So union is a specific information consortium and more. We hope that you'll participate in the conversation to please use the chat box to talk to each other and comment on the presentations. And if you have any questions for our speakers, please use the q&a box for that. We'll try to answer as many questions live as we
can. Yep, all questions in that q&a box. And additionally, we also have live closed captioning and subtitles enabled for today's session, as well as interpretation in Spanish thanks to our fantastic interpreter Martha Rodriguez, you can enable the closed captioning or Subtitles by clicking that CC at the bottom. To switch your audio to Spanish click on the world button that says interpretation. And then you can switch your audio stream to Spanish. And thanks to our wonderful colleague, Mariela Santos. Yes, you can follow along today on Twitter using the hashtag, LNS 21. Or she'll be live tweeting today's sessions and all of our speakers. On Twitter, we have a list of them you can find that Bitly slash L and S Twitter. And one very special feature we've added is our asks and offers board. So if you go to Bitly slash L and S asks, you can post a job share your own resume, maybe bouncing ideas off someone else. Anything you want to do that asks and offers board is available to you. And there was already I think a job posting posted before our summit even started today, whatever you like.
And so if you guys miss any of those links that Stephanie just shared, don't worry. Thanks to the talented man behind the curtain here at the center assistant director Joe Amditis. Everything you could possibly need is collected on our event dashboard, which you can find in the chat. From here you can navigate to the schedule the speaker's page, the acid offers board, or even sign up for the News Digest which is our biweekly newsletter, about the news ecosystem and New
Jersey written by Cassandra That's right.
Or you can even buy some merch
we have merch now. Yeah,
this is new. We not have t shirts sweatshirts until they're very comfortable,
very comfortable. Or you can see Joe's modeling for us and mugs
available for purchase just in time for the holiday season. So you know, just put that out there do with that information what you will, but there's not a tote bag insight on Yeah, on there. So like, no tote bags right now. No, um, and all proceeds support the center and its program. So thanks for checking it out. Before we get rolling on, we want to give you a bit more information about the center right? Especially since we're about to celebrate our 10th birthday. I'm 20 years old. Oh my gosh, I'm Time sure flies. I'm the mission of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support and inform Science Society in New Jersey and beyond. And we envision a world where people work together to create the news and information needed to participate in society, to tell stories that reflect true experiences and live with dignity and purpose. And we work in New Jersey through the New Jersey News Commons. That's our flagship project is dedicated to supporting journalists and local news news across the Garden State, especially journalists of color and those who serve marginalized communities. And nationwide we also study collaborative journalism. Yes. So I'm here we'll just take a pass to give special a special thank you message. We're very grateful to our core founders, because without them, we couldn't do any of this work now. Um, so that includes Montclair State University, the democracy fund, Geraldine R, dodge Foundation, and Abrams Foundation. Thank you so much for your continued success.
Thank you so much without your core operational funding, none of this would be possible. So thank you so much.
Absolutely. Um, so yeah, as we said, We were founded in 2012. And we'll be celebrating our 10th anniversary next year. Ahead of that, and after the Thanksgiving holiday, you'll be hearing much more from us about that. We will be announcing a complete overhaul reimagining of the New Jersey News Commons that's exciting, along with a completely new membership structure. Details about our 10 year celebration plans for 2022 might
be a party might be a party guys. Well, we'll get all together in person again.
Yes. Which will be nice after this. It'll be great. Yes, um, and a fundraising campaign to help us get there. More information will be in your inbox soon. And with that, I'd like to welcome our first speakers to the stage. Yeah, running ahead of schedule is great. Wonderful. I'm so over the last several months, a group of stakeholders across New Jersey has been meeting to build a collective agenda for local news and information in the state. As a reminder, we ask that if you have any questions, please post them in the q&a box and we'll try to answer them as many of them as we can live. So I'll hand it over now to Vanessa Maria Graber of free press, and Megan VanDyke of art yard to tell us more. Everybody please welcome Vanessa and Megan. Welcome Hello, how are you guys? My name is Vanessa Maria Graber and I am the news voices director at free press. And I'm joined here by my colleague Megan, Megan want to tell folks Hello.
Hello, everyone. I am Megan VanDyke. I'm a communication strategist, community voice amplifier and network tender, committed to collaboration, social change and racial equity. I'm a former New Jersey journalist, journalism funder. And I now work on the other side, at our yard, a nonprofit arts center whose mission is to incubate creative expression, and catalyze collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art.
Thanks for that intro, I work at free press, which is a media advocacy and technology organization. And we have a project called news voices, which aims to connect journalists and community members together so that we can have more inclusive equitable media, and so that we can change narratives that have been harmful to many different impacted communities. In New Jersey, we lead a project, which is a collaboration of four hyper local news outlets, which we'll tell you more about later on today. But right now, we're here to talk about our participation in New Jersey's collective agenda for New Jersey news and information. So I'm going to share my screen and we're going to get into our presentation, so hold on one second.
For some reason, I'm not able to share my screen. But what I can tell you is that we have been embarking on a six month long process that has not just finished but actually just started. And it was a collaboration of folks from across many different sectors and New Jersey, working together to create a shared vision and collective agenda for a million. Okay, for him, and journalism ecosystem. So there we go, y'all can see this. So we're gonna just go through our process and purpose. And this presentation, give you an overview of the work that we've been doing, and tell you why it matters and how you can plug into the work. But first, we want to know a little bit more about you. I see some folks have said who they are. So please, in the chat, continue introducing yourself. Tell us your name, your pronouns, your organization or media outlet that you are representing. We'd love to see the cross section of folks here. And because the collective agenda planning team and visioning process is all about making connections, we would love to know who you are. So keep those coming.
All right, I see some folks are already in the chat. So that's great. So a little bit about who we are. This initially got started from a group of anchor organizations that were looking to talk more about some of the challenges that we're facing in the field of journalism, news and information in New Jersey. And those folks were the New Jersey civic information consortium, the Center for Cooperative Media, of course, free press, the New Jersey local news lab Fund and the democracy fund. And we had a planning team, with diverse voices and people representing many different kinds of media. So I want to shout out some of the members of our planning team, Bob Atkins from New Jersey health initiatives. Chris Daggett from the New Jersey civic information consortium, Teresa Gorman of democracy fund. Britt Harley, who you'll hear from later on today, from the Newark news and story collaborative. Of course, our friends from the Center for Cooperative Media, many of their staff members participated. Christina noble from stories of Atlantic City, Angus sponging from Paterson Alliance, and Robin Wilson Glover from New Jersey advanced media. We were also supported by Lauren Maddox and Adriana Weisberg from GE partners, who helped us coordinate all of this set up these meetings and events and listening sessions, took notes and help us keep on track. So we just want to shout out everyone on this team and thank them for joining us and committing their valuable time to plan challenge and hold the space for the work that you'll hear more about today. And again, our desire was to engage a wider network of journalists, media makers. community leaders, academics, philanthropists, organizers, and anybody who is interested in local journalism in the state of New Jersey and beyond. So what did we do when we came together? Well, initially, we wanted to listen to people, right, start having conversations about what the needs are in New Jersey, what type of resources are needed? What are journalists facing in the newsroom? How is information flowing? What are the media ecosystems, and really address the main problem of the decline of local news in New Jersey. Part of our strategy also was to vision right to imagine a future where we didn't have those challenges. So we're going to do a little visioning exercise coming up. So you can get a little taste of the kinds of activities that we engaged in to really imagine and create the future that we desire. And our overall mission, which came later, right, we didn't necessarily start out this way. But we came up with a mission based on what people told us. And it was to work collaboratively to make New Jersey news and information more inclusive, equitable and sustainable for all of our communities. So over the summer and early fall, the planning team can be more than 100 people for exploratory conversation, to open planning meetings, and a final implementation and planning session, we brought our creative minds hopes vision and the lessons we've learned from journalism and community building, to put together this mission, vision and structure that we're going to share with you for the first time. And instead of being siloed. And trying to tackle these issues on our own. We wanted to join forces, and build a collective agenda that we could work on together, by no means is this agenda. All inclusive, right, we're just beginning this process. And there's many, many more people to engage. So again, this is just the beginning of this listening and engagement process. And, again, the feedback that people gave was very, very expansive and diverse. But this is really just a snapshot of what people said. And we're trying to showcase the themes that came up most often from all of the people that we talked to. So this is where there's a lot of energy and conversation. But again, it by no means includes every single thing that people lifted up. And this is also a living, breathing process. So if you're coming into this, and you've never heard of it, and this is interesting to you, and you want to give feedback and participate. Again, we're gonna continue meeting and organizing. So it's not too late to plug into the process, and add your ideas and share your questions and concerns.
So mainly people we're interested in creating solutions to the problems that we're all facing in this field. Many of the journalists shared a very important perspectives on the challenges they were facing in the newsrooms. And also we heard from community members who talked about not getting their information needs met, and not being represented or feeling seen in mainstream media. And then we also heard about the lack of funding that there is for local journalism projects. So here, you know, we've outlined of, you know, some of the broader problems, which is, there's been a rapid decline in the number of local news outlets and growing information gaps in New Jersey communities. And with that, misinformation is widely circulating on checked on social media platforms. There's a lack of equity, diversity and inclusion in our newsrooms, that is black and brown people do not own the media in New Jersey, by and large. They're not represented in many news content, news stories, and there's a real lack of power and leadership identified that it would never look on. And also, again, people were siloed and not working together to be able to build power and coordinate on some of these issues. There's a need for more resources for local news and information organizations. And also, a lack of trusted factual information is a major barrier to participation in civic life, and can directly lead to negative outcomes for both individuals and the community as a whole. The impact of that civic last identifies the key that you would see it inclusive is communities. So we're aware of the impacts of this right when we don't have access to accurate news and information from trusted sources that represent our communities and reflect our communities. It can be really impactful to our ability to access resources, understand what we need to do to keep our families and ourselves safe, and also to stop harmful narratives.
So those are the problems
that we're facing. This is the process that we embarked on in order to address those problems. So again, step one is this data collection, listening, that we engaged in with the wider field of people working at the cross section of journalism, news and information. And also people that are media adjacent people that work in narrative storytelling, public relations, and any other fields where you're having to provide important information to the public. We brought people together, especially major stakeholders to develop a shared big picture goal, then we created a collective agenda with mutually reinforcing activities. We refine the collective agenda based on feedback that we received, and developed a coordinated plan of action. And the idea is that this collective agenda will get strengthened over time with more participation. And again, so we're sort of at the tail end of this where we have a pretty solid draft, we want to launch into working groups and organizing around this collective agenda, so that people can take decisive action to address these problems and implement solutions. Okay, so the first thing that we want to do with all of you is invite you to participate in a visioning. And we do a lot of visioning at free press, you might be familiar with our media 2070 project, which is a look back at all of the policies and content and ways that media has harmed black people, and media 2070 invites people to dream up a vision of the future where they don't have to face that in 2070. So we're gonna do a little bit of a shorter timeline where we're gonna envision a world in New Jersey, where resources are abundant, and all of our wildest dreams come true. Again, visioning is a tool for us to build a plan and create the future we want. If we want to build a house, we first need to imagine what that house looks like and create a blueprint for that before construction can begin. So I'm inviting everybody to go to the Padlet. So I'm going to stop my screen right here. And then I'm going to share the Padlet link. And if you haven't used Padlet before, it's pretty simple. You go to the link, which I'm going to show you in just a second. And then you're going to click this pink button with the plus sign, and you should be able to answer this question. And again, it gives you a text box that you can enter. So again, I'm inviting everybody to close their eyes think for a second of what an ideal world would look like, where all of your dreams came true resources were abundant, and we had an ideal future of journalism. So I'm going to play some music take some time to fill that out. And we'll come back in about five minutes or so. And we can see these things pop up while other people are completing it submit a stop my share and go to the next slide and play a song for y'all so again, the prompt is up there all right. And this is a song that inspires me it's colors from the black few months woke up to
this brown brown brown brown battle of green for to downtown. You I got all my favorite sisters the baby blues moves of blue skies we don't fly least not anticipated come to read is being mitigated my sisters and mom a good Day sisters we're the baby blues birds and great clouds or wet balls or blue sky filo ray to help me anticipate
all right, thank you everyone. This board just keeps getting bigger and bigger with your ideas. So I'm just going to shout out a couple of them. A pipeline of top notch well trained young journalists from a diversity of backgrounds and newsrooms fighting to get them on board. journalism as mutual aid. The future of journalism is people, more citizens committing acts of journalism collaborative cooperative structures for mutual will support nuanced housing and transit stories about pedestrians houseless people, and that that that board meant or moved on me not just about cars and houses about people about people more than property, less personal opinion news and more factual news, people telling their own stories. So there is a lot, a lot of synergy here of what we heard during the process. And this was very, you know, our process was very much like this exercise we heard from a lot of people broke out into small groups with unlikely partners, and returned together as a big group over a couple of different sessions to find where our hopes and beliefs intersected with the realities of our work. We also heard a lot of feedback via email from people who couldn't join some of the meetings. So the words phrases and how they are grouped together and our our shared values and vision was very, was a very intentional debated process that wasn't about perfection. It was about progress process and creating and building together. So we mapped the values of what our work must center around. What came to the top was equal access to information, shared power, inclusive decision making, and transparency and accountability at every level. Our vision is for a healthy democracy, where all New Jerseyans have the news and information they need to make informed decisions, engage in their community and shape the world around them. We believe in creating transparent, accessible, and Representative news and information across New Jersey. journalism that values and is valued by the people it serves in every community. And we believe in creating a more connected, civically engaged an equitable state we brainstormed our priorities and strategies, and then or and then organize them around the themes that emerged.
So our first priority is addressing news and information inequities, to increase the number of journalists, locally owned media outlets, and to pay pay journalists of color living wages. We identified news and information. The strategies to do this that we laid out was is identifying news and information gaps in communities, which I think you'll hear more about today. Equipping communities to build power and hold media accountable, providing inclusive journalism and anti racism training and education to the field, establishing more locally owned outlets to cover regions not represented by legacy media, and to hire more journalists of color and pay a sustainable living wage. Our second priority was to strengthen news and information infrastructure to increase the access to government records and engagement of residents and civic activities. To do that, we will develop innovative technology, resources and structures to share content and information collaborate across sectors to inform us to increase coverage, distribution and engagement and leverage public institutions and community organizations as resources and information hubs. Our third priority is to enhance and expand quality trusted journalism, so that we increase the number of people trained to do reporting and journalism and the number of journalists to cover local affairs and issues. And the number of students trained as journalists will do that by focusing on the news and information needs of traditionally marginalized communities, providing journalism training to members of communities most heavily impacted by the decline in local news, teaching media and civic literacy in schools and communities, training more student journalists and creating and sharing resources, guide books, case studies and research. And we know that we can't do any of this without our final strategy to diversify and grow funding for local news. To establish my buy step to establish a agreed upon budget and plan for raising and funding news and information to create public and private partnerships, and innovative tax programs to support New Jersey news and information to build and grow a $25 million endowment to sustain news in New Jersey and engage elected and government agency officials to invest in journalism as a public good good. A movement to transform local news and information requires transformational funding to support it. Anything less will result in incremental progress at best, and at worst, perpetuate inequitable structures that currently dominate our news and information and ecosystem. So who is doing this work? Well, we want to hear from you again. And we're building we're going to drop in another link for a Padlet. So we want to hear from, from those of you to share ideas on who is doing this work already in New Jersey, and what other or outside of New Jersey and what other models we should be looking at for bread for best practices.
Yes, again, we're not reinventing the wheel here. So much of the inspiration has been drawn from people already doing this work. There's organizations or people or freelancers, all kinds of folks all over the country that are already addressing all of these challenges. And we can learn a lot from them. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, we're looking for best practices, case studies models of how we can again, address all these different challenges. There was a comment in the chat about one of the elements being priority number one, they're not in any particular order. We have four priorities, but they're not ranked or anything. So they're interchangeable. So again, if you're looking to rank them, that's totally fine. But we did not rank them in this process. Obviously, who you are, what field you're coming from, is going to shape the way that you prioritize these priorities that we have listed. Okay, so the Padlet is in the chatbox. And he's distracted. So let's take a minute to populate that by suggesting projects, people that are either doing this work already, or just people that we should be connecting with that have really interesting ideas and inspiration that we can draw from. Yes, and you can share media outlets outside of New Jersey, we have people from all over the country attending, if you know of a really awesome project or initiative that's tackling some of these issues. Definitely put it in the Padlet
All right, so let's get started. Yeah, Joe, if you want to play some music, feel free.
I know this is going on YouTube, so I'm trying to refrain from more copyrighted music. But I am going to switch my screen share so that y'all can see the Padlet.
There it is. Thank you Okay, love to see how those great suggestions, and there's a bunch on there that we had not come across. So that's why I say this is an ongoing process, it's really impossible to capture everything in such a short amount of time. But I love those ideas, we'll definitely be looking into those. And again, those Padlet links are live. So if something comes to you later on, or even next week, feel free to drop it in there. And we will not be cutting off submissions to that. And I just want to read something from Arielle is collaboration is key to the future of journalism. And I say amen to that. We totally agree. And we love collaborating, get to meet lots of really great people and be inspired by all the brilliance in the room. So I'm just going to return to our slides one more time. And thanks for everybody who recommended folks. What is next. So we've outlined some priorities and a mission, vision and values. We've identified the problem, people are recommending folks for us to now talk to you and look at other models and all of that. So what happens with our planning team and everybody that came together initially? Well, we're pausing for the cars to formalize a structure. So that means we're going to be forming an actual like project or initiative. And it's going to be anchored by the Center for Cooperative Media. So we're super excited about that they're well positioned to take on this work. We're going to be formulating a new leadership team, working groups and a wider network for people to participate. So if you don't have the time to go to lots of planning meetings, there'll be other events, newsletters, updates and places like this, where you can still stay informed and contribute to this whole process. We're also having to fundraise, right in order to be able to continue planning and innovating especially over a long period of time, right to get us to 10 years from now, we have to raise money, we have to get more people interested in local journalism, and media ecosystems in New Jersey. So we'll definitely be presenting this in more places to help get resources to do this work. And then again, continued engagement and organizing, there's people from different parts of the state that we haven't heard from that we really want to reach. There's non English speaking community, as Latinos, you know, when to some of us work with people that speak Spanish or other languages, we want to be able to talk to people that weren't initially part of this process, because everybody's voice counts. So that's what we'll be working on. And we have a landing page on the Center for Cooperative Media website, where we're going to be posting more updates and information, and definitely, you know, stay in contact with us, and follow the center on social media to receive those updates. So we wanted to give you
a peek inside what our organizing model right now looks like. So as Vanessa said, you know, this work will be held deeply by a backbone organization that is going to help us, you know, organize meeting dupe, and play key administrative and coordinating roles, that that leadership or that core backbone organization, you know, the Center for Cooperative Media is a natural partner to be the backbone of this work. So we're in the early process of fleshing out what that may look like. We imagine that there'll be a core leadership team, commission comprised of fundraising leads and implementation leads the work group co chairs, that will be developed to help advance the collective agenda and to raise the funding that is needed to support it. This is sort of like a board to for those of you who are familiar with the nonprofit model. And we also envision workgroups, you know, three or four work groups to start out that are going to be engaging the community, and field leaders advancing specific priorities or results within the collective agenda in areas without existing leadership. And we know as Vanessa said that there are many, you know, organizations that are and and partners that are already working to do this. So we're not looking to replicate, you know, we're looking to bring, bring those those folks in.
So now is our pitch our call to action to get all of you involved. We're looking for collaborators, thought partners, people that have innovative ideas to a lot of the challenges that we're facing funding partners, even if you just have resources or people power, we will definitely love to hear from you. And network members, we know people are working very busy jobs, especially our journalists and media makers out there. And they might not have the time to contribute as much of this process, but they want to stay informed. They want to be able to give feedback and share ideas. And so we'll be creating a wider network for this shared agenda that you can plug into. And what we really want is we want people to step up, because we know that it is possible to create those visions that we just put on the Padlet. That world is totally possible. If we work together and we fight, advocate and organize for those things. The time is now we are at a moment in this field, where we're turning a corner, there is an awakening, people are advocating for themselves, communities are demanding more. And so we need to capitalize on that momentum, and continue organizing, talking and collaborating. Again, through solidarity and mutual aid. And being able to cast a really wide net and bring in a diverse group of perspectives. We believe that we will be well positioned to move this work forward, and to be able to get the things that we need for that future that we want to build. So I'm and then I'm going to skip to our last slide, we'll go to questions. This is an invitation to dream and vision with us and to build the future that you wish to see. We are also interested in helping people and other states out launch this type of collective agenda. Because again, if we start lighting these fires all over the country, we can create a real movement that advocates for local journalism, equity anti Racism and all the things that we want that are going to improve access to news and information. So with that, I want to thank my partner, Megan VanDyke, for CO presenting with me and the Center for Cooperative Media for giving us the opportunity to share our work. And we're happy to take some of your questions.
Yes, thank you so much, Vanessa. Thank you, Megan. So there are a couple of questions in the chat. You probably can see them too. But I'll read one off. So Mattiello, from our team asked, and you we alluded to this a moment ago is how could How could this work be done in other states? So let's talk about that for a moment.
Well, we have a model, right, so everything begins with like a committee meeting. If you've ever worked at a university, or large organization, right, it all begins with that first initial meeting. So creating a list of people that you want to get into the same room, create a very persuasive invitation that says, hey, we know our state has all of these challenges, we want to talk about it, we want to create those solutions. And we invite you to the table to talk about these issues. Once you have a committee of people and you have an agenda mapped out and you can facilitate a conversation about how to move forward, then you can set forth a plan for future meetings, events, and listening sessions, it's really important to have a series of different listening listening sessions at different times in different parts of the state, maybe, so that people have multiple opportunities to think I'd be good at this more, you could listen to me document the process and share the results of each meeting. So that folks who can't attend, can read and still stay up to date. I would say again, you know, it's really just about talking through some of these things, and identifying the unique challenges that are in your state, what affects New Jersey isn't the same as what affects New York and Pennsylvania, right? Each local place has unique challenges. And even within a state, we have urban areas that have different challenges than rural areas. So it's important to, you know, talk about all of those differences. And then also talk about the things that unite people and bring them together. So like I said earlier, the things that we have in there is not everything happening in New Jersey, that's problematic or can be improved. But it's where there was a lot of energy, and were multiple people mentioned it many times over this process of six months. And yeah, do East is really good at this. We have a lot of materials to share. So you can hit us up and we can share some of the materials that we created. So you can kind of take a look at how we documented
this process. And I would add the importance of bringing in local funders to help you to help pay for this work, you know, this work is his work, it takes people's time. You know, people come from different expertises and they should be paid for for being part of this work. So this is, you know, a good opportunity to thank democracy fund again for their support in New Jersey. Just today. They are just this week, they did Josh turns and Teresa Gorman, from democracy funds Public Square program was sharing the importance for all funders to support journalism if they hope to advance their missions. So there is a case to be made to, to all funders to to join in this work as well. We can grab that link and drop it in the chat to separate Yeah. And I also dropped in the chat a few minutes ago, a link to the Jersey waterworks collaborative, because if I know acts as part of the planning committee,
and I know it was hard for me to get my head around, where we were going, what this could look like when we're out in the wild next year. And so I encourage anyone who might be confused by that to also go to that link, because it's the way Jersey waterworks has organized is unlikely, very similar to how we'll end up organizing. And if anyone who's on the webinar now, you know, right now, you want to be a part of this if you weren't swayed by Vanessa, how she closed? Sure, yeah. Which was amazing. Let us know right now you can you can DM us in the chat, you can email the center, we will be publicizing As Vanessa said in 2022. A lot of ways to get involved whether you want to be part of a workgroup or a leadership team or you want to be involved in the broader network. We want to start recruiting people right away. To do that. We have a couple more questions, two in the chat, and then one in the q&a box. So Allison Davis asked a moment ago in the chats many communities depend on Facebook groups for their local news. How do we wean folks away from these sites which too often spread untruths and rumors and get them to embrace true journalistic efforts? And then we have a couple of questions from Lisa. Jack. Now we'll get to two, somewhat related. No, Megan, Vanessa, Cassandra wants to take up.
Yeah, I can take that, as you know, free press engages in many different forms of advocacy. And one of the campaigns that we have is for all of these social media platforms, not just Facebook to be more accountable. So one strategy is like, making these companies actually take down the harmful content and, and, you know, kick off people that are frequent spreaders of misinformation. I think the other side to that is offering more media literacy so that people can understand the difference between factual information and misinformation, we don't have a lot of resources for media literacy, especially for younger people. So that is definitely something that people can advocate for is more media literacy resources, in schools, and in colleges and universities. I think, lastly, you have to create alternatives, you can't just tell people not to check out that platform, if that's where they find information, you have to create new sites where that they can migrate to right. So if you're telling me, Hey, um, you know, this Facebook group that you're in has a lot of misinformation, and you shouldn't be listening to that. Tell them where they can go, right? What are the trusted sources of local media, where they can transition to, I also think sometimes you need to actually create the alternative within Facebook. So a lot of small outlets don't have an effective social media strategy. You have to get in there, right? You can't beat them join up, you have to get in there. And combat misinformation, right. One good role for local journalists is to create content, clarifying, verifying news and information, so that they're not just seeing the misinformation, but they're also seeing other narratives that will cause them to think more critically. But that's what I would suggest, you know, for that problem, obviously, we have to attack it from many different fronts,
contact like that. And for organizations or people who are using Facebook as a platform to, to share responsible factual information on Facebook, there are ways with the, you know, aligned values or ways that we can support those people and organizations, and not be just dismissive of them, because that's the platform that's their access to, to sharing news and information about their community.
And Lisa, Jack now dropped a couple questions in the chat on the q&a that I want to get to. She, in her first question, she's most mentions, there's a large and leases in Princeton, there's a large Hispanic population, her area, many are undocumented, and they're extremely hesitant and often resistant, to speak with her about stories that she's covering. So she asked for advice, to get their stories or perspectives to include them in her coverage. Um, and then she also asked about distribution. And she, she works on an online magazine in Princeton. But it's been difficult to distribute and inform the community that they even exist since they launched during COVID. So two different questions there one about reaching marginalized communities, undocumented communities, and one about platforms reaching folks? Well,
the answer is the same for both questions. And that is that you have to be present in that community, and develop trust and relationships. And that takes time. I feel like people want this like instant connection. Especially, you know, I'm Latina. And but I'm Puerto Rican. So even for myself, if I have to work to develop trash, trust and relationships with people from the undocumented community. And the way that I've been doing that is by showing up for that community, right. There's cultural events. There's advocacy around immigration rights, and then partnerships with organizations that are trusted that work with immigrants and undocumented people. And so sometimes you need a conduit, right? You need someone to connect you so that they can vouch for you and say, hey, this person is not going to harm you with their story. They're not going to out you and it is okay for you to talk with them. So I would say start with these partnerships with these community organizations. Churches are also very effective. You don't have to be religious are part of that church to work with people in the faith based community, and then also, really educating yourself on what their challenges are when you better understand the population you're trying to serve. And the very real daily lived experiences that they have You can better communicate with them and build those bridges. Again, with distribution, you have to show up people have to know about you the best way, at least for the left, the next community is word of mouth, right? So, again, it's really hard to do this work virtually like from your computer, there are safe ways in the pandemic, to get out into the community, to partner. And also, news outlets don't often capitalize on hosting events, you know, so we're not just here to get a story from you. We're hosting an event, we're hosting a conversation, we're doing something cultural, we're profiling people in the community that are awesome. So try to create those safe spaces that provide an entry point that drives people to your content.
Thanks. One of my one of the things I'm seeing in this question is one of the inherent challenges that's in journalism, which has to do with trust between community members and journalists, and the historical trends, trends, extractive relationships that journalists have had with communities, and so interrogate that. And this, it also makes me remember a project in New Brunswick that colab arts led called 37 voices that worked with directly with journalists and community organizations, on oral story, oral storytelling methods in journalism, so that you're taking a whole different approach. So I would, I would recommend learning about that project as well.
We have 60 seconds left. So the last question, what are people going to get out of being involved in this initiative?
Well, they're gonna make awesome friends, because I love everybody that has been part of this process. So again, to relationship building, you can't really put a price tag on that. A lot of times as when I was working as a journalist and producer, you work alone, you work on your story, you work on your thing, you're so like, dedicated to your organization, you don't often have time to reach out. Also, like thought partners, right? Like these conversations, spark other ideas and projects that go beyond the scope of this work. So when people are like trading, emails, and phone numbers, and having meetings because of something that they talked about in this space, I feel like that's also a measure of success. And lastly, like, I want my voice heard, I want to be able to shape the future, I want to have a say I want to represent for my people. Because for Latino, we're not always invited to have a seat at the table. And so I would invite people who feel the same way you feel like your voice isn't heard. You feel like you don't have power. This is an opportunity to assert that power and advocate for yourself and your community.
Thank you, Megan. Thank you, Vanessa, thank you so much for both of you for being here today. Oh, thank you for all the work you've done to on the New Jersey news information collaborative.
Thank you very much.
So next up, and we are right on time, which is exactly where the center likes to be like this, we're going to talk about the New Jersey civic information Consortium. So I'd like to welcome board members Teresa Edwards, Robin Wilson, Glover and Chris Daggett to the stage. So they're each going to take turns talking about different parts of the consortium. And then we will open it up for questions. And I know there will be likely a lot of questions for the board. So we're going to try to save at least 10 minutes for them to answer questions that you may have. And don't forget to drop those please in the q&a box, not the chat. And with that, Chris, I'll hand it over to you to get started.
And I just want real quick. Can I have Theresa Theresa is here with us. But it's it's not letting me make her a panelist, Teresa, if you can hear me, can you jump out and jump back in? And then I'll see if that works. Thanks. So if not, we'll bring you up without video.
Great. Thanks, Chris floor is yours.
Great. Thanks, Stephanie. And welcome, everybody. So we only have 30 minutes. So we're going to try to make this pretty quick. In terms of our presentations, I'm going to give a little bit of overview of the background of the Civic information consortium, there's Teresa, and then Teresa is going to talk about the grant selection process and then Robins gonna wrap it up covering the future and the kinds of news projects that the senator is interested in supporting in 2022. So with that, just by way of quick background, there's been a lot of focus on local news and information in the past decade, actually, beginning with some of the work we did when I was president and CEO of the Geraldine R dodge Foundation, creating the informed Communities program of which actually Megan VanDyke, who just was on was a part and led at the time by Molly dag er, who's also a board member of the consortium. We spent a lot of time trying to use New Jersey as a laboratory for local news initiatives. Funding ideas from around the country that would come here and try things in New Jersey and also funding New Jersey bread programs. All the while we're trying to figure out what is a sustainable model from a financial standpoint. And to be honest with you, in the 10 years, we worked on it, we had a lot of difficulty figuring that piece of the puzzle out, as many of you who are in the nonprofit sector of journalism know, it is a very difficult challenge to make a build a sustainable, financially sustainable news organization. So there's still a lot of focus on that around the country, there's been a few successful ideas done. And then on the private sector side, you've had some examples of people doing things like here in New Jersey, we have tap into which has done a very good job of franchising local news organizations, but that's on the for profit side. But in any case, we thought of the idea of trying to create through the sale of spectrum that went on in 2018. Because New Jersey had several television station. Spectrum, sessions are sections that were not being utilized. So as part of a national effort to sell excess spectrum, Jersey had three I think, was three licenses went up. And the sale of that generated more money that almost anyplace in the country is $330 million. We had hoped to be able to use that money to create basically a pool of funds from which local news could be supported around the state for a long period of time, because we envisioned the idea that it would be like a foundation where you'd spend maybe 5% of that, per year. See, you'd have 15 or $16 million annually to support local news. Unfortunately, that money was used instead to plug a hole in the state budget. And as a result, another effort was was put together led a lot by people had free press and supported by the democracy fund and also the Dodge foundation that ultimately led to the creation of the New Jersey civic information consortium. And the Civic information consortium is a nonprofit created by legislation in 2018. There are 15 board members, six appointed by elected officials, five appointed by each of the five member universities of which are the state public research institutions and we now have a sixth public research institution just in the past week in Kane University. So we'll be bringing on someone from Kane as well. But at the moment, it's NJIT, Rutgers, Montclair State, Rowan and the College of New Jersey. And so there's five representatives from those five institutions. And then there's four public members appointed by the board itself. So the total is 15 board members. And in the first year of of existence, we're given a grant of
a million dollars, but unfortunately, it was frozen in the state budget due to COVID. And when the entire state budget was frozen for a period of time, and then in the shortened budget of last year, we received $500,000, in legislature. And then in and in that process, we received 74 applications and gave out 14 grants no more than $35,000 Each, which you can find on the website, if you haven't looked at it already. And then this year, for fiscal year 22, we've received another million dollars. And it's that million dollars that we're now looking at how we will allocate over the next few months as we begin the process of fiscal year 22. So our whole goal is to be as flexible as possible. We don't want to pretend that we know all the answers to things that we want to encourage people to dream and to envision local news, nonprofit local news, that would be serving communities, through the idea of understanding what those information the information needs are of those communities. And while we have some ideas, we're open to virtually anything that people might propose with the eye toward moving the ball forward on on local news and information in the state. We do have a requirement in there for each applicant, each grantee to have a university partner, that's part of the legislation. So each of the five universities has partnered with the 14 grantees that we have this year. And that requirement is again going to be as part of the future grants that we're making. So that's basically it. I don't know if Robinson Do you want to add anything to what I said? Otherwise, I want to turn it over to Teresa to talk about the grant selection process.
Okay, thank you, Chris. Um, as as Chris said, Yes, we received 74 applications in this initial grant cycle, which was possibly a little bit more than we expected. But we were pleased that there were so many. And the overwhelming majority of them were extremely worthy. So we went through a process of each member had about 10 to 12 that they had to evaluate. And there was there was a number of criteria that they had two questions that they had to answer. So we had this spreadsheet rubric that we plugged our numbers into. And from that, looking at those numbers, we whittled it down to maybe about half of what it originally was. And then all of those applications had another committee member, review them. Now, it was important to us in the beginning, that we wanted to spread out the awardees in different areas, we didn't want a glut necessarily in the northern region. So we wanted to make sure that all regions were fairly and act adequately represented. So once we went through that, again, they were all re reviewed, we started the process of believing. We got the 74 in early April. And so by mid April, we had, we had our second round list, we went through that. And again, after those were re reviewed, then we had the process of holding meetings to for each committee member or members to make their case, because there were still more worthy applications. Then there were available funds. So we worked down and we got down to to the 14 that were selected, unfortunately, because of administrative issues one had to back out. So that was replaced with the next highest score. Where, again, this was brand new to everyone. We're looking at the process now to tweak it a little bit for the second round. We haven't made any final decisions. But again, we have almost double the budget. So we will be making those announcements shortly. As to how that's how that's going to go. There was the one thing that we did want to to focus on is that in the applications that we received, we did not have a tremendous amount from the AAPI community and we want to try to increase that this next go around. And I think that about covers everything. Does anyone have any questions? Or I can turn it over to Robin?
Why don't we have Robin present? And then we'll open it all up to questions. And I assume Stephanie's gonna lead that. From this from the podium, if you will, or we can just do it here on the chat.
Nope, I'm
gonna jump back in and help. Okay. Sandra as well. Okay, Robin, you're up.
Thanks.
So I'm Robin Wilson Glover. You may see my name there. You may not. I'm the media representative on the board. I'm part of what people call legacy media work at the star ledger nj.com. I, they had to explain where we're going in the future, it's probably easier to explain where we are now or where we have been this past election, and I got my ballot. I did the Malin ballot and had to look up online who these people were who were running in my town because there was no story to explain who they were. And thank goodness I was at my desk and could do that. What we have is a number of news deserts. We aren't able to cover the news the way we used to. We used to cover school board meetings we used to cover zoning board meetings we used to cover a variety of meetings that explained what our government officials and how our government works, we can't do that anymore because we don't have as many people. We've lost about half the journalists over the last several decades. And we've lost at least a quarter of newspapers in this nation. And a lot of the newsrooms are, are just shells of themselves. At my publication, we went from 350 journalists at the height of our new cycle or our publication, we're down to about 140 150. Now. So we've lost about half of our people, we can't do the things we used to do. That means that places like Salem County and Warren County don't get the attention that they should get. And our job is filling those news deserts. As Teres explained, we can't we'll continue to green that desert, pick more sites to do that. I think that the next step, of course, is educating these people, journalism is not easy. I've been a journalist for almost 40 years, is very easy to misinterpret things get things wrong, or to get legal trouble. And that's like the worst. But it's a difficult task. There's new technology. And so our job is to find ways to teach these people to do these jobs, and to monitor how they do this job. The other type of news desert, as many of you may know, is that our country is changing, New Jersey is changing, they're becoming majority minority states, the way they call it, meaning that a large number of Latino and Black and Asian people are are becoming customers and readers and traditional sites, news sites, TV sites, newspaper sites no longer or never did cover these communities. So we need to make sure that those communities are covered as well and represented in the sites that we do picked. As we green our deserts. I think the other way that we can do this is to is to provide as much support collaborate among ourselves and with others and with the communities that we cover. So there's a just as we've gone from the traditional old dinosaur model of the newspaper that used to get thrown on your doorstep, we're evolving, we're changing, we're no longer have a dinosaur that we used to be where a completely different model is taking shape. We're nonprofits and communities, and individuals and corporations are providing the news. And hopefully, we'll work collaboratively.
Pretty Thanks. Well, Robin, so Stephanie, I think we're ready to try and leave as much time as possible for questions and answers.
Yeah, sounds good. Thank you. Thank you, Teresa, Robin and Chris for share a little bit more about the consortial board. So I should say also, just so everyone who's on who's with us today knows that Montclair State, we're the host institution for the Civic information Consortium. So we've, you know, provided backbone support to help make the grant selection process go as smoothly as we could, in the first round, to help build the website and, and other things like that. So there are a couple couple questions in the chat. The first is so can you talk a little bit more about when the next grant cycle will be? I know, you talked Chris, you mentioned that million dollars that you have is Can anyone on the on the board tell us more about when you're going to open another round of grants and what the focus might be?
Sure, I think that the grant, the call for applications will probably go out sometime in the next two or three weeks. And we'll look to probably have a deadline on the applications. I think we talked about somewhere around February 1. Teresa to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that was a ballpark timeframe. And then to make grant award some time at the end of that month or beginning of March somewhere in that in that timeline. And Tracy, you want to talk about some of the focus that's come out of the grants committee work
I'm sure we'll as I said, in my first comments, one of the things that we really want to focus on is greater outreach to the AAPI community because we didn't have quite as many applications, as we would have liked to seen from there. So we're working on a couple of different things. And yeah, we, as a matter of fact, when we leave this meeting, we're going into a board meeting. And so hopefully, we will have the final decision on that we'll come up with an exact date for when the next round of grants will go out on but it will be soon and they will be due relatively early in the first part of 2022. Again, we're tweaking some of the, the criteria isn't really going to change we just made tweak the scoring models a little bit. But we haven't made any final decisions. And again, immediately following this meeting, that is what we are going to be jumping into.
That's good to know. So
anything? No, I think that Teresa kind of handled down, that's important that we reach out to a big black community that the Latino community, those are the important communities that we have to consider.
One good thing to note, too, is our the center has strong connections with several ethnic community media partners across the state, a few of whom are with us today on the webinar, John, one leave the Create daily climate workato from reporting span, oh, well, he's a here. We've got several folks, were probably really excited to hear about that focus for the next round. And it's good to know that you're gonna open applications so quickly, because folks will want to start thinking about their ideas. Now, in the second half of that question was also about the $35,000. Cap. Do you know if that will still be the cap for the next cycle of grants? Again,
go ahead, Teresa.
Yeah, we haven't made a final decision on that. It will. I don't want to get people overly excited. But that probably will increase somewhat. I won't say by a significant amount. It's not going to double necessarily, but there will, in all probability be an increase to that gap.
Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you. So there's another question about news organizations in the chat. Will you fund more news organizations specifically in the next round?
Are you how do you define news organizations?
Not sure. I would assume from the comment that they're talking about. And established news organizations like a news outlet that produces original reporting that is already established now versus a startup. I'm just assuming, if if someone wants to drop another question, and to clarify that go ahead, and the q&a, but that's what I'm assuming Chris.
Our goal is to try to foster innovation and new ideas. But also to identify organizations that may be established, it could only be a year old might be longer, that with a bit of a boost of money might be able to do something really different or new creative side, I wouldn't rule out anything. Again, we're trying not to. We're trying not to in the we're trying to make this about the grantees not about the board. So we don't want the board to be the determinant all the time of what exactly we will inviting ideas we want people to give us some suggestions of good ones come out of established organizations, news organizations, that that very well might be funded. I mean, I don't think we are wed to, for example, only organizations that are just startups. And that's not that's not our mission, necessarily.
Right. And we did have a couple of grantees that were existing, and I wish john was here because he's much better. He's worked with them one on one a little bit more than I have. He's had contact. So he knows the names right off the top of their heads. But yes, some were startups brand new projects, but some were existing projects, existing in news organizations that wanted to branch out into another area or expand something that they had already started. So yeah, it's not mutually mutually exclusive. We, if it's a good project, a viable project. It certainly can be funded
and Hammonton times as well. One of those is you see in the chat, and we take Thank you.
Yep. Um, also we, we, we talked to Chris, you mentioned earlier a little bit about the university partners. This is not a question in the chat, but I'm just bringing it up, because I know there was some confusion about that. The first round, can we talk a little bit more about how folks might think about involving a university partner when they think about their grant applications, but I'm happy to add anything you need.
So we're trying to, we're trying to make that a little easier by one identifying specific areas of focus of each of the universities so that someone might be doing something in broadcast, they would go to one university, if they're doing something with ethnic media, they might go to another university. So we're trying to do that. And then we're trying to have the universities identify either some graduate students or professors who might be open to partnering. And then between those opportunities, and and there'll be, and working through the center, which has been terrific. And I and I should underscore what Stephanie said, Stephanie was being a little more modest, maybe without the Senator, we wouldn't have been able to get those grants out last year, they provided terrific back office support for us in reviewing and pulling all the sort of the administrative side of this application process together. And part of that is helping to identify people when an app a potential applicant does not have a grantee, and we're encouraging people to try to get them before they apply. But if they don't have a partner, from university to reach out to us through the Center for Cooperative Media, or through our website, and request that kind of assistance, and we'd be happy to try to match people up with interested university partners.
And the university partner partnership can take out a lot of different forms. And that's something that we that as we help counsel people to on their grants, because as I should mention, anyone in the NJ News Commons, who is looking to apply for a certificate infringe consortium grant, we can also help you work on your proposal or connect you with folks, there are a lot of different ways that a university partner could be part of your project, it doesn't necessarily have to be an overbearing, or it could be a huge part. You know, university partners can do research, they could provide guidance or expertise or just advising, you know, it's there. There's a wide expanse of ways that a university partner could be involved in, in a project that's proposed.
And we're trying to formalize that into providing some sort of a template of an agreement that might exist just to make it so that there's a little bit more formality to it. But but it's not one page, I'm not talking about negotiated agreement, I'm just talking about just to describe what the relationship is. And it might be one where somebody just checks in every month or something with a university partner. And in other cases, the university partner may be deeply involved in it in some fashion, to do research around it, or to do a thesis around it, it could be any number of things that people envision in that relationship. So again, we're trying to encourage people to dream about it, and to think what's the best way to interact?
Just to clarify earlier, the whole million dollars, the board's gonna award,
we're probably going to end up, it's probably going to be around 850,000 Out of the million, because we're also out of that grant each year, we're supposed to fund administrative support, which means staff and we don't yet have a staff person, we're going to be going out looking for an executive director probably just after the first of the year. So some of the money goes to that. And we've also been fortunate to get a New Jersey local news lab Fund grant of $250,000, which can help supplement that that grant was the general operating support grants, we can use that also, our goal is to use as much money from the public funding as possible for grants.
Yep. Yep. One of the quick questions that came up in the q&a is the grant opportunities are only for the for New Jersey, right? Yes. nearby? Yes. Well, and
you know, if somebody came from another state and said, we have this idea, we're gonna do it in New Jersey, or there's something that somebody is aligning with somebody out of state. I think we'd be open to that. But But generally speaking, yes, this is from New Jersey entities. And that's effectively what we did at the Dodge foundation. When we started out, we said, look, you're doing something great in Illinois. Wonderful. We'd love to have support you but only if you come to New Jersey and do it here.
So one last question in the chat from earlier was and I'm going to reword this slightly in the q&a. And we have about three minutes. Theresa, Robert and Chris before we wrap up What would be your advice? If someone wants to start a civic information consortium in their state? Where do they start? Because I know why you're, you're laughing. This is a years long process. There is a lot of Yeah. A lot of stuff starts.
Yeah, there's a lot of steps to it. It starts with a conversation. It's finding a legislator or two, or three or four or five that is highly interested in local news. And, and then looking around what's you know, not not to reinvent the wheel take advantage of things that have been done elsewhere. I think it's California now that has a similar Colorado, right has a similar entity. So yes, there's a it's a it's a process like I'm not unlike any other legislative process, you got to find a good sponsor, and then you have to fashion a piece of legislation and then start going to the various legislators and working through the process.
Robin tracer, Chris there last couple of minutes. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with Robin Theresa,
please pipe in? Teresa, you're muted.
Sorry, I there's construction next door, and I didn't want it to interfere. I'm going back to your last question about being in New Jersey. As Chris said, you know, if they have a project, and they want to come to New Jersey, but if it's someone, if it's an organization that's here in New Jersey, their their reach can extend beyond New Jersey, so it doesn't have to be specifically focused solely on New Jersey. So if they're in New Jersey and have a project, and they want to cover the northeast, that's fine. If they want to extend all the way to California, that's great, too. But yeah, they for they do have to be based here. But it all of the work doesn't have to be geographically restricted to New Jersey.
Robin, I would just say that the important thing is to create trusted media. When we talked about what is news news is someone who delivers information that's accurate, and that's trusted by the community. And that's what the goal is
the great way to end it. Thank you, Robin. And if anyone has any questions about the Civic information consortium, the email is info at NJ civic info.org we'll drop the chat info at NJ civic info.org. So thank you. It's 130. Exactly. Go to your board meeting.
Thank you. Have a good afternoon.
All right. Well, thank you, Stephanie. And also thanks to the New Jersey civic information consortium board for being represented here today. Next up, I'm delighted to welcome to the stage a group of leaders who have been conducting community information meat assessments in New Jersey over the last 18 months. Everyone please welcome Sarah Alvarez. And welcome back. Vanessa Maria Graber welcome Britt, Harley and Christina noble to the stage and they'll tell us more about their work in Camden, Newark and Paterson.
You're muted, Vanessa. Hello, thanks for having us back. I'm with a whole new crew here. We're really excited to share some information about the work that we did in New Jersey to better understand people's information needs. At the beginning of the pandemic, the new cycle change dramatically right as information was coming out every day, and New Jersey and struggle to understand what the health and safety guidelines were how to get access to COVID testing, and how to get financial and economic resources. When news voices held listening sessions across the state, we receive lots of anecdotal evidence about what news consumers want from media outlets and from journalists. This project was an attempt to actually get official documentation through text message surveys, where we implemented them in a Newark, Atlantic City and KHAMSIN to answer the question, what are your biggest questions right now? What are your information needs right now during the pandemic? So right now I'm going to introduce us are Alvarez who led the research on this front from outlier media. Sarah has a lot of experience, engaging community members through this platform right through text message, which is very accessible for people to use, and has done this and other places outside of New Jersey. She's going to tell you a little bit about the research methodology and why this information is important. And then we'll hear from Brett Hartley who is the founder of five words media, and then Newark news and story collaborative, who was our partner on Anchor organization in Newark when we did this work. And then also Christina noble, who's the project manager of stories of Atlantic City, our anchor, organization and partner in AC, we also work with a Center for Cooperative Media. So we want to shout out the peer learning fund that was able to make grant opportunities available to people who want it to specifically address these information needs. So I'm going to kick it off to Sarah to tell us a little bit about the project and how we implemented the research.
Hi, everybody. It's good to be with you. I'm joining you from Detroit, from a very blustery fall day here. And we were excited to be able to do this work in New Jersey. Our whole newsroom at outlier is based on these information needs assessments when we started outlier, five years ago now, this is what we did in order to figure out what we should cover. And, you know, I want to take a step back before I talk about exactly how we do these info needs assessments, and talk about why we think they're important, especially as local news is more stretched. And there are fewer folks doing local news, it's really important that the people who are doing local news are making sure that that news is valuable to people who live in the community. And this is, it's always been important. There are communities that have always been forgotten by local news providers. And that's predominantly, you know, communities of color and low wealth communities. And so that's what we're hoping to solve with these information needs assessments, right? We want people to be people who want to do news to make sure that they are in the best position to provide valuable and actionable information to the people who need it most. And it's just not enough to use your own experience as a meter for what type of information people need, even if you're from the community, right? Like even if you represent groups, not just based on like, where you're from, but who you are, it's still not enough to use your own experience all the time, because we're just always going to be in a different position as journalists. So what we hope that we can do with these information needs assessments is allow people to say, Okay, let's look at the data, let's ask as many people as possible and then efficient in in an efficient way, what it is they need. And then whoever wants to fill those information needs and and attack those accountability gaps is in a better position to do so. So what we do just very briefly, is because you guys can see the reports, and we explain our methods in the reports. But there's two parts. One part is we look at the data from a city and from a state from the country and see like, how is this place? Exhibiting stress, right? Like, what are the systems that are breaking down and not allowing people to, you know, meet their needs and reach their goals, because that's really a role that local news should be filling, we should be making it easier for people to meet their needs and reach their goals. So we look at this data, we look at things like 911 response times and just see like, okay, in a city, when someone calls for an emergency, depending on where they live, are they being treated equally? Are there some neighborhoods where people are calling for calling emergency services for things that are not an emergency and other places, this really does actually help you figure out what you should cover? We do that. And then we also do an SMS based text message based survey. And we don't ask people, What kind of news do you want? Or like, what kind of news do you like? Or what do you wish the news would tell you? We ask people. What do you need right now that you don't have? What do you think is going to keep you from meeting your goals over the next couple of months? We're really looking for pain points, right? Because that shows that there's either an information gap or an accountability gap, and who better positioned to work on those than local news, especially in partnership with community groups and community organizations and the people who live in the community. So that's what these assessments are, they're not really designed to
fill any coverage gaps right away. It's designed is like some architecture for you to build a responsive new system on top of, right? It's designed to help you determine what are the beats that you should cover? It's designed to help you know, when should you change your beats, right? Like at outlier, we do change our beats based on these. So we just recently added transportation, to the list to the things that we need to cover because after the pandemic, it's just gotten so much worse, apparently, that it started showing up in our assessments when it never did before. So those are that's basically what the assessment is. It's, and we worked with all the three communities that we work with in New Jersey, we're so different, and I'm sure that they'll tell you about that. And I do think though, what is true about all of these assessments is that the projects that have been really successful are the projects where the groups really wanted to be responsive, they were looking for a way to target that energy. And in a way that was going to be really valuable, but it the the will, was already there. And the knowledge of how to meet the needs was there. The thing that was missing was like what needs should we attack first, and that's where these information needs assessments can be really helpful. So I'll turn it over to the experts now.
Thank you, Sara. Um, how we got started is we formed a collaboration in each community where we had an anchor media organization, we also invited lots of community leaders and other stakeholders, and we convened a community convening, to talk about information needs. before deploying the survey in Newark, Britt Harley is going to tell us a little bit more about what resulted how this information impacted her project, and some of the steps that they took later on to address information needs in Newark.
Thanks, Vanessa. And thank you, Sarah, and Christina, appear with some of my favorite people, but really honored to be sharing with all of you who are logged in today. So I'm Britt Harley here in North New Jersey, and I'm talking about the North music story collaborative. We bring together reporters, residents, content creators, media makers, to really think about how we can fill information gaps here in New York together. And so what the assessment, what outlier media, some of the things that we learned, if you see me looking, trying to be laser because I got a few minutes, so I'm just making sure I have all of the notes. But some of the things that we learned were that some of the biggest challenges were around food utilities, really connected to economic challenges. That was some of the things that folks identified residents, North residents, specifically as a concern in a pandemic. And we did this assessment in August of 2020. Support for housing as well, support for virtual school also came up. And some of the most severe information needs were around COVID-19, and food security. And so really what the North pier fund allowed local organizations to also create, whether it was an event information project, or some sort of media to fill that gap. And through my work with the collaborative, we also collaborated with Chalkbeat Chalkbeat, NORC, to really censor youth voices, we also understand if we're talking about virtual education, what are the needs of young people, you voice wasn't president, so we wanted to make sure that that was there as well. We also use this information as our North Star through our community media incubator. And so we train residents and news gathering, media making to really think about how they can create an information project or a piece of some sort of content to feel set information gap or really thinking about diverse issues impacting different neighborhoods that don't get the coverage that they deserve or not being covered by legacy media. So we really use these information needs from the assessment to not just inform the media incubator, but to make sure that we were filling gaps and really targeting other partners, which I'll talk about and the work that we'll continue to do. But it really helped inform our efforts, even in thinking about engagement. So hosting listening sessions. I've known that COVID-19 questions were concern for residents we hosted a community vaccine q&a and from National session just to make sure that residents had access to the information that they needed when it came to vaccination. When it came to COVID-19 testing, we call them folks who are already engaging communities who were health experts, it just really asked them to come, just kind of just in plain words were things available. These are the concerns of residents. So just getting really clear and driving also the programming and engagement to make sure that we knew exactly how to engage but really, that we were trying to meet folks where they were and what they identified that they need it. And his work is just really important, because I'm a North native, I've lived in New York all 30 years of my life. So of course, I have an idea of some of the challenges or the pain points or even the things that I experienced. But I never wanted to use that as like, this is the thing that we needed to do. So to be able to have the information assessment confirmed some of the things that I know, coming from you think community advocacy and organizing background, before I came to media, this really helped ground the work, and also kind of steered the conversation when we were talking to partners like Chalkbeat, to say, here are the needs, this is what we seeing, can we explore collaboration. And so how we continue to do this work, we actually have a resource guide, knowing that some of the challenges were around rental assistance utilities, we wanted to make sure that these things were accessible. So while they're all digital and available on our website, folks can just download the guide. One of the constraints was that we didn't have the assessment in Spanish. And so we're working also to translate our resource guide to make that available. But to continue this work, we want to do another information session to reach folks that speak Spanish that wasn't missing in this information thing. So going deeper and going further, that's where our work will be we're going to continue to do listening sessions. And we're currently in recruitment for our next cohort of residents for our community media incubator, and they receive a stipend to do these things. So we're really excited about some of the things that they're going to be able to create, knowing that these are still the information needs. And following up with folks and learning. You know, some of their challenges have even gotten worse, although things are opening up and things are moving forward. So how do we kind of meet those needs are, are what we're exploring. And I don't want to take up too much time. So I'm going to stop there because I know we have some time for q&a. And I know that Christina from stores at AC is going to jump in next.
Thanks, Brett. And again, I want to shout out again, all of the grantees from the peer learning fund that were able to access resources to create their own projects to also expand capacity for addressing information needs. So not only did we have local media responding and innovative projects, like the New York news and story collaborative, but we also had people that maybe weren't journalists, or people who are regular media producers, who are also able to design different solutions to address these needs. And so maybe this jerk had dropped a link for the grantees so that you can just get an idea of the depth and breadth of those projects. Next, I'd like to bring on Christina noble, who's going to talk about our project in Atlantic City, we sort of did this in reverse, right, where we did come together to shape the questions that were unique to Atlantic City. But we actually had the convening afterwards, to invite collaboration, and to talk about what the implications were of the data. So Christina, take it away and tell us a little bit about what happened in Atlantic City.
Right. Thank you, Vanessa. So Brittany basically took my entire presentation. We have very similar communities, we know new work and AC have some resonances between the two. So we found a lot of similar data between the two as well. But for those who don't know, my name is Christina noble. I'm the project manager for stories of Atlantic City. We're a collaborative journalism project that focuses on and telling stories of resilience and hope surrounding Atlantic City. And we're also hyper focused on information sharing. So, and a bit of transparency. This assessment for us, we didn't have as much as a turnout as numeric head or other larger cities. And the Atlantic City is unique for a lot of different reasons. We are up substantially smaller than most of the cities that were surveyed before us. We have about 40 blocks, precisely. And then we also have a very diverse community. Within the 40 brats, blacks there are about I think only 40% of people speak what they speak languages other than English. There's about 30 language is spoken throughout. So we have a little bit more of an uphill battle trying to reach all the different communities. So that was one piece of feedback I had to offer, I think we're to do something like this again, in the future, we will try to make it available in more languages just so that it's more accessible for everyone. But we still did learn a lot from this assessment and really did confirm some of the beliefs that we already had, we know that people were already struggling with things like rental assistance, transportation, unemployment, food security, of course, that's always been an issue here. So what this survey really helped us to do was really steer our content from then out. So we were also able to hold a few community meetings and events. So we held one to share the stats and the information that we found from this survey with some of the stakeholders in our community, and then followed up that meeting with an action meeting. And then people will really interested in ways that they can get involved, we also met with other people from different media works, to see how we collect could collaborate together to create the content that the people really need it. Another thing that came about from this is our vaccine panel that we hosted. We had some community experts come in as well as some medical experts come in, and really talked to our community about what they needed to do the ins and outs of COVID-19. In the vaccine, they answered all their questions, and share some information that we didn't even know we didn't know that there was a hotline, through the city through town hall that people could call if they had questions. So people really appreciated hearing that information, we were also able to create content around the issues that are that residents are facing. So we were able to obtain a small grant to fund some stories surrounding the digital divide in the city. And how it was faring throughout the pandemic was exacerbated by the pandemic. And when we brought some local content creators on to produce these stories. And then lastly, we also produced a food security resource page on our website. And that consisted of information that people needed a live calendar of food, destroy events. And also to put in our time, stories of resilience. We also share some profiles of people who are doing the work in the community are ready to share some cope with the community. So we plan to continue to do work this way, and to find new ways to engage with our community to get their needs, so that we can then develop the information that they need.
Thanks, Christina, I would also add that something that was unique that also came out of this process was that when we did the vaccine community information panels in both Newark and Atlantic City, it was really important to have black doctors and black public health officials being able to speak to those communities, and a culturally competent matter, because there was public health information out there, but people were not accessing it because it wasn't being delivered by people from their communities. So this was another opportunity for us to make those connections, and to be able to facilitate more collaboration between the hyper local media, public health officials and other people involved in public health. So
that's a great point, you know, and a lot of the work that we do, especially me as the community organizer of the group, is to really build those relationships with the community, we are backed by Stockton University. So that's just another institution that is still some mistrust and distrust and people in the community. Um, so a lot of our work is really based around building those relationships. And that was something else that we really determined with this assessment. People didn't want to answer a survey from some strange number that came on their phone, because there's already that weariness about institutions, and things of that nature. So that was something else that was eye opening for us, really confirmed to believe that we already had, but it was eye opening for us. And so that's something that we have to consider down the line. How do we better engage with people in a trusting way where they know that we are reliable, and we're delivering accurate information?
Yeah, you have to read between the lines and the data, because it's like, hey, everyone's requesting information about vaccines, but every day they're off the news talking about vaccines. What's missing here? When we bring in community members, they can actually put that into context and say, Well, yeah, but we need black people or we need the information in Spanish to be reaching people, or we need it delivered in different formats, right, like people are not reading it, we need to hear it, we need to see video. So all of those things, like part of this process, right is trying to understand why the gaps exist, and then creating ways to like fill in the gaps. So lastly, I just want to say we also did this in in Camden, we're still it's still part of an ongoing process. We were able to do the survey in Spanish In Camden, we had a Spanish language option. So that was something we learned from Camden and Atlantic City. And again, many of the same obstacles appeared where people, you know, they literally wrote, I need money now to pay my rent, I need childcare I need to get through to unemployment. So we're seeing a lot of themes emerge across the state in terms of access to resources, and again, needing that information delivered in many different ways. And one thing that I should also mention that part of this process is actually having somebody answer those questions right away. So I want to shout out, I'm a member of the stories of Atlantic City team, Aaron O'Hanlon Keyes, who has a background in social work, who worked with me to answer those questions in Atlantic City, and provide lots of resources because you don't want to ask people what they need and leave them hanging, right? Like you actually have to respond to them and tell them what's going on. So it's, I think I did that work, um, you know, in Newark, and it was really hard. So when we did it, let ik city I was like, I need to bring in some help. And, and also when it comes to Spanish, and you have to reply to them in Spanish, too. So just make sure that if you are asking people what they need, you're in a position to respond in real time to give them answers to those questions. In our last few minutes, before we take questions, I do want to give it back to Sarah Alvarez to talk more about the potential and the limitations of this research.
Yeah, just like Christina said, you know, we're limited in a lot of ways by what media who's come before us has has done, right, that's the reason that these information needs assessments are necessary in the first place. Because the way that media has traditionally focused on folks who make more money, and focused on predominantly white audiences has really exacerbated these information gaps. So the reason that we have to do it is because, you know, news hasn't done their job in most of the places that we live. That means that we're coming in and we are already, like Christina said, potentially not coming in with a bunch of goodwill. Right? And so this is one of the ways though, that you can start to build up that goodwill, by answering people when they say, This is what I need saying like, Okay, let me answer your question. And then also, let me not discount the issue saying like, Okay, well, everybody needs food here. That must be because people are poor, what's happening? Why it's like, this is not just a problem about economics. This is like someone isn't doing their job, who is it? That is the job of, of reporters, right. And of news, especially working alongside community is to not say like, Let's attack and report on the problems that we want to, but let's attack and report on the problems that people say are most immediate and necessary. Right. So that's the potential. And I think the limitation is that it's a big change, right. And it is, to be quite honest, a complete, different way to see your own role as a reporter, and the role that we see at outlier. And luckily, with the partners that we've worked with, we see our role is in service to community using the skills that we have to meet the needs that we see presented. But it's not, we don't see our special skill is like knowing what stories are important. That's not something that we feel like should be centered. So that's a huge shift. I think it's worth shifting, I think it makes our work more valuable, more fulfilling. And ultimately, if we don't know how much time we have in local media, right, like, every, it's so hard to do this type of work. So if we don't know what kind of runway we have, let's try to be as valuable as we can in the time that we have. So I think that that's the potential but the limitation is that it's a big shift. I don't think it's a heavy lift once you get over the idea of it. And the other thing is that like in this cohort, there's so many great people to help.
Thanks for and I'll just add Lastly, that like solving information needs isn't just a journalist job. It really takes a coalition of people, especially during a pandemic around public health issues. You have to work with local and state government. You have to work with community based organizations and service providers. You have to work with medical community, there are so many people that want to provide information to the public. Sometimes it's not going to result in like, Oh, we're going to do a story on that. And we're going to cover that, it might look more like we're going to actually contact to the government and tell them to do a better job to get this information out to the public, or to put it in Spanish. So even though this is a tool for journalists, really any organization can embark on info needs assessments, to help them better communicate important information to their constituency. I think we have time for like two questions that are in the chat. And I'm just gonna jump in and read them really quick. Since we only have two minutes. The first question is, Will you continue to do more community information needs assessments in these and other New Jersey communities in the future? The answer is, yes, hopefully, um, this is a shout out to funders, if you want to fund this work, there's many people that want to do this, not just free press, and these organizations, it would be great to do it and Trenton and Paterson and Jersey City, there's many communities that could benefit from this. And again, you know, you can do this on your own, you don't have to do text message, you can use surveys online, you can use social media, you can have in person gatherings. So don't wait, you know, use what resources you have to be able to answer people's questions. And then what are some areas of your communities that were unable to reach as effectively or deeply as you hoped? Um, I would say, again, you know, there, there's many different immigrant communities in New Jersey, especially in our urban areas. So we do want to hear from many different ethnic communities. We didn't hear from young people, right? Probably because their cell phone numbers aren't available for us to to purchase. Our seniors also, you know, have technological barriers. So those are folks, people with audio visual disabilities, there's a long list of people we didn't reach that we would like to. And so that also shows up when you see who is responding. And then we also asked for people's zip code. So you can like map out the specific neighborhoods where people were texting from, and you can easily identify who was not connecting with us. Well, thank you so much, Vanessa, Sarah, Britt and Christina, for your presentation. And just sharing more about info need assessments and and your work throughout New Jersey. And with that, we've, you know, we've come to our first break, so how to strike. Yes. So you know, water, get up, yeah. Water, grab a snack, whatever you need to do. And we'll see you back at 215 to talk about unionization in New Jersey. Thanks, everyone.
