But the radio show “This American Life” has created a new web app that it hopes will help. Shortcut, available both on desktop and smartphone, lets you snip your favorite podcast clips into animated and transcribed videos that can then be shared on Facebook or Twitter. The developers were careful to build the app in a way that makes audio visual and shareable and that is also helping the program better understand what’s resonating with its audience.

It’s something Stephanie Foo, producer at “This American Life” and project lead of Shortcut, has wanted for a long time.

“When I started thinking about this — how do I make things easy to share — and I started thinking about GIFS,” Foo said. “If you search for ‘This American Life’ on Giphy though you just get a video of Ira dancing. It’s not representative of our show.”

She recently discussed the inspiration and development process of the app to a packed room at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism (full disclosure: I’m a student at the J-School). Foo was joined by the rest of the Shortcut team: Jason Sigal, developer; Jane Friedhoff, UX designer; and Dalit Shalom, UI designer. The tool was initially conceived at TAL’s Audio Hackathon in 2015, and the group developed the prototype over the last the year with support from the Knight Prototype Fund, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Right now, Shortcut just lets you cut audio from the “This American Life” podcast; the prototype is based around the archives of the show. But the codebase for Shortcut is open-sourced, which means any podcast creator, whether you produce in the closet of your apartment or in a spacious studio, can set it up for their own archives.

Tapping into the archives

For “This American Life,” all episodes have been transcribed and time-coded, which makes the whole process easier. So far, the average clip length is between 18 and 20 seconds, according to Foo. She also noticed that most listeners pull audio from the first 20 minutes of a TAL episode.

“You can see what stories people are most interested in by how much people are sharing part of it,” she said.

Listeners weren’t just clipping audio from recent episodes, but ones from the beginning, close to 20 years ago. Shortcut, Foo said, has the power to make audio content evergreen. It’s helped her share some really great moments from the TAL archives, like the episode in which Foo’s interview subject called her “China lady.”

“After that happened, I really wanted to show it to all my friends,” she said. At the time, in 2014, she posted the entire episode, “Tarred and Feathered,” to Facebook. Friends may (or may not) have navigated to the page and fast-forwarded to the correct timestamp. Now Foo just needs to do a quick search for “china lady” on the Shortcut episode page, and voilà, she can share just the one scene she wants. The Shortcut video clip also links back to the full episode if her friend wants to hear more.

Creating a Visual and Structural Experience

The two designers, Friedhoff and Shalom, carefully considered the user experience both visually and structurally when creating the tool. Shalom drew inspiration from visualizations of sounds she’s come across over the years, including sing-along tapes and karaoke.

“I was so grateful for them,” she said. “They were a confirmation that I knew the words.”

The classic Disney Sing-Along Songs, for instance, featured the best musical moments from Disney movies, television shows and theme parks, like “Heigh-Ho” or “Colors of the Wind;” the lyrics were displayed on the screen, and a bouncing Mickey Mouse ball would indicate where you were in the song. Shalom used a similar concept with the Shortcut tool. Instead of a bouncing ball, she used a highlighter functionality to show the listener where they were in the audio clip. She compared it to an enhanced karaoke screen where color travels through the words.

Friedhoff swapped Disney Sing-Alongs for video games as she explored the UX side of the Shortcut design. A classically-trained game designer, she understood how play and discovery would enhance the user experience of Shortcut. Audio content isn’t inherently shareable, so there were definitely design challenges, according to Friedhoff. They wanted to support multiple kinds of listening and sharing experiences, as well as making sure it would work for a variety of podcasts.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is a freelance reporter and student specializing in audio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. At Columbia, she’s recorded and edited stories on topics like the problems homeless voters face on Election Day and what it’s like being an undocumented youth in America. Before starting school, she was a business reporter for the Greenwich Time, Stamford Advocate and the Connecticut Post. She was previously the associate editor of Mediashift.org (formerly with PBS) where she covered podcasts, crowdfunding, virtual reality and all things digital media and technology.

The post How the Shortcut App Can Help Make Audio Go Viral appeared first on MediaShift.

Sure, they found voting problems here and there, but overall Election Day ran smoother than anticipated. As CUNY’s director of social journalism, Brown was part of the team that helped transform the graduate school into a makeshift newsroom for Electionland on November 8. Alongside John Keefe of WNYC, she explained the collaborative project to a room full of journalists, developers, designers and more earlier this week at the monthly NYC Entrepreneurial Journalism Night meetup hosted by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. At every event, they feature emerging entrepreneurial media ventures and innovators. This month’s event included two election-focused projects, Electionland and the New York Times Election Bot.

According to Keefe, senior editor for data news at WNYC, Electionland was a big undertaking; it brought together 250 news organizations, 450 journalist, 13 journalism schools, 670 students and 120 people in one pop-up New York City newsroom. In total, more than 1,100 people were involved in the collaboration. But the breadth of the project wasn’t problematic. Keefe said it was like the Panama Papers on a smaller scale.

“What’s really fascinating about this is there were no written agreements,” Keefe said. “A bunch of organizations just got behind one mission.”

That mission was to track and report on voting problems across the country and in real-time. They wanted to hear about anything and everything at the polls — long lines, machine breakdowns, voter intimidation and other barriers to voting. Electionland launched in October when early voting started across the country and continued through Election Day. From First Draft to Google News Lab, the Electionland partners developed tools to monitor election-related issues. Google News Lab, for example, analyzed search trends and data, while First Draft and Storyful lent their expertise in content verification.

The Electionland newsroom sifted through social media, platforms like Dataminr and Facebook Signal, and tips from Election Protection, a project that let people report voting issues via phone. They also relied heavily on Slack to communicate internally. Once the team verified the reports, they connected with local reporters around the country to investigate.

“We really think this is a model of how journalists and universities can collaborate when resources are stretched thin,” Brown said. “We think this could be applied to other elections, smaller elections.”

Hailey Persinger, product manager at the Times, explained how the Facebook Messenger bot gave readers automated updates about the election.

Another project that could be used in future elections is the New York Times Politics Chatbot. Hailey Persinger, product manager at the Times, explained that the Facebook Messenger bot gave readers automated updates with the latest election poll numbers, along with other news via Facebook Messenger. Though the experiment has now ended, it would text subscribers every morning with an up-to-date election forecast, news and conversational insights from the Times’ political reporter Nicholas Confessore. Subscribers could ask questions like “Will Hillary Clinton win Connecticut?,” and the bot would send the state’s forecast as a response. The key was to ensure that interactions mimicked real human conversations.

Now for something a little different:
Today through Election Day, daily FB analysis from me–direct to you! Signup: https://t.co/8qvtXC9dBi pic.twitter.com/ZBwqcLvRh4

— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) October 20, 2016

Persinger said they were trying to simplify the way readers consumed news about the presidential election, as well as potentially reach new audiences through the Facebook platform. The New York Times launched a similar experiment back in August. Deputy sports editor Sam Manchester sent updates about the Olympics in Rio via text message. The only difference? It wasn’t automated like the Politics Chatbot. Instead, Manchester texted responses in real-time to subscribers.

“When we came down to election, we knew it wasn’t scalable to do texting back and forth,” Persinger said. “Since the election moved so quickly, we decided to try something different.”

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is a freelance reporter and student specializing in audio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. At Columbia, she’s recorded and edited stories on topics like the problems homeless voters face on Election Day and what it’s like being an undocumented youth in America. Before starting school, she was a business reporter for the Greenwich Time, Stamford Advocate and the Connecticut Post. She was previously the associate editor of Mediashift.org (formerly with PBS) where she covered podcasts, crowdfunding, virtual reality and all things digital media and technology.

The post How Electionland, NYT Bots Engaged Audiences Around Voting appeared first on MediaShift.

Both a neighborhood newsroom and journalism training program, City Bureau wants to regenerate civic media within Chicago’s historically disenfranchised and underreported neighborhoods. Idea Lab recently spoke with City Bureau’s four founders (Darryl Holliday, editorial director; Bettina Chang, editor; Andrea Hart, education director; and Harry Backlund, managing editor) to discuss how the program hopes to accomplish this. Though the founders have worked in different areas of journalism, they have all experienced frustrations with how stories were being produced and distributed. Together, they want to ‘shake up’ the journalism landscape in the Windy City by imagining and testing a new model of reporting.

Q & A

Idea Lab: What pushed you and your fellow founders to launch City Bureau?

Harry Backlund / Darryl Holliday: We were all working in different areas of journalism, and we all had frustrations with the kinds of stories that were (and weren’t) being produced, and how they were being distributed, so we started to trace the connections between those areas of frustration. Those conversations turned into a shared sense of potential, a feeling that the ongoing shake-ups in journalism offer an unprecedented opportunity to create better models for reporting, and that we were in a unique position with a real opportunity to try something new.

The guiding principles and many of the specifics of how City Bureau operates have bounced around separately as ideas and in our past projects. Elements of the South Side Weekly, Real Chi Youth, and Illustrated Press, and our individual work as journalists are all present in City Bureau’s model.

IL: Why now?

HB/DH: In a word, crisis. Journalism as a practice hasn’t fully adapted after the economic shifts that destroyed its business model, and as in any crisis there are a lot of resources piling up while the system that connects them adapts.

At the same time, our city is in a moment of transition, and a whole new world of stories is opening up, one that older models of journalism were never very good at telling. As journalists, we’re predisposed to take advantage of the moment, to be objective, and to figure out the human elements that matter most. The City Bureau approach has been to apply that instinct to our own organization. The institutions that sheltered and fostered thoughtful, credible public narrative have largely broken down, so we’re building our own. In many ways our structure is a logical extension of hustling for a good story.

IL: What makes your newsroom different from traditional media outlets in Chicago?

Bettina Chang: City Bureau’s goal is to develop our strategies and strengths outside traditional media circles, then inject our values and stories into traditional media to eventually effect change on the whole industry. We structure the newsroom in a few ways that differ from others — first, by putting community first. We hold regular events to engage residents in our reporting process, from the point of developing a story idea, to finding sources and refining the narrative, to the final release of the piece. We also encourage collaboration among our reporters — it’s uncommon to find just one byline or contributing reporter on a City Bureau story. Our reporters are at all different levels in terms of skill sets, so they work together and teach each other, whether they’re out filming an interview or formulating a story idea. That taste for collaboration exists on an institutional level, too — we love partnering with other civic groups and publications who are open to trying something new and exciting in the community media space. We hope the dynamism of the City Bureau newsroom will not only prepare journalists for their future careers, but energize other media outlets to take a new approach to newsmaking.

IL: Were there any existing community newsrooms or models that inspired City Bureau?

HB/DH: Oh man, there are a bunch, and we keep collecting more. Probably the most important to mention is that we have a lot of respect for the old school newsroom as a workplace and a culture, and we think of City Bureau as a renewal of those principles in a new era. Darryl and Bettina have both previously worked at several mainstream publications, including legacy and start-up outlets. Andrea has worked with youth-oriented nonprofits working in media education, and her work has put pedagogy and process front and center. Harry worked in local publishing with the South Side Weekly, which converted a former student paper into a community newspaper, and that experience showed us the viability of the educational model. The basic framework of combining educational opportunity with a careful editing process, and using that potential to both cover stories that wouldn’t otherwise be written took a lot of influence from those projects.

One idea that was important early on was a feeling that a city needs many different kinds of media. Neighborhood papers and ethnic press bring an invaluable local perspective. Public interest watchdog reporting keeps us all accountable. Longform narrative writing has the power to totally change how a reader understands an issue and commercial news, for all its faults, needs to be acknowledged for its deep impact on public conversations.

But elsewhere, the economy around journalism can appear grim at times. Lack of diversity in newsrooms is nothing short of systemic and communities of color feel left out of the conversation. Students can pay $60,000 in pure tuition for a graduate degree in journalism, and then work several unpaid internships, only to take a position with mediocre pay at an under-resourced newsroom where they don’t have time to tell stories they believe in. City Bureau is an extended response to the question of what it would look like if journalism education were truly public. In practice that’s a lot to ask, but as an ideal it keeps us honest.

IL: From your perspective, how does City Bureau compensate for other outlets’ shortcomings? How is your approach different?

BC: At the Tribune and Sun Times, revenues are down and both newspapers faced major editorial cutbacks in recent years. We work in communities where overworked/underpaid/under-resourced reporters and publications in traditional media lack a foothold.. So City Bureau was born in part to reinvigorate coverage in these areas. With support from our funders, plus the resources/ relationships we have developed in these areas among other civic groups, we are able to train and provide resources to journalists who live and work on the South and West sides, many of whom are minorities and/or from low income backgrounds. These journalists bring invaluable expertise and perspective that ensure fair, balanced and in-depth coverage of the important issues facing marginalized communities in Chicago — plus they have a fuller understanding of the vibrancy and diversity of experience in these neighborhoods than a reporter who might visit once or twice a month.

Most importantly, not only do we hope to fill that gap in the short term, in the long term, we hope to make a change in the media landscape so that such coverage becomes an indispensable part of mainstream media. We hope that some of our trainees will eventually join traditional newsrooms and create change from within.

Check out photos from our launch & #ReportingBack Town Hall presentation w/ @ILhumanities https://t.co/WL36v7yULm pic.twitter.com/sCJvJItzCU

— City Bureau (@city_bureau) October 30, 2015

IL: The program focuses on students from the South and West sides of Chicago. Do you anticipate City Bureau greatly amplifying the voices of those from historically disenfranchised parts of the city? Up until this point, how successfully have traditional outlets represented these communities?

Andrea Hart: We want to amplify and integrate these voices into the city’s narrative in the hopes of deconstructing problematic narratives imposed on the city’s South and West sides. It should come as no surprise that there are young folks in these neighborhoods who are incredibly capable of telling stories about police misconduct that are layered and living. They have a right to access media production just as they have the right to access beneficial educational resources. City Bureau is creating a space where that access is combined. For various reasons traditional outlets fail to accurately represent these communities — in part because they are caught in longstanding stereotypical narratives and also because of limited capacity. Unless they are actively working against it, newsrooms can be complicit in historically discriminatory policies. Just as we are seeing a need for cultural sensitivity training amongst Chicago police, this is something that could also be useful in media outlets.

IL: At its core, you say City Bureau is a journalism lab that provides hands on training for student journalists. What will you be teaching these young journalists? Is there anything you wish you were taught before pursuing a career as a journalist?

AH: Our training approach is rooted in the foundations of journalism as well as the context of our location. The goal is to not only help students develop skills but to also get an understanding of hyperlocal civics. And in that regard it’s not just the students learning–everyone at every level is participating in an exchange of knowledge. Whether it’s better understanding these communities or better understanding how to use Final Cut X — it all matters. Having students understand they are working within a network of resources both human and not is also a way to expand their social capital. Two of us have gone through Medill (Bettina and Andrea) at a time when there was fear and uncertainty around tools like Twitter, blogs, etc. Instead of being apprehensive about new technology, we think a critical openness and willingness to experiment are essential to training. Also, if you are going to try to get into more “social justice” (however you define that) journalism it’s important to understand what assumptions you are carrying or who you are attempting to speak for that might already be able to speak for herself.

IL: How does the program actually work? What does your newsroom look like?

DH: The program works by bringing journalists of different ages and skill levels together to work in teams that help guide and teach each other. City Bureau is set up in a 3-track structure that includes high school-aged mediamakers, college-aged reporters and early career/independent reporters — all of which have opportunities to learn from each other throughout each cycle. By putting these reporters in teams led by our early career journalists, experience and knowledge is shared freely across the pipeline. Our founding group leads the newsroom and curriculum, where our reporters are assigned research reports and story assignments, learn journalism 101 skills (from man-on-the-street interviews to the art of FOIA) and attend educational workshops led by other working journalists. For our pilot cycle, we’re reporting around the Citizens Police Data Project, a new interactive database of more than 56,000 Chicago police misconduct complaints. Future cycles will tackle similar issues that are of utmost importance to the city as a whole, and the South and West sides of Chicago in particular.

A second and equally important aspect of the program centers around our public town halls, hosted in partnership with Illinois Humanities. At these “reporting back” events, City Bureau journalists interact with communities that are often marginalized in media coverage in order to seek input and dialogue around their reporting through presentations and small group discussions.

The final portion of our work uses our in-house editing process and connections in the media industry to direct City Bureau’s publication-ready stories to larger outlets in Chicago and around the country — stories we’ve published in the Chicago Reader, The Chicago Reporter, DNAinfo Chicago and The Guardian are some of our earliest examples. This serves several purposes: bylines for our reporters to show how their work can have immediate and powerful effects on public discourse; support for young journalists that may one day soon intern and/or work at such publications as well as the creation and distribution of high-quality content directly informed by marginalized communities in Chicago. 

How did we build our team of journalists? Why are we covering police misconduct? Read more: https://t.co/CAIX8cNwBe pic.twitter.com/oKT97ubX7b — City Bureau (@city_bureau) November 18, 2015

IL: Right now, how are you funding City Bureau? How does it hope to sustain itself in the long term?

HB: The first few months have been a pilot project supported, in part, through funding from Illinois Humanities as part of their Reporting Back program. We also just received a planning grant of $25,000 from the McCormick Foundation, which we expect to put towards new start-up costs and some improvements to the newsroom, and we’re starting the conversation about funding with other foundations as well.

Over the long term we believe City Bureau can be sustainable through a mix of syndication and other business revenue, and nonprofit revenue from private foundations and the general public.

The revenue model reflects our mission. We know from experience that good journalism needs space and resources, and that the market is nowhere near as supportive of that as it used to be, but we also want to avoid a space where journalism becomes charity. “In the market but not of it” is phrase that has bounced around in our meetings before. We want to keep skin in the game, but we also want to effect a change in the rules.

IL: City Bureau also wants to test and prove new business models for local journalism. What do you think are the biggest challenges local journalists face right now? How will City Bureau address these challenges?

BC: As a group, we’re incredibly cognizant of the challenges facing local journalists. Each one of us has worked in a different capacity for different local outlets — from indie media, to nonprofit media to traditional newspapers. One challenge for local outlets is the ability to develop talent in racially and socioeconomically diverse populations. It’s very hard to be a journalist now without a college degree or a few unpaid internships under your belt. Another major challenge is that local residents rarely see fit to pay for good local journalism. Decades of advertiser-supported journalism have conditioned people into thinking that journalism is free or cheap. Now that the quality of reporting has fallen, especially in disenfranchised neighborhoods, people are starting to take note and demand better.

Our program seeks to both lower the cost for traditional outlets to produce good reporting in these neighborhoods (by training journalists capable of that work, and preparing them for full-time jobs), and to increase the demand for it, through the relationships and connections being drawn at our town hall meetings and between our reporters and their communities. There has been evidence at the national level that increasing the diversity of viewpoints in journalism can increase the value (in page views and social shares) of content. Anecdotally thus far, we’ve seen that readers are responding well at a local level to our stories and that we are providing value to the outlets where we syndicate.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of Mediashift and Idea Lab.

The post Q&A: How Will City Bureau Regenerate Civic Media in Chicago? appeared first on MediaShift.

National Public Radio (NPR) has been experimenting with storytelling techniques, tools and technology for years. Earlier this week, the public radio powerhouse celebrated the 10th anniversary of NPR podcasts, which debuted as a directory of 170+ programs created by NPR and other public radio stations.

Before the success of TED Radio Hour, Invisibilia and other shows — and unsure of its viability as a media platform — NPR viewed podcasts as a way to rethink its programming as audiences’ lives became more mobile and on-demand. Back then, it took a year and a half to reach 80 million downloads between NPR and other public radio stations that contributed to the directory. How times have changed! Last month, NPR had a comparable number of downloads — 76 million to be exact — for just the programs it produces or distributes.

Since those early days, the podcast landscape has expanded and evolved beyond numbers alone. In fact, podcasts are no longer a niche medium; they’ve become part of the mainstream media. Consider the parody of Serial on Saturday Night Live, President Barack Obama’s appearance on WTF with Marc Maron, or the rise of podcast networks and companies, like Gimlet Media.

With its new Storytelling Lab, NPR has created a designated space to think about and experiment with the act of storytelling not just in radio or podcasts, but across all platforms. The lab provides an opportunity for NPR employees to pitch, pursue and develop passion projects away from the pressures of their day-to-day responsibilities.

An Experiment in Public Radio

Technically, the NPR Storytelling Lab is a launchpad for innovation within the organization. Inspired by venture capital models, like those on the television show “Shark Tank,” the Lab’s origins begin with Matt Thompson, former director of vertical initiatives at NPR, who wrote a paper calling for a year of experimentation in the art of storytelling. Chris Turpin, NPR’s vice president of news programming and operations, took this idea and tweaked it to address what the organization sees as its current challenge: the development of its storytelling model.

“What we do is we produce a huge amount of programming,” Turpin said. “The problem with that is it becomes formulaic. The Storytelling Lab will help us break through that.”

NPR has become a top-notch journalism organization over the years, Turpin says, but has yet to focus on or think about its storytelling model. He jokes that “our storytelling muscles could use a little shaping up,” which makes Michael May NPR’s personal trainer.

Michael May will lead NPR’s Storytelling Lab. Image from Twitter.

May, the Lab’s new senior producer, comes to NPR from The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and will be responsible for coordinating the Storytelling Lab. A former public radio reporter himself, May will work closely with staff members who are selected for the lab, developing a close relationship with the editorial coaching and development team and applying lessons from the lab to the daily grind in NPR’s newsroom.

“What I like about the NPR model is that it’s so focused on giving people in the newsroom a chance to do new things,” he said.

In the Lab

According to Turpin, anybody at NPR (with the focus being on those in the newsroom) can pitch an idea to the lab. A volunteer panel comprised of individuals across the newsroom will then review all of the pitches and select one person to work in the lab for two weeks. This person will forgo his or her daily duties and responsibilities for the duration of the lab session. To prevent work from piling up, NPR has put aside funds for backfill in the newsroom. Turpin says they don’t want one employee’s absence to cause more work for others. Right now, there will be one project in the lab at a time. Inevitably, there will be multiple projects happening simultaneously in the future.

As senior producer and resident polymath, May will support the employee and his or her project from idea to proof of concept. This could involve reporting, engineering, and mixing an audio story, or developing and building an app or website. Following this two-week sprint, the individual will present the project to the panel and at a brown bag to the entire newsroom. After that? It’s TBD. The Storytelling Lab is an experiment in itself, and the whole process is iterative. Some projects may go back to the lab, to podcasts, to shows. Others may fail, and that’s okay.

“For us to succeed in public radio and public media, we’ve got to be better than we’ve ever been,” Turpin said. “We can’t take audience for granted on any platform. We’ve got to tell more amazing stories in more amazing ways. This is about us making a really conscious effort to raise our game in everything we do, telling better stories and telling them in more creative ways.”

The lab creates a space for ideas to flourish from the ground up, and Turpin thinks of it as an “acknowledgment that there are new things that can be tried.” Ideally, this call for experimentation will infuse the wider newsroom, and encourage more creativity, new thought processes, and a ‘culture of risk’ where employees aren’t afraid of failure.

The First Batch

Podcasts are already part of the public media landscape, and May thinks the lab will help NPR put its stamp on the ever-growing medium. As someone who loves both podcasts and traditional reporting, May wants podcasts to move beyond just interviewing someone where ‘a couple of people [are] talking about big ideas with beautiful sound,’ as he told Columbia Journalism Review. That’s where NPR’s newsroom can help. There’s an incredible opportunity for NPR’s reporting talent to make a huge mark on the podcasting world, he says.

“There’s been this debate of storytelling versus journalism, and I have no use for that,” May said. “I don’t think that makes any sense at all; the best storytelling is the best journalism and vice versa. I want really incredible stories I know are true.”

Turpin added: “A great story told in tedious ways might as well not happen.”

Thanks to the Storytelling Lab, some of the those stories are already out for the world to see. NPR’s food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles brainstormed a food podcast experiment devoted to stories on how food affects people, such as the emotions it awakens in them or what it causes them to do. NPR Music’s Mito Habe-Evans and Anastasia Tsioulcas launched a documentary project amidst the Black Lives Matter movement. And, in collaboration with KUOW’s Ashley Ahearn, NPR correspondent Jeff Brady created an environmental podcast, This Land, whose pilot focused on the connection between climate change and wildfires.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of Mediashift and Idea Lab.

The post NPR to Incubate Innovation with Storytelling Lab appeared first on MediaShift.

Why Workers’ Comp?

As part of its ongoing investigation, Insult to Injury, ProPublica found that 33 states have recently changed their workers’ comp laws to either reduce benefits, create hurdles to receiving medical care, or make it harder to qualify for workers’ comp. It’s an issue that has the potential to affect hundreds of thousands of workers; more than 3.7 million work-related injuries and illnesses were reported in 2013. And, with no federal oversight of workers’ comp laws, policies vary greatly from state to state, making it difficult for journalists to cover effectively.

“There’s a huge discrepancy that happens from state to state,” said Keren Goldshlager, project manager at Beacon. “We know there are talented local reporters in every  state, and we can use Beacon’s platform to fill in some of those [reporting] gaps and get more stories told.”

ProPublica has been investigating workers’ comp laws across the country.

How It Works

The Beacon-ProPublica partnership invites journalists to use their existing resources to help document the impact of workers’ comp reductions across the country. Independent journalists or local news organizations can fill in the reporting gaps by acting as the eyes and ears on a city or state level.  Here’s how you can get started:

• Identify a story idea: ProPublica has already asked people to tell them their experiences navigating workers’ comp claims, with more than 300 people sharing stories so far. These stories, combined with its state-by-state research and detailed benefits data, will help regional journalist dig into the story. ProPublica has also put together a Reporting Recipe which includes a database of new workers’ comp provisions and other useful information.
• Find a source: Get matched with workers who have been affected in your region.
• Submit your pitch: Beacon’s platform gives journalists the tools they need to fund their work by connecting directly with readers. Hundreds of journalists have already used Beacon to fund their work on issues ranging from net neutrality to climate change. Like these stories, workers’ comp law has a big potential impact, and backers will respond accordingly. In your pitch, explain the idea you’re pursing and then launch your crowdfunding campaign to start raising funds. Not sure how to get started? Check out this tutorial. If you add the tag “Workers’ Comp” to your pitch, Beacon will add $250 in matching funds for any ProPublica-based pitches.
• Send your story: Once successfully funded and reported, send your story to Beacon and ProPublica.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab.

The post Beacon, ProPublica Partner on Workers’ Comp Stories appeared first on MediaShift.

Why Bounties?

Beacon Reader is a platform where readers fund journalists that do important work. From climate change to net neutrality, journalists have been able to cover the topics their audiences want to read.

Early on, the Beacon team recognized that readers want to engage with a specific  writer, not necessarily a whole publication, says Keren Goldshlager, project manager at Beacon Reader. Beacon readers can fund individual writers through recurring monthly payments ($5, $10, etc) or a one-time fee. The monthly payment then gives the reader access to the entire site, not just the writer(s) they support. Through this financial support, journalists then find and publish new and exclusive stories that audiences want to read.

Beacon Reader funds journalism on the Internet.

“Readers get excited about issues they care about,” Goldshlager said. “It drives them to fund journalism projects.”

At its core, Beacon Reader is about the reader-writer relationship. Its new service Bounties expands upon this relationship by allowing readers to crowdfund and propose topics for journalists to cover. With Beacon Reader, journalists choose which topics they think readers want covered. With Bounties, readers–not journalists–decide what’s news.

Goldshlager said they knew readers thought certain issues were not being covered enough or at all.  They asked themselves: How can we empower them to help make this journalism possible? Their solution was Bounties.

How Does It Work

Readers create Bounties about topics they’d like a journalist to cover and pledge money directly to the topic. When a bounty hits its funding goal, Beacon Reader helps find a journalist to fulfill the bounty. According to Through the Cracks, deadlines are negotiated between the Beacon Reader editors and assigned reporter, and then communicated to funders. Funds cover everything from the journalists’ time to necessary resources, such as travel and equipment. Like their traditional platform, stories created through Bounties are published on the Beacon Reader site as well as any other outlet the author chooses, such as the Huffington Post orGlobal Post.

So far, Beacon Reader has used Bounties to crowdfund stories on topics ranging from the lack of diversity in the tech industry and housing costs in San Francisco to teenage incarceration and the story behind Planned Parenthood.

Three current Bounties on Beacon Reader.

The Future

For the initial Bounties, Beacon Reader sourced topics from their team and active community members. As they integrate Bounties with their existing platform, Beacon Reader views the first batch of Bounties as a way to learn and experiment with crowdfunding campaigns in practice.

For example, Beacon Reader realized the critical role the creator plays in crowdfunding campaigns. When someone launches a campaign, he or she not only reaches the Beacon Reader audience, but also their own personal network: friends, family members, colleagues, social media followers, and so on. It’s a commitment, according to Goldshlager.

“As with any crowdfunding campaign, we can’t just put into the ether; it’s an active effort,” she said. “You’ll be most successful if you’re excited about topic and share it.”

Readers become more engaged when they play a direct role in creating journalism. Through Bounties, readers are engaging with journalism in the most tangible way possible. These crowdfunding campaigns are creating communities of people who all care enough about a topic to pool together their own money to make it a reality.

Beacon Reader has always focused on producing the most interesting projects possible. With Bounties, it wants to show readers the value that comes from funding journalism directly.

If you want to learn more about crowdfunding for journalism projects, check out our DigitalEd training, Crowdfunding 101, on August 18, 2015, at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab.

The post Beacon Reader Launches Reader-Driven Crowdfunding Service appeared first on MediaShift.

As part of its Knight News Challenge, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation recently awarded $3.2 million to 22 projects that will better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during, and after elections. Launched in February, the Knight News Challenge on Elections is a collaboration between the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, Hewlett Foundation, and Rita Allen Foundation.

The Knight Foundation’s John Bracken, vice president of the Media Innovation Program, and Chris Barr, director of media innovation, announced the winners Thursday at the one-day conference, “Break Through,” hosted by the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication.

The latest question asked by the Knight News Challenge. Image from the Knight Foundation.

As supervisor of the Knight News Challenge, Bracken introduced the ten projects receiving ‘scaled funding,’ or grants between $200,000 and $525,000 each. Major news organizations, small civic startups, the public sector, and government entities all received funding for ideas ranging from new ways to bring more transparency to campaign financing to enlisting barbershops to spread information on candidates and issues.

“Focusing on the critical area of elections, the winners explore new ways to use data and technology to enable citizens to determine their own best interests,” Bracken said in a press release.

Barr, who runs the Prototype Fund, then announced the twelve winners of the $35,000 Prototype grants, which rapidly develop early-stage media and information ideas. With these grants, the Knight Foundation provides funding to new and emerging ideas for a short period of time, six months, during which grantees quickly test their key assumptions to see if they are on the right path.

“The winning projects offer the opportunity to advance journalism innovation, while helping to ensure voters have the information they need to make decisions at the polls and become more involved and engaged in the issues that affect their communities,” Jennifer Preston, Knight’s vice president for journalism, said in a press release.

Like the conference, the Knight News Challenge on Elections explores ways to move citizens from bystanders to active participants in the democratic process. From technologists and journalists to civic leaders and public officials, the grantees seek to get all people involved in shaping their communities and participating in the political process.

Knight News Challenges winners explained their projects to conference attendees in a series of lightning talks following the announcement. Roger Macdonald and Tracey Jaquith, of Internet Archive, received $200,000 for their 2016 Political Ad Tracker, which hopes to bring accountability to the voting process. Piloted in Philadelphia last year, the Ad Tracker will be an invitation to collaborate. As Macdonald explained, the project will create a public library of television news and political ads from key 2016 primary election states. They will then enhance this library through non-partisan fact-checking and additional analysis from PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, and others.

Roger Macdonald and Tracey Jaquith, of Internet Archive, received $200,000 for their 2016 Political Ad Tracker. Photo captured from livestream.

During election cycles, citizens witness an enormous amount of political messaging. In fact, as Macdonald predicts, the amount in 2016 will be twice as much as it was four years ago. The problem isn’t the messaging itself; it’s the lack of context surrounding this messaging, according to Macdonald.

“It’s time to give people real information they need to make sound choices,” he said.

The Knight Foundation has already announced the next round of the News Challenge, which will focus on data. Below is the full list of this round’s Knight News Challenge winners, including the 12 projects receiving funding through the Prototype Fund.

News Challenge Winners

News and Information

2016 Political Ad Tracker by Internet Archive | $200,000 | Project leads: Roger Macdonald, and Tracey Jaquith; San Francisco: Bringing accountability to the voting process by creating a public library of TV news and political advertising from key 2016 primary election states, paired with nonpartisan fact-checking and additional analysis from PolitiFact, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org, The Center for Public Integrity and others.

California Civic Data Coalition by California Civic Data Coalition, a partnership between The Los Angeles Times, The Center for Investigative Reporting, Investigative Reporters and Editors and Stanford University | $250,000 | Project leads: Ben Welsh, Cheryl Phillips, Aaron Williams, Jennifer LaFleur; Los Angeles: Making it easier to track money in California politics with an open-source tool that will help journalists, academics and others mine campaign finance data.

Campaign Hound by Reese News Lab, University of North Carolina | $150,000 | Project leads: John Clark and Sara Peach; Chapel Hill, N.C.: Helping to hold politicians more accountable through a searchable archive of campaign speech transcripts that provides customized alerts to keep voters informed about candidates and allows journalists and others to monitor political speeches remotely.

Inside the 990 Treasure Trove by The Center for Responsive Politics in partnership with GuideStar | $525,000 | Project lead: Robert Maguire; Washington, D.C.: Helping voters and journalists better understand who is funding campaigns by partnering with GuideStar to unearth more comprehensive data on the sources of so-called “dark money.”

Civic Participation and Engagement

Civic Engagement Toolkit for Local Election Officials by Center for Technology and Civic Life | $400,000 | Project leads: Whitney May, Tiana Epps-Johnson, Whitney Quesenbery; Chicago: Helping local governments more easily engage with communities by developing a civic engagement toolkit for election offices, including website templates, icons and illustrations that provide visual guides for information seekers, wait-time calculators and other tools.

Informed Voting From Start to Finish by E.thePeople | $200,000 | Project leads: Seth Flaxman, Kathryn Peters, Whitney Quesenbery and Alex Quinn; New York: Helping build a more informed electorate and making the voting process easier by combining the voter services of TurboVote, which helps people register to vote, request and absentee ballot and receive election reminders, with local guides and candidate information from E.thePeople.

Revive My Vote by Marshall-Wythe Law Foundation | $230,000 | Project leads: Mark Listes and Rebecca Green; Richmond, Va.: Helping Virginians with prior felony convictions restore their voting rights by organizing local law students to help remotely process rights restoration applications and lessening wait times for those who have applied; an outreach platform will also be developed to motivate and inform prospective applicants.

Sharp Insight by Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program | $250,000 | Project lead: Duerward Beale; Philadelphia: Engaging black men in elections by recruiting barbers in predominantly African-American communities to disseminate nonpartisan information and resources on voting.

The Next Generation Beyond Exit Polls by the Associated Press | $250,000 | Project leads: Sally Buzbee, David Pace and Emily Swanson; Washington, D.C.: Providing less-expensive, more accurate alternatives to exit polling by working with survey firms to develop new ways to gauge voter preferences in real time.

Vote-by-Smartphone by Long Distance Voter | $325,000 | Project lead: Debra Cleaver; San Francisco: Making it easier to vote by mail by using mobile technology to allow voters to request absentee ballots with their smartphone.

Prototype Fund Winners

News and Information

Judge Your Judges by WNYC | Project leads: Kat Aaron (@kataaron) and John Keefe (@WNYC, @jkeefe); New York: Enabling people to make more knowledgeable decisions about judicial elections through a tool that will provide key information, insights and context about candidates, their views and the court system.

Lenses by NYC Media Lab | Project leads: Amy Chen, Justin Hendrix, Kareem Amin, R. Luke DuBois, and Mark Hansen (@nycmedialab); New York: Enabling journalists and other storytellers to transform and visualize data to build interactive election stories through an open-source, mobile-friendly tool.

OpenJudiciary.org by Free Law Project | Project leads: Michael Lissner (@mlissner) and Brian Carver (@brianwc); Berkeley, Calif.: Helping to make judicial elections more transparent by creating online profiles of judges that show campaign contributions, judicial opinions and biographies.

Prompt Data Query by Center for Responsive Politics | Project lead: Sarah Bryner (@aksarahb); Washington, D.C.: Bringing more transparency and accountability to elections, through an automated, interactive tool that will give users access to real-time campaign finance data.

Silent Targeting, Loud Democracy by University of Wisconsin (Madison, Wis.) Project lead: Young Mie Kim (@DiMAP_UW). Promoting transparency in elections by prototyping an investigative service that tracks political ads that use online microtargeting to reveal how political action committees, parties and candidates target individual voters based on their personal information.

Tabs on Tallahassee by the Orlando Sentinel | Project leads: Charles Minshew (@CharlesMinshew) and Andrew Gibson (@AndrewGibson27); Orlando, Fla.: Fostering government transparency by creating a searchable database of the voting records of Florida lawmakers for newsrooms across the state.

Up for Debate Ohio! by the Jefferson Center | Project lead: Kyle Bozentko (@JeffersonCtr); Akron, Ohio: Increasing political knowledge in Ohio through community deliberation, online engagement and the media to provide citizens the opportunity to discuss issues and campaigns thoughtfully and civilly.

Voter’s Edge by MapLight | Project lead: Michael Canning (@votersedge); Berkeley, Calif.: Providing in-depth voter information that is easily accessible, neutral and factual on one platform; the mobile-optimized guide provides voter information on federal, state and local elections, including endorsements, candidate biographies, ballot measure summaries, top funder lists, videos, news, and more.

Civic Participation and Engagement

Accessible Voting for Everyone by University of Florida | Project lead: Juan Gilbert (@DrJuanGilbert, @FloridaEngineer); Gainesville, Fla.: Making voting easy and accessible to all through an open source electronic voting system that allows citizens, including those with disabilities, to cast ballots by actions such as tapping a touchscreen or speaking into a microphone.

Erase the Line by D.C. Board of Elections | Project lead: Margarita Mikhaylova (@dcboee); Washington, D.C: Helping election officials improve the voting process by creating a digital platform that will document wait-time information at polling places across the nation.

Rhode Island Civic Fellowship by Rhode Island Secretary of State | Project lead: Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea (@RISecState); Providence, R.I.: Encouraging more millennials to vote through a statewide civic fellowship program designed to inspire, recruit and train them to get involved in shaping voting and elections in their communities.

The Iowa Electorate by The Des Moines Register | Project lead: Amalie Nash (@AmalieNash); Des Moines, Iowa: Engaging young voters in the Iowa caucuses by sponsoring a series of public events and initiatives that use social media to draw millennial attention to issues and candidates.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab.

The post Knight Announces News Challenge Winners Focused on Elections appeared first on MediaShift.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab.

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“With this gracious, continued support from Sloan and Knight, we can continue to focus on our largest strategic effort, which is to expand the DPLA network and provide an on-ramp for all states to participate,” said Emily Gore, DPLA’s director of content. “By building out DPLA’s coverage of state and regional service hubs, new communities and organizations from across the country will have access to essential 21st century services and programs, further enriching the scale and availability of our shared national cultural heritage online.”

A few of the DPLA’s curated exhibitions.

Whether it’s written word or the data of science, the DPLA compiles the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them publicly accessible to the world. Right now, its collection includes over 10 millions items from 1,600 institutions nationwide. Launched in 2013, the DPLA initially partnered with 16 major collaborators across nine states. Since then, that number has grown to more than 20 states, and plans to reach all 50 states within the next two years.

Accelerating Growth

These new grants will accelerate the growth of the DPLA’s network of service hubs, or state and regional digital collaborators that host, aggregate, or collect digital objects from places like libraries, museums, or archives in their communities. Through its aggregation of these digital collections, the DPLA has seen the emergence of innovative new projects and tools on a global scale, from curated exhibitions on the golden age of radio to an app that shows how many items an institution has contributed to the DPLA.

This visualization lets you hover over an institution’s wedge to see how many items it has contributed to DPLA.

“The Sloan and Knight foundations have been such generous contributors to DPLA’s success, from our planning phase to the rapid build-out of our national network,” said Dan Cohen, executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, in a press release. “With these twin grants, we will be able to bring online 16 new states, and approach completion of that network.”

The Knight Foundation also just announced its international call for ideas on innovating libraries through its second Knight News Challenge on Libraries.

“An informed and engaged public is a prerequisite of American democracy. Libraries – be they physical or digital – play a fundamental role in encouraging people to know more about and become involved in the places where they live. DPLA brings to life the unique items locked away in our nation’s libraries and archives while providing an invaluable opportunity to bring this information into people’s lives and homes – better connecting them to each other and their communities,” said Jorge Martinez, vice president and chief technology officer at Knight Foundation, in a press release.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab.

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“We are in awe of the talent and diversity of ideas represented in the hundreds of applications we received from around the world for this Fund,” said Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the IWMF, in a press release. “The strength of the proposals truly reflects the bold aspirations of women journalists.”

With this new fund, the IWMF wanted to create an opportunity for women journalists “rooted in hope, strengthened by ambition, and represented by extraordinary projects that challenge traditional media narratives,” says Muñoz. The voice of women journalists matter, and this fund hopes to show that through positive, forward-looking opportunities.

The IWMF believes this fund will positively impact the state of the media, based on the encouraging response from applicants and the strength of their proposals. As Muñoz says, there are “thousands of women around the world eager to report and ready to clear any obstacle to that goal.” From field-based expertise to entrepreneurial innovation, the fund will support grantees as they expose underreported, yet critical, global issues and strengthen countless careers in the process.

Iris Kuo and Katie Orlinsky are two of the grantees. Photos from Twitter.

For the last 25 years, the IWMF has strengthened the role of women journalists by celebrating the courage of those who have overcome threats and oppression to report and bear witness to global issues. Through its grants and programs, the foundation empowers women journalists to become leaders in the industry with the training, opportunities, and support they need to succeed.

With help from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, this new fund will award about $2.3 million over the next 10 years to grantees whose work demonstrates a commitment to transparency, democracy, and diversity across media platforms. Three additional rounds of funding will be completed this year, with a total of $230,000 awarded to applicants. Applicants must be female journalists working full-time for a specific media outlet or as freelancers. The next round will be open from June 15 to July 27, 2015. The application will be available here.

Meet the Grantees

Lily Casura will complete a multimedia project examining homeless female veterans in the U.S.

Priyanka Dubey will complete her book on the crisis of rape in India.

Rahima Gambo will pursue a multimedia web project about students in Northeastern Nigeria, who have been impacted by the Boko Haram insurgency.

Iris Kuo and her team will create a multimedia research tool and web app, LedBetter, to increase access to information on gender in corporate leadership.

Victoria McKenzie will pursue an investigative reporting project on water access in rural Colombia.

Pascale Müller and her team will implement a skills-building workshop for female journalists in the Middle East and North Africa.

Katie Orlinsky will complete a photography project exploring climate change and environmental issues in Alaskan communities.

Alice Su will complete Hostile Environments & Emergency First-Aid Training (HEFAT).

Tennessee Jane Watson and her team are awarded a grant of $36,000 to complete an audio documentary examining childhood sexual abuse in the United States.

Learn more about the inaugural grantees and the fund.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab.

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