Cultura Colectiva, headquartered in Mexico City, first launched its Spanish language site in 2013. The site covers arts, culture and lifestyle from a millennial Latinx perspective. In December, the company opened an office in New York City, where staffers will lead marketing initiatives and publish Cultura Colectiva +, also known as CC+, the company’s English-language site.

Sarah Vander Wal

But Cultura Colectiva didn’t always have plans to launch the sister site. In 2017, as an experiment, Cultura Colectiva’s Editor-in-Chief created an informal Facebook page where she would post the site’s stories in English to see if she could garner interest from an American audience. Soon there were 2.5 million people following the page, and it was receiving higher engagement than the Spanish-language Facebook page, according to Sarah Vander Wal, Cultura Colectiva’s Head of Brands.

“The market sought us out instead of us trying to position ourselves in the market,” Vander Wal explained.

We spoke to Vander Wal to learn more about what gave Cultura Colectiva the confidence to launch the new English site in the current market, and to see what advice she has for other digital publishers.

Use data to drive decision-making.

The key to Cultura Colectiva’s success, according to Vander Wal, is data. In fact, the company sees itself as a data company first and a media site second. That’s what distinguishes it among the cluster of digital media sites that exist right now, she said.

Cultura Colectiva developed specially-designed software that can help predict how viral a story will be. The software uses artificial intelligence to determine what a story’s headline should be and can also spit out a word cloud of related terms that should be incorporated into the story – all information that staffers use to make editorial decisions.

Without data, those editorial decisions, such as SEO keywords, headlines and more, are subject to human error, Vander Wal said.

“When it’s really data-driven, it’s a very different story – you get surprises,” she said. “Data will say where you really have to go.”

The Cultura Colectiva lobby. Photo courtesy Cultura Colectiva.

Know your audience and create content specifically for them.

The other benefit to using data is that it allows Cultura Colectiva to get to know its audience intimately. And that allows editors and writers to create content that they know its readers will enjoy.

“Use data to understand where your audience is and let that data drive your decisions,” Vander Wal said.

For example, CC+ doesn’t just translate Cultura Colectiva articles into English and repackage them. Instead, writers are creating entirely new stories for an audience that is predominantly based in the U.S. Though there is some overlap with stories that have universal appeal, the two sites do have distinct audiences.

She also noted that the Hispanic market in the U.S. is growing at a fast pace, meaning that there will be a larger audience for CC+ to reach.

“The voice needs to be created specifically for them for it to really resonate,” Vander Wal said.

Produce quality content.

Vander Wal said Cultura Colectiva’s levels of engagement have not decreased despite Facebook’s recent algorithm changes that will deprioritize posts from publishers on the News Feed. That’s because both sites produce quality content, she said.

Cultura Colectiva’s specially-designed software can also analyze sentiment, for example, of Facebook comments from readers. Emotion is what makes readers want to share a story, and when writers and editors understand why readers share a story, they can create more content to tap into those emotions, Vander Wal said.

“At the end of the day, emotion is what moves the needle in terms of engagement,” she said.

Have a distinct brand.

Vander Wal’s advice to other digital media publishers is that having a distinct brand – or voice – is critical to success, she said.

“It’s very important if you’re going to come into a very crowded field to have a voice,” she said. “No one needs another aggregator of media content. You need to have a unique voice because at the end of the day, that’s what a user seeks out.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor of MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post How a Mexican Publisher Used a Facebook Page, Data to Help Launch an English Site appeared first on MediaShift.

Nearly half a million people are still without electricity more than four months after Hurricane Maria pummeled the tiny Caribbean island of Puerto Rico on Sept. 21. One of the biggest challenges for the entire island was the lack of functioning communications services, like cell phones and internet access.

In response, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, a group established in 1984 to support Latino journalists, launched the Puerto Rico Emergency Communications Access and Journalism Initiative in October. NAHJ’s three-part initiative was designed to assist journalists in reporting news from the island, to allow local communities access to communication tools, to illuminate the humanitarian crisis happening on the island and to provide ongoing support for NAHJ members.

People tend to overlook the need for communications and information during a disaster, but it’s a basic need as well, the initiative’s project editor, BA Snyder, said.

In some cases, it took weeks for hurricane survivors to contact their family members in the U.S. The lack of communications impeded the disaster relief effort, as well as journalists’ ability to report the news. In the first few days, WAPA Radio, based in the capital of San Juan, was the only media operation still able to broadcast.

“Following Hurricane Maria, collective data showed minimal coverage compared to both Harvey and Irma affecting the continental U.S. weeks before,” NAHJ’s executive director Alberto Mendoza said. “The neglect though wasn’t just found in media coverage, but additionally, we came across polls that showed less than half of Americans knew Puerto Ricans were American citizens and interest or online searches of the hurricane devastation to the island were excessively lower.”

A MediaMatters analysis of five political shows aired on the Sunday after Maria, three of those shows did not mention Puerto Rico at all. And the two that did dedicated less than one minute of coverage to the storm.

Communications Stations Allow Journalists to Report, Communities to Connect

The first step of NAHJ’s initiative was to set up 10 “communications stations” throughout the island and equip them with satellite phones, solar power chargers and wi-fi hubs. The stations were placed within newsrooms where journalists could manage them and use the equipment to report stories. But the stations, all of which are still operating, are also open to the wider communities, providing an invaluable resource by allowing community members to communicate with their loved ones.

The idea for the communications stations was developed in conjunction with the Knight Foundation, who pledged to match crowdfunded donations up to $10,000. The day the initiative was announced, the Ford Foundation also gave $10,000. To date, more than $29,000 has been raised.

Snyder said one of the challenges of running the stations is that the equipment is costly to operate. However, power is slowly returning throughout the island, and the equipment will be donated when it’s no longer needed.

Stories Published as a Result of the Initiative

NAHJ’s initiative gave reporters access to phones and other tools, allowing them to publish from the island. Any of the stories published by those outlets in the months after the storm before their newsrooms had electricity restored were made possible by the Puerto Rico Emergency Communications Access and Journalism Initiative.

Those include La Isla Oeste’s “How to Make Water Safe to Drink,” WALO Radio’s “Social Media Helps Get Aid to Humacao’s Mariana Neighborhood ,” and “Dozens of Uncounted Deaths From Hurricane María Emerge in Puerto Rico,” by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism. CIJ also collaborated on stories with Latino USA.

#ConnectPuertoRico Supports Journalism About the Aftermath of the Storm

—NAHJ members Mc Nelly Torres (left) and Rafael Mejia (right) hand out satellite phones to journalists from the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo de Puerto Rico. Photo by Angel Valentin

The second piece of NAHJ’s initiative is a longer-term collaborative effort to support journalism on and about the island in the wake of the storm. Members and supporters of the initiative can get updates through a Facebook page and a Twitter profile. The organization is working with citizen reporters supported by NGO NetHope who are dedicated to gathering information and sources for publishers at no cost to their newsrooms. It’s also working with Storyful, an agency that finds and verifies social media content, to ensure that all content posted to the #ConnectPuertoRico social channels is accurate, according to Snyder.

Finally, NAHJ will produce a longterm guide for journalists, a sort of “dos and don’ts” blueprint that will focus on best practices for disaster coverage. Snyder said the organization expects to publish it shortly before its annual convention in July.

Long-Term Support of Members and Students

Part of NAHJ’s mission is to provide training and resources to its members. As part of its long-term plan to support Puerto Rican members, the organization will provide free membership to journalists and scholarships students on the island for 18 months.

“The three-part initiative addresses everything from the immediate needs we saw directly following Hurricane Maria, to our long-term commitment down the line with support and training for journalists in Puerto Rico,” NAHJ president Brandon Benavides said. “Bottom line is, if you take away a community member’s access to information, to communication, you eliminate the ability to connect, mobilize and provide proper response in the wake of a disaster.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor of MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post How a Collaborative Project Supports Reporting In Post-Maria Puerto Rico appeared first on MediaShift.

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We’ve launched a special new annual feature called the MediaShift20, in which we recognize the top innovators in digital media for the year. We asked our community to nominate people they think should be recognized for their contributions to the industry.

After the nominations were made, the MediaShift staff then voted to create the final list. We’re excited to announce our 20 picks, a diverse group of individuals who hail all over the world, representing disciplines from investigative reporting about big data to artificial intelligence and beyond.

We have also created the EducationShift20 and MetricShift20 lists for top educators and metrics professionals, respectively.

Congratulations to the first-ever MediaShift20!

1. Stefanie Murray, Center for Cooperative Media

First up on our list is Stefanie Murray, the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey. The mission of the Center, a grant-funded organization, is to strengthen the local journalism ecosystem throughout the Garden State through partnerships, collaborations, training, product development, research and communication with more than 170 partners. She also helped shepherd the Voting Block project in New Jersey, with news organizations throughout the state helping to produce dinners for voters to understand their issues before the governor’s election last fall. Murray’s background includes working for the Ann Arbor News, the Detroit Free Press and the Tennessean. At the Tennessean, she focused on innovation and audience growth, and was selected to serve on a small Gannett-wide team that built a training program for journalists around the country.

2. Francesco Marconi, Associated Press

Francesco Marconi serves as the manager of strategy and corporate development at the Associated Press where he manages strategy and co-leads the organization’s automation and AI efforts. He’s also an Innovation Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as an affiliate researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Laboratory of Social Machines where he works on the applications of machine learning in journalism. He recently published Live Like Fiction, a book about being successful and creative, based on some of his most popular Medium blog posts. As NYC Media Lab’s Justin Hendrix wrote in his nomination for Marconi: “Francesco is relentless in his curiosity for new technology and how it might be applied in media. This year he has focused on what I think are the two biggest trends impacting the future of media: artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality. Francesco is a connector, across different companies and industries and communities.”

3. Lydia Polgreen, HuffPost

After 15 years at the New York Times – where she won many awards for her international coverage – Lydia Polgreen took the helm of HuffPost in December 2016 after Arianna Huffington stepped down from her role as editor-in-chief. In that year, Polgreen oversaw the publication’s name change, a site redesign and traveled on a special listening tour bus to visit 25 cities across the United States. She also ran HuffPost’s Facebook messenger bot.  In a cover story for Out, the magazine called her the “Queer black woman changing journalism.”

“You would not describe Lydia as someone who is patiently waiting for things to come her way,” Joe Kahn, managing editor for the New York Times, told Out. “She has her eyes set on various prizes, and she’s really good at making things happen for herself.”

Be sure to check out our interview with Polgreen from October on the MediaShift Podcast.

4. Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath, Scout.ai

Together Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath run Scout.ai, a social platform where users submit ideas about the future of technology and vote to predict what will happen next. Scout publishes original research, analysis and science fiction. Anderson is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the site. Formerly she worked as the managing editor of Crosscut.com, a Seattle-based news site, and at Strategic News Service, a predictive newsletter. Horvath is Scout’s head of strategy and partnerships and formerly worked on election campaigns. He also worked with foreign governments to respond to online threats and opportunities and designed the first comprehensive search tool that could search Twitter’s entire database in real-time.

5. Doug Mitchell, Next Generation Radio

Doug Mitchell has dedicated his career to supporting aspiring journalists. He founded NPR’s Next Generation Radio program, a week-long program that trains young journalists how to report for radio. His work as a mentor began in 1999 when he watched a group of NPR interns struggling. “I was right there and I’d walk across the hall and say ‘No, no, you do it this way,’” Mitchell said in an interview on the “It’s All Journalism” podcast. “I thought, nobody’s helping them, so maybe I should help them. So, I helped them finish their show that summer of ’99 and I thought, you know what, this is a really good idea. Let me see if I can carry it forward.” A supporter of diversity in media, Mitchell sits on the board of the Latino Public Radio Consortium, is a peer reviewer for the Fulbright Association and consults with the International Women’s Media Foundation. Along with ONA, Mitchell also recently helped launch the Journalism Mentorship Collaborative, which is an open network of newsrooms committed to diversifying their organizations through mentorship programs.

6. Dana Coester and Gina Martino Dahlia, 100 Days of Appalachia

100 Days of Appalachia launched a year ago with the goal of telling stories from within Appalachia, a region of the country that was suddenly getting a lot of attention after the 2016 election.

“We’re not a local media outlet and we’re not a regional media outlet. We’re a national outlet about the region and with the region,” Dana Coester, the site’s creative director and executive director, told MediaShift in December. She’s also the creative director for the WVU Media Innovation Center and runs the Innovators-in-Residence program there. Coester is directing a documentary film on Muslim identity in Appalachia.

Gina Martino Dahlia is the general manager for 100 Days in Appalachia and is the executive producer of WVU News as well as the managing director for the WVU Media Innovation Center. Previously, she has had many roles in journalism, including a TV news anchor and reporter at a CBS affiliate.

100 Days of Appalachia made our list of the Top 6 Journalism Collaborations in 2017.

7. Sumaiya and Yusuf Omar, Founders of “Hashtag Our Stories”

Wife and husband duo Sumaiya Omar, a social media consultant, and Yusuf Omar, a journalist, launched social video platform Hashtag Our Stories as a way to empower disenfranchised communities to tell their own stories through mobile video. In 2017 they set out on a world tour to meet with local communities to train them in storytelling. 

“I realized that there was a massive potential in training people on the absolute fringes of society, voices that are not being listened to, and the next billion people that will come online, in using mobile phones to tell their own stories, and to curate that into meaningful shows and content,” Yusuf Omar said in an interview.

8. Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed

Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed’s first-ever media editor, is the guy known for helping to popularize the term “fake news,” a phrase he says now makes him cringe.

“When people see the term ‘media editor,’ they probably think the coverage will be about hiring and firing, financials, new product launches and so on,” Silverman said in an interview with Fortune. “But my beat is going to be more about networked media or democratized media—platforms and networks, misinformation and the economic incentives for creating different types of content.”

Silverman, who was named in last year’s Politico50, is a powerhouse at BuzzFeed, constantly producing stories about online hoaxes, digital advertising, Facebook’s disruption of the media industry and more.

He also runs the Fake Newsletter, where he briefs readers on online rumors, fake news and misinformation. You can sign up for it here.

9. DeShuna Moore Spencer, Kweli.tv

DeShuna Moore Spencer runs Kweli.tv, an interactive video streaming network where users can watch films, documentaries, web shows and news about the African diaspora. The network won Harvard African Business Club’s New Venture Pitch Competition last year. Spencer is also the founding publisher of emPowermagazine.com, where she launched an awards program to honor community activists of color. She’s also the producer and host of the emPower Hour radio show. In 2014 she won UNITY Journalists’ NewU Start-up Competition, which included a $20,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.

10. Kate Lesniak, Publisher at Bitch Media

Kate Lesniak has been the publisher of Bitch Media, which publishes Bitch Magazine, the feminist quarterly founded in 1996, since November 2016. She previously served as the non-profit’s director of strategic engagement for eight months and as its director of development for four years prior to that. At Bitch, she helped launch features including the Weekly Reader, Feminist Snack Break and What Just Happened? As Bitch Media executive director Julie Falk wrote in her nomination: “Kate is passionate about reader engagement and about converting readers into sustaining members. In 2017, she designed and implemented a project to test whether readers who engaged with Bitch Media through Hearken would convert to membership at a higher rate. Her project demonstrated that they did.”

11. Sally Lehrman, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University

Sally Lehrman is the director of the journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. There she leads the Trust Project, a consortium of about 75 news companies that is developing transparency standards to help assess quality and credibility of journalism. She also helped launch “Trust Indicators,” to surface quality news to potentially billions of readers (here’s more background on the project). She’s won awards for her reporting on medicine, biotechnology and science policy and was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. She specializes in identity, race relations and gender.

12. Michelle Holmes, Alabama Media Group

Michelle Holmes has been the vice president of content for the Alabama Media Group since 2013 where she oversees editorial operations for the Birmingham News, Mobile’s Press-Register, the Huntsville Times, the Mississippi Press, AL.com and gulflive.com. In 2017 she helped launch Red Clay Media, which produces shareable videos about life in the South. Holmes also helped launch Reckon, a special Facebook page to foster tough conversations among followers. Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt called Reckon “Vox on the Chattahoochee.” Holmes was a 2012 Knight Fellow at Stanford University and the director of business development at UstreamTV in San Francisco, where she focused on content partnerships.

13. Simon Galperin, Community Information Districts

Simon Galperin is the director of Community Information Cooperative (CiC) an organization developing community information districts (info districts). Galperin believes it’s a model for revenue generation that can work in any community that understands the value of local news and information. Special districts already exist for services such as firefighting, water and sanitation. He’s also an engagement advocate for Groundsource.

14. Carlos Watson, OZY

Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC news anchor and journalist, launched Ozy Media, a millennial-targeted news site, in 2013. The site made headlines a year ago when it landed $10 million in funding, which it said it would use to hire more editorial staff. Past investors include Axel Springer and the Emerson Collective. He has hosted a show for PBS called “Third Rail with OZY” and has helped run an outreach project to help journalism educators.

“Part of OZY’s mission is premium journalism with broad appeal,” Watson told USA Today. “It is not a narrow niche publication.”

15. Irene McKisson, Arizona Daily Star / This Is Tucson

Irene McKisson is the editor of #ThisisTuscon, a millennial women’s lifestyle vertical at the Arizona Daily Star. She helped develop the product and manages a small team of writers who also create content for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and an app. According to Becky Pallack at the Arizona Daily Star: “Using the lean startup process, they built #ThisIsTucson, a digital media brand with unique content, read mostly by millennial women on mobile devices. At the end of the first year, the reach is 45% of the millennial women in our local coverage area.” McKisson previously ran the Star’s social media accounts as the newsroom’s social media and audience engagement editor and trained reporters. She started at the Star 13 years ago in the sports department. She also works as an adjunct instructor at the University of Arizona School of Journalism.

16. Julia Angwin, ProPublica

Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica where she covers big data. To explain her motivation, here’s a quote from when we interviewed her on the MediaShift Podcast in September about ProPublica’s series on Machine Bias: “I feel like we’re in this weird situation where this big data economy feels like it’s fracturing our democracy in a way I wouldn’t have envisioned in my most paranoid moments before.” She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal where she led a privacy investigative team, and won a Pulitzer Prize. MediaShift covered an event last February at NYU where she discussed her groundbreaking work on algorithms.

17. Brian Stelter, CNN

Brian Stelter started TVNewser, a blog that covered TV news, in 2004 when he was a college freshman. Six months later he sold it to Mediabistro.com for $500. Two months after graduation he joined the New York Times as a media reporter and was a contributor to the publication’s Media Decoder blog. He was featured in the 2011 documentary “Page One” about the Times. He moved to CNN in 2013 where he now hosts “Reliable Sources,” which covers the week’s top media stories, every Sunday. He also reports frequently for CNN.com (and wrote 439 stories for the site in 2016 alone), and runs a daily newsletter that rounds up the day’s media news here. In a profile in the Washington Post’s Style section last spring, Stelter’s editor Rich Barbieri described him this way: “He’s kind of a force of nature. There are reporters out there who just cannot turn their curiosity off. That’s Brian.” His show, “Reliable Sources,” won a Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

18. Upasna Barath, Rookie

Upasna Barath, a student at North Central College in Chicago, is a contributor to Rookie, a site for teen girls founded by fashion blogger-cum-media entrepreneur Tavi Gevinson. Barath writes monthly essays and also creates a video series called Upasna Asks where she ponders questions like “How do I break up with a friend?” and “What if I don’t like my name?”

“I don’t know who ‘2019 graduated Upasna’ is, and I don’t want to make any decisions for her yet,” she said in an interview last month about what’s in store for the future. “A very smart person named Tavi Gevinson once told me, ‘You do not have to know now.’ I don’t want to make decisions for the person I haven’t become.”

19. Janine Warner, SembraMedia

Janine Warner is a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists and the co-founder of SembraMedia, which supports digital media entrepreneurs who publish in Spanish. The organization researches digital media projects, is building an online directory and is developing training programs and support services. As San Diego State’s Amy Schmitz Weiss wrote in her nomination of Warner: “Her organization has opened so many doors of opportunity and created a network that wasn’t possible before. She truly is an innovator!” Previously Warner worked as a reporter in California and served as the director of new media for the Miami Herald in the late 1990s. She’s also written several books about the internet, including several in the “For Dummies” catalog.

20. Claire Wardle, First Draft News

During her time as the research director of Columbia University’s Tow Center, Claire Wardle worked on topics such as how publishers work with platforms and what universities can learn from news organizations about innovation. She’s now a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center where she leads First Draft News. First Draft is a non-profit that focuses on how to find and verify content found on social platforms. The organization has dozens of partners, including news organizations, associations, research labs and universities. Among its projects is CrossCheck, a collaborative project which debunked fake news around the French election last year. Wardle has written about why the term “fake news” should be avoided and the created a popular graphic and explainer for different types of mis- and disinformation.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post MediaShift20: Recognizing Digital Media’s Top Innovators appeared first on MediaShift.

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The term “fake news” entered the mainstream consciousness in 2016, but it has carried on through 2017, for better or for worse.

Whether we call it yellow journalism or fake news, deliberate misinformation has always existed in the media world. But thanks to a combination of social media, Macedonian teenagers and the dawn of a post-truth political era, the conversation around fake news intensified this year. Even the pope issued a warning about the dangers of bogus news.

Many educators expanded their efforts to teach media literacy, but that’s likely not enough. At the beginning of the year, we asked whether it was possible to solve the problem of fake news at all. That remains to be seen, but below is a look at the some notable projects that are working to do just that.

Duke University Tech & Check Cooperative

The Tech & Check Cooperative is the brainchild of Bill Adair, the individual responsible for the creation of Politifact at the Tampa Bay Times in 2007. Now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, Adair’s goal is to bring fact-checking to new audiences. The Cooperative involves three parts: a suite of fact-checking apps, AI tools that can help automate fact-checking and collaboration with other fact-checking organizations around the world.

Adair also thinks smart speakers hold some promise for fact-checking efforts. The Cooperative developed an app called Share the Facts, which allows users to fact-check a claim simply by asking Amazon Echo or Google Home. And now that it comes with a screen, the Home could be particularly useful if the screen is used to display headlines, Adair said.

The Fake News Challenge

Creative Commons image.

The Fake News Challenge was a collaborative effort that tasked programmers with developing machine learning tools that could help flag fake news stories as a way to support fact-checkers. The goal of the Challenge, which attracted more than 100 teams from 25 different countries, was to build functioning tools and make them available to news organizations. The three top teams won prizes and their solutions are provided open source online. The organizers have plans to host more challenges in the future.

Storyzy

Storyzy is another project that uses machine learning to counter fake news, but it specifically focuses on fact-checking quotes. While a written story can contain half-truths, a published quote is either correct or not – a more black-and-white scenario where machine learning can be more effective. Storyzy also tracks the growing number of fake news sites (about 22 per month in the U.S. this year) and CEO Stan Motte has written about how that could hurt brands who use programmatic advertising.

Facebook, Google & Twitter

Representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google testify before Congress. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In partnership with the Trust Project, Facebook, Google and Twitter announced last month that they will display “trust indicators” on their platforms that will provide extra context about a news site for readers interested in knowing more about a publication before reading a story. The indicators, which are already being used by publications like the Washington Post, the Economist and the Globe and Mail, will also provide information about whether a piece of content is news or advertising.

All three platforms have been heavily criticized for allowing misinformation to run rampant and for allowing Kremlin-linked Russian operatives to purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising with the goal of sowing discord among Americans during the 2016 election. Facebook in particular has come under fire.

While Facebook has taken some steps to smooth over its relationships with publishers and journalists, such as launching the Facebook Journalism Project, it remains to be seen how effective its efforts to stamp out fake news will be. Third-party fact-checkers hired earlier in the year to weed out false stories on the platform said that effort was largely a failure. Facebook also tried an experiment in which it promoted comments under news stories that used the word “fake,” but that served to only infuriate users on the platform. Most recently Facebook announced that it has launched the News and Journalism Accelerator Program to foster start-ups working on media projects; pitches related related to fighting fake news are welcome, but only start-ups located in Canada can apply.

CUNY’s News Integrity Initiative

The News Integrity Initiative at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is a $14 million fund that aims to provide support for organizations, projects, applied research and events that connect journalists, technologists, academic institutions, non-profits and other journalists. The NII is interested in funding projects that counter misinformation. Here’s information about how to apply.

Photo and Video Verification Tools

There’s evidence to indicate news consumers are generally more trusting of TV news than other sources of information. But video, as well as photos, can be manipulated too. InVID, the product of a three-year collaborative effort in Europe, offers a suite of tools that simplifies the video verification process.

One of the keys to verifying photos and video is to establish place and time for the images you are trying to verify, according to Aric Toler, an analyst at Bellingcat.

“The vast majority of materials can be verified, or confirmed as fakes, by just establishing where and when they were shot,” he wrote for MediaShift. Geolocation is one of the tools he uses to do this. For any readers interested in learning more about photo and video verification, Toler has an upcoming online training on the subject.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, an independent journalist and social media consultant. She is a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

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The Challenge is one of the steps Facebook is taking to better support journalism; the social media platform has been widely criticized for how it has turned the media upside-down, from sucking up digital ad spend to perpetuating fake news. Facebook is partnering with tech business incubator DMZ, which is based within Ryerson University in Toronto. 

“Quality journalism delivers facts and ideas that help us better understand society, and each other,” Kevin Chan, Head of Public Policy for Facebook Canada, said. “The Facebook community values sharing and discussing ideas and news, which is why it is critical for us to partner with leading organizations like the DMZ and Ryerson School of Journalism to support the Canadian news ecosystem and help these startups succeed.”

How the Challenge Works

Five teams will be selected and will be provided workspace in Toronto for five months and have access to coaching from mentors and bi-weekly workshops. They’ll also be given up to $100,000 in non-dilutive seed capital and a $50,000 Facebook marketing budget. Participants can be just an individual with an idea or a team already building a product. But to participate, start-ups must be based in Canada.

Kevin Chan, the Head of Public Policy at Facebook Canada, said in an email that participants aren’t limited to focusing on certain interest areas like fake news, media literacy or the distribution of content.

“We’re open to a wide range of ideas and excited to see what Canadian entrepreneurs bring forward to boost innovation in the Canadian news ecosystem,” he said.

Applications to participate in the accelerator program close March 9.

About the Challenge Partners

Abdullah Snobar, DMZ Executive Director.

DMZ Executive Director Abdullah Snobar said the incubator has worked with media-oriented start-ups before – like SmartTones, which helps broadcasters track analytics, and 500px, a stock photography site and community.

News and journalism are not the focus of DMZ, but because the incubator is located within Ryerson’s School of Journalism at the Faculty of Communication and Design, participants will have access to more mentors and journalists, Snobar said.

Snobar said he’s looking forward to seeing what types of pitches the Challenge receives.

“We’re dedicated to supporting and building companies to help them become global powerhouses,” he said. “We’re looking forward to working with Facebook to do the same thing on the media side.”

Kevin Chan

When asked why the California-based company chose to launch the Digital News Innovation Challenge in Canada rather than in the U.S., Chan said the launch of the program stemmed from conversations Facebook was having with Ryerson. He said Facebook does not yet have plans to expand the Challenge or launch something similar elsewhere.

Facebook’s Past Efforts to Support Journalism

Since evolving from a social media platform for college students to one-half of the Facebook-Google duopoly dominating the U.S. advertising market, Facebook has had a profound effect on the way news is distributed.

Shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously remarked that the idea that Facebook could have had an impact on the election was “crazy.” In the months since, the social media giant launched the Facebook Journalism Project, hosted workshops and hackathons with journalists and, in a total about-face, Zuckerberg wrote in September that he regretted his remarks from the year before.

Though Facebook is taking steps to ameliorate its relationships with publishers and acknowledged the way its secret algorithms encourage fake news to go viral and impact news literacy, it remains to be seen how successful those efforts will be.

In October, third-party fact-checkers hired to weed out fake news on Facebook said that their effort had been unsuccessful, a Facebook experiment that promoted comments that included the word “fake” also failed, and the platform is still under scrutiny for accepting $100,000 worth of advertising from Kremlin-linked agents designed to sow discord among the American public. In one example, Russians used one page that promoted Texas secession to organize an anti-Islam protest. A second page, also operated by Russians, organized a counter-protest, scheduled for the same place, date and time.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post Facebook Launches News and Journalism Accelerator Program in Canada appeared first on MediaShift.

Startup studio Like No Other is behind the project, and founder Stuart Goulden believes OtherWorld offers users a new way to engage with the world and hopes to expand to other cities in the future. The project has received funding from Google’s Digital Innovation Fund, which Goulden said, allows him to experiment with the project while working to develop a working business model. Rather than just accept ads, he envisions funding opportunities like working in conjunction with local news organizations, running tailored marketing campaigns for content partners or earning a commission on “positive” actions that OtherWorld users take via the platform.

OtherWorld, which is managed entirely by Goulden, now has 60 content partners, from the BBC to the National Football Museum. But operating the service has not been without challenges. The theft of a beacon, the impact of weather on users’ mobile phone habits and even Google’s recent update of Chrome have proven to be challenging, though manageable, obstacles.

“There is no instruction manual, but that’s the fun of being the first,” Goulden said.

We had a Q&A session with Goulden to learn more about OtherWorld and his goals for transforming local news. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A

What is OtherWorld? How does it work?

Stuart Goulden: OtherWorld is an experiment in next generation news. It uses beacon technology to magically send location-based stories to people’s mobile phones, without the need for an app. As such, it doesn’t need a news homepage or traffic from social media or search engines.

Strip away all the technology and the proposition is simple but powerful: It allows you to discover the nearest news to you now and explore the world around you like never before.

How did you come up with the idea for OtherWorld?

Goulden: From personal frustration and by asking an entirely different set of questions. There’s a whole generation of people, like me, who care deeply about where they live but will never read their local newspaper. OtherWorld is trialling something radically different for the sector that is more playful, relevant and made for mobile.

Google’s support for the trial (via their Digital Innovation Fund) means I have the luxury of not having to worry about business as usual and the freedom to think a few years ahead. Almost all of my work and start-ups look to bring an outsider and long-term perspective to more traditional industries.

Stuart Goulden

Where do the stories come from?

Goulden: The pilot in Manchester has about 60 content partners, from the police and local council to cultural institutions and venues, and everybody in between. They’re clearly important for a regular flow of original stories. However, they also encourage their customers, residents and fans to activate the phones for the service. That contribution is priceless.

OtherWorld is an incredibly lean news ecosystem, with just myself running all aspects of the service for a large city the size of Manchester.

How do you work with partners?

Goulden: The relationship with partners varies enormously and some are also more active than others. At one of the spectrum are those looking to share their news with passersby and reach new audiences. At the other are organizations more interested in placemaking and encouraging active citizenship. OtherWorld meets a need for both.

Can you give examples of the types of stories you share?

Goulden: OtherWorld presents news, events and other alerts as highly targeted and relevant stories that are tied to a location. It could be anything from a police appeal about a crime nearby to letting you know about an upcoming festival or consultation, or encouraging people to volunteer for the soup kitchen that pops up where you’ve stood in the evenings.

One of the key learnings so far is that people value this geographical relevance over everything else – we don’t need to be the first to a story, have the deepest coverage on an issue or even the best photos or exclusives. The proximity of our stories means our readers are also better placed to act on what they read.

It’s important not to get too caught up in the editorial side of the pilot. OtherWorld is proof of concept for a new model of news distribution, discovery and monetization, and so it’s important to stay true to that. An obvious next stage of development would be to build more editorial resource or partner with an established news organization and test its real-time and two-way storytelling potential.

Why did you decide against building an app for OtherWorld?

Goulden: I don’t think the world needs another news app. By going app-less, we can speak to anybody with a smartphone and it shows the potential for real-time, location-based storytelling without the development time or cost.

How many users do you have?

Goulden: The record visitors for a single story on a single beacon for a single day is 700. That’s from a standing start with no existing readers or brand awareness. If you can imagine a city running a virtual newspaper with 100+ beacons, you can get a sense of its exciting potential.

How do you reach new users?
At this stage, it’s been achieved by encouraging our content partners to speak to their customers about the service. In doing so, they amplify our small marketing budget many times over. More recently, we’ve noticed more people serendipitously discovering OtherWorld because of Nearby Notifications on new Android handsets and the growing popularity of Bluetooth.

How does your business model work?

Goulden: OtherWorld is equally relevant to large news organizations who wish to reach new audiences in new ways and perhaps halve the average age of their readership, and smaller outfits who wish to resourcefully and quickly create a new news ecosystem from scratch for their local area. It also has a third life in digital placemaking, which transcends news and taps into revenue streams outside of advertising. Now that we have proof of concept, a number of conversations are happening about what happens next and I’m keeping an open mind. Ultimately, I’d love to see local news take inspiration from the pilot and to weave more location-based storytelling and discovery into their reporting. I think they’ll find it incredibly exciting and liberating.

What do you envision for the future of OtherWorld? Do you have plans for expansion? 

Goulden: There are lots of opportunities to enhance the user experience and the technical backbone of the service. I’ve tried to think a few years ahead and keep the iterations short, with the initial pilot ending in December 2017. Ultimately, it would make sense to do this with an international news partner, who can roll it out to multiple cities and respects the trust that comes with beaming location-based stories to people’s mobile phones. A few conversations are happening and I’m keeping an open mind as to where they take me.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, an independent journalist and social media consultant. She is a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post How OtherWorld Uses Beacon Technology to Share Local News Stories appeared first on MediaShift.

The goal of Tarbell, named for muckraker Ida Tarbell, is to shine a light on the way corporations influence American politics and public opinion. (Full disclosure: MediaShift executive director Mark Glaser is on the advisory board of Tarbell.)

Tarbell seeks to be entirely reader-funded in the future, but is taking some money from foundations. To launch, the startup is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign that offers membership tiers with different benefits to supporters. At press time, they were 35% funded, with 1233 funders from 50 states, with 16 days left. Tarbell will be based in Philadelphia, where Potter envisions a staff of about 10 people as well as contributing freelancers around the country.

We asked Potter some questions to learn more about his plans for Tarbell. The interview is edited for length and clarity.

Q&A

Tell us about more about your aims for Tarbell.

Wendell Potter: Tarbell is a new independent non-profit investigative news organization that will focus on the power and influence of big corporations and other monied special interests. It will also investigate solutions. We believe there is not enough investigative reporting being done, and what there is focuses a lot on lawmakers and political corruption. There’s not enough emphasis on who pays for that corruption and who’s behind it – who’s spending the money to influence public opinion and policy and elections and help people understand why things are what they are. This will be investigative and explanatory journalism and will connect the dots to help people understand who the big check writers are. It will also help people understand how they can  be involved in a given issue. We want to help people understand how they can be more effective individually and also as a part of a larger group that is engaged in the issue in one way or another.

Why have you chosen a crowdfunding model?

Potter: We chose crowdfunding because we ultimately want to get to the point of being entirely reader-funded. That’s a lofty goal. But we don’t want to start as an organization that accepts advertising. That can be a conflict of interest. We don’t want to have any pressure from advertisers or to know the advertising might go away if we were to take on a given issue. We also want to demonstrate that this can be done. We can begin publishing with support from prospective readers and not solely depend on foundations that have been the main support for non-profit journalism. We know it can work. It hasn’t been attempted very much in this country. But there are examples of where it’s been successful in Europe. Those organizations that have launched with crowdfunding are thriving and continue to grow.

Wendell Potter.

How much money are you trying to raise in advance of the launch?

Potter: We ultimately would like to raise $1 million. That’s quite ambitious. We may not raise it all through crowdfunding, but would like to get as close as we possibly can. We’re well on our way. It’s a 30-day campaign, but this will be an ongoing thing.

How do you foresee members participating in the reporting process? 

Potter: We want to have sessions – and they could range from Facebook Live to webinars or other means of interactivity – with our reporters and members. We want reporters to engage with audiences and let them know what he or she may be working on and get story ideas. We can’t assume we’ll know everything our readers will be interested in. And we hope to get story ideas and recommendations on subject matter experts. Members themselves may have stories to tell. We want to have ongoing dialogue with our members.

Tarbell.org’s home page shows the progress on its crowdfunding efforts

How do you see solutions journalism fitting into Tarbell’s mission?

Potter: We want to make sure people understand that our problems are not intractable. One of the reasons I want to have equal emphasis on solutions is, I think a lot of investigative reporting reinforces peoples’ cynicism and sense of despair that everything is terrible and there’s no hope. But that’s not true. Problems can be solved.

There are ways that we can, as a society, do things even without legislation – whether it’s climate change or health care. But we also want to highlight what’s going on that people might not be aware of. I’m not talking about happy news. But what’s going on with the private sector of health care that’s helping people get access to needed quality care. Or the work that’s being done to remove costs from the healthcare system to improve quality, maybe in an individual setting in a health center. We want to make an impact on individuals and communities. We also want to look abroad. There’s not a lot of coverage about what other countries are doing, and there’s little understanding about how healthcare systems abroad work.

You used to work in newspapers and then you were a healthcare executive. Can you talk about how your personal experiences led you to Tarbell?

Potter: I loved my first career as a journalist. I was lucky too – I worked as a general assignment reporter, a political reporter and a business reporter. I covered state governments, the federal government, worked as a reporter in Washington in the White House. That was my first love. I was lured into public relations because public relations pays more than journalism. I’ve joked that during the time in my career spent working for big insurance companies I was really working under cover. I learned a lot. It was an invaluable experience.

I know how special interests and corporations are able to influence public opinion in ways the public isn’t aware. That influences how elections go and how politicians think and vote. I want to share that understanding with people so they can see and understand how things got to be the way they are. I want the public to be more discerning and hopefully less gullible by having information and understanding about how this takes place. I think connecting the dots is extraordinarily important.

There have been other crowdfunded journalistic ventures in the United States that have ultimately failed. Does that concern you? And how will you be different?

Potter: We’re not putting all of our eggs in the crowdfunding basket. But we do want to demonstrate that we have a community of readers. Very early on, we had over 1,000 donors in every state in the country. I think that there are a lot of other funders out there who support non-profit journalism who want to support organizations that are showing there is another revenue stream, and that they’re working on this and have been thinking this through and doing their best to develop it.

One problem even non-profit journalism organizations who have not done crowdfunding have is that the big donations from the reliable sources have a time limit on their grants. They want media organizations to demonstrate they do have a plan of sustainability after the grant expires. That’s what we want to do to show that this is viable and show we can eventually get to the point of being reader-funded.

Are there other challenges you anticipate?

Potter: When you’re running a non-profit, there’s always the challenge of raising money – it’s a constant effort. I knew that going into this. I think another challenge will be also helping people understand that we can have a media organization that is not affiliated with the left or the right. We can produce news and information that is seen as credible by everybody. We’re not going to be producing just for people who live on the East Coast or West Coast. That’s not a challenge, but it’s something we have to be mindful of.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, an independent journalist and social media consultant. She is a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post How the New Non-Profit Investigative Outlet Tarbell.org Aims to Cover Money in Politics appeared first on MediaShift.

Adair, who created PolitiFact in 2007 and is now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, is leading the Tech & Check Cooperative, a project working to develop new automated fact-checking efforts.

The Cooperative recently received $1.2 million in grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project and the Craig Newmark Foundation.

The Origins of Fact-Checking Technology

When Adair started PolitiFact, the concentrated fact-checking effort at the Tampa Bay Times (then called the St. Petersburg Times) ten years ago, he never anticipated the proliferation of fake news the way we know it today, he said.

Misinformation spreads because it appeals to people’s “political sweet tooth,” Adair said. But the speed at which it spreads is largely due to advances in technology, he said.

Bill Adair

“What we’ve seen is that the same things that make fact-checking possible at a large scale also make it possible to spread falsehoods at an even larger scale,” Adair said. “[Fake news] lends itself to bots in ways I don’t think any of us anticipated.”

PolitiFact, at first, wasn’t very popular. Adair recalls how when the site first launched, he would spend his weekends at home refreshing the PolitiFact homepage because the site’s traffic was so low. However, those early fact-checking efforts helped lay the groundwork to make new projects, including those by the Cooperative, possible, he said.

PolitiFact structures its content in a way that allows and encourages user interaction, making it easier for search engines and apps to access the content. That framework is useful for the news apps and projects being built in 2017.

The Projects

Adair said the overall goal of Tech and Check is to get fact-checking to more people.

There are three parts to the Cooperative: a suite of fact-checking apps, a series of tools that will automate the most repetitive aspects of fact-checking and convening and collaboration with organizations around the world to learn from each other’s work, he explained.

The suite of apps includes “Share the Facts,” which lets users check a fact by asking the Amazon Echo or Google Home. The app pulls from a giant database of fact checks from major organizations around the world.

The partner projects include:

• ClaimBuster, a tool by the University of Texas at Arlington that can identify fact-check worthy claims.
• The Talking Point Tracker, developed by the Internet Archive, which identifies claims used repeatedly in politics.
• Truth Goggles, which provides pop-up fact-checking for online articles.
• Digital Democracy, which works to identify claims from video of the California Legislature, and is developed by the Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo.

Dr. Chengkai Li

Dr. Chengkai Li, who is behind Claimbuster, said being part of the Cooperative is beneficial to partners because it increases access to funding sources. But it also gets these tools into the hands of the journalists who need them.

“In academic environments, often when we develop a project, the end product is a paper,” he said. “It’s rare for a research product to have real uses.”

Without the Cooperative, getting his product to the right people is one of the obstacles he faces, he said. News organizations sometimes prefer to stay in their “comfort zone” and may not always see the value of automation tools.

The Future of Fact-Checking

Other obstacles, beyond technical challenges, in developing these tools are societal and political barriers, Li said.

“Often if you point out something is false, people will not care or will say you are the source of fake news,” he said. “Those are things that cannot be solved with technology.”

However, because fact-checking is such a popular topic now, Li takes that as a sign that fact-checking and truth will continue to be valued.

Adair predicts that in the future it will be possible to have near-instantaneous fact-checking at the same time while someone is speaking.

But for now, there are still so many nuances and decisions that have to be made in researching and writing a fact check.

“Things are still complex and need to be done by human journalists,” he said. “But we can try to help those journalists by automating the things that are repetitious and time consuming.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, an independent journalist and social media consultant. She is a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post The Fact-Checking Army Waging War on Fake News appeared first on MediaShift.

After a dozen years, the Media Consortium will be sunsetting so that a new, stronger organization can rise in its place.

The Media Consortium was founded in 2006 to create a collaborative network of self-sustaining independent progressive journalism outlets. The good news is that this work has succeeded.

The independent news sector is among the healthiest in the news business. In its lifetime, the Media Consortium increased its number of outlets by 400 percent. Since 2011, only three of those outlets have gone out of business, while many have doubled or even tripled their revenues. From Mother Jones to Democracy Now!, these outlets are also having an outsized impact on world events. The sector is strong.

The strength of the progressive news sector is magnified by the collaborative culture the Media Consortium has built. From 2014 to 2017, the Media Consortium has run over 45 funded collaborative projects (thanks to generous funders including Voqal Fund, the Quixote Foundation, Wallace Global Fund and the Media Democracy Fund).

These projects, ranging from joint reporting by six outlets on pesticide use in Kauai to joint reporting on immigration, climate change and reproductive health, have had a measurable impact on changing attitudes. We know that because the Media Consortium conducted a groundbreaking metrics study proving this effect, the results of which will be published in an academic paper in 2018.

So why would an organization that has been this successful want to sunset? We are doing so in order to relaunch with a new mission and vision—and a new, more diverse membership.

Challenges For the Progressive News Sector

The greatest challenge facing the progressive news sector now is not technical or business needs. The greatest challenge is to create a collaborative network built on equitable partnerships between national and local media in a way that centers grassroots communities while providing for deep features and investigations at the national level.

We all have heard that the media system in the United States is broken. What many don’t realize is that the recent collapse of corporate chains only shows up the problems corporate media has always had in reporting on all Americans. For decades, the unspoken secret of national news was that nationals relied on metros to feed them story ideas and sources. For big events, national reporters have always had to “parachute” into places like Jordan, MT (fire) or Port Arthur, TX (hurricane)—and miss stories because they are not familiar with the communities there.

As Media Consortium members developed a collaborative network, members became increasingly uneasy with parachuting into local communities. In 2015, after a stirring talk by Malkia Cyril on the problem of white reporters parachuting into African American communities like Ferguson, the Media Consortium launched into a racial equity analysis of our sector.

The result of that two-year look at ourselves through a racial equity lens made clear that the Media Consortium as currently organized—a network of national progressive outlets—could not create equitable local-national partnerships. Why? Because the local news outlets in such a nationally-based network would inherently not have the same power as the national members. That is the meaning of equity—equalizing the power in a relationship.

An Effort to Create Equity

Aiming for equity, in 2017 we invited people working in community-specific media to our annual gathering–35% of attendees were from community media, and over 50% of attendees were people of color. As a result of conversations at that event, Media Consortium members awoke to the fact that local community media required much more than a collaborative network—the need was not merely to structure an organization, but to begin a movement that would center media working within local communities. Without such a media movement to center grassroots media, it would be too easy for national media to simply coopt local media.

So far, that hasn’t happened. Yet, what we do see is that philanthropic dollars increasingly are going to a handful of national organizations that dictate editorial terms to local media, pulling up sources from local media while pushing down narrative frames. The stories produced by this work are often excellent, and have far-ranging impact, but they run the risk of missing the diverse perspectives of the communities they report on.

This is a critical moment for journalism. As the digital revolution continues to churn, key pillars of national and regional reporting are crashing down and new ones are being erected. This is the moment to hold journalism accountable to our highest ideals for what journalism can and should be. That means not only a journalism that is fact-based, transparent and accountable, but one that is equitable.

Local is Where It’s At

Outside of foreign policy pronouncements, very little news originates at the national level. The big drivers of national political life—immigration, education, health care—all begin with local stories. To best tell the story of our times we need to be able to tell these stories where they start. We need to tell the stories of Puerto Ricans living in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago; white tobacco farmers near Springfield, Kentucky; African Americans living in Roxbury, Boston; the Pima people living by the Gila River in Arizona; Somali Muslims in Minneapolis; and yes, techies working in Silicon Valley.

Attendees at the TMC in Color gathering in Washington DC, 2017. First row, left to right: Lesley Etherly Martinez, Stephanie Rodriguez, Veralyn Williams, Rocio Santos. Second row, left to right: Ivan Roman, Luis Oscar Fernandez, Carla Wills, Sharis Delgadillo, Ravneet Vohra, Monica Cadena, Natalia Linares, Sabine Blaizin, Manolia Charlotin, Elijah McKinnon. Third row, left to right: Adaobi Okolue, Joseph Torres, Christopher Walker, Amara Enyia. (Photo courtesy the Media Consortium)

Those best equipped to tell these community-specific stories are reporters living in those communities. Here’s what we imagine as the next iteration of the organization that is currently called the Media Consortium:

The new organization will be a network of news outlets dedicated to building a racially equitable independent media ecosystem. Consortium members will center the voices of culturally-specific communities, promote local/national partnerships, and work collaboratively to grow impact.

Decision making in this organization will be decentralized, with every outlet choosing what stories to send through the network and what stories to pick up from the network. The flow of stories from grassroots to grasstops will be conducted via partnership agreements that are equitable, respecting and rewarding the originators of the stories. Outlets will work collaboratively, sharing resources and co-marketing content in order to ensure that stories are told by those most impacted and reach those most impacted.

This kind of network is feasible because of the digital revolution. The technology exists to create a nonprofit marketplace through which outlets will be able to share stories based on equitable partnership agreements that govern byline, remuneration, and other legal and financial relationships (these can be standardized like Creative Commons agreements are now). Heather Bryant has already built a platform, Project Facet, that helps newsrooms collaborate.

What’s missing are local hubs which will support hyperlocal outlets in connecting to this larger marketplace. Most community-based outlets don’t have the resources to connect directly to nationals. Local media networks can help mediate that local-national relationship in an equitable way by serving as disinterested networkers.

Such local hubs, using a wide variety of models, are already being built in communities around the United States (inspired in part by the pioneering work of Molly de Aguiar, Josh Stearns, Jon Funabiki, Chris Faraone, Roberta Rael and others). As a next step, current Media Consortium staff will leave to form a private consulting firm to support the development of these local networks. Once a number of hubs have become strong enough to connect to a national network, we will relaunch as a movement organization dedicated to creating a national network that centers grassroots community reporting through equitable local-national partnerships.

So you may say goodbye to the Media Consortium, but we are saying hello to what comes next.

Jo Ellen Green Kaiser is the executive director of The Media Consortium. Passionate about mission-driven independent media, Jo Ellen has worked for a succession of independent magazines, including stints as Managing Editor and Associate Publisher of Tikkun, Publisher of LiP: Informed Revolt, and Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of Zeek. She is driven by a belief that democratic societies thrive only when their members have access to accurate information and informed opinion. A leading figure in Jewish media, Jo Ellen is an expert on the Jewish social justice movement. She is the co-editor of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Response to Justice (Jewish Lights) and co-led the Righteous Indignation Project. She has written about Jewish social justice for a number of publications, including The Jewish Daily Forward, Sojourners, Tikkun and Interfaithfamily.com.

The post In Search of Equity: the Media Consortium Reinvents Itself appeared first on MediaShift.

“People laughed at us,” Pinder said. “They said ‘nobody’s going to get on air and talk about their breasts.’”

Nearly 400 women had submitted surveys, and the results were surprising. Throughout the New York City metropolitan area, residents were charged anywhere from nothing to more than $2,000 for a routine screening. In some cases, costs for the uninsured were lower than for individuals with insurance.

Four years later, ClearHealthCosts is still collecting and analyzing data. Its goal is straightforward: tell people what stuff costs in health care. And after ClearHealthCosts collaborated with two New Orleans newsrooms, readers reported saving hundreds to thousands of dollars — true impact.

Using Collaboration to Crowdsource

ClearHealthCosts has partnered with a number of local news outlets throughout the country to crowdsource data and publish stories.

“My knowledge helps to infuse their reporting,” Pinder said. “Their local ties give us access to really dive deep in the local area. It really proves the value of local journalism.

“We’ve somehow begun to forget how important local news is. It has immense promise and we disregard it at our peril.”

Sharing their reporting strengthens the work of each organization, she added.

In February, she began working with the Nola.com/The Times-Picayune and WVUE FOX 8 Live in New Orleans. Together, the three media outlets have collected more than 3,000 pieces of pricing information from readers and viewers throughout the area.

Jeanne Pinder

This kind of collaboration is one that demonstrates amazing impact: readers report saving money, their stories get thousands of shares online, the Louisiana’s insurance commissioner called local billing practices “unconscionable” and the work even drew the ire of the president of a local medical center.

Both Manuel Torres, the Times-Picayune’s News Manager, and Lee Zurik, WVUE’s Chief Investigative Reporter, said Pinder’s knowledge, including her connections to health experts, has been invaluable.

Torres said one reader was able to save more than $3,000 after switching the location for her MRI after seeing in the database that it was cheaper elsewhere. He hopes providers will become more transparent about pricing as a result.

“It has helped open up a dialogue about the policies that health providers have,” Torres said. “Because of that conversation, we may see changes happen.”

How it Works

Reporters atClearHealthCosts directly call service providers – “shoe leather journalism,” Pinder noted – to ask about their prices. That data is then published in a database on its website.

In some cases, providers have reached out to offer their prices, she said. In other cases, they are reluctant to provide any information at all. Because of this, ClearHealthCosts also crowdsources data. Anyone can access the website and submit their personal information and experiences with a provider. So far, the site has accumulated thousands of pieces of data.

A screenshot from the ClearHealthCosts website.

ClearHealthCosts then analyses the information to find patterns and the data is used for stories online. The goal is to offer patients insight into the health care marketplace and empower them to ask the right questions of their providers.

It’s not unusual to find that prices for the same procedure, even within the same community, can vary wildly. That data is not only relatable – it’s actionable. Armed with new information, some patients have found ways to save money, such as paying with cash or just using a different provider.

“At least you have some agency now and some means of protecting yourself,” Pinder said. “You will never look at a health care bill the same way.”

How ClearHealthCosts Got Started

In the summer of 2010, Jeff Jarvis announced that he still had space available in his entrepreneurial journalism class at the City University of New York. Pinder, who had taken a voluntary buyout from the New York Times, pitched the idea of a website to help people understand their bills, and she was accepted into the class.

Though a veteran reporter and editor, she hadn’t covered health care before. But she was inspired by her own difficulties understanding health care bills – she found it a low-level annoyance that medical billing information was so hard to understand.

“It was like a weird string of numbers that had been typed in by chimpanzees,” she said in looking at her own health care bills. “I started to think it was me. But then I thought, ‘I’m a smart person – I  should be able to figure this out.”

Pinder went on to win several grants to support her work in the beginning.

“A lot of people told us it couldn’t be done,” she said. “They said there’s too much power and energy and money behind business as usual. I have learned about myself that when people say ‘you can’t do that,’ it’s very motivating for me.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post How ClearHealthCosts Helped New Orleans Newsrooms Save Money for Readers appeared first on MediaShift.