July 01, 2009
EveryBlock, which aggregates news and data at the neighborhood block level, makes its source code public so developers in any community can make it their own
EveryBlock scrapes the Web for content of interest and makes it available by neighborhood down to the block level. Simply input an address and it will show you links to news, links to public data such as building permits, rezoning proposals, liquor licenses, restaurant inspections and, of course, crime reports. Developed with the help of a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, It’s online in more than a dozen cities.
EveryBlock developer Adrian Holovaty announced publication of the code.
Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in “micro-local” news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we’re fulfilling that second purpose.
“You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it’ll probably make sense only if you’re a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps spark lots of great work.”
Holovaty said EveryBlock would continue operating as a private company. But he wouldn’t say more about plans for now.
By Michele McLellan, 07/01/09 at 1:30 pm
Posted in Databases | Knight 21st Century News Challenge | Local news
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June 04, 2009
“New Media Makers” documents a growing role of foundations in supporting new community news outlets to fill information gaps and that holds promise for creating a new news ecosystem that is more diverse and more engaging to citizens as the news industry declines.
A new report pushes back at the notion that the decline of traditional news organizations will inevitably result in a vast wasteland of bloggers with agendas dominating the information stream.
Instead, the Knight Community News Network report finds that new structures for producing journalism are emerging to fill information gaps in local communities, often with support from foundations.
“New Media Makers,” says 180 foundations have contributed $128 million to support 115 news projects in 17 states and the District of Columbia since 2005.
“Philanthropic foundations are increasingly embracing the idea that journalism projects can be a funding fit,” says Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, which operates the Knight Community News Network.
“These are not random acts of journalism, such as eyewitnesses uploading photos or videos of a major catastrophe. Nor are they the rants of Internet cowboys opining on the state of neighborhood affairs in their individual blogs,” the report says. “Rather, these new projects are often organized acts of journalism, constructed with an architecture and a mind-set to investigate discrete topics or cover geographic areas. The projects provide deliberate, accurate and fair accounts of day-to-day happenings in communities that nowadays have little or no daily news coverage.”
The report profiles four news organizations: New Haven Independent, PlanPhilly in Philadelphia., Voice of San Diego in California and the New Castle News & Opinion Weekly in Chappaqua, N.Y.
Perhaps of most interest to established news organizations is a database of foundation-assisted news organizations. Editors can use the database to discover sites in their areas that may be helping to fill coverage gaps.
These emerging organizations may not offer the complete, daily, fine-tuned packages that traditional journalists associate with quality news coverage. But their entry into what could be a more diverse and citizen-engaging news ecology is welcome.
(Disclosure: I coach community news startups as a consultant to the Knight Foundation, which is partnering with local community foundations to fund new initiatives through its Community Information Challenge. New Haven Independent and Voice of San Diego are among the projects receiving funding.)
By Michele McLellan, 06/04/09 at 4:25 am
Posted in Local news | Emerging roles and jobs | Leadership | News Industry
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May 07, 2009
In a guest post, Steve Buttry discusses what C3, his Complete Community Connection news model, will mean for the culture of his organization
Steve Buttry, information content conductor for The Gazette Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, recently released his “Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection,” and wrote a couple of good blog posts (here and here) about his ambitious plan for revolutionizing his news organization. I asked Steve to write an additional piece for this blog with a focus on what attitudes would need to change for his organization to be successful. As a longtime student of newsroom culture, I think it’s important for newsroom leaders to develop culture change strategies that are in step with their content change strategies. Here’s what Steve had to say:
By Steve Buttry
A newsroom leader’s most important job today is changing a culture you love.
I love working in newsrooms. I love the energy, the fun, the humor, the skepticism. They are my favorite places to work. And they need to change.
As I outlined in my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, newspaper companies need a thorough change in our relationship with the community and in how we operate.
For most of my career in newsrooms, most of my colleagues were oblivious to most of the business considerations that paid our paychecks. We just wanted to do great journalism: tell stories, cover the news, uphold the honor of the First Amendment.
We can do all that. And we must. But we also have to lead a transformation of our companies and our industry, starting in the newsroom. In the C3 blueprint, I tackle several issues that traditionally haven’t been newsroom concerns:
Revenue. Journalists have enjoyed our insulation from the actual generation of the revenue that supports our work. I am not suggesting we jeopardize our integrity by actually selling ads or dealing with advertisers, but we have to advocate and work to achieve a new revenue approach to support journalism. The failure of our leaders and advertising colleagues to develop a new business model has caused too much harm to journalism. Waiting for someone else to innovate hasn’t worked. We can and must engage in the how of revenue generation, even if we have to keep our distance from the who.
Evergreen information. Our business model for decades has focused on providing timely information for our community. We need to continue that, but also become the place where the community turns for timeless information. We can add value to our work by using our archives to provide context and by developing community content that remains useful and brings people back again and again to a helpful community resource.
Personal news. From my first days in a newsroom, as a high school student covering sports in Shenandoah, Iowa, the jading process began as I scorned the “locals” that the Evening Sentinel published about people who were visiting, ill or retiring, and the formulaic announcements of engagements. But as an adult, I know that the personal events that barely make the newspapers, if at all, are big news in people’s lives. As I look back on recent years in my family, the huge events are a son’s wedding or graduation or a nephew’s illness. The C3 blueprint calls on us to provide personal-content platforms where people can turn these life milestones into the big news that they truly are.
Achieving success in these new pursuits (especially in a time of staff reductions) will require several changes in how newsrooms traditionally operate:
* We need to engage the community and let people tell more stories themselves. Where our reporting amounts mostly to gathering quotes from officials and participants, we should provide platforms where those people can tell those stories directly to the community. This will allow us to spend more of our resources telling the stories that officials don’t want us to tell.
* We need to separate content from products, at least in our minds and probably in our organizations. If you speak of stories in terms of inches, you are thinking of stories through the frame of the print product.
* We need to provide links to helpful information that adds depth and context, even if we didn’t publish it. News sites have been reluctant to send users away from our sites, as if that would somehow keep them captive. Google developed the most successful business in the history of the Internet by sending people away. We need to do the same. As Jeff Jarvis says: “Cover what you do best and link to the rest.”
When I was the editor of the Minot (N.D.) Daily News in the early 1990s, my attention focused heavily on the next edition of the paper or the next Sunday’s paper. I always knew what stories the staff was working on and what stories would be on Page One. When I came to Cedar Rapids last year as editor of The Gazette, I fell into the same pattern as a historic flood in my first week overwhelmed our city. I quickly learned that my staff could handle the biggest disaster in our state’s history. So I stepped back to let others handle the day-to-day challenges of covering the news.
My job was changing the culture and helping us find a prosperous future. I started the staff liveblogging events ranging from Black Friday shopping to federal trials to Hawkeye football. We began thinking about telling the story as it unfolded, rather than simply taking notes and telling it later.
I pushed my staff to use Twitter to connect with the community, gather news, write tighter and promote our content. We started engaging routinely with the community.
As the pace of change accelerated, we changed my title (to information content conductor), in part to reflect new realities and in part to underscore to the staff that all our jobs will fundamentally change.
We have a long way to go. And I think our staff will enjoy working in whatever our newsroom becomes. Much as we loved what was, we know we need to reach what will be if we want to continue having fun in this business.
By Michele McLellan, 05/07/09 at 4:37 am
Posted in Culture | Local news | Leadership
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March 31, 2009
The digital revolution is remaking the idea of civic engagement and re-connecting journalism to community is both a challenge and a promise
Digital media provide exciting tools for connecting people and millions are online in social networks discussing matters both important and trivial. Being a link in the network, rather than owning it, challenges journalists and news organizations to re-establish community connections they severed long before the Internet grabbed center stage. Partnerships of journalists and citizens hold promise for the future of news. But rather than asking if citizens can learn journalism, why not ask if journalists can learn civic engagement?
David Stoeffler describes the decades old credibility gap in a recent speech:
“Where we see fairness, many see bias ... many readers believe that our editorial opinions and our own personal biases carry over into coverage. And if we are honest with ourselves, we know they are right - if nothing else it shows up in the stories we choose to cover and those we choose to ignore. ...
“Where we see the importance of getting the facts right, many see we are failing to get the right facts. Accuracy is not just about spelling the names correctly, it’s about talking to the right people, about providing context and perspective so the picture is more complete and the coverage “rings true” to readers.
“Where we hold ourselves out as the most credible sources of news, many see an aloof institution that often refuses to own up to its mistakes. Our newsrooms rarely reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. Our leadership is primarily still a club for white males. Too few journalists are willing to engage readers - still thinking of them in disdainful terms as uneducated or uninformed. ...
“These are challenges we must confront if we are to survive - if we are to get to the other side. ...”
Well said.
Now, we’re also hearing a lively debate about whether citizens can really perform journalism. How can citizens be objective? What about conflict of interest? How will they meet the professional standards of craft? These and other questions about the ability of citizens to provide news coverage are valuable and necessary as society processes the tectonic shifts beneath the news landscape. Certainly, the broad debate about the value and ethics of independent journalism is important as the traditional financial base for news gathering diminishes.
Among the many things the Internet is remaking is the definition of credibility. Transparency and a willingness to engage are replacing authority and objectivity as top standards. I sometimes hear journalists wondering how citizens might be trained to be journalists. I always want to flip that—What will citizens teach journalists about community and civic engagement?
I hope that learning is already taking place at hundreds of community news sites. The broad debate often obscures what is happening on the ground: Citizens concerned about news in their communities and journalists recently forced out of their newsrooms are finding ways to make it work. Hybrid models that team professional journalists with citizens are emerging all over the United States. While often less complete, authoritative or sophisticated than traditional counterparts, these emergent partnerships spell a piece of a future for journalism, especially for journalism at the community and local level.
What if established news organizations partnered with the citizen sites to cover community news? One editor at a mid-sized newspaper recently told me she is considering asking a local non-profit to help with arts coverage the newspaper no longer has the staff to provide. The Oakland Tribune is partnering with Spot.Us to report on the deteriorating state of Oakland’s streets. A freelance reporter will be paid with micro-contributions from the public and Spot.Us will ask citizens to report potholes that will be mapped online.
These are a couple of small examples. But on the Internet, a lot of small can add up to something big. Reliance on citizen contributors for micro-news might free up journalists for enterprise stories that citizens are less likely to be able to produce. I’d like to hear of other examples of established organizations reaching out for help from citizens. Please comment or e-mail me at michele dot mclellan at yahoo dot com.
If your organization is interested in working with community sites, J-Lab is looking for partners for a Networked Journalism project that will involve partnering a newspaper in five cities with five hyperlocal news projects in each of their communities. The project will provide micro grants for the hyper local sites and will fund a part-time coordinator at the newspaper. Contact Jan Schaffer via news at j-lab dot org.
By Michele McLellan, 03/31/09 at 3:30 am
Posted in Business model | Local news | News Industry
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