 100 days, and it's only very recently that their numbers are really coming into alignment with what the state provide. We quickly threw together. Mission, which was just to compile and publish state and territorial data and really worked on, on thinking about it as a public good and because it was a public good. We didn't try and centralize it inside the Atlantic, we were like this must be an effort that builds the network of understanding not just sort of narrowly, you know provides coverage for the Atlantic. It also helped that we were sort of inside and outside of the Atlantic at the same time for the first couple of months of the project, and that there was no money at stake in the in the beginning and by the time there was money at stake, it was kind of clear that it was a significant enough effort that, that the Atlantic very generously just said like okay we get it, we're going to rave, you're going to go raise money for this thing and we're going to make sure that the CTP staffers get it. This is what we produced at the end of the day. A lot of charts, lots of data. We publish these things every day we did pretty deep analysis of federal and state data, probably about as deep as you can find anywhere including inside the government, in some cases, like in this case, with HHS is hospitalization data. We both helped get the data out of the government, and we also were able to verify that it was reflective of reality or at least as reflective as any other data that we had. We also teamed with evomax Kandi and his team at Boston University to put together the COVID racial data tracker which better racial data will come online but for quite some time this was kind of the best you could do which was to try and look at what states were reporting and stitch it together. We also put together the most comprehensive Long Term Care numbers it's extremely difficult. We did really deep data annotations, I think this is really what we became known for,
and why people ended up trusting the numbers that we were putting out despite the fact that we were didn't exist on March 5 of 2020, including people intend to government and other news organizations were really, really clear about here's what we know, here's what we don't know here's how these data definitions match up here's where they don't. And this was just an absolutely unbelievable amount of work to put that kind of stuff together. We also worked directly with states as well as with journalists on the ground in some places to say hey listen, let's shake free more numbers from different states. We work directly with HHS to to say listen, we know you're worried about all the, all the data that you have in your word, it's not quality controlled enough, we if you give us an embargoed look at it, we will help you QA, this data as a means to you, making it public for everyone, because one of the things that we realized was that there were a substantially larger number of people on our project than there were inside the federal government working on these issues. So what difference did it make tons of press mentions, one of the things I thought was most gratifying is we saw just constant basically rescanning of our charts by local television affiliates across the political spectrum, so far 1000 citations in academic journals, I think that's really just getting going and also used by most of the big dashboards. The data is used by the Trump and Biden administration's and laying out their COVID strategy is cited in 13 congressional letters, CDC reports in a bunch of other places. I think this is really why it worked, seems dumb seemed very simple as a, you know, why did this work as volunteer driven project. There was just something to do, so often, there is not always something to do in these kinds of collaborations, and there were some key features to that you know the work really happens. Together we ran shifts so it was kind of like you're working at a bar, you know, there's like a busy rush and then everyone like hangs out afterwards together, You know the work was really easy to learn just putting numbers in boxes, but it was hard to master was used instantly basically and the work was really valuable. These are our four lessons, basically boiled it down into four lines, you know, being a force for reality, you know when there's hard decisions to make, make sure that you reflect reality to the extent that you can increase people's speed to knowledge, you know, there's all. There's a lot of slow we're ways of coming to knowledge we were about making things faster, really model the culture of gratitude were a volunteer driven project so people got thanked for things that were just in the course of their, their daily work and I think it made things work well even with our paid staffers. And again, pushing the value out to the network is made all the collaboration work for us. So thank you very much.
And Jacqueline, tell us about what first attracted.
I will and I will also share my screen.
Present. Awesome.
So thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure to come to this summit, it's one of my favorites and I do also enjoy the music so please keep that. So I'm going to go through a little bit about what we've done at first draft this year as far as collaboration insight from newsrooms partnerships while covering the pandemic. So, my name is Jacqueline Mason and I'm Senior investigative researcher and Special Projects Manager at first draft, first draft is a global nonprofit combating mis and disinformation. So over the past year my team and I have been looking into COVID-19 disinformation narratives. More specifically, narratives which affect and proliferate in black and Latin X communities online, so I'll just highlight all the work we've done during the pandemic. And so what we do at first draft, we work to empower people with knowledge and understanding, and the tools to build resilience against false, misleading information. We are a global organization, as I've said, We're based in the US we also have offices in Europe and in the APAC region. And really what we talk about and what was very big, with all misinformation, but definitely with COVID-19 misinformation as it really harmed our communities is that, You know our relationship to information is emotion. Also, the highly emotional and provocative information really stands a stronger chance of lingering in our minds and incorporating it into our memory bags, and so the first job of missing this information is to catch our attention, and that reason novelty is key so this is why for something like the novel Coronavirus was something that really just, you know, was very intense. So, you know, we talked about you know the ways information disorder is spread a lot with journalists, you know we do train in middle media literacy and general training, you know how Meems and things with a kernel of truth or mis and disinformation has some truth within it right confusion amplication uncertainty are ways that misinformation spreads. We also talk about the trumpet of amplification right. It basically illustrates how misinformation travels through anonymous platforms niche communities, private groups and into the mainstream, and sometimes it's picked up by the mainstream media and the debunking coverage can feed the fire even more. So we also talked about data deficits. We noticed we're initially failing to provide the right information right health authorities, sometimes newsrooms about COVID-19 vaccine at the right time to the right people, right, so we have reporters governments and health bodies sometimes have trouble providing information in an effective way, or a compelling manner. So we needed to monitor these online spaces for a sudden demand and new information on given topics, so we knew what information was needed and when. So as I said earlier COVID Case Study is a case study for a perfect storm right it's new. People are scared so you become emotional, it's very complex. There are already pre existing narratives, especially as we moved from COVID-19 into the vaccines, and the high impact that has on people's lives and already the fears about Big Pharma which were pre existing narratives. So, were first draft really was able to partner with newsrooms was through our through our monitoring through our research, we were able to partner with different news organizations such as BuzzFeed on multiple pieces on COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, including this one about how US exports conspiracy theories and another about conspiracies proliferating on tick tock, tick tock was a very hot topic platform for us this year to talk about the first draft team was early in flagging misinformation about the pandemic documentary on platforms, so we were able to provide a lot of insightful analysis on how it proliferate across these platforms. We also provided insights to CNN health news on anti vaccine activists, and how they peddle conspiracy theories, as well as 538 piece on general vaccine misinformation. And we collaborated with the BBC to apply our research and vaccine topology to Latin America to track narratives, related to vaccine disinfo in Spanish and Portuguese.
So this brings me to our team also looked into COVID-19 narratives that most affected communities of color specifically black and Latin X communities, leading up to the election we did notice that many newsrooms had a critical misunderstanding of some issues which were important in black and Latinx communities. So this year, we worked with community based organizations, grassroots organizations, to see what they are seeing on the ground right and to really bring them together and collaborate with newsrooms because this is key, right. Sometimes newsrooms do not represent the communities that they're meant to serve. They are not as diverse. So, this is a systemic problem but in the meantime, to bring newsrooms together with these types of organizations to really tell them what's missing, lack of access was something that didn't necessarily get covered in the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and that was something that gradually we saw right like, how are you know black and lettuce communities, gaining access to vaccines, right, and this comes from community interaction. So, furthering things along, I mean we always have our news. Our daily and weekly newsletter. We did modify our newsletter to be specifically COVID Central. We regularly host webinars to help reporters and the wider public understand and manage vaccine misinformation. We have a public guide on how to navigate the infographic right just information disorder and that explains how misinformation spreads and gives practical tips for verifying content online for journalists, we have an online course that was very popular early last year and still remains to give journalists the practical tools, techniques and advice they need to tackle the info Demick and produce credible coverage on Coronavirus. And we also have a two week text message course that's been very helpful. We have an English and in Spanish, so that is on general missing disinformation so it can help community members, really get prepared for the threat of US election misinformation but also misinformation in general. And I thank you so much, I will turn it over.
All right, great. Well thank you all and reminder to everybody you can put your questions into the q&a box and we will be getting to those shortly. You know one thing I want to ask all of our panelists was prior to my current role, I was running reveals collaborations. And you know collaborations can be so rewarding and so effective and you know I think the work that you all spoke about really showed that, but they can also be really, really challenging and difficult and time consuming. And so I'm wondering were there things that you all learned, you know about how to manage the work
so quickly and so fast and there's so much intensity. How did you how did you navigate those sort of competing needs.
I can go someone else wants to get theirs. Okay, double up with a question that's in the in the q&a which was, you know, what aspects of collaboration alignment strategy planning, did you have to go without. I guess I would say this about that, the speed and the intensity of COVID kind of cut both ways, in the sense that never waste a good crisis, basically, I think that the the unprecedented nature of what was happening particularly in the spring of last year, meant that all kinds of doors flew open, and all kinds of locks were busted. And I think it was kind of just a matter of like how ambitious, could you get in that moment, to actually deliver the things that people needed the actual valuables that that people need and I think if you were doing that, I think most people were willing to be flexible because society as a whole was sort of flexing and bending in this sort of unprecedented way, so I guess that's why I think about it it's like you know, if the thing is valuable enough, and there's a crisis moment, you can use those two things to kind of lever your way into, you know, kind of durable partnerships that might not otherwise have
have worked
15 What about you, you were talking about 30 partners. As part of the loved and lost project I mean that's a pretty staggering number. Having, how did you all navigate sort of some of the typical pain points of collaborations.
Yeah. One of the things that helped was, you know, obviously that initial onboarding call, and giving them access to all the resources we had. So just as a collaboration just being completely open with whatever we had. So we had 20 Central spreadsheets that we collected all of our information on, and we just made that really accessible to them so that they could get into that and get information for themselves, but also just being really open to say, Hey, what is it that you need. Do you need somebody lanzones To help you in your work. Do you want us to be editing Stu always showing you how can we help you and just being really just open to doing what they needed us to do. And just really kind of being there for those needs and following up with them every so often. I think one of the challenges with our project has been f1 is oily, they latch on to the mission, but those, you know, as we all know does a million still is to catch up on specifically with COVID and there's always something new so it's just keeping this in the forefront of everyone's mind, specifically when you have maybe not, you know when you have someone who died for example in April of 2020, making sure that that person isn't forgotten, but that will still telling those stories, while trying to also tell the stories of the people who died last week, because it seems like there's just so many stories to tell, but just making sure that we're all able to tell as many as possible.
You know, listening to you all talk, the one thing that sort of struck me was that in the course of your projects, all of you in different ways stepped in, where, you know, perhaps,
government
agencies, Nest didn't necessarily step up so you know Marina when you were talking about the efforts in Venezuela to get the posters up in communities that weren't necessarily online or Alexis when you were talking about sort of tracking this data that nobody else had. I mean, What we do so has such a big responsibility to begin with but then this feels like an even more extended layer of responsibility and
how did you,
you know, how did you approach, sort of do change anything in your approach, in thinking about sort of feeling some of these huge information gaps.
Reena
Do you want to self,
I think. I think that I would like to, to share that I didn't in my introduction is a project that we decided to tackle during the pandemic related to rain forests. This is an area that the Pulitzer Center has done a lot of work on. And of course, their communities living in the rain forest regions of the world are among the most highly impacted by the pandemic so we discourage travel, and we encourage collaboration, and also data journalism in these areas, and that work well, and we created we decided to launch a network called the rain forest investigations network. And what these network of reporter has started to do, now that are like 13 media organizations collaborating on leveraging data and technology to tell the crucial and urgent stories of the destruction of a rain forest, yielding call it has even worsened. But you seen what what we do have available at this time. And what we have available is technology is GIS technology is mapping and satellite imagery. So really thinking creatively and out of the box in non traditional ways to still be able to get that story out and to then leverage collaboration among those reporters to stay on, on that story. So what we've seen as a waste to sort out these obstacles, he says, How do we go around the obstacles by leveraging what we do have what we do have is one another, technology and data
like this. What about you, you kind of spoke about, you know, owning up to what was known what wasn't known. Were there other things that you all did to to balance those needs
to balance needs just of information and, like, like useful information versus good information. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of it was just research, you know, there was a tremendous need with COVID data to not take the charts at face value. It was like, very easy to kind of bundle the numbers into something that looked complete and rigorous and verified but because all of these data pipelines were being patched together sort of at the last minute. There were a lot of problems, and so I thought the kind of most important thing just tied into some of the misinformation, as well, was to show the ways that the data could could be wrong but in somewhat predictable way so around like holidays for example we could call it ahead of time listen here's what you're going to see the cases are going to go down the deaths are going to go down and then on the other side, things will go back up this is not reality that's an artifact of being able to sort of discriminate between when the data was reflecting reality and when the data was reflecting pipelines or process issues. Build trust over time. And I think that it, It was really important, is just that like to actually know that stuff requires like a lot of research and it requires a lot of kind of experience with just seeing how the data moves through time and being really, really close to it I think a lot of us could sort of by the end could sort of feel it in our bones you know we'd be like no that's not real. I'm going to take a look and then you find out that there was some issue with reporting in that state or whatever it was so.
So, question from the q&a from the audience.
Somebody asked, you know,
you know, Alexis,
you mentioned how difficult some of these efforts could be particularly we were talking about the work that Betsy and her team have been doing on loved and lost. You know, how did you navigate that with all of your collaboratives like what type of care for partners or participants did you need or did you now in hindsight look back and say you wish you had provided. You know and I think, you know, it's not just sort of the professional right we were all sort of living it at the same time so it's like for those of you who were covering it professionally, you're kind of living and breathing it continuously. So, how did you how did you navigate those kind of needs for yourselves and your partners, Betsy, maybe you can start itself.
Yeah,
I think it's really challenging sometimes when you show a stowaway and it kind of reminds you of someone you know. And it's, you know, when I joined still was like that that may be one of our fundamentals what submit all that we got back on someone or maybe one of our media partners published, and did have to kind of step back and be like, I need to do something else for a while, which is why Belkin home home kind of has its benefits you can take a walk at a coffee break or something and so I'm reading about now. I'm not exactly sure I can answer exactly what each one of them did, but I will say, when we got those positive comments from family members as often as we could read I would try to pass that on. So that they knew like, yeah, this book was really emotionally taxing but it means so much to the family members. Sometimes it seems like such a small thing like putting someone's name on a website, but it meant so much to those families to see even that so just being constantly reminded of why we are doing what we are doing kind of made those difficult days a little better.
You know you and your team were sort of immersed in all of this information. This information this information. How did you kind of take care of yourself how did the team kind of manage that, how do you kind of pull yourself out of that kind of universe. Yeah,
that's a very,
that's a very difficult question right because, I mean, although we are not necessarily a content moderator raters who face a lot of, you know, issues as far as how much you know, of this stuff that they're taking in you know we're not Look, we're not people who are constantly moderating the internet right we're fortunate in that way that we're, that we're just looking at certain things and not hate content, but it does take its toll. I'd have to say that, you know our kind of collaborations with the SeaBIOS were really helpful because we felt like one we're working with people who are actually on the ground and who are directly benefiting from the information that we're giving them. I think that is something that was a bit cathartic. And I think that's something that we did as a team was really trying to make sure we took a lot of the, you know, turns with each other and take the pressure off each other, you know, in order to just kind of prevent burnout. Right, I mean it's been a it's been a long time I mean from the last time I was here almost we were talking about, you know COVID misinformation, so it's been over a year of, you know, kind of looking at this kind of content. But yeah, so I think just like the systems that we kind of have in place but it does take its toll, and it's very difficult and I think it should shine a light on people who do this work even more frequently, and rigorously. Yeah,
maybe 32nd attack on we actually brought in a counselor for our folks to mostly do group sessions and just kind of think in that way and we thought about doing more like connecting folks up with with therapists when they needed them, but there were some kind of like hrs kind of issues with that and I think people got a little bit. Got a little bit worried so yeah that was like cultural support and also trying to bring in some professionals who know what they're doing.
And also my 32nd second ad from a supporter of journalism perspective, we made sure that journalists in the budgets that they presented to us that day included the items that would help them take care of themselves and the people they were reporting with and the communities that we're covering so that there was a line item for PPO equipment that there was a line item item for testing that, and that there would be and that they would spell out in the narrative how they were planning to approach those reporting situations, in a way that would keep themselves safe, and also the communities they were covering.
Um, you know this is a question somebody asked in the chat. You know we touched on this a little bit about the things that in collaborate in your collaboration that you maybe necessarily weren't able to get to just because things were moving so quickly, but building on that in the second half of this question, you know, for future efforts. Are there things you didn't have time to do that you think should be incorporated going forward are things that you will take into your future collaborations that you've learned from beats. Jacqueline, do you want to start us off.
I think I would mention something that I talked about I touched on earlier, which is kind of our insights, you know generally with the election right we kind of noticed this disconnect with communities of color, right, and what can we actually do about this disconnect. You know when COVID 19 misinformation started coming out, we noticed a lot of, you know, emphasis on historical harms medical atrocities right, but from the qualitative research that we did those weren't really the conversations, people were having on the ground about COVID-19 or COVID-19 vaccines Tuskegee experiments such right, but these were the articles that we were seeing coming out, initially, right, so we just noticed something that seemed to be a disconnect right and automatic kind of out to talk about vaccine hesitancy and and put the onus on black people for historical traumas, right. I think something that I would do is just put an emphasis on actually talking with community based organizations, you know what I mean, larger than we have in the past because I think it's a really important key, Because finally, you know, some months later we saw, you know, maybe necessarily, you know, black Americans were the most vaccine hesitant right or there are other contributing factors lack of technical access, lack of actual access to be able to get places, you know, basically white people coming to black and Latin X vaccine sites and taking appointments where other people had to work all day and weren't able to take those appointments. So really getting those stories out, those were important and they did come out eventually. So I don't want to say it didn't happen but just something that could happen sooner, faster, things like that
about you. Are there things that in sort of your role as founder, I mean you spoke, you know, it's really admirable thing to build that into you or ask people to build that into their budgets of like how are they going to take care of themselves but are there other things that he that you all have learned that you want to sort of encourage future grantees to consider for collaboration. Yeah, so
we are thinking a lot about how, as a, as a funder as a supporter of journalism, we can help create conditions for collaborations, a lot of our grantees had never collaborated before they didn't necessarily have the technological platforms or the know how. So, we saw space there is a gap there that we can help feel there's, we have people in our staff, and we have partners like our partner organizations that can help us provide the training and the support that these journalists need to do collaborations that are successful collaborations that really leave them wanting to do more, that are not just a collection of people doing individual stories in isolation but like true collaboration at all phases of the research on the reporting, and the publication stage. So I think what we are the Pulitzer Center going to be doing is more of these, creating conditions, coaching collaborations. So, More, more journalists can not only take advantage of the support we provide but also office, and on how that we can help them.
And it's a question that came up in my q&a. You know, did you encounter, Jacqueline you touched on this but did you encounter any pushback from certain communities who may not traditionally want to share information about how a loved one died, especially if it was due to a disease like COVID, you know, Jacqueline touched on this but that's he tell us about your experience trying to even sort of really get into the human level impact of this
pandemic. Yeah,
that's a good question. Um, another, you mentioned it, and I want to talk about both phones. Oh well, I think it'd be really helpful to do, just thinking out loud and audit of the news we have on the list, because, you know, just from my own experience we have found that certain communities, just don't want to even advertise someone's death, we found that some communities just don't place death notices for example, that just don't promote that information. We've had a couple of instances as well. Not many maybe one or two out of the 1200 we've had family members say, Please stick my loved ones name down, but I don't want people to know that died of COVID. So it hasn't been often but I do think that there was a stigma, especially in the early days as well. People like you know they weren't treated like outcasts, if they are someone they knew had had COVID So that was an issue. But I think for the most don't people, especially the ones who contact us, of course, they want a way to memorialize their loved one, especially because so many of these individuals didn't get to have a funeral or they didn't get to have a memorial service. So there wasn't really a public way to pitch my view to that person. So this is that public way to do it. And even as I think about like just having something that lasts, you know, as things are opening up again and then so going back to normal, like this families haven't forgotten about their loved one and they don't want others to forget you though, so we do want this to kind of be a lasting view to all those people who have died.
Another question from the q&a Have any of your collaborations around COVID lead to other collaborative work or at least new relationships, and are you tracking the impact of your work. Alexis, do you want to jump in on this.
Yeah,
I mean, you know, in our case, there were, I wouldn't say that it led to new collaborations like per se, aside from with philanthropy is in the Atlantic, that that happened a little bit I think I can speak kind of for myself here that one of the reasons why I wanted to do. The new work that I'm doing was to bring some of these community building and collaboration techniques to working with the Bay Area community so I do think that a lot of us feel personally influenced by it, and hopefully some of this work will continue, particularly with Rockefeller and Robert Wood Johnson and Chan Zuckerberg who were big supporters of ours and who have ended up supporting sort of spin off efforts like within the Atlantic and otherwise.
Certainly I think that one thing that I would like to reflect on is how the pandemic and and these collaborations. In the case for example of the Pulitzer Center really help emphasize the role of the local reporting partners. These journalists, all over the world that in the past, sometimes we've called fixers. We had the Pulitzer Center no longer use that term we can see that that that term doesn't really do justice at all the and is not respectful of the incredible contributions that these reporters, make in the reporting process, and I think that for many journalists used to jumping on a plane and going places, whenever they want it, it was a very humbling experience to be at home like we were all and, but really provided an incredible opportunity to work with this local reporting partners and to really value. They are unique contributions from the ground, so I think if there's a silver lining. For us, it has been that and in many cases we see that there's no going back to the old ways, and maybe we're going to see a lot less parachuting journalism in the future, and a lot more collaborations, not only within a country with the NSA but also across the world, across newsrooms and on board.
What about you.
Yeah
I would say the biggest thing that's really come out of this and feature collaborations were, you know, first draft was basically just partnering with newsrooms. Historically, you know, leading up to the election we began to partner with a disinfo Defense League, which is 200 grassroots organizations that were looking at missing disinformation and black and Latinx communities, post election that really expanded into these, you know COVID-19 vaccine narratives within these communities right and then we did branch out to another pilot project which is looking at, you know COVID access to vaccines COVID misinformation in a few pilot cities across the US, right, and imparting that information on the CEO SeaBIOS working with them for trainings, you know, we have not trained as many CEOs as we have journalists, so this is a very new experience and how to cater that to them, you know, in a different way than to journalists right. You know, we also do like real life simulations with them like to say like, how would you handle this amount of misinformation. They have a tip line to where they can submit missing disinformation which is very interesting because, you know, This is the first time for them doing something and they don't necessarily know what they're seeing, or if it's missing disinfo and so that training really comes is crucial. At that point, so that's what I would say.
Yeah. And another question, you know, that came up in the q&a is like, you know, with the pandemic, which I know you know things are loosening up, but it's, it's gonna keep going for a while, I think we all know that. How do you decide how long your collaborative projects will go on, like when is it time to sort of say, Okay, we're gonna put a bookend on this work and how do you decide, Betsy, do you want to kick us off.
Yeah so I think that's a tough question to answer because, like I said, we have about 500 people identified in New Jersey who have died of COVID but we have over 25,000 who have died. So we have quite a long way to go. So I would love to continue this project, until we have, you know, everyone who wants to have the old loved one come away to it come mo I did. So I would love to keep going until you know, we have everyone who wants to share all about their loved one named
Alexis, what do you think, how do you decide,
yeah this is a tough one, you know, I mean you build something with hundreds of people and 30 staffers, how do you how do you say, shut it down, you know, there were two things I felt like it was really you know to Betty's point it's kind of like has the has the mission sort of been accomplished at least this for insofar as it's possible for that to happen. In our case the project began because the federal government wasn't doing the job, as we got into December January and February, the federal government was doing the job maybe not exactly the way that we were doing it or or providing exactly the kind of API that we did or the kind of posts that we did, but the data was there and I think that made us think like, are we doing this for, to sort of keep our sensuality within the COVID, you know, data and information ecosystem, or are we doing this to fulfill that mission and if that mission has been fulfilled, then, then maybe we need to know when to hang it up here. You know, the, the other considerations were that a lot of people gave a lot of themselves who are probably that weren't necessarily expecting to was emergency response. And we also began to require quite a bit of money per month to run and we'd always kind of sift a little bit so I thought there were a bunch of different kind of I'm just giving you our thought process when you're thinking about this, you know, there's sort of the inside intra institutional dynamics of like, just, just projects still make sense for us to continue is it sustainable into the future, both on a personal emotional as well as sort of financial practical kind of level. And then, you know, has the mission been fulfilled and I think for us that led us to just basically pick a date of one year from the start of the project to the end because we figured there'd be nothing better from then on, you know, it wasn't like there would never be a day, a day that was perfect because yeah the end of this thing is gonna be ragged it can go on for years, there's going to be waning attention there's and and waxing attention sometimes so it's just really really tough and I don't know that there's ever going to be a clean call there.
Yeah, and I think just like jumping off of what Alexis just said too. I think sometimes it just evolved quite, because while now, the storage side, the project manager protonating everything. Maybe it looks like families uploading names to all sides don't actually, I may be laid out, if the need arises someone else man it but I think that just like keeping in mind what is the need and what can be streamlined and like, because, you know, we don't know how long distance will go on and if it'll pick back up again and how it changes so just being kind of windy to shift and adapt and not being too cautious about it, while also trying to like Alexis said achieve the mission.
Yeah, I mean, and Jacqueline I think this question is particularly pertinent for you because it's not like, you know, any of these discern misinformation campaigns around COVID are about to go away anytime soon, how are you approaching
exactly I mean one thing we have to assess and we can't know is how long will this remain a threat to democracy, how long will this, these narratives be weaponized and politicized right we don't we don't really know how long that will last, right, so I would have to say that's a huge contributing factor to how long we'll continue to talk about something like COVID Right. You know, we don't know where vaccines are going to go we don't know if they're going to, you know, have something that's going to be have to be continual and to get boosters right and who's going to get behind that and use that as a wedge issue. So, you know, we'll have to say,
and Marina How are you, you know you're bringing slightly different perspective, how are you helping projects that you all are sort of funding and supporting, think about making those decisions.
So you know in a few cases we have extended the support to second iterations of the same project, for example, example mission local is a wonderful community outlet in the Mission District in California. And what they did during the pandemic is like a really deep collaboration with the community to tell uncover the COVID stories in their own words. These youth for example would like record the diaries on their phones, and then though there will be regular striations and animated video to tell those stories, they really found new ways of reaching the community working with the community and then telling those stories with them. So we were happy to do a second round of support so that they continue with that. And now, Mission locally thinking about expanding that model to other community outlets around the country, perhaps on a post COVID theme perhaps on a vaccine theme. So it's just really nice to see how a little seed money, kind of call and really multiply these collaborative efforts, and the ability to work differently to think differently and especially in collaboration with the community. So,
I am cognizant of time I know Stephanie and Joe are very strict on timekeeping. So we are down to our last five minutes so I just wanted to ask, let's do a quick lightning round of our panelists. Any parting thoughts, any advice or when you want to share with folks about how to run a collaboration, or what you've learned
today it's extremely gratifying, working with the broader community and working with other news organizations, and that, you know, there's such a tendency I think of people to try and suck all the value into their own news org for obvious reasons, but there's just so much power in reaching out, outside of your own org, even though it requires a lot of tap dancing internally.
Jacqueline.
I agree and I you know not to sound like a broken record but it's extremely, extremely important, you know, to be able to have diversity within reporting right, and if there's no diversity in newsrooms that's that's still no excuse, right, we can still reach out to our different community based organizations or people on the ground, and talk to them about issues that truly affect people and communities of color, and get that right information out to them, you know, the data voids that exists within these communities are massive, and in some cases they kill right so we need to do more of that. Yeah, that's it.
Yeah absolutely and I think this is Danielle she also often during this summit is just how important collaboration is, and especially I think over the past year we've all seen that way. Each of these newsrooms could have gone ahead and done their own obituary always relates to people their own identification, but how much stronger when you do it together. It just lightens the load when your load is already so heavy. So I think that was just a huge takeaway and just being able to open with no data and all the information you've collected, and knowing that it strengthens you know the whole news ecosystem.
From the founders of journalism perspective we were focused on the story but we are focused on the process how we get to the story. And so when journalists are thinking about and conceiving their projects. Think about how you know, a collaborative project can bring so much more to your newsroom. In terms of diversity in terms of depth, and also in terms of like resource leveraging and an economy at a time of its course resources and come to us and to other organizations like us. We are eager to support in enterprise ambitious and diverse projects from all over the world.
So Well, with that, thank you everybody special thank you to our panelists in special thank you to the books who attended the session. We will see you next time. Thanks.
Thank you sue me.
Thank you.
Thank you everyone on the panel. I really really appreciate it.
Thank you for being here today.
So in just a couple of minutes we are going to welcome to the stage our next discussion about the solutions journalism networks local media project. And while we get those folks ready to come up here, I just want to give a brief plug to the collaborative journalism that org website. So if you haven't visited collaborative journalism.org Please go ahead open up a new tab, new window and do so right now, sign up for our newsletter and look at our database. So if you've been on Twitter today you'll see, hopefully that Manila Santos Munez has been tweeting about the summit. Mariela, is based in Puerto Rico and she works here at the Center for Cooperative Media to update our database. A lot of folks don't know about this resource so I want to put a quick plug in for collaborative journalism.org slash database Medela works tirelessly to ensure that all the work that you're doing, goes into that database. We try to track everything from one off one time temporary reporting projects, all the way up to ongoing integrated permanent or semi semi permanent efforts. If you are not in the database, you have a project that you want, you can send it to Mattiello or send it to us at the center and we will get it in there. We really want folks to use that, too, as a source of inspiration to see what other folks are doing. We're even for research if you're looking, you know, to find organizations to do case studies on if you're a researcher or just to learn from. If you're a practitioner in the field. So go there, also sign up for our newsletter every two weeks, there'll be one coming out next week we do the collaborative journalism newsletter. If you have any items that you want, put in there or if you want a story featured, send it to us and we will be happy to include it. So with that I would like to welcome Amy Yi to the stage, Amy is an independent journalist who will be hosting today's conversation with lies of gross lies or runs the local media project at the solutions journalism network, and she'll tell us about the halfway point of her project. So, Amy, I'll hand it over to you.
Great. Thanks, Stephanie. I'm going to introduce Eliza gross, the solutions journalism network. First I'll just tell you who I am. I'm a journalist, primarily a writer. I have done a lot of solutions journalism. I have about 75 or more articles in the solutions journalism networks tracker. And I've been doing it for a while. I used to work for the Financial Times in New York, and India and New Delhi. And then I went freelance, and we're still in India and reporting from Bangladesh and Nepal and then also spent a couple of years reporting in Africa in 10 countries. And I have gotten a few grants so I'm going to be listening to license presentation as someone who's been received grants. I've gotten grants from the Pulitzer Center and economic hardship reporting project and solutions journalism network. So, let me introduce Louisa. She is going to be giving a presentation about the newsroom collaboratives Loayza is the vice president of practice change at solutions journalism network. She has more than three decades of experience in media, she was the managing editor of the Miami Herald. She was the executive editor of Nueva dia in Puerto Rico. She was the publisher of exito the Spanish language, publication, the Chicago Tribune, and she was the executive director of the International Women's Media Foundation. So the format of this session is lizer will give a presentation and we will have a q&a at the end. So do put your questions into the q&a box. Without further ado, let's just dive in and Lysa can tell us more about the news and collaborations. Thank you so
much, Amy and I must correct something you said you've done a ton of outstanding solutions journalism, not just you've done a lot of solutions journalism, great, great pieces I recommend that all of you go to our story tracker and find me a nice pieces because you really will enjoy, enjoy them. Thank you Stephanie, thank you Joe, thank you the entire team Betsy the entire team at the Center for Cooperative Media. It's so wonderful to be here again and so wonderful that we can hold a summit, again, I must apologize. The good news is that Mayor Ras Baraka here Newark is replacing all our lead pipes or lead water pipes. The bad news is that they are doing my block as we speak, so hopefully it won't interfere too much I have like five closed doors in between me and the and the street. So, without further ado, I will share my screen so I can give you some details about
the solutions journalism project. Then in the local media project of solutions journalism network.
Okay.
Now,
slides for today's lecture.
Okay.
I apologize I don't normally use Google Slides. So, I do not know how to do the entire screen. But I will proceed this way if it's okay with everyone. I just wanted to give you an overview of where we're at now with the solutions with the local media project of course it's no, no secret for any of us.
Yes, because if you just click the Present button in the upper right you may have to move the zoom window out of the way. Ah, probably not the yellow one, but the present one right next to it. Click and Drag that window though of our faces out of the way and you can click present right there the white button. Nope. Nice, go up a little bit, right next to the yellow Share button
on the left, on the left.
Hey. All right, we're here.
I always knew you were a genius. That's why
they pay me the big bucks, go ahead.
Thank you Joe.
So, it's no secret for any of us that journalism and the media industry is facing pretty pretty severe challenges I am not going to dwell on them much but I just want to point these three in particular because these are the ones that the local media project has set is intent on addressing the decline, and loss of content to address critical community information needs the exacerbation of the news divide where those informed are increasingly better informed, and those less informed are increasingly less informed, and also persistence and a persistent uncertainty around the long term financial sustainability and this goes for any news endeavor, and not just for legacy media and even players that today think of themselves as pretty solid like a local TV for example local commercial TV, but also for digital startups and all other kinds of startups. So this is what we're trying to solve for the local media project, we want to address these challenges by strengthening the media ecosystems through the establishment of solutions based collaborative as a viable, sustainable response, these collaboratives are meant to become a fixture of the landscape, I was hearing Sumi talk in the previous panel about how long should a collaborative last Well we hope that the ones that we're setting up will last forever. So we operate at the intersection of solutions journalism and news collaborative, it's very important that our collaborative the collaborative that we're setting up embrace solutions journalism as the driver of their reporting. This does not mean that every single piece they produce will be a solutions journalism piece but the entire project needs to be infused with a solutions perspective. And the other thing that we also really hope is that these collaborates will focus on one challenge for the community at a time. It could be affordable housing. Last year, of course, COVID-19 became the topic, the urgent topic. It could be economic mobility, wherever the community chooses, or the collaborative chooses, but focus on this topic with a solutions perspective for a long period of time. That's what we propose, with our solution space collaborators, until you have changed the conversation around this Stop, where are we now, the local media project started about three years ago thanks to a grant from the Knight Foundation. Thank you very much, Albert riverwind Thank you very much, Jennifer Preston and Karen Rundblad who really were the the main players in the golf course Alberto is the main player but the main individuals in Knight Foundation that got interested in our concept when they saw what was happening in Philadelphia, which was our original project. So right now we're halfway through as Stephanie indicated, and we are at nine collaborative so our goal is to wrap up this project in two and a half more years with 15 of these collaboratives in various parts of the US, seven are stewarded directly by us, by solutions journalism network with funding from Knight and the Ralph C Wilson Foundation which joined us. A couple of years later, and to our partnership with the local media Association. This morning you have you heard the panelists talk about Chicago and Oklahoma City, And so we are, we have an involvement there nine include ethnic media because we hope that all the collaborators that we build are representative of the community they serve. So all our all our nine collaborators include ethnic media six are producing Spanish language content consistently three include LGBTQ media, and six of them include a participating academic institution. This is also important for us, when we think about a collaborative. We want to encourage those participants to think not only of what comes to our mind when we say news organization, but of other suitable organizations or institutions that might bring value, such as academic institutions, for example Temple University is one of our most vital partners has been since inception in Philadelphia. Queens University in our collaborative in Charlotte, Franklin Pierce in New Hampshire.
We also encourage other institutions like libraries, and thinking really outside the box we have an emerging collaborative that we hope will be launching over the next couple of weeks that will include a theater group and another one that wants to include a choral group, and we think that this is a wonderful idea, because we think of these collaboratives as transformational on many levels, and that would qualify, how do we tell stories, how do we want find different ways to tell narratives. So here's what the picture looks like now, from the west to the east, we are in Wichita, in Oklahoma. We're in Charlotte, Northeast Ohio or near sojo as they are known, solving for Chicago, and in the Southeast Michigan journalism collaborative and the western New York collaborative are going to be merging or have recently merged to become our first interstate collaborative, they are working on the topic of caregiving. And then of course, resolved Philadelphia which started out as the reentry project over three years ago now, and the Granite State News collaboratives That's New Hampshire. So this is what we mean, our definition of an solutions based news collaborative, we understand and of course, Sarah Stonbely has put together a wonderful grid of the different types of collaborators and how they compare to each other and what is the level of involvement, and what are their characteristics, this is how we define our collaborative, a group of news organizations, such as libraries and universities which formally work together with a long term strategy for the purpose of better informing and engaging the community they serve with a solutions lens. And so this is why we sort of landed on this model, after some trial and trial and error and we keep refining it also I mean we are learning. Every time we launch a collaborative, we learn something new. And we think that there's still a lot to be discovered and added to the field. So we want to prompt first and foremost because we're the solutions journalism network, a culture shift among news practitioners, how do we see ourselves as journalists, how do we connect with the community we serve, how do we examine the premises and the frames that we use to modify correct of meant to better serve and to better do our job, we want to foster entrepreneurship creativity and innovation. We know that that you know we have some gaps in this area as journalists, and particularly for example in our level of comfort with technology, and also in the area of audience engagement. So there's much to be explored at this level. We also wonder collaboratives to share best practices on everything that they do, or, or explore it, over the course of their residency with us, which last two years, and, and then, hopefully, organically build up a collaborative of collaboratives and to facilitate a new inclusive dialogue with audience. Cole Campbell has this fantastic definition that I really adopted this. So, such that journalism becomes a system of democratic inquiry, a constant effort to generate public knowledge through exchange and testing of ideas among citizens, and that's the role helping this process is the role we see our solutions Collaborate is doing. So these are some we don't have a lot of requirements but we do have some requirements for those participants are those collaborators potential collaborators that approach has to participate in the local media project. Of course they must embrace solutions journalism, they must agree upon one topic for a while until they change the conversation around that topic that they are satisfied that there's been some change set clear expectations for the participation among themselves. This is sort of a marriage, not a date, so like marriage you know you don't say okay let's get married and then we'll see how it goes. Now, first talk about it first, and then you launch yourself design processes and protocols as journalists, you know we love the idea of All right, let's do, you know, we're so action oriented, but let's sit. Let's think. And then we do ensure diversity of representations and collaborative are some potential collaboratives come to us and say we have this and this and this and so our question is Well, do you have that and that and that, or have you approached this
group or that group or this radio station, or that newspaper, develop an impact and matrix strategy from the start, not as an add on, this has to be part of the DNA of the project so you can start measuring changes as you will. And in our collaborators participants, keep their own statistics but then we ask them also to think of the metrics for the collaborative what does success look like for that collaborative and build a business strategy, of course, as well as I say the residency last two years. So in the second year we work very hard to think about what would a sustainability strategy look like which includes of course philanthropic dollars, but it must include other things philanthropy is not the only stream that will be able to sustain the work of journalism. And most importantly, these are the culture shift changes that we focus on, we want to establish a different way of relating to audiences, believing that, so far we have been enemies in local in local media ecosystems, but we can be partners on certain things, particularly if it means addressing something that has been a chronic challenge for the community. And you know, moving away from the mindset that real journalism is oppositional journalism, there is a place for that there is a place for Investigative Reporting of course we're certainly not saying that, but we are advocating for solutions journalism as a way to establish a dialogue, and look for solutions and responses that are working, it is not puppies and kittens journalism, it is journalism that simply applies rigor to looking and analyzing responses in the same way that it analyzes problems. So here are some of the things that we have achieved today, and later how we will have our I hope you will all attend our graduation ceremony of our first cohort where Philadelphia, New Hampshire and Charlotte will be speaking at length and in detail about their own experiences, but here are some of the things that have emerged already our our collaboratives have really scaled up the production of original local, local content on on their, on their chosen topics. The connection among participants has been incredibly strengthened we have a lot of data to this effect, creative innovation and knowledge sharing, and it could range from learning to use Slack, to writing your own algorithms. It can be anything, but really something that shows that you have raised your game in terms of being more comfortable with technology, increased fundraising capability we have already are collaborative these three collaborators have already raised money and have already been able to frame their narrative in a very positive way, individually and as a collaborative efficient use of resources of course that we hope that they will do that. What does radio bring a radio station bring that a legacy newsroom could benefit from, and vice versa. And inroads, of course, with no audience SEC audience segments. Now, this cannot be thought of as a transactional thing, you know, it cannot be okay I am a newsroom and I am going to participate in this collaborative so I can get to talk to the Latinos because there is a Latino paper there. It cannot be a transactional relationship you have to want to be there, and you have to want to change the way you speak to this community or to others that you have not connected to. Beyond that, you know, the broader picture for us of course the collaborators or labs, if you will, our tests. We are now engaged in a pretty massive research study with the incredible team of Elizabeth Hanson and Carrie Porter because we want to understand more how collaboratives work, how they evolve and how their insights can be integrated into other projects and we can advance the field, how it changes journalists, how injury, it changes. Local media ecosystems, how it changes the consumers of news. We are already also putting together resources library we're using the collaborative summit to launch two guides, and
one on audience engagement and one on impact on how to measure impact. And then of course it's our training curriculum solutions journalism network engages for two years with our collaborators, and we bring all kinds of things we do webinars we bring resources, we connect. We show what others are doing in terms of business models editorial processes etc. And then of course we learn from the collaborative, because every time they show us thing that we had not thought of So, This is where we're at now at the local media project. We are looking to incorporate four new collaborators into this mix pretty soon, two are pretty advanced in conversations and two are a little bit behind, but we're pretty confident that we will be able to launch officially with them. Pretty soon, so any here. Oh, here is what my email. Of course I know that. Stefanie or Joe or someone from the Center for Cooperative Media will drop it in the chat at some point, but if you just want to take note.
Okay, I think I'm unmuted. I am having like major construction outside as well. Yeah, so I actually got kicked out for a minute, but I managed to get back in so I hope my connection stays stable long enough. Thank you for your presentation. It was great to learn about this even though I've known solutions journalism network for a long time I didn't know about this particular project. So from the grant perspective I know about some of the individual grants, but this is, this is quite different, so thanks for the, the overview. I will ask some questions for a bit and then we'll open it up to q&a but I would love for you, you know if you could give some more detail. Perhaps you could allude to one of the specific projects, I'm still trying to get like a picture of what, what it means to do, you know, this kind of collaborative project so for example I did read the blog post on solutions journalism networks website about the collaborative in New Hampshire. Grant state news, and it sounds like teaming up with lots of different media organizations, and perhaps some other institutions like libraries I don't think that we have concluded that but I don't remember exactly, and then working together to share content. And also, teaming up with marketing and social media. So that's my very broad understanding, but I wonder if you could give a bit more detail. And, perhaps, you know, refer to one of the specific projects. I also wonder how the collaborations are organized like if you have a lot of partners like 10 Is there one point, organization or outlet or do they all, you know, collaborate together, how does that work. It's kind of hard to be organized in just one newsroom in your own use room, much less across like 10 or more partners.
Yes, let me say that our collaboratives range in size from shallow being our most petite one now, with six news partners, and two news institutions the Mecklenburg library which has been a stellar stellar contributor to the collaborative and Queen's University to Philadelphia, which of course now has almost 30 partners, but they've been added for a while so yes they range in size. And the last thing we want is to create a burden for the individual news organizations or for the individual organizations that want to participate. So we strongly strongly suggest that they hire a project manager and this was also brought up in a previous panel, it is very important that participants in a collaborative don't feel that this is just another, you know, one more burden one more thing that I need to pay attention to or organize, so you need that project management role in there, whether you're a smaller collaborator, but of course, much more so if you are a larger a larger collaborative, like every relationship collaborators have their ups and downs of course, the first month or euphoria we're together we're launching and then, of course it's a long haul project so sometimes disagreement happens sometimes, things need to be resolved, but we always encourage them to resolve them together and they're don't start talking separately in your periodic meetings, go there, bring it up, see what you think and see how can this be resolved. For example, there may be tension between we know that this is no secret that say entrepreneurial digital startups have their built in thoughts about legacy newsrooms and legacy newsrooms have their built in thoughts about digital startups. And so sometimes these need to be worked out in the, in the process as you go along when you're deciding coverage when you're deciding how to spend money, I should have mentioned that we bring in a significant significant financial support for the collaborative for two years. But this is money that needs to be spent in the collaborative we're not saying okay, you participant get a little bit or you get a little bit, but the decisions around spending need to be collected, need to be decided, among all participants we are going to go for this reporting trip, we are going to do this audience engagement event, we are going to spend X amount of money to build a database on, you know, a new database on the topic we're covering all of this happens in the periodic meetings that the collaboratives have, they need some meet once every two weeks, others meet once every three weeks. Some at the beginning, not every week, so we leave that up to them. But it's this constant contact and this constant conversation that is capable of building and forging a different relationship, a different understanding and collaboration. I mean, chances are that when you're talking about covering a specific story, you will have discussed it in your meeting before you run out and covered so everybody's aware of what's coming down the pipe, and you know, how do you make your coverage more than just a collection of stories but certainly really something that will bring a new infuse that topic with new energy and a new way, a new frame so that consumers can become engaged with it. So that happens when you do a lot of meetings where many times things. It looks like nothing is happening. Other times we argue, and other times, it all looks fantastic. Your first question had to do with how do they come together.
We normally work. We're in Philadelphia, of course, that was a different story because we're already working there and Jeanne Friedman that may not, hopefully she's here but definitely we need her in the graduation ceremony was what we call our first enthusiastic convener, along with Jane van Bergen, of the Philadelphia Inquirer Jean has since retired after plotting the collaborative that change the local media landscape in Philadelphia. And so that's what we look for, we look for this enthusiastic convener, there is always one or two or three, let's say okay I'm going to rally the troops, I'm going to extend an invitation to other organizations here, see if they want to work in a collaboration in a solution space collaboration and see what happens. And then we have what we call our origin meeting where they all meet for the first time. And sometimes you know this origin meeting is like I described it like a subway car in New York City in the summer with no air conditioning, everybody is kind of very uncomfortable looking and what's going on. But that dissipates pretty quickly. And, and that's when also people decide that well this is not for me, or Yeah, I'm enthused about this I'm jumping in, or, you know, I'll wait and see. Let's talk some more. Some of those brick meetings, maybe we have two or three before official launch, but it can be spread over two or three months and then site conversations also take place. So the process of putting it together, takes its time in order to ensure that all of these issues are resolved before you get onto the dance floor.
A huge amount of coordination. I'm curious, like what is the range of the the size of the grants, didn't say on this Jan's website. Can you say anything about that. I know what they are for individuals that are around 5000 So, just for people who are listening who are curious. So, these grants I assume are bigger since they're more partners. I also wonder how much things change from the constant Inception inception of the project over time, you know, since these are longer time periods to is more players come in then, things might change. And then the other question I have is, do you look for particular themes like would a project have to focus on let's say like health care for their project or is it just solutions broadly. Yes, thank you, thank
you for that question, um, of course, the amount of financial support depends on the funder, and we have two main funders, one is the Knight Foundation and the other one is the Ralph C Wilson. Wilson Jr Foundation, and the Knight Foundation is a pretty robust. Grant, and sometimes we do it on our own but sometimes we do it in partnership with another group as is the case of LMA so our investment becomes more and more modest than would be if we were stewarding it only ourselves, but our collaborative scan expect you know about 100,000, a year for two years. By then hopefully they will have developed a plan. Ralph C Wilson is also a robust grant it's a little bit less than that. But those two collaborators are now actively engaged in reinforcing the sources of revenue. Of course we would like any collaborative we would want more support. We definitely are encouraged by some of the very very staunch support that we've gotten from some place based foundations. Shout out to Courtney Benson, in the widget a community foundation to Michael Murphy, the Cleveland Foundation. They have, you know supported for example, the role of project manager and a written that or underwritten report for America reporter, so we get also those types, those types of support and, of course, another shout out to Charles Thomas the night person in Charlotte, who has introduced us to numerous potential place based funders.
So the the theme of the project depends on what the funders are looking for. At that time,
yes or no on the issue, Ralph C Wilson, for example, let me take that case, one of its areas of interest is elder caregiving. And so we presented the idea to a western New York outlets. Would you be interested in reporting on this we actually did a pilot program with Mike Kilian at the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, and the results were so excellent that we forged on with the western New York collaborative, and we found that that topic, immediately resonated with the journalist, both there, and in Southeast Michigan where Karen Magnus and my colleague launched the second collaborative and now of course it's only one it's the interstate collaborative, many of those journalists were caregivers themselves. So it was a topic that resonated. What we want of the topic is that the collaborative should choose something that is relevant to the community that is well known that has afflicted, the community for a long time and has been described in the set with using the same frame, and without adding new information and without any attempt to engage the community. Charlotte settled on affordable housing, and it turns out that, you know, affordable housing is the topic of course our collaboratives pivoted to COVID-19 last year, but they are now returning to that original topic, however, adding the COVID-19 consequences that will be with us for a long time. Yep, so
there is. There are many instances where projects pivot and shift. And that's that's okay because sometimes, you know, I know when I'm doing my own reporting you know the initial plan that I submitted changes a lot after six months of reporting and other stories come up, And, you know things are, they happen kind of organically. So it's grantees perspective it's great when the grant can be kind of flexible. And
once you've settled on the topic and the more expertise you gain on this topic, the more strands you find, the more paths you find for things you didn't know about and that you can continue to explore, and the more passionate, you'll become around the topic. I don't want to speak for our collaborators, but I, I can say that I am sure that the Charlotte participants know a heck of a lot more about affordable housing now than they did a year and a half before, and particularly about responses, around the issues of affordable housing. So, the broad topic needs to stay, however you want, you will discover all kinds of aspects that you can mind over the course of your reporting and why do we insist on one topic that is relevant to the community because it's much easier to measure results it's much easier to see how the conversation has moved. Are you better informed now around issues of affordable housing than you were before you heard about the Charlotte, the CJC the Charlotte journalism collaborative, are you better informed now around issues of poverty and social mobility in Philadelphia, than you were before you became acquainted with resolve. I should say also that audience engagement is an integral part of the work of these collaboratives. So you not only produce the stories but you're actively bringing them to your audiences in conversations of course it was much more difficult during COVID. Now that we're sort of getting back to normal in person activities may resume, but here is where, for example, the library. Libraries can play a pivotal role as conveners, the universities, the academic institutions, the students temple students have really been fantastic and friendly and beer students have really been fantastic in terms of embracing solutions journalism and giving it currency and putting it out in the conversation in the community conversation.
Yeah for universities, that is that their main role as events and forum for different kinds of events and engagement, or did they ever help with content.
Oh, no, no, they helped with content to students can submit their stories, absolutely
right, and perhaps universities have access to databases or information resources and things like that, you know when they also have their own their own platforms that are well established and respected.
Of course, and they go to, you know, what universities. In the case of Charlotte, it's the library that does it. But universities typically step up in the collaboratives to curate and manage the common website of the collaboratives and that is a huge help. Again, in the spirit of not burdening individual participants, but making it as, as easy as possible and distributing the load.
Yeah, and is part of the process, how do you how do you get feedback from the participants in the project, like something that I'm, I wish that grant givers would do is get feedback from the reporters who got the grants, about pickups and things that could be improved. I mean that's it seems pretty obvious to me and we're never really asked to get feedback on how everything, which is curious since we're the ones who are like on the front lines, you know, getting these stories in far flung places. I mean, it's just seems very logical that you know to improve the process so they should get some feedback from us. Do you do you get feedback from the participants during the day,
I totally take your point, Amy, let me clarify though of course that we are grantees ourselves, right and then we read grant so we do also have obligations to the Knight Foundation and the Ralph C Wilson Foundation to report on progress and on what's going on with Galera so we do ask for information, if nothing else for that reason, but we are maniacally interested in what's happening to these collaborators, because we want to understand whether this model, how useful this model is and how it can help a community and how it can revitalize and strengthen a local media ecosystem. Our team is petite, but we do have point, folks, assigned to each collaboratively at odd works with Ohio with Nia sojo and with New Hampshire. Amy masters works with Witchita, and the folks in Oklahoma she's starting to deepen that relationship, Karen works with Karen Magnuson works with the interstate collaborative, And of course the rainy bad Butler coordinator works with all of them because she facilitates all kinds of issues related to logistics and how these collaboratives move and I of course jump from collaborative to collaborative and try to keep my presence there. We don't want to be intrusive, but we want to be seen as partners that happen to bring funding, not as funders, so we are really, really interested in what's going on, and we're very interested in hearing feedback, even if it isn't happy feedback because we want to know where the pitfalls are so that we can sort them out and avoid them in the future. Yeah, I'm
really I'm glad to hear that. I think feedback from reporters on the ground is essential. So this ties into a question in the q&a. But you mentioned your funders and what they're looking for. How are they measuring impact. I mean, they want to know that, you know, their funding made a difference. So what are they looking at. I mean sometimes these indicators can be like, you know, not the best like, you know, the number of Twitter likes really like the best way to measure social impact. And then on the other hand, you know funders really want you to like change the law, or put someone in jail, you know that's not always going to happen so especially. Yeah, that's, that seems to be like the thing that people are looking for and I just think that's not often not the best measure so how are they looking at impact.
Your point is totally, totally well taken, I was listening, couple of weeks ago to a webinar from the person the engagement Person of the Guardians den. I can't remember her first name, Stanford, I believe it was her last name or Sanford, and she was talking about modern metrics and the need to get away from vanity metrics, not that they are useless, but they only tell a very narrow piece of the story. So what we tell our collaborative says devote a lot of time while you're getting together to think what would success look like for you. What does changing the narrative around this topic look like for you. Don't choose 15 objectives, think about four or five and organize them as low hanging fruit, a little bit more level of difficulty and very difficult, very difficult would be for example knocking over the head of the agency and and getting, you know, a new person in there, Those are policy changes those of course are the most difficult to tie conclusively oh it was because of the work of the collaborative. It could be eat but maybe not or maybe it was one factor and there were others, but there are other things that can be measured. You can take a base baseline survey for example, in the community around elder care issues, and then administer the same survey. Eight months later, after you've done a lot of audience engagement you've produced a lot of content, and see if knowledge on this topic has improved. Compare the responses that came at the end with the initial survey, and how have they developed now. And there are two things that we are interested in seeing one is of course the impact of the reporting what does success look like they're both quantitatively and qualitatively, but for me and for the local media project and what you know I talk a lot about with with founders, is that mindset change among journalists, you know, how do we move from paradigms that now may not be serving as well maybe we're fine for a certain time and place, but clearly insufficient now. And if we don't change ourselves we won't be able to change the content we produce in order to connect with audiences. So those are my, you know that's one of my main drivers and we do that a lot through, we hope that the research we're engaged in can show us some of that now. But, but also through qualitative you know through comments. What did the collaborative talk about at the beginning. How do they look at this issue eight months later. Any serendipitous comment by some participants say you know I'm glad I'm in this collaborative because I got to meet the folks from newsrooms that I would have never met before and I'm glad I do. These are gold for us because they indicate that there is a change in an attitudinal change in the way we think of ourselves as journalists who we think are appears, who we value how the information flow in the community goes, those are the things that we look at,
is there a way for potential grantees to look at successful proposals, Or maybe not the raw proposal bit like, you know the outcome I did read a couple blog posts on SGS website that gives some detail. But, you know, it can be intimidating for people who are trying to write a grant for like $200,000 How to set up all these indicators and apart you know it's a big project. So, what do you suggest for people who are interested in writing a really, you know, a successful grant. Yeah,
and first let me clarify that, if, even though of course we talked about a residency of two years. The grant is year over year, so you need to fulfill, you know, certain requirements in year one in order to go over to year two. Again, because we need to account to our funders for how we're spending that money so we need to make sure that it's been down the first year correctly so that we can, we can move on. There is a collaborative playbook that I wrote, chronicling the experience of Philadelphia, its first project the re entry project, which took about a year and a half, and was of course the emblematic the first big collaborative, 14 news organizations and temple launched that that project and lots of detail in there about the different stages of what the collaborative went through and how they were able to jump from one level to the next and to the next into the next. What we suggest to folks that are interested in launching a collaborative is getting in touch with us, and we can have a preliminary conversation, and then you can start structuring your, your proposal we can share with you some of the proposals we always ask permission of the collaborative, whose proposal we're sharing. But, but the first step is for you to really meet with us, tell us what you want to do. See if this is for you. It is a heavy lift as Nick was saying, as the word in black folks were saying it is heavy work. It is a commitment but we are confident also that you'll see really remarkable results. So that's why we continue to try and create these collaboratives. And we learn along the way but get in touch with us. You, my email was has been posted, I think you can also write to Delaney Delaney, at solutions journalism.org or to any other member of the team, everybody is featured in solutions journalism networks website, but please go ahead and read also we have several posts on medium. You can check out the websites of the, of the various collaboratives and see if this is for you, see if this is something you, you might want to explore and and move forward with. Yeah,
that's great i i also think it's fantastic that you're doing a lot with ethnic media and media, in, in other languages, whether you know I think there were six in Spanish, and I wonder about outreach to try to reach beyond someone like the bigger ethnic media outlets to some smaller rooms. I mean I rarely see support for like Asian language, media outlets, and that's very necessary because it's extremely difficult to get anything and mainstream media about patients or Asians and Asian Americans, I know that from my own experience, it's easier to get a story from like Ethiopia into mainstream now than the story about Asian Americans, so how about other ethnic media and other language media.
Yes, and two points on this. First of all I get hives when a group comes to me with an idea for a collaborative they say well you know we'll have the anchor legacy media outlet, no no no we don't want anchors, this is not a mall, we don't want Macy's and all the small, everybody is equal in this collaborative, and we have quote unquote legacy media that does outstanding work like this and has understood this. Shout out to Sherry Chizen Hall in in Charlotte and to Mike Kilian in Rochester, for example, perfect examples of legacy media that is an fantastic contributor and understands the importance of what real diversity is and everybody at the table talking and having a voice, our most diverse collaborative is Neo sojo, and there are sometimes very spirited discussions there. So, but this is what we want, because this is what the local media ecosystem is now, and we have hyper locals in Ohio, rich Weiss, for example represents some of those outlets to LGBTQ outlets to a Lebanese outlet so everybody has a chance to talk now. Also, to the point that you raised me. Sometimes it's difficult to convince ethnic media to participate because historically, they know that this has not been a good deal for them, because the attitude has always been extractive okay let me just go get what I can from that Korean daily, and, and then run into the story with no thought to, this is my partner and we're going to do the story jointly Medina alluded to the fixer. Yes, in the panel in the previous panel has a similar role, you know, the fixer. This was in many cases someone who had a story to tell about his home country or her own country, and a lot too. You know a lot to contribute but it was always seen in a sort of, you know, a symmetrical power dynamic. So our collaboratives really really really strive to be a place for democratic discourse and discussion. And if you don't have. When you come to us, pitching our collaborative. Our representative global our community we ask you to go on and get some and then come back.
Yeah, so there have been examples of, you know, I would love to see some of the smaller hyperlocal media organizations I've seen like there's a bilingual Chinese newspaper in Boston, it's called Sam Pat, you know, it would be great if they collaborated and one of the one of the big media outlets like the Boston Globe or web or something that you know they they rarely have stories about Asian communities so I can see though that it would be, you know, there might be some, some dynamics there with a local media or an ethnic media organization partnering with the big, you know, regional outlet so you know I just hope that there's some way that these collaborations can exist, those, those small media outlets are struggling, I don't know how they're keeping afloat, I'm really happy they are. So anything to help them is a positive thing. Just another question about challenges, or failures that you've seen or problems that have come up, are there some common pitfalls.
Sure,
as in every relationship, you know, sometimes things don't go well, and there are disagreements and there are misunderstandings. And so those need to be sorted out but of course once they are sorted out. It means like a couple of months of very tense meetings where it feels oh my goodness, you know, this project is going overboard and nothing can save it or we're not making progress, or we should be at this level, and we are not. Or this person is disruptive, and we have had very, very few defections once, once you decided you want to be there and that goes for every participant from the most powerful legacy newsroom to the most humble hyperlocal. You have to want to be there. So once you've made that decision. We have a good track record of people staying, I wish I could count maybe the fingers on one hand, those that have dropped off once the Collaborative has gotten launched, however, You know there are good days and bad days. So, now in terms of challenges in general I would say, but this is not particular to collaboratives. We need to ratchet up our level of familiarity and comfort with technical tools, and see how to integrate them in our daily routine, and understand that there are narrative forms, particularly for us who, you know come from a newspaper background that the word is on paper is not the only way to tell a story, visual storytelling, there are many, many other ways of exploring how to tell a story, and what's more important. There are certain communities or certain groups within your community that connect better with those different forms of storytelling, not with the traditional income. Income paper.
Hey,
I think we are running short on time. I have two different times on my computer and my phone so I'm not sure what's happening outside. But I think we're coming up on our time. This has been great, and I hope it's been helpful for the listeners and thank you guys very much. Is there anything else you want to add in our last few minutes.
Anyway, you know,
there's a lot to say but anything else.
Thank thank you I mean, thank you, thank you for taking the time to, to have this chat with me and allow me to talk a little bit about a topic that's very near and dear to my heart, and to my team's heart you know we are all very, Very committed we live and breathe collaboratives. I see a couple of questions in the chat talking about are we looking for projects we do have a few slots open still. And of course, the conversations, the ongoing conversations, may not pan out eventually. We've had experiences where we've talked to a group for months and then in the end it fizzled out. And so, we never say we are officially launched and we were officially officially launched so we're always still looking for more participants and my hope is to continue to raise money to keep this project going. But beyond that, we do have some availability with this current round of funding.
How long does it take to hear back like one is it a rolling deadline for the application, and then does it typically take a couple months to hear back. I mean sometimes projects are time sensitive. That's why, you know, when I'm looking at new grant guidelines and like is it going to take two months to hear back or is it going to take five days. And that varies that difference. Thank you, Pulitzer Center for getting back to us within three days, and then others take two months. How long does it usually take for you. Well,
of course you know when we, when we got launched, we had this fantasy that we would be always methodically organized and we will have a cohort of three and then a cohort of three and we would have a rolling, but it did not turn out that way. And the conversation process, always involves the participating collaborative once some details are sorted out the broad, the project goes pretty quick, but I have to say the onus is on the collaborative. We need a proposal, we need a memorandum of understanding. So we walk everyone through the process very carefully and we're always available, but we don't do it, they need to do it so it goes as fast and as smooth as the collaborative can afford it because of course participants have their day job as well. Yeah,
well thanks so much. I think there's going to be a graduation ceremony ceremony with some of the grantees later if people want to tune in and hear more details about those projects and just my parting thought it would be great if there was some kind of help with potential grantees to get them ready. You know props from past past grantees. I just feel like some of the mediality are most need they don't, they don't necessarily have the person who can devote the hours to this so I would love to see a way to, to build,
build capacity. Yes, this is true, this is true, capacity, so that's why I always say you know we have some merit in this, that the real heroes of this are all the journalists and all the editors, and all the professors and the folks from the library that stayed with this project for day in day out week in week out month in, month out because they believe in it and they felt they feel they're going somewhere with it so kudos to all our journalists and those associated with our collaboratives.
Thank you. Thank you, Amy.
Hand it over to us, Stephanie.
Thank you.
I always like hearing from Eliza gross, she is a frequent collaborator of with us at the Center for Cooperative Media, and I'm really proud of all the work that you've done Laza it's been so very inspirational to watch what you've built almost single handedly with Delaney and Leah and the team across the country, and it's, it's impactful and it's going to continue to be very impactful for years and years to come. So thank you, and I really hope everyone joins us for the solutions journalism networks first graduation ceremony, first ever for the local media project, you're going to hear from result Philly, the Granite State News collaborative and the Charlotte journalism collaborative, amazing people at all of those organizations and we're going to have some pomp and circumstance so we're gonna have a little fun. So please join us for drop that link in the chat, you'll be able to close the webinar, we'll have a break 5pm Eastern we'll be in that room, but before we do that, we're gonna do asks, and offers live, this is sponsored by blue Lena. And I will turn it over to my colleague, Joe Amditis, the man behind the curtain, who will host for us so Joe.
Hey everybody, can everybody hear me okay. All right, so we're gonna try some stuff here this is going to be a little weird hopefully we're going to do a little intense music for our asks,
right, we're gonna have
to do give you
an opportunity to come up on stage and tell us a little bit about what you have to offer. And what do you have going on in your world. And so at this moment I'm going to ask everybody to go ahead and if you'd like to tell us what's on your asks and offers, go ahead and raise your hand in the chat and we'll bring you up on stage as a panelist. Yes, it is a fan, my hand is my hair just just naturally blows like this. I got I guess I see some people who'd like to come up, I'm gonna do my best to go ahead and choose you in the order that I see you so we'll start with Christina gonna have you come up on as a panelist and we'll start your video and your audio and we'll get you set up and you just go ahead right out right off the bat as soon as we get you up here. So I see there we go, Christine is coming up now. Perfect, go ahead and start your video and go ahead, tell us what's on your mind, we're gonna try to keep these to about a minute, so that we can get everybody in, but go ahead. Christina. Okay, sure. Hi, I'm
Christina. And I'm in unseeded although they are lonely land and sand there and so he's to San Francisco and the proud multi generational multiracial working class community, and I am here because I'm a former journalist I was a science and tech reporter. A while ago, and absolutely loved it, and I'm inspired by this conference, and I am currently a literary publicist founder of the agency authors, large and small, and we are interested in offering our services to any kind of collaborative media organization through grant writing and then also we are submitting proposals to the association of writing programs conference, a WP, which is a something going on this month, and we're working on, that's a conference where people put together the short proposals. And then if you're accepted you can be part of a group of five people giving a virtual presentation it's the conference is going to be the last Saturday of march in Philadelphia, but they're recording virtual panel proposals and going to broadcast them live at the conference so you don't have to attend in person unless you want to, they're trying to make it be as accessible as possible to everyone. And so we have a few panel proposals where we would love to have people here, join us alongside the writers, and yeah, one of them has to do with women and advocating you know strategies for women to overcome work around subvert sexism and sexual harassment in the professional writing workspace, and other ones we have somebody else who has written a book about climate change, he'd be interested in speaking with maybe other journalists writing on that topic, and the woman who's written an exposition about Silicon Valley, so I've got that and I also would be willing to put together a panel proposal that's just of journalists, talking about the important work that journalists do about journalistic ethics how that can inform writing in other fields, just, you know if there's a way to be able to bring journalists and the work that journalists do into it, you know, a conference in the space that has to do with academic writing teaching, and you know also commercial fiction is fiction and nonfiction books that are published for a mass market. So please let me know I can type my email into the chat, so that people can reach me and also our information is on the Padlet. So thank you very much
fantastic yes I was gonna say I hope you, you drop that information on the patent Padlet, thank you so much, Christina, we're gonna bring up mark now Mark is going to come up and, oh, it looks like he just dropped his hand mark I'm gonna bring up Karen and then you can go, oh no we got him. There he is. Okay, hold on. Here we go. Karen you're coming up next. And I will say this is sponsored by blue Lena we have Ned Burke, who has graciously agreed to join us in the chat here, net I may ask you to come up and tell us a little bit about Blue Lena if we run out of people, but that doesn't look like it's gonna happen, Mark, I think we're gonna get your hand back up there if you still like to go, but we have Karen Magnuson on the, on the line right now we're gonna go ahead, Karen, you can unmute yourself. And there we go. Awesome. Take it away.
Okay, so, thanks everybody. It's great to see you here. My name is Karen Magnuson I'm the project director for the New York and Michigan solutions journalism collaborative, and I just wanted to let everybody know that we are hiring. We have three part time positions. I'll put something in the chat about it, and it's also on the tablet, but one position is for Project editor, another position is for a Data Coordinator and position number three is for what we're calling an emerging audience editor, which really is an engagement specialists, engaged in the community. Our project is focused on caregivers of older adults. And of course, it's part of the solutions journalism network so that means that we're focused on solutions potential solutions for caregivers of older adults, and that topic is become really hot because of the pandemic of course, but also because of the aging demographic and the severe shortage of caregivers for young people. So thanks very much. That's really my pitch, I'm hoping that anybody that you think would be qualified for one of these jobs, or part time contract jobs that they pay really well at $40,000 per year for 20 hours of work, so please spread the word, and I hope to get lots of applications after today. Thank you.
Thank you Karen so much, appreciate it. Once again, folks, this is an opportunity you're one of your few opportunities to come up here and introduce yourself to this crowd. We are using webinars so we don't get to see everybody and this is one of the rare opportunities where we do. Mark, I'm gonna bring you up now, and when you get on here just go ahead and unmute yourself turn on your video and have at it again Ned I am calling you out in advance here I may have you come up at the end, and tell us a little bit about Blue Lena and maybe tell us one of Your Own asks and offers, Mark. All right there he is. Come on up, unmute yourself, you just muted they come on, unmute yourself start your video, and let's go. We'll get it going here and then I see Bridget and Neil will be next. So, Mark, take it away any, any, any time now. I will bring back the intense music if we've Okay there you go, you're unmuted, go ahead. Okay. We knew this would happen. Oh, Mark. Can you see me, I can't see you, but I can hear you, we can start with that, let's just start with the word hearing you go ahead.
This is Mark Taylor Canfield I am the Executive Director for democracy watch news, which is an international news organization and we focus on pro democracy movements around the world, and we are always looking to collaborate with other news organizations, we are, we have a major twitter feed going on. So you can find us at D watch news on Twitter and you can follow our, our feeds from all around the world. We have an international group and then our staff is spread across the country and every Thursday we have a national an international press briefing, where we bring together people to talk about all sorts of issues that, either directly have to do with democracy and journalism or are directly related to the A. Here we go, I'm on. So, we also have Craig was first for a second and joins us again.
We.
Yes, we also have a podcast called democracy cast that you can find on all of the major providers, and we try to cover stories that definitely directly have to do with democracy so things about voter suppression or freedom of the press, freedom of speech, we've been big on reporting on the Reporters Without Borders, World Press Freedom Index result for 2021 showing the United States is now 44th in the world in terms of press freedom. So, journalism ethics is also a major part of our coverage, and you can check us out at democracy watch news dot orgy and we are definitely interested in collaborating with anyone else who can, who wants to do good real informative news for people around the world.
Thank you so much. All right, next I see Bridget so I'm going to put Mark back here as an attendee and we're going to bring Bridget up, Bridget. Are you ready, doesn't matter. We're going with you anyway here we go again so make sure you raise your hand also net I saw that comment about my hair, I see you. Very funny. Go ahead, Bridget, you're up. Thanks so much, Joe. Hi
I'm Bridget Thorson she her I'm the member collaboration editor at in, and My offer is to please email me at Bridget at Ion n.org I'll put it in the chat. If you're interested in talking about opportunities to collaborate with nonprofit news outlets.
You do not
have to work at a nonprofit news outlet, if you are interested in collaborating with nonprofit news outlets as well. I would love to hear from you at IMS, we are building on the work of my colleague Sharon, who you heard from during the lightning chats to build regional and national reporting collaboratives to drive forward impactful reporting. So please feel free to reach out, I've made a number of calendar slots available in the coming weeks, And just email bridge with a T i n.org, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you.
Fantastic again yes you can go to collaborative journalism org slack.org slash asks to see the full Padlet asks and offers board sponsored by blue Lena. Next up we have Neil, Neil is going to come on up now and I'm going to put Bridget back into the audience, go ahead, Neil, come on up there we go.
Yeah, let's see if I can get the video going perfect you're killing everybody. Neil Mehra I am a longtime journalist, and was one of the first managers of the Charlotte journalism collaborative, recently I've been doing research with RJ AI and University of Missouri and I wanted to let everybody know about a new study that just came out on preserving digital news content, all of you in collaboratives are creating content that is part of the public record. It's important for democracy that your content sticks around. And we spent 18 months talking to newsrooms about how that's going. And what we found is actually not a very positive picture because content is, is actually a lot more fragile than most of us think, in the digital environment. So, what we, what we have in this report is a lot of information about the state of digital preservation, and also ideas for what you can do about it. We have 14 recommendations. So I encourage everybody who's interested in this issue. Please just check out this report. A lot of good info in
there. Thank you so much, Neil, we do have one more we got Joe, Joe dan Born here So Neil, I'm gonna go ahead and put you back in the audience, and we're gonna bring Joe up a little nervous because I'm, I'm a little concerned with there being two Joe's on stage at once, I'm not sure how I feel about that but we will see how this goes. So if this gets weird I might have to kick you back so Joe, you're on stage, go ahead start your video and let's see what you got to say. Alright, see it's already a problem you're muted we're gonna have to, there we go. New this is a bad idea. Oh, we're muted again. Here we go. You're still muted. Ready. There we go.
All right, don't, don't do it show don't do it.
All right, I
am wearing my hat today from the AP as our editorial lead liaison for AP story shares is a bit of a repeat presentation for some of you who might have heard of us story share in previous years past, and what it
is is a content sharing platform it is a collaboration enabler, if you will. So for those of you who are already collaborating and are looking for better ways to do it easier ways to swap the content. That is what story share is all about we, we launched last year in New York State upstate New York, with our friends in Colorado Elora Frank and the folks kolab and out in Oregon State substantially on geographic you know state issued state centric networks, we are looking to expand those from those three to 20 networks. This year alone, we've been hiring as well we've got one spot open for support staffer for that if you're interested.
And particularly, I want to talk about how we are moving into beyond you know beyond the, the state specific
networks, and into topic driven networks, and that is noted by the launch of our first topic of a network that have around
indigenous peoples, news, so thanks to our friends High Country news in Indian country today for getting on board and helping us pilot that we think that's got a lot of promise. Story share is gratis for AP members, we have a whole bunch of folks who are not part of the AP cooperative, who, who are in on story share as I mentioned co lab, we have, I NN folks lion folks LMA just across the board so we're excited to help
anybody who, who wants to get in on this and then perhaps use a tool that can foster all the great work that's already being done out there.
Thank you very much that turned out to be pleasant, thank you so much. All right, we do have level one more Joe we're gonna put you back into the, the crowd here. We do have one, one more here we got rich, who's going to come up on stage now Rich, thank you so much for joining us. Come on up, and let's get your video started and unmute yourself whenever you're ready, and you will finish it off for the evening.
Unmute Hello,
I'm Rich wise with neighborhood Media Foundation we're concerned specifically with community media, we don't see a lot of concern out there for community media so if you are concerned about community media, shoot me an email at rich at neighborhood media.org. The other big piece of what we're trying to do is find community voices
to report on their own communities. We believe that's where trust lies, so again that's rich at neighborhood media.org Thanks so much hope to hear from you soon.
Alrighty, well thank you so much rich I appreciate it and thanks to everyone who shared we will be doing one more of these magical sessions to starting tomorrow, this will be the last opportunity. We do again still have your opportunity to put things in the Padlet asks and offers board at collaborative journalism.org slash asks, that is sponsored by blue Lena Ned made it out. Luckily made it out without me having to pull them up on stage because we had enough of you who wanted to share today so hopefully you all will be ready tomorrow, and save Ned the embarrassment of having to show his face after that comment he made about my hair. So with that I'm going to go ahead and we're going to turn it over now we're going to take a short break and we'll see you all at the solutions journalism network graduation ceremony if you don't know. Now you know, the link is on your dashboard the link dashboard we've been sharing in the chat, which you can find a collaborative journalism.org slash dashboard. We'll see you there starting at five o'clock. We'll go for about an hour and it'd be a good time so come on and join us. And if not I will see you tomorrow. Take care everybody.