Blogging While Brown: Communities of Color Aren’t Waiting for Your Outreach

You probably missed the recent Blogging While Brown Conference (July 25 - 27, Atlanta), which was small but apparently quite successful. Comments and reviews on blogs and elsewhere seem generally positive. Several attendees also posted photos and video. Here’s a list of blogs that were in attendance, and the founder’s blog offered official coverage.

Blogging While Brown shows how citizen media can respond directly to how communities prefer to receive and interact with information. The story here isn’t just interactivity—it’s inclusion.

One session should particularly interest news organizations…

Bridges: Build, Cross or Burn? Can New Media Work With the Old Guard and Old Media? Here’s what several bloggers reported about that workshop. Theo Johnson livestreamed the video. It’s worth watching, in no small part because the three accomplished women on the panel have a number of important insights to share with you.

Video chat rooms at Ustream

The stated mission of the Blogging While Brown conference bears repeating:

“Whether it’s fighting injustice, debating racism in the media, serving as a new technology underground railroad of information or celebrating our best and brightest, bloggers of color are a vital and viable part of the blogosphere who aren’t afraid to voice their opinions on a number of subjects. ...Blogging While Brown is the first international conference for bloggers of color. For the first time this new generation of activists, entrepreneurs and new media content creators will step out from behind their keyboards and meet in person.”

This emphasis on opinion and activism might make some traditional news organizations wary. However, it’s important to recognize that these things are valued in many communities of color. And whenever you’re trying to connect with people, it helps to show that you respect their values.

A quick search of Google News reveals that mainstream news organizations largely overlooked the event. That was a missed opportunity. But fortunately, this group and event appear to be picking up steam—so there’s still time to build bridges there.

Broadband Growth Stalls for Poor: Another Reason to Go Mobile

According to the new Home Broadband 2008 report from the Pew Internet and American Life project, it looks like low-income people will continue to have a harder time getting access to high-speed Internet. 

In his summary of this report, Broadband Census editor Drew Clark noted that the adoption of broadband has leveled off among American households. This year, among poor and African-American households, broadband subscriptions have been at a standstill—or even negative. The current economic downturn hits Americans in unexpected places, it seems: the most-cited factor was the squeeze broadband fees put on already tight family budgets.

So what? Are we contradicting ourselves? Saying high-speed Internet is a lousy way to reach American households? No way! Currently 55% of American households have broadband. Many households that don’t have broadband still access the Internet via dialup. Therefore, it’s still important for news sites to track the type of connections visitors use, and to have your pages “degrade gracefully” into dialup-friendly versions for users on slower connections.

But here’s an even cooler option: go mobile. According to the New York Times and many other sources, cell phone usage is way up among poor Americans, especially immigrant populations.

Worldwide, this is even more true. In many parts of Africa, people can get a satellite phone signal in places where there is little apparent infrastructure. And of course, cell phone rentals is a booming global small business. In several African countries, people are even using cell phone minutes as currency. So if a lot of people who don’t have broadband are using their phones more and more, why not give them a jingle?

Voicemail news is a great thing to add to your news organization’s informational smorgasbord. It’s sort of like a podcast for your phone.
WGN in Chicago has a great handle on this one. Apparently it’s not hard to set up. This strategy lets you deliver your major stories to cell phone users who may not be able to access your web site—yet. Plus, this audio-based strategy can help overcome literacy barriers.

NOTE: This story was written by Meg Spohn and edited by Amy Gahran

New America Media: Gold Mine of Ethnic Media

One of the easiest ways news organizations can start building bridges with communities of difference is to highlight angles especially relevant to those communities within its regular news coverage. Where can you find these angles? Ethnic media—which is probably much more popular across the U.S. than you might suspect.

Ethnic media may be the sleeping giant of 21st century news—and a natural partner for mainstream news organizations seeking to strengthen connections with communities of difference.

You might be surprised to learn that ethnic media regularly reaches a quarter of the American population. A 2005 poll by Bendixen & Associates found that:

“A staggering 29 million adults (45 percent of the 64 million ethnic adults studied), or a full 13 percent of the entire adult population of the United States, prefer ethnic media to mainstream television, radio or newspapers.

“In addition ...ethnic media reaches another 22 million ethnic adults on a regular basis. These adults prefer mainstream media, but they also access ethnic television, radio, newspapers or websites on a regular basis. Therefore, our study indicates that the overwhelming majority (80 percent) of the ethnic populations studied (64 million adults) is reached by ethnic media on a regular basis. The 51 million Americans reached by ethnic media represent about a quarter of the entire U.S. adult population.”

If you want to keep an eye on current news from ethnic media, as well as identify which ethnic media outlets may be most relevant to your local communities (even though those media outlets might not be local themselves) is New America Media. Founded by the nonprofit Pacific News Service in 1996, NAM is a “national collaboration and advocate of 2000 ethnic news organizations.”

The NAM site features current news from member ethnic media outlets—categorized by ethnicity, special beats, and more. It includes not just traditional media, but also blogs, Web sites, and multimedia.

If you add NAM to your regular “radar screen,” you might find intriguing angles that mainstream news outlets might miss, such as:

• In China, there’s a growing controversy over Kung Fu Panda: Protesters are trying to scuttle the film’s Chinese release because it is “taking advantage of Kung Fu and the panda—both are Chinese national treasures and Chinese see it as a distortion of their culture.” Also, because DreamWorks was founded by Steven Spielberg, who withdrew as an adviser to the Beijing Olympics to protest China’s role in Sudan.

• Hispanic baseball fans have become crucial to the survival of Major League Baseball: According to HispanicBusiness.com, “More than half of all fans who watched Los Angeles Dodgers games at Chavez Ravine in 2007 were Hispanic. That represents nearly two million baseball lovers.”

• Could another Darfur be unfolding in Ethiopia? Ethiopian immigrants in Minnesota are monitoring the situation, mainly via cell phone.

When you pick up on a story or angle found in ethnic media, be sure to credit and link to the ethnic news source. That’s the first step toward building partnerships and respect with ethnic media—and their loyal audiences.

Denver’s “Black Anthem” Mashup: Missed Opportunity for Engagement

When jazz singer Rene Marie performed a civil rights anthem to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner just before a major speech by Denver’s mayor, a local TV news station missed a key opportunity to quickly spotlight a controversy of interest to the local African American community. Here’s how Twitter can help your news org keep from missing such opportunities…

Yesterday in Denver, at the opening ceremonies of the mayor’s annual “state of the city” address, local jazz singer Rene Marie gave an unexpected performance. Instead of singing the Star Spangled Banner, she combined the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice” with the tune of the national anthem.

Popularly known as the “black national anthem,” Lift Every Voice was written in 1899 as a poem by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson. It was first performed in 1900, and gained popularity through the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Understandably, Marie’s surprise performance has sparked a heated local controversy—especially since Barack Obama was speaking today in Colorado Springs.

I live in Boulder, Colo., just north of Denver, and I’m an avid Twitter user. So I follow several local news organizations via Twitter—including our local ABC affiliate, KMGH-TV Channel 7 News, which posts ("tweets") under the Twitter ID DenverChannel.

Yesterday morning, about an hour before the speech was slated to start, DenverChannel tweeted, “We will be livestreaming Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s State of the City speech at 11 a.m. on our various online platforms.” A subsequent tweet included a link to the live video. I wanted to watch it, but got caught up with work, which pushed the coverage down on my priority list. Which is why I missed Marie’s performance.

This morning, I learned what happened via an instant message from a friend. I was puzzled why, since 7 News had been running live video coverage of the event (including the anthem), they hadn’t tweeted when something so obvious and unexpected started happening.

So I called 7 News and spoke to Wayne Harrison, who runs the station’s Twitter presence. He told me that no one in the newsroom paid attention to the video feed until Hickenlooper started talking; they didn’t realize the controversy until after the fact.

It’s understandable that in a city with relatively few African Americans (according to 2006 U.S. Census data, Denver is 68 percent white, 35 percent Latino, and only 10 percent black), and which wasn’t a leading locale in the civil rights movement, local journalists might not immediately recognize the words or significance of “Lift Every Voice.” However, when something obviously and deliberately different is happening with a deeply symbolic aspect of a public ceremony, shouldn’t any journalist’s “news radar” kick in?

Also, even if you don’t quite understand what’s happening—if you’re providing live coverage and something noticeably unusual happens, shouldn’t you draw attention to it while it’s happening?

I don’t mean to criticize 7 News. It’s admirable that they have a Twitter presence and tweet daily. Also, every journalist misses a breaking story sometime. That said, yesterday 7 News (and other Denver-area news orgs covering the event) missed an opportunity to immediately engage their audience in figuring out what was happening and what it might mean—and thus to highlight a matter of potential important to Denver’s black community.

A simple quick heads-up tweet from DenverChannel such as “Live: Local jazz singer appears to be changing lyrics of the national anthem at Denver Mayor’s speech,” followed by a link to the video stream, might have quickly brought several viewers to the live online video. Then, one of those viewers might have sent a fast reply via Twitter to DenverChannel along the lines of, “She’s singing a famous civil rights movement song, this will definitely infuriate some folks.”

Getting such clues from social media might have helped 7 News get at least an initial story about the controversy onto its site much faster than 3:26 p.m. Mountain Time—hours after the event.

Social media like Twitter are mainly about what’s happening right this moment. That makes your “posse” of social media “followers” especially useful when something potentially newsworthy seems to be happening, but its meaning isn’t immediately clear to the journalists who happen to be covering the event. We all have our cultural “filters” and sometimes can use extra help understanding how events might relate to various communities.

A service like Twitter, which has a simple text messaging interface, might be especially useful in reaching out to black and Latino communities. Even the most basic cell phones can send and receive text messages. And, as we noted in our recent Total Community Coverage Best Practices series, research shows that U.S. blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to use their cell phones for text messaging and other non-voice uses on a typical day.

So if your news org wants to reach out more effectively to cell-phone-loving communities of difference, it makes more sense than ever to have a strong Twitter presence. Specifically, you can:

• Promote your Twitter updates as a text-messaging service (rather than only as an “online” or “Web” service)—especially in your marketing to communities of difference.
• Provide an info phone number or extension that people can call to hear instructions on how to sign up for Twitter, get your updates, and interact with you via Twitter’s “@ reply” convention. (Useful people with limited Internet access)
• Post to Twitter first whenever something unusual happens during live coverage—especially if you don’t immediately understand it.
• Configure your Twitter account so you receive “@ replies” from anyone (Not just from people you follow, or who follow you). Make sure you regularly glance at incoming @ replies—especially when you just tweeted about breaking news.