So the lightning talks are always our most popular thing. Every year we survey attendees and every single year lightning talks are far the way that the folks love. So let's get to it. We have half of our panelists are here and even present in a studio. We're all together here in a room. The other half are virtual. So this is going to be a fun experiment. We'll see how it goes. So we will start off Lee's out, please take the stage take over and tell us about Tayo.
All right, hi, everyone. My name is Leezel Tanglao. I am the Project Director of Tayo. We're super excited, here to talk today about our project and our main takeaways, and working with a very collaborative and multidisciplinary team. So we're going to start with our team member, Dr. Melissa Palma, who is going to talk to us about some of the major things that are happening in the community and filming community in regards to COVID-19. Sorry.
Hi, and thank you so much for having us at the Collaborative Journalism Summit. My name is Melissa Palma, one of the title medical advisors and along with Leezel Tanglao and Mark Calaguas, I'd like to welcome you to our talk to help desk putting us into Filipino American COVID-19 community health education. And so as a background as the services we provide to the Filipino community, Asian Americans are the fastest growing US racial and ethnic minority, covering a diverse range of cultural, linguistic and socio economic statuses anywhere from Burmese refugees to Bangladeshi refugees all the way up to high earning Indian South Asian Americans. The Asian American population the US has grown more than 72% Since the year 2000. According to the Pew Research Center, and immigrants from the Philippines are oftentimes the third or second most largest Asian American group in many United States. The Philippines is an archipelago colonized by Spain since the early 16th century and then later the United States after the Spanish American War, and with a population of over 100 million people. The Philippines actually has 10 million people in diaspora over 4 million of them living here in the United States. And due to the history of colonialism, overseas worker policy of labor, export and remittances to keep the Philippine economy alive, has led to many folks here in the United States working in both healthcare and as domestic workers. For the Philippine exile community in the United States, a majority over 50% live on the West Coast living in states such as California, whereas Los Angeles has the largest population of Filipinos outside of Manila. Other large states with populations include New York, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, and where I live my hometown in Chicago, Illinois, where over 140,000 Filipino Americans live,
work and play.
However, throughout the pandemic, it's become very apparent that there have been health disparities suffered by the Filipino community. And this can be hidden by data aggregation making Asian American groups as a whole look healthier than normal, whereas other groups such as Filipinos can have worsening health equity in mental health, cardiovascular health and other types of health outcomes. This is really highlighted by a paper published by Carlos Barone say at all, in the Jama health for showing how the US healthcare relies on Philippine X Americans while ignoring their needs in the COVID pandemic. Although Filipinos comprised only 42% of COVID deaths among Asian American adults in California, despite making up just 20% of the state's non elderly Asian American adult population in the state of California in the study, no other Asian subgroup accounted more than 50% of deaths. Oftentimes, this is attributed to the higher rates of multigenerational households in Asian American communities make it difficult to socially distanced from COVID-19 high rates of comorbidities such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes within Filipino Americans when data are disaggregated as well as occupational hazards. Although Filipinos make up just 4% of the nursing population in the United States, they accounted for over 25% of nurse deaths due to COVID-19 According to National Nurses
United. Hi, and so now mentors still Pro Tool pro stands for the Filipino Young Leaders program. Before the pandemic, the organization was censored on a yearly immersion trip. We're A cohort of young Filipino Americans representing a broad range of industries were selected to travel to the Philippines to connect with decision makers in government, business and the nonprofit sector. This program aimed to foster citizen diplomacy, and develop legacy projects that make a positive impact on people in the Philippines are here in the diaspora. All of the presenters on this talk are alumni of the program when the pandemic hit, so procreated COVID task force to provide a rapid response. Initially, this consisted of fundraising efforts to boost the capacity of those working on the ground. And so we were able to get things like PPE, food and other supplies to local communities on both sides of the Pacific. But as Dr. Palma just referenced, all of us were feeling the personal toll of the pandemic, many of our family members, our health care workers, and sadly, we didn't need to look very far for examples of loved ones dying or falling seriously ill. Filipinos also tend to have close knit families, and the urge to come together socially, through large gatherings has been a traditional source of comfort. But for this crisis, these activities posed a huge threat to our health. We were all struggling with how to keep our families safe under these conditions. During one meeting, a board member lamented how hard it was for him to convince his parents to shelter in place. He said he wished there was a playbook to help fil AMS talk to their elders about taking seriously the public health guidance about COVID. This was the initial spark. In summer 2020, we successfully pitched the Booz Allen foundations COVID Innovation Fund, and secured our first major grant ever and Phil pro history. This was the seed money for the title help desk, which launched in October 2020, with a pilot geared towards Filipinos in the LA region tayo, which translates to us and Filipino consists of a virtual platform located at title help.com, where we have since published more than 500 articles in a q&a format, covering a wide range of topics. Our main goals are to combat misinformation, and to connect seniors, the unemployed, and essential workers with government resources and social services. before it's published, the content is vetted by a panel of subject matter experts, including physicians, public health experts, attorneys, social workers, and more. The articles are written in an accessible and culturally relevant style, which are available in both English and Filipino. This content is also posted to social media, which is a major source of news for Filipinos. For any questions not covered by existing article, users may submit their queries through our ticketing system, which we'll pass along to our experts in order to craft an individual response or even a new article. So far, title help.com has received over 4600 visitors and processed more than 25,000 self service interactions. Titles offerings have only grown since. After receiving a second round of funding for Booz Allen. We launched a dedicated hotline earlier this month, which replicates the website services via a live call center agent. This brings us closer to fulfilling our original vision for the help desk. It makes our content more accessible to a major part of our intended audience, which is seniors and other folks who may not be comfortable navigating online platforms. And now to talk about the many partners we've collaborated with during tiles ongoing growth and expansion. I'll turn it over to title project director and Filipino President Lise Eltech. Lau
Thank you Mark. As you can see, this project would not be possible without a wide variety of body of collaborators that have become a community in itself. This is truly a community driven project that leverages a multidisciplinary team that's deep within the community on the ground and emphasizes the power of story to connect, in fact that I am like the only soldier on this on this project. But it's been truly an honor and joy to work with so many different folks from different industries. And it's really a confirmation of like what you can do together, even though you come from very different approaches. So I'll just go really quickly on some of the things that we've been able to do in terms of impact lies just being in a very multi multidisciplinary group. So we've done multi media campaigns, such as the, the campaign that we did with Department of Health and Human Resources. This was you know, very much culturally tailored and which is a very much a way that we've been able to make ourselves differentiate ourselves in the community as well as our I'm connected in a very intimate way. These are other examples like, again, very culturally tailored in our community that we've been able to do in the last less than two years, we've also taken the initiative to collect data around us, because of the lack of this aggregated data in our community. And as Mark mentioned, we also recently launched a COVID-19 call center, because we heard from our community, the lack of accessibility with our seniors, and the preference to talk to somebody intimately versus online. And then this is just a quick look at all the collaborative partners, we've been able to get on board. And it's just a testament to a small lean team that what we can do together, we can have a lot of a lot of impact as well. And pretty much that is that is it.
Thank you, you. Were like three seconds on time. All right. So we are going to switch out now because we've got a couple other folks in the room for the next lightning talk, which I'm proud to say is from New Jersey, where the center is based at Montclair State University. We have folks who a Newark news and story collaborative Britt Harley and James Fraser coming up next, and they are in the studio, they're sitting down, they're getting settled. And you're gonna see the news the moment if anyone has any questions for our lightning talks, we don't really save time for questions during lightning talks. But we do ask folks to answer in the chat which Thank you, Mark, you just did for Tayo. So if you have questions for any speakers, drop them in the chat, and we'll try to get to them. And don't forget also that everything you need for today is also on the dashboard. If you haven't checked the dashboard out recently, I do that Bitly slash CJ s 2022. We have the asks and offers more that's open we have some zoom rooms you can visit. Look at the list of attendees, we have email addresses for everyone who said that they'd be willing to share their email address. We have playlists. If you haven't heard the CGS beats playlist yet, hopefully you will listen to it is very relaxing. And we also have will have links to slides and recordings. A bunch of folks have asked about that. Over the last day and a half. We will be sharing slides, recordings and all links with everyone afterwards. So no worries if you missed something, or you wanted to see something on a slide and it wasn't there. We've got you covered. So now take it away Britt and James, your business very collaborative.
Let's do it.
Oh, Brick City, we back in it. You can't dig that your whole perspective this way. Hey, Brick City we back in. If you can't
do that your whole perspective is wack.
I'm Brett Harley. I'm James Frazier.
And we're here to talk to you all today about the New York news and story collaborative. I met James in 2013 at an open mic in North New Jersey. And that's what I heard him singing from the stage. And I just knew that this was somebody that I wanted to be in community with. Now, let's fast forward from 2013 to 2019, when I joined my local, my local public radio station in North New Jersey, as a New York resident to think about how to bring in different perspectives from residents, how do we tell other stories and really center that in our news coverage. And I couldn't imagine doing that work and not including community as part of that. And so I thought, why not have residents come and not just share their stories, but we equip them to tell their stories themselves? And how do we also use that training and this space to ultimately look at how we can fill information gaps across the city of north.
So again, my name is James Frazier, widely known as Jimmy so though, and I'm a lifetime artists, creative author, I do stuff. And you know, NORC has a an abundance of creatives, entrepreneurs, artists, and there's a there's a question that we all seem to have, which is why isn't the Sioux City producing more superstars? And I'll answer that question with a quote by a great philosopher named Grant Cardone. He said, the entrepreneurs biggest problem isn't product. It is ambiguity, the simply unknown. This is really where my media and journalism journey began. And journalism has impacted my life in a lot of ways, but I'll start with my personal life. It gave me the opportunity to be a stay at home dad which frightened me initially, the idea of being at home The title is so and but what this grant me an opportunity to do to do was really support my family not only financially but also with my presence. So when my wife was pregnant with my 393 month old son, I was able to provide, you know, change pampers and just just really be there for her. And prior to that, just help her you know, provide a space for her to progress in her career. So now she's director of operations for city MD, managing 10 urgent care centers in New York. And also for my daughter, my seven year old, I can attend recitals drop off and pick up from school. Professionally, I have gotten the opportunity to interview a cast of pure geniuses ranging from you know, Tyree, Barnes, Tiffany the budget Nisa, Lee J. And even my seven Well, my, I think he's 10. Now my 10 year old nephew, who was the only person that charged me to interview I work with in some amazing organizations, but most notably is politics urban Review magazine, which has created the space for the incarcerated population to earn revenue by submitting book reviews on a weekly basis. So currently, I am managing the senior writing fellows for fog was media founded by Brett Harley.
The slides went away. So give me a second shot because we are absolutely doing the most with this hybrid. So we're a team of North residents organizes young people credible messengers that commit acts of journalism. And I wanted Jimmy here today to just represent one of 30 residents since 2020. have completed our community media training. What we've been learning since we've been doing this work, the intention, of course, was for folks who submit some sort of media piece whether it was a project or written piece of photojournalism piece, at the end of the training, as we've gone on, what's been happening is that folks are launching projects, impact projects in our community, to Ryan's an example was actually in James cohort, who was formerly incarcerated just recently launched her own publishing company. And she's publishing a book but other formerly incarcerated folks as a manual for people to navigate life across New Jersey, her audio series that she built, and that she, you know, she is the host of hiding in plain sight the neighbors you never hear from was, it includes a lot of those people who are sharing their stories, things that they've learned inside of that manual. Can I get a Tom chat? You got five, four point. Cool, thanks so much. Because I've had a lot of slides here. But we use storytelling and media to share power and build power. We not only just look at information, gaps across our city, but we also think about communities that we usually don't hear from, and also how can we amplify the great work and the different champions across our community as well. And what the information gaps that we learned about very early on in a pandemic, we created resource guides, to be able to have folks have the information that they need on hand based on what we've learned from folks on the ground, on folks experiencing food insecurity, housing challenges, and these were things that were already challenges for folks in the city of New York prior to the pandemic. Um, so we wanted to have a guy not just, you know, content for folks to engage with, but something tangible, that we can Canvas with, that we can leave in communities, and also that is downloadable. There's also a large Spanish speaking population in New York. So we knew at minimum, we needed to at least have this resource guide in Spanish as well. So we also respond through creating also guides for our community. And just to kind of wrap us up, I wanted to also share the intention of this work, right, we started at a radio station, and because of a lot of reasons, we have transitioned into an independent project. And so it was really, really hard to think about how to have media partnerships, we talked to tons of newsrooms, and nothing really happened. And so I got really clear that we had to build our own space. It was really important for us to create a space where we saw value and where we could really, really honor our community and also our own stories. And so Sam is a college student in the city of New York that reached out to us via our website. And when I built what I built, I was thinking about the young people I was thinking about the organizers I was thinking about so many residents in the city who want to tell stories. And so Sam is a young person who has been organizing and Stephen Crane village in North New Jersey, that is public housing. And a lot of the units, some have more, and a lot are just inhabitable. And so Sam is not the only person dealing with that, but reached out to us and saw us as a resource because of the work that we were doing. And so from this form, on our website that Sam reached out with Sam had a call with me, Sam had a call with Jimmy to really think about what are the ways that you can tell your story. And I think, what I love so much about this work that we get to do, we didn't say, I'm going to write it and Jimmy didn't say I'm going to write it, we allow Sam to be able to tell that story on their own. In coaching,
only a little bit. So really, really sharing that power again, with somebody like Sam, who's on the ground, knocking on doors, if you go to five Ward's media.com, you can read Sam's full story, Sam goes out every day, every weekend, and is an organizer in all types of ways, but really, really is making a difference where they are in their community. And we felt that it was really important for Sam to be able to tell that story and have a call to action. For anybody who came into contact with that particular story. We created a space that values us, because we see value where others don't. And we're launching our online news site. We didn't go and charge it there. Nobody wanted to work with us, we just want to keep building our own thing. And so what are all my new site, our reporting fellows, we're going to open it up for different journalists in the city to be able to contribute. And if you would like to support our work, make a donation sharing works following us works. And we just really loved the work that we do. And we really imagine unity where everybody gets to be a part of the story. And that's the work that we're here to do. So thank you so much and happy Friday.
Thank you so much Brit and James. Yeah, we want everyone in our studio wants to clap. I mean, I We Can I know your work, you know, so well, because you're in New Jersey with us in Newark. But being able to, you know, be here and hear your energy, feel your energy is awesome. So we're gonna leave the screen on here. So you can see. She's quiet in the studio quiet in the studio. So next up, we have Jack rosenberry, who's going to talk about a solutions journalism Network Initiative. And there he is, Hey, Jack, I see you. And there's Joe to help them share his screen. We're gonna go and we said leave the camera on this time. So you can get a little bit of the behind the scenes feel of the lightning talks if you're not here with us in person. And so here we go. Got it. Jack floors yours, take it away.
So my name is Jack rosenberry, as Stefanie just said, and I'm Data Coordinator for the New York and Michigan solutions journalism collaborative.
First, how do I get these students? There we go. First, a little bit of background about the collaborative. It consists of about 30 newsrooms and community partners such as colleges, across three metropolitan areas in two states Buffalo and Rochester in New York and Detroit, Michigan, collaborative is exists has existed for about a year and a half. And it focuses on coverage for a solution journalism coverage about caregiving for older adults. It's affiliate with the solutions journalism networks, local media project, which is stood up a number of collaboratives like this and across the country. And our primary funding comes from the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation. Now, when I was hired as a coordinator, Data Coordinator last August, one of the main responsibilities I was given was to create a data center with resources to help journalists from the collaborative develop stories and research stories. Now this data center has several components. One is a source database of like state and national caregiving and caregiving experts. So far as we can tell this is unique doesn't exist anywhere else. The data center also has a lot of curated information from various public sources made accessible in one place through a lot of online links, to make the resources searchable, and sortable and filterable. They're organized into a series of online spreadsheets. Google Sheets turned out to be a great tool to do that, actually. And then it also has a front end interface to Google sites that links to the spreadsheets and other resources. So I'm going to give you a very quick overview of what's in the data center, and then describe some of what it's helped us learn about caregiving. And also what's in store for the future. Starting with the source list, or actually the source bank, as we call it, because it's really three lists with about 200 entries. One of which is the main one is the expert source bank, expert source list, excuse me, which has 120. Individuals with expertise around service to older adults, and their contact information is filterable by geography, specialty type of affiliation, for example, academic or government. And then related to the source list is, is a database of about 45 organizations. And these are mostly government and nonprofit agencies that have some expertise around serving older adults. These are the types of organizations whose staff members could serve as sources to contact for interviews or to get data for reporting. And then finally, we have a list of about 25 people who are caregivers and other community members. And mostly these are people who have been quoted in stories done by our collaborative members. So that's what the center has to help reporters find sources. The data part of the data center is a variety of other resources, with background information for stories about caregiving, has about 300 entries, all together of two types, some of them are qualitative, such as you know, reports, government reports, NGO reports, things like that. And some of them are quantitative like tables of statistics. Again, this area also has kind of three things to drill down into. The largest of these is the resource bank. And this is a Google Sheet with links to about 150 reports, research studies and things like that. Some of them are web based, others are PDFs. And they range from like one page fact sheets to reports that are hundreds of pages long. It's organized by date newest first, and also can be filtered in several ways. Then we have something called the Academic Resource Bank. The heart of this is again, a Google Sheet with summaries and links to about 100 pieces of scholarly research on on issues facing older adults and caregivers. And this is really useful to reporters, I think, because solutions reporting should be evidence based. And often when reporters are looking for evidence to support something that they're writing about, an academic study can provide that evidence. The Academic Resource Bank has a couple of other things beside the index, though one's a four page summary that lists some overall insights about individual topics such as dementia, or homecare or things like that. And the other add on is a a document with story ideas tied to individual articles. So if a reporter is looking for a sort of a one off story idea, they might find it there. Plus, all of the academic artists, articles that are indexed also have the names and contact information for at least one of the authors. And so that's another list of expert sources on top of the the other more formally labeled source list. Then there's the data bank portion of the data center, which again has a couple of components. One is an index of data portals. These are websites where reporters can search for data sets related to a story topics such as like data.gov, which a lot of people probably know about. That's the federal government's main portal, which has more than 300, and about 300,000 data sets in it. The Data Bank also has a separate index of some specific data sets. These are either ones posted by a government or nonprofit agency, or some of them that have been curated and posted by me.
To be honest, there isn't a lot of this yet growing this area is kind of one of the priorities we got for developing the data center further. Finally, there's what I call the training bank. And this is a Google spreadsheet with about 45 links to professional development resources, on topics such as using spreadsheets, data journalism, data scraping, things like that. You know, it's sort of modeled as modeled after but on a much, much smaller scale of Mike Riley's journalist toolbox. And, of course, Mike's toolbox is is one of the links that's in it. So this is sort of a self training guide for for reporters and members of the collaborative if they want to go there. So to wrap up, I want to want to talk about some of the insights and takeaways that have developed from working on this project. One of the key findings so far from collecting and reviewing these resources about caregiving is that the United States is largely unprepared to deal with volume of people were going to need extra care as they age, and also lacks the capacity to deliver lots of the types of care that will be needed. And you know, this sort of cries out for solutions journalism coverage, right. This is a major social problem, you need some investigation of some solutions. We've also learned that when family members take on the task of caregiving for an older adult who's no longer independent, it changes the caregivers life dramatically. And this in turn creates a need for various kinds of caregiver support and assistance including in Information, which is what we're designed to provide here. And as so that's why as a parallel project, we've developed a public service oriented resource guide that curates a wide variety of publicly accessible information that caregivers would find helpful, such as links to different state agency ombudsman programs for for older adults, for example, getting these come mostly from nonprofit agencies, government agencies and the like. And this will be posted online very soon, we're in the process of updating our website. And when the website revision is launched, you know that the resource guide will be publicly available. And our main intent with the resource guide is to meet the informational needs of family members who find themselves responsible for caregiving. Because when this happens, people often don't know where to turn for information about assistance and relief. The research we've reviewed shows that when caregivers have information about this, and about getting support, it goes a long way toward easing their burdens. And finally, we're making, we're working on plans to make the full set of resources publicly accessible. Right now, it's for the internal use of our collaborative members only. But we hopefully, you know, we're looking at ways to possibly make them more publicly available, and possibly even monetize them as part of our plan for long range sustainability. You know, if we're able to do this, we think the data center could be a really valuable resource for journalists, but also for policymakers, advocacy organizations, those in the business of caregiving, increasing public awareness about all aspects of caregiving is really the New York, Michigan collaboratives. Number one strategic goal. So our hope is that by bringing information from the data center into public view, to complement our journalism, you can really catalyze a shift in the public conversation around caregiving from one about all the difficulties and problems that surround it to one that focuses on overcoming those challenges.
Awesome. Thanks, Jack. You came in under time to like, Awesome, thank you so much. All right. So Jack, and Sarah. Now we're gonna switch seats real quick. And next, we get to hear about open campus. And I also want to thank open campus for also being a sponsor of this year's summit. As I've mentioned, many times before, you've heard me say this for six years now, we could not do this event without the generous contributions and gifts from our sponsors. They make this all possible from you know, paying for zoom in our equipment, to food for in person, attendees, name tags, programs, everything we we just break even every year, and it's because of the generosity of our sponsors that we do that. So thank you. So Joe is there and he's getting Sarah set up. I see. share her slides. And then we're going to jump in. You guys ready? You get there. You're getting there. We're getting there. All right. You're good. All right, Sarah, take it away. All right. Oh, all right. Thank you. Um, am I sharing this? I'm not sure. Sorry, guys.
All right there. I am a co founder of Open Campus, and nonprofit news organization focused on higher education. It's great to be here with you and to talk about our particular form of collaboration. So as we've been talking about over the past couple days, collaboration means a lot of things and takes a lot of forms. And also, it's been evolving a lot. It's going well beyond co reporting, as we were hearing some of that yesterday. And that's certainly how it works for us here at Open Campus. And for us partnerships are sustained. They are things that happen week in and week out. And they are relationships that are built for the long haul. So as we are working with our partners across the country, we are focused on am I doing good? Okay, cool. Joe's coming up here, you're just something for me. So we're focused on CO creating a beat and we're focused on actually sharing a recorder which may sound scary or complicated or hard, but actually turns out to be fun in creates good work and extends sort of the notion of what a colleague is. So just press the arrow keys on the people trying to progress. Sorry, the trying to fix the slide here and then just click here. Okay, what do you use this back and forth? Okay, cool. Thank you. So how does it work? We are we embed reporters in partner newsrooms across the United States, dedicating reporters to improving the coverage of college for communities. We We currently work in seven locations seen here. And we have to be in 12. By the end of this year 25 In the next couple of years, and eventually to be in all 50 states, we work to fundraise with our partners often together, we are pooling resources from national, regional and local funders to pay for a full time reporter salary to put that person on the beat covering higher education in a dedicated way, and also to raise money to support the Open Campus part of the collaboration as well. The person is very deliberately, we say explicitly, the employee of the local newsroom, and they are, so that means hiring decisions, ultimate decisions about what's on a person's plate week in and week out, they abreast with that local newsroom are very clear about that there's a shared understanding of that. Open Campus we say is their second team of reporters. We, we reporters and editors, we come along for the ride, we don't just put the person on the beat. We stay with this collaboration and are very engaged within it. We provide big picture, story coaching and editing we help set coverage agendas. We provide some content and context analysis of data to help people understand how the issues that are playing out in their local community of food into the national historical context, we work in a practical way that means that we, every other week are meeting with this reporter and their editor to talk about these. These topics, talk about what's happening, talk about or seeing at the national level, and how we can help. They're also in our Open Campus slack. And we are working with them in the course of their work. As somebody's reporting a story, they might come across a weird policy, they want to know who might have done some research on it, who at the national level might be able to tell us if that's unusual, if that's a better or worse outcome than typical. And we often can put them in touch with those people. We can help editors we can backstop on ambitious, coverage, planning and editing. And we are engaged in the work. So how we think about this is
sorry, I'm still trying to get the slide to work. Oops. Okay. So we talk about this as being a national newsroom that knows a topic deeply combined with a local newsroom that knows a place deeply and we think together that can create impactful journalism. So here's some examples of a few of the resulting stories that have come from the sort of collaborative work from public source from Mississippi today. And from Chalkbeat, Colorado, just a sample of the various headlines, the stories I should say they run both in the local newsroom and an open campus so that we are giving a national platform to the local stories and they are reaching the audience of that local newsroom, we feel that we can be a force multiplier, and really help them do meaningful work for the people that they are trying to reach with their other coverage. We one example here I'll just site to talk a little bit more about how these collaborative cloud collaboration works sort of in practice, in the flow of the work. In Colorado, there are something in higher education that he called The Paradox. That essentially means that Colorado is one of the most highly educated states in the entire country. However, they do a relatively poor job of educating their longtime residents, the people who grew up there, most of the people that are the highly educated population, or people they've imported from elsewhere. And so we tried to write about the two Colorado's we've worked with the editor and the reporter there in chocolate, Colorado, one of our partner newsrooms, to really dive into the data to talk about different populations that are affected by this paradox. We paired our understanding of where our national data lies, and some of our own strengths and data analysis with the partner newsrooms, expertise in the geographies of Colorado in the demographics of Colorado, and also where some of the state based analyze and we together can create data tools that helped us identify where to go set stories. We just most recently published this week a story about gaps in rural college going and we're able to find a tiny town of Fowler, which is out on the eastern plains of Colorado were actually they are bucking the trend and doing better than typical and we wanted to look more clearly at what's going well there and what others can learn from them. So some of that combined Data Analysis. God is to that point, we are talking a lot about what makes things work.
Sorry, I'm still struggling with
the slides. I will just skip my slides and I will just talk about what makes things work. There we go, being clear about roles. Knowing when to lead knowing when to support, embrace playing second fiddle. As I said earlier, we very much identify ourselves call it out as us being the second team. That doesn't mean we're any less valuable in this partnership, we actually feel like that's a really central role to be playing. And we want to be clear that that's where we sit, we are there to make the partner newsrooms work better their jobs easier, and in the process, make this collaboration, create this impactful journalism I was talking about. We also think a lot about focusing on what matters most. So when we form our Mo use with our partner newsrooms, we try to avoid a whole long laundry list of all of the things that we want to make sure happen. There are a lot of things in there that are needed, the you know, payment schedules and the like. But we really tried to identify things that we found have been the most critical and making sure that this partnerships works well, for both sides, we sort of talked a lot about communication and regular communication and how that works. So that we are together, helping this coverage be better and shaping it together, bringing our strengths to the table. And we are also talking a lot about enterprise reporting, we want to make sure that we are doing more than just your typical ribbon cutting ceremony type story that we are both about in depth journalism, that we're regularly talking about broader issues, and that that coverage is rooted in something beyond breaking news, and that these reports that we're working with, are dedicated to regular coverage of higher education. Every Thank you, Joe, every talk I give, I want to make sure that I talk about things that can go wrong in troubleshooting, nothing's perfect, things go wrong, things need to be fixed. A few things that we have found, you know, too many cooks is one thing that happens if you're not very clear is going back to directly communicating. You can be doing overlapping edits at the wrong times. So we've tried to be very explicit and talk directly with people about where we're most helpful, that's often early in the process. And so we've worked that out with our partners, direct feedback, direct feedback, I can't say that enough. Don't pull punches, people want to know how they can be better I win, and I can be better. So communicate, be direct. I was talking earlier, somebody who said clarity is kindness struck misses, kindness actually helps us all do better work. And finally, like in any relationship or partnership, it's just not going to work. If you're swimming against the stream, and you've picked the wrong people pick people who want to do the work that you want to do in a meaningful way. So thank you so much. It's been great to be with you. If you want to work with us. I met Sarah at Open Campus media. Org. We'd love to hear from you. Share your ideas, and have a great afternoon and a good weekend. It's great to have had this time. Thank you.
Thank you, Sara, thank you so much that Sara@opencampusmedia.org. We'll drop that in the chat as well. Thank you so much for being here today, Sarah, and also, Sarah and I played up together last night we won. So yeah. So next up, we have a topic that you're gonna hear a lot more about over the next several months. We have Rachel Glick house here to talk about democracy day, which is she's going to tell you a lot more about it. But it's a collaborative that I'm also part of helping to organize that we're aiming to launch for the first time this fall. So Joe and Rachel, as you can see that we're getting the slides up. And you can read more about this at collaborative journalism, that org slash democracy day. I'll drop that chat just a moment to and Rachel, the floor is yours.
So I'm the director of learning and labs at the news revenue hub. And I have run or participated in a number of national collaborations since 2016. Today, I'm going to talk to you about a new cooperation that's in the works now.
Yeah, there we go. There we go. Now you can use there. Okay. So we're gonna do a little experiment. I would like you to close your eyes briefly for a moment. Whether you're watching on Zoom, whether you're watching in the auditorium, and I want you to imagine that you You're sitting in the newsroom where you work, or you're sitting in a newsroom where you have worked before. And I want you to imagine that the editor in chief has called everyone to physically come in. And she comes out onto the floor and announces that everyone is going to be laid off today. And that the news organization is shutting down. And the reason it's shutting down is not because of money. It's shutting down because the federal government is closing your news organization by federal decree. So as the staff is in shock, and gathering their things to leave, the police arrive, and they arrest the politics reporter who sits next to you. So you can open your eyes again. So this type of scenario happens in countries around the world, this more specific type of scenario happened in Turkey in 2016, when 140 media outlets were shut down by emergency decree, and where nearly 150 journalists and media workers were jailed, as you can see in this photo. So I know what you're thinking, that would never happen here. Things are bad. But that's not something that would happen in the United States. And sure, business, reasons are always a reason are always the motive for newsrooms getting shut down, but not the government. Well, I am here today to tell you that we are on a really dangerous trajectory, where that kind of scenario could become a reality. And experts are the ones that are telling us because we're journalists, we like to refer to the experts are telling us that our democratic institutions are eroding. And this is happening across the board. So I just want to give you a couple examples of to put this into perspective for you. Rick Hasson is one of the leading experts on US elections and constitutional law. And he has talked and written a lot about this. And recently, he wrote, the Democratic emergency is already here, we face a serious risk that American democracy as we know, it will come to an end in 2024. But urgent action is not happening. And he also said in a recent TV interview that he is, quote unquote, scared shitless about 2024 Pardon my language. In a recent analysis about the upcoming Roe v Wade decision and the New York Times, they looked at which countries have rolled back abortion rights since 2000. And found that there were only three, Nicaragua, Poland and the United States. And in this analysis, they said curbs on women's rights tend to accelerate backsliding democracies, a category that includes the United States, according to virtually every independent metric, and watchdog. This is not only happening at the national level, but also on the local level, we're seeing democratic erosion. And these three stories I'm very sorry to say were all published this past Tuesday. So that is how easy it was for me to do a little roundup of democratic collapse on the local level is all three of these stories were from from Tuesday.
So with this in mind, as an industry, we think that we don't want to wait before it's too late. We don't want to be reactive. We want to be proactive as we are seeing these trends happening. So back in January, I tweeted this idea of what if What if we put together some kind of democracy day. And Stephanie Murray, for the Center for Cooperative Media immediately responded, of course. Jen Rendell from Harkin responded, and Bridget Thorson from CNN, all chimed in and said, Yeah, this is a good idea. Why don't why don't we try to do it. So we started meeting and came up with this idea to hold democracy day. And the idea we came up with is to coordinate with newsrooms around the United States on September 15th of this year, which is the International Day of democracy, to sound a collective alarm about what's going on. And the idea is that all of the purchasing participating newsrooms will publish some kind of democracy related work that day. So it might be investigative, it might be a reported story, it might be an editorial, but the idea is everybody comes together on the same date to publish this kind of work. So we're hoping to do a couple of days In things through this project, we want to inform and empower the public because we think not enough people understand the scope of what's happening. And there's so much happening, especially on the local level that we'd like to surface. We think a collective approach means greater reach an impact. We also want to make sure, especially since we are in an election year, that newsrooms aren't getting too focused on the regular type of politics and election coverage that they usually do that we are not unusual times, and that they should also be putting some coverage towards these democratic issues. And then also, we would love to do a test run this year to prepare for 2024. So the four of us came together, started meeting and started talking about this. And we published a post about this on the Center for Cooperative Media site with a signup form. And so far, almost 100 People who've signed up, either to participate to follow to help organize since then, and we met with a group of the people who signed up to be organizers and started hashing out some of the details about what participation really looks like for newsrooms, what we want to be able to provide them. And we're also in the process of trying to get funding, since everybody currently working on the project is just doing this in their spare time as volunteers. So we're still in that fundraising process right now. We started the recruitment process, already. And we will continue to do that through September. We are also working on finalizing the guidance we're going to send to participating newsrooms, which we'll send out soon. And then as soon as a new organization joins, they will receive that guidance, basically just telling them what it means to participate. And making sure they know that September 15 is the day we're all going to publish. And a couple other details. So there are a couple of things we think we need to be successful. The first one is we just need critical mass. So we would love to see, as many newsrooms sign up as possible, also across the spectrum of the types of media that are out there from including digital and print, but also TV, radio, ethnic media, we think that local TV and ethnic media would be really critical for us to cast as wide a net as possible. Again, funding would be really great, because we're all just using our spare time for this. So we have limited bandwidth. And finally, it would be really great to get a couple of big national newsrooms to participate, because from my own experience, I can tell you that that really helps get buy in from lots of other newsrooms to sign up when they sort of like follow the leader. But it also helps reach a much wider audience when you can tap into those kinds of partners. So for those of you watching today, there are a couple of ways you can join us, you can sign up as a newsroom to participate, you can become an organizer to join our team that's helping with the organizing process. Or you can help us fundraise so you can get to that signup form at bit.ly/demo day. And we will get back to about how you can help. So thank you so much.
Was all awesome. Thank you, Rachel. You're gonna hear a lot more like I said about this because we are after the summit, we're going to really focus on this as much as we possibly can. Our center has committed to, to being the backbone organization to help this move forward. And we need your support. So Rachel, that was amazing. You killed it.
Thank you killed it.
All right, up next, New Mexico local news collaborative. The folks in New Mexico are great friends of the center. They are building a strong healthy ecosystem there and I'd like to turn it over to Rashad and for tourists.
Everyone. Thank you so much for having us. I'm excited to talk to you today about the New Mexico local news fund. My name is Rashad Mahmoud. I'm the executive director. And I'm also joined by our collaborative reporter as Mata and our southern New Mexico Project Coordinator, Diana Alba salon. We're both here, hopefully. So the local news fund our mission is to support the local news ecosystem throughout New Mexico and make sure that the people of New Mexico have access to the news and information that they need to make the best decisions for themselves for their families for their communities. You know, New Mexico like a lot of rural states has a lot of challenges with access to local news. four counties in New Mexico have no newspapers at all 22 counties only have one. And, you know, people often when they think of New Mexico, they think of like the beautiful scenery, the the wonderful wildlife nature. But really our focus is on the people and making sure that they're having their information needs met. So, today, we're going to talk about our southern New Mexico collaborative reporting project, because a really awesome project funded by the solutions journalism network, thank you so much, as well as some other local vendors. We're going to talk a little bit just about southern New Mexico in general, why we decided to focus there. And we'll talk about some of the solutions that we've discovered through that collaborative that have been working really well. You know, southern New Mexico, immediately when we started the local news fund, this was clearly an area of focus for us. It's a very rural part of the state. And there's just a lot of news deserts down there. It's in a media market. That's a lot of it is in the Texas, El Paso media market, so they don't even have access to local New Mexico focus television. And so I'll turn it over to Diana to talk a little more about southern New Mexico.
Certainly, yeah, thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today. So in Mexico is a minority, minority majority state often described that way. And there's a strong presence of the Hispanic Latino population as well as native and indigenous peoples. And there's also a large immigrant proper population, particularly in southern New Mexico, the percentage is greater than in northern New Mexico. In southern New Mexico, it's a very rural area, there's pretty much like one population center, Las Cruces. We're closely tied to El Paso. And there's just been a shrinking of the newsroom, local newsroom size in New Mexico, as well as fewer journalists reporting what's happened over the past 20 years. I was a journalist at the Las Cruces Sun News, which was one of the larger publications and it'll be small, small by most standards, even though it's considered large for our area. And I was there for almost 15 years. In that time, I'd say they were. By the time I left, there were only about a third of the journalists there were as when I started. And also, there's just been communities that were never really served. Never really served very well by look by local news, particularly Spanish speaking community. And so I'm going to turn it back to Rashad to talk a little bit about how we got this off the ground.
Yeah, so one of the first things we did in southern New Mexico is we launched a collaborative legislative reporting project, thanks to some local funders here. Because you know, the Capitol is in Santa Fe, it's very far from southern New Mexico. And people felt there was a real disconnect between what was going on in the capitol during the legislative session and what the needs were of people in southern New Mexico. And it was an incredibly successful project. All the participating newsrooms really loved participating, we we managed to find funding for a shared reporter that would provide content to all those participating members, as well as for free to any newsroom in New Mexico that wanted to run that content. And that really gave us the motivation to pursue something bigger. So we had talks with the solutions journalism network, and are so grateful that they decided to help us fund this project, as well as putting together some funds from some other local funders. And so that's how we got to our southern New Mexico collaborative reporting project. And I'll give it back to Diana and then raise to talk a little bit more about how its structured and how it's going.
Okay, so we have about 15. members and community organizations involved and community organizations are just talking with us at this point, we don't have a formal structure. We have the New Mexico local news fund serves as the host organization for the collaborative, at least for now. And we took our inspiration from other journalism collaboratives across the country. And I definitely want to say thanks to all the managers who have shared their expertise with us. And also thanks to SGM and Lea Todd lane, who's been helping helping us to start this project, we set up a shared reporter model, because just the lack of capacity that exists in local newsrooms here. And we also have hired a freelance editor Kate Shambo, who's working with us to produce news around our topic, which is COVID-19 recovery, and we're moving forward to hire a freelance community engagement editor. Newsrooms are also going to be contributing stories around the topic. And one of the big goals is to produce more Spanish language local news, of course, which there's just an absolute lack of right now. We decided to go forward with hosting listening sessions. Since our project is relatively new, we want to connect with communities. And so I'm gonna turn it over to Reyes, who's the project freelance reporter to share what he's learned so far.
Hi, my name is Reyes Mata. I'm a freelance journalist for the southern New Mexico journalism collaborative. Like Diana had mentioned, we are in their early stages of using about 30 communities in southern New Mexico, just as how New Mexicans are doing at this point of the pandemic. It's getting to be conducted through four different tourism listening sessions throughout the different areas of southern Mexico, and start to establish relationships with the underserved communities, Spanish speaking communities, the immigrant populations, so that we can create improved for the state. So I go out to community centers, to churches, grocery stores, anywhere where there's a chance to meet with a group of New Mexicans. Oftentimes, it's just a matter of me out into neighborhoods, leaning on fences, and knocking on doors, or just walking alongside people who walk into neighborhoods with them. And it's all done so that we can reach real New Mexicans, those people who we might not otherwise hear from. And so we can have an added richness and texture to our news coverage. And the listening section is going out and talking to people, it's been very eye opening. Because you never know what you're going to hear. You see someone who appears to be just your regular person, they don't seem to be going through a big stress or anything, but you start to talk to them and develop rapport with them. And the floodgates open and realize that many people at this point in the pandemic, they're harboring tremendous emotional trauma. And a lot of them are appreciative of being able to share that there was a woman in Anthony, New Mexico who I spoke with, and she had, she contracted COVID, she she got over it physically. But she was very concerned because a part of her, her an emotional part of her had been lost. She had been a very outgoing person, before, after the pandemic, she wasn't the same anymore. And she was very concerned that she would never be the person who she once was. And so what she described very much was depression that she didn't rank as such. But in speaking with experts, that is very much something that's going on with people who have recovered from COVID. There is another encounter that I had, it was a gentleman in Columbus, New Mexico.
Golden because as you commit himself to a metal facility, because we're so concerned about getting COVID that he couldn't handle that stress. So we're definitely looking forward to talking to more New Mexicans and highlighting more numerical issues. And I'd like to pass it back to Diana, so she can talk a little bit about that.
Okay, yeah, so Reyes has published his first story. And it's running in a number of the partner organizations, including a version in Spanish, which we're happy to have. Moving forward, we're going to be looking to boost community engagement through these lesson listening sessions, some townhall discussions and audience surveys, we're exploring the idea of a Spanish language texts, Spanish language, text, service, text messaging, service, or newsletter. And we're hoping to gauge metrics by looking at you know, story, reach, changes that happen as a result of this project, which is solutions oriented. And also, we're just hoping to change the way that local news and information is done in southern New Mexico, just to more inclusive and more diverse, and so we're happy to talk with anybody further, you know, in chat rooms, or, you know, just reach out to us through social media or via email, and we would love to talk to you further.
Thank you all so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I love to hear what you're building and best of luck. So we've got two more lightning talks left. Don't go anywhere yet. So up next, we have folks from Philly joining us to talk about one of the most interesting and unique collaborations in this country. Why wise, nice. So, Eric,
take it away. Chris. Good afternoon, everyone and happy Friday and thank you for such a warm introduction. My name is Chris Norris. I also answer to flood or flood the drummer I'm who wise managing editor for community and engagement. I've been at why now almost three years. And I can remember my first few days like it was yesterday, I was having a conversation with my supervisor at the time, Sandra Clark. She was, at the time, the VP of news of, excuse me, the VP for news and civic dialogue. She's now the CEO of story Corp. And we're having conversations about what people like me people who commit acts of journalism, not at a news organization, but just in the community, people who Bootstrap, you know, platforms and Bootstrap conversations and just dig deep into neighborhoods who produce content. And so that's what I did, actually, before I joined Why spend 10 years as the chief publisher of technical line covering police, politics and protests. So Sandy and I was sitting, we would talk about what would it look like to find other people who commit acts of journalism, and then didn't hit us with this acknowledgment that there are a lot of people out there like like me, and it was acknowledgement that communities are not just consumers of news and information, but producers of it too. So we start to have a more and more conversations and we had a whiteboard session, it's now become very famous or infamous. And we were challenged to think of what's the next step in engagement. At the time, we were taking essays and amplifying Community Voices, we were diversifying our sources and tracking them. But what could we do that could take it to the next level? And we thought about approaching journalism from immediately context, but particularly focusing on grassroot content creators, people in neighborhoods every day who produce news on behalf of their neighbors and friends. And at first it was thinking about just cataloging them and identifying them. And then it was, well, if we've got to find them, how do we support them. And we begin to grow this, this infrastructure of sort of trying to create a mutual aid journalism collaborative that supports and develops grassroot content creators. But the first thing we had to do was find somebody to manage it on the day to day, and that's what Eric March came in. He's who is first community outreach organizer, and I'll let him tell you about how he built the network.
Yeah, thank you, Chris. And honestly, I want to say, you know, from the very beginning at that whiteboard planning session, the vision that Chris and Sandy had was really to recognize that communities have their own voices and can tell their own stories without the need for journalists parachuting in and extracting information without any real investment in the people that they reporting on. So we set out to identify a rat, a variety of talented individuals and organizations with a range of skills and experiences, who had established a track record of trust and consistency within their community. partners like uptown standard Chinese Metro weekly dose puntos radio and fun times magazine all brought a strong tie to their community that was coupled with a depth of knowledge and journalistic savvy. So we found that creative, many creators often felt siloed. As we were looking through the community and identifying new partners. Many of the partners felt like they were looking for like minded community members to offer support and bounce ideas off of that would foster growth. So partners like PQ radio, one in the streets, department and revived media have flourished in the environment that nice has created and expanded in creating new forms of content than they ever did before. One of the biggest lessons we learned is that building this community of creators acts as a catalyst for innovation and foundational change. So partners like the local and friends peace in Sanctuary journal or supportive Older Women's Network and uptown radio, hard city TV, they've all added entirely new perspectives and directions and even audiences that we had why why would it not have traditionally thought of or attracted in the past? So some of the highlights that stand out for me over this past year that nice has been part of or been recognized for include placing as one of four finalists on a national competition, the local networks competition, a pool of over 100 Different contestants. The local that works is an ongoing project that recognizes excellence in local content, community engagement, and revenue initiatives. The local that works as a collaborative of current and public media futures and is funded by the Wyncote Foundation. We really honored to be one of four finalists for that or contest in January of 2022. Why why and nice, hosted the new neighbors in newsrooms summit. The neighbors of newsroom summit featured many of the nice partners where they were joined in a series of conversations between residents and reporters about journalism, community and collaboration. The neighbors of newsrooms Summit is rooted in the belief that our audience can also be our collaborators and communities are not just consumers of new is an information but produces a bit too. Another highlight includes December of last year, our city council president Darrell Clarke, and other city council members actually introduced a resolution honoring the nice program, and its partners specifically for diversifying local news sources, and elevating grassroots news producers in the city of Philadelphia. Another highlight that stands out for me personally, is the way that the partners continue to come up with innovative ways to collaborate. Like the local, they just announced the name and brand change and named their fellow nice partner POC from revived radio as their new publisher, which is amazing the fact that this organization these two just met within a year ago, and they were able to create this catalyst change. James Williams, a publisher of the Uptown standard is expanding their publishing relationships across state lines into New Jersey, and as developed the youth podcast. But I think the biggest highlight I want to share is due to all of the amazing work of our teammates, and why why and the incredible nice partners that we have all 12 of them. The night Lenfest fun, it was awarded nice a second round of funding under the local news transformation fun for another three years. So we can continue the work that we started and deepen our commitment to organize, support, and develop grassroots creators who commit acts of journalism.
So here's how nice 2.0 was going to look. It's going to start in June, actually just a couple of days away with a vaccine outreach campaign called Boost truth. We have a dozen community content creators who are going to amplify facts about the vaccine, and educate the rest of their their neighbors, and try to combat misinformation. That's really what this is about amplifying truth combating misinformation and boost truth, of course, is a play on the booster shots and also the act of amplifying information. We're going to focus on creating entrepreneurial and editorial capacity of our partners. So in layman's terms, how do we get them to make money and monetize that content? And how do we professionalize their operations? And Eric hinted to that the local has launched a new website that we're going to focus on how to optimize partner content we working on that. But the big thing is the 2023 mayoral race in Philadelphia, how can we take this cohort and really show this muscle that we have built to really impact neighborhoods in a meaningful way, provide the information that they need, create opportunities for residents to better interact with the candidates and tell better stories so that people can make better decisions? And I'll turn it over to Eric for final remarks.
Well, I just want to get my final marks. First of all, I need to acknowledge the brilliance of Chris Norris and Sandy Clark, in the fact that my position community outreach organizer didn't exist. Why why? So for a new legacy institution, like why why a news organization to be thinking about community organizing and relationships with the community in such an innovative way that they would tap someone who wasn't necessarily a journalist or someone with a media background, but someone with an understanding of community and community relations, I'm really, I've really feel like that that was a fundamental part to the success of nice. And I want to thank Chris, again, for just his leadership and the work that we're doing, and helping to identify the partners. But most of all, I want to acknowledge the 12 partners who make up nice, who work hard every day, who recognize that they provide a vital source of information to their community members, and who, without them, this would not exist.
Thank you. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Eric. The work you do is so important. And you know, the Center, our Center is based in New Jersey, and we've been doing more work in South Jersey. And I mean, every time we talk to someone they mentioned, one of the two of you, and the mentorship and the support that you provide to journalists and media makers in Philly and South Jersey. So thank you for everything that you do. So the last lightning talk, you save one of the best for last. It's the rural news network. And I'd like to welcome Dianna Hunt onto the stage to talk about ICTs work with a recent collaboration. Dianna, the floor is yours.
Hi, everybody. Are you still with me here? Let's Let's everybody stand up, turn around, shake their hands. It's been an interesting, it's been an interesting discussion. Before I get started, I want to throw out that I'm also a board member of the fund for investigative journalism, which is launched emergency grants available to support reporting on threats to democracy. So any of you guys out there have some of those, you might want to take a look@fifa.org which is the website. That's a whole separate thing. So let's talk about the special project that we just and I'm a senior editor at Indian country today Indian country today is a national essentially international publication out digital only developed out of a newspaper that was formed 40 years ago. And we have reached into Canada, Australia, we have a weekday newscast. So we have a broad reach. And we were became involved with the Institute for nonprofit news. And as a pilot project that they were launching through the rural, a new rural news network that they have, are are taking the lead on. And so Indian country today was selected to be the lead on the project. And then we went out for participant participants, we ended up with nine other news partners, and produced essentially a 10 part series on tribal economies jobs, what's the status of the economy? And what's the status of, of where people are in rural communities. So we have, we have the projects were funded by the Walton Family Foundation. So Indian country today got a grant for editing. Indian country today also wrote the main story, we had our senior editor or editor at large Mark Trahan, who wrote the overview story that drew it all together. And then each of the individual partners got grants for their story. So it was a it was a broad project, there was a lot of juggling. And one of the things that we had that I would say one of the things that worked is that everybody had their own their own targeted story in their own community with their own ideas. And the only issue for me as the as the editorial juggler was let's just be sure they don't overlap too much. And so we we walked a fine line on some of those. The the grants included a component that involved audience engagement. And there were some grand plans when we started and then COVID worsened. And so a lot of the townhall meetings and and various events that had been planned, got sidelines a little bit. So we decided at Indian country today to do a nationwide international survey. So we asked people questions about what what do you work? Are you employed? Are you looking for work? What's the best job in your community? What's the worst job in your community? What's the highest paid job in your community? Sometimes the highest paid job was the worst job sometimes. You know, what's your quality of life? How do you what would make your quality of life better housing, transportation, job opportunities? We asked a lot of questions and we got an amazing response. We posted it on our website, Indian Country, today's respondents, just our respondents had had, we had more than 250 people, we represented more than 130 tribal nations. And they were in 38 states plus the District of Columbia. So it was very broad, and they were very careful and serious about their answers and what they wanted. And what we found was what are the jobs of the future in these native and tribal communities. Health care, health care lead the pack, forget casinos, casinos are on the down or on the downslope according to our readers. So because healthcare is the job of the future close behind that is green energy. So those are two areas where they anticipate growth, they want to work in those areas, they want more opportunities to work. Casinos and the oil and gas industry, both of which are very prominent in tribal and rural communities
are considered to have their they're expected to take a lesser effect on the economies in the local economies. So we looked at those at those issues. And then everybody divvied it up at the series is at the crossroads. You can find it on Indian country today, we had 10 different stories, the main story, which also looked at our survey, we looked at whether tribes should can need to diversify beyond relying so heavily on casinos. And the assumption is absolutely yes, they do. How's it happening? So Wisconsin watch looked at the Ho Chunk nation as an example of efforts to diversify. One of the things that they did that I thought was really smart. They didn't have great connections in the tribal community. And so they hired a tribal representative, public relations person to run interference for them and it worked very well. She went to folks and say you need to talk to these people. They're good guys. You ought to talk to them. You need to do this and it worked. It was very helpful. And I thought that was they use some of their grant money to hire her. We had New Mexico in depth look at the abandoned uranium mines, and how the cleanup of those mines can actually create jobs because there is a demand for clean up and certified specially trained people who can clean up radioactive contamination. So that's a job potential. We had K LSU radio in Oklahoma look at the Potawatomi fire. It's an esports team that the tribe has created. We have had investigate West in the Pacific Northwest, look at renewable energy, solar, wind, any all sorts of renewable energy that tribes are turning to and so then we had Rawhide pressed, looked at work penalties and how hard it is sometimes the way that tribal systems are set up, if people get jobs, they lose their health care, they lose their food stamps, they lose their their supplement, so it's cheaper for them to stay unemployed than to get a job and that needs to be changed. We we had Buffalo's fire in sell in North Dakota, look at the oil and gas boom there and what's next and how some of the smaller businesses and tribal businesses are being not included in that windfall. We had green energy, we looked at lithium. And while while lithium is viewed as the future of green energy, and the key to making electric vehicles work for the world, it's also going to create a mess when they clean out when they dig up that that lithium from those areas. So we had story there from underscore, which is a reporter who is shared jointly between underscore in Indian country today he works on other projects too. And then finally, we had a we had Muskogee media which looked at a big ranching operation in Oklahoma, and how they're using their light, we're doing a sustainable sustainability approach toward ranching, to provide food and jobs and, and funding for their community. Then lastly, we had working together, which was the Osage news in Oklahoma as well. And they looked at how the tribe is trying to partner with local government officials to try to bring jobs everywhere, what we found was that the jobs created by the tribe don't just benefit tribal members, and they, they benefit the entire community. So we, we work together, the stories ran over four days, the main story ran first day, and then we rolled them out three at a time after that on on our website, each of the partners ran, of course, their own stories, they were able to pick up any and all if they wanted, and in fact, those stories are still available Indian country today has an open policy, and you're welcome to pick those stories up and use them if you give us proper credit. We have learned, I think working together some of the things that we've learned that it's it's very important. For us it worked best to let each group each organization plow into its own story. I think it was important to have a senior editor person who can who could manage those projects independently, and make sure that they all pull together with the common thread that we were hoping they would have. And then the Institute for nonprofit news played an amazing role in providing administrative oversight, coordination, collaboration, assistance, and it was very helpful.
It was something I would duplicate again, I might aim a little smaller and maybe not go for 10 The next time, first time out, but it worked, I think, and we're very pleased with the stories that they came out. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Dianna and thank you for being here. And thank you for that and I I look forward to seeing that work, continue and expand. And I'm grateful that you shared it with us.
