Sunlight plans to compile a national database catalog. The goal: to create an interactive catalog for all data the executive branch is putting out under www.data.gov, plus state and local data, too. The idea, Miller says, is that there be a single point for someone interested in a topic – say the environment – to search the relevant data, whether it’s collected at the federal, state or municipal level.

Q: What else are you doing?

A: “We’ll be creating more tools. We’re very interested in the iPhone and Android; we’ve created two apps already this year – Real Time Congress and Congress. We’re bringing state campaign finance data and federal data together in one place, (so) the user can download it and search by name. . . . One of the other big things we’re launching this year is a national campaign, a state-based campaign to create transparent government from the most local level to the federal level. We’re identifying 300 citizen leaders (to) create a national force. . . . And we’ll be rolling out Open Congress, a joint project with the Participatory Politics Foundation, at the state level. By Sept. 30, you’ll see Louisiana, Texas, Maryland, California.”

Q: What are the biggest challenges for those of us who care about democracy and transparency?

A: “The biggest challenges are cultural. We have an administration that has said, ‘This is how we want to do things.’ But we know there’s a cultural resistance in government (to transparency). Things change slowly when it comes to government. The key challenge is the willingness to do this, the associate cost the government will have to bear as the transition (to transparency) takes place. There’s a great deal of excitement about it. . . . We have a very active advocacy campaign that’s focused on the federal level working with both the (Obama) administration and Capitol Hill that will help redefine what transparency means. We’re also looking at best practices.”

Miller says this month, during Sunshine Week, new transparency legislation will be unveiled. And she says there are plans to create a transparency caucus in the U.S. House. There are also  efforts underway to respond to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United. And Sunlight will continue to identify government data that should be public but isn’t.

Q: All this costs money. Do you resent that your group has to raise and spend money to get the government to do what it should be doing anyway?

A: “No, not at all. . . . I don’t mind modeling behavior and showing (government) how it has to be done. It’s an open door now (with the Obama administration), and even with Congress, though that door has some stuff behind it. There’s a little more resistance in Congress. But if we can model the good uses for this data, then this is a purpose for a non-profit.”

Q: Which social media tools are helping most in the battle to make government more transparent?

A: “Sunlight is a huge believer in the World Wide Web. The most recent example was last week – where we embedded the video from the president’s health care summit. We blogged it live and added important details. . .  . We’re great users of Twitter; we’re developing a series of widgets that will allow anyone to embed them on their sites. We may pioneer, but we’re also making it available for others to use.”

Q: Before he was elected, President Obama vowed to make the federal government more transparent. Has his administration delivered? What can everyday people do to ensure the president keeps his campaign promise?

A: “They’re in the process of delivering. We’re certainly not satisfied with everything we see. It’s not perfect, certainly the data is not. But at least we have sites like recovery.gov. Before we didn’t have this data . . . We can press them to make more relevant data available. It’s a wonderful conversation to be having. We feel like we’re pushing them. The administration gets kudos for moving forward, but there’s a lot to do.”

Q: For many of us, getting public documents and attending government meetings at the local or state level is challenging. What advice do you have?

A: “A lot of that is going to come through our community engagement and campaign work. There is such a thing as a cycle of transparency. Journalists have to be involved, non-profits have to be involved, government has to be involved. One thing has to lead to another. More requests for information beget information.”

Ellen Miller will be discussing “how everyone is changing everything” with Steven VanRoekel of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission March 10 at WeMedia. She’ll also be part of a panel discussion later that day on nonprofit journalism.

Remember Copenhagen? The world’s last chance to save itself from climate calamity came and went last December. But if you heard of civil society’s concerns about the urgency of the problem, that may have been because of the global environmental marketing campaign by the people at the urgently named TCKTCKTCK.

About two years ago, “a number of the leading lights in the climate movement decided that what the movement really needed to create more momentum was a campaign similar to the Make Poverty History campaign or the One campaign in the U.S.,” said Jason Mogus, TCKTCKTCK’s digital strategy manager, who lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. “They decided that the movement needed to come together, and we needed to get on the radar of world leaders. We needed to change the direction of history by getting a global agreement of all nations to get a coordinated climate plan to deal with this issue.”

The campaign started with 18 partners, including WWF, Greenpeace and Oxfam, which realized that the challenge was bigger than any of them, and if they were to have an impact on world leaders they had to act in a coordinated fashion. So they decided to coordinate their strategies with a single brand suggesting a time bomb — “Tick Tick Tick” — and a single “ask,” what they termed a fair ambitious and binding climate deal — or “FAB.”

The campaign really only got off the ground four months before the conference, but was able to rally an astonishing 16 million signatures in support of the FAB agenda, now embraced by an expanded coalition of 250 nongovernmental organizations worldwide.

But the campaign was much more than a marketing coup. It represented an opportunity for the organizations — not all of which had been focused on the environment as their main issue — for the first time to work together on a common project.

“The biggest innovation we did was not technical, but building a collaboration model or a network-driven model into everything that we did,” Mogus said. “It wasn’t easy for us to bring together all these diverse groups into one common framework. This campaign was a lot more like a Facebook — we had to bake network principles into everything that we did.” The organizers called it an “open source campaign.”

The site launched in the end of August, and the campaign was done in mid-December. In that four months, TCKTCKTCK got 2.5 million page views, a little over half of them unique visitors.

Perhaps more importantly, Mogus said, more than a million people engaged in action on the streets. In Copenhagen in December, the organization, which had only about 40 staffers at its peak, set up a “rapid-response e-network,” including Grist, Huffington Post and bloggers from more than 80 countries. They also set up a Fresh Air Center in downtown Copenhagen that incorporated a “blogger support center.” The center hosted briefings during the day, and a live feed from the conference.

“That became particularly critical when they shut bloggers and NGOs out of the out of the conference for the second week,” Mogus said. The combined effects added up to a lot of influence, both among participants in the conference, who were unable to go home and declare victory, and spectators worldwide.

“The power of this campaign,” Mogus said, “was that through all of these organizations we had millions and millions of people.”

Why would anyone give money to a journalist? Even during their heyday, organizations that actually did pay the wretches — be they ink-stained or coiffed for the TV camera — made their money off advertising more than direct audience payments. In other words, the value of the reporting got somehow abstracted from the enterprise that sustained the outlet.

Which brings us to our present predicament, to wit: In an era of Craigslist, citizen media, Twitter and Wikipedia, why would anyone give money to a journalist?

Because of trust in the person, and in the enterprise. Yet for Tom Stites — a self-described “ink-stained wretch” and founder of the still-nascent Banyan Project, a consumers’ co-op for news seekers — solving the trust puzzle is more than a matter of enabling a transaction with a good product and good service.

After all, there are plenty of reputable media companies out there selling quality news products. Why, then, the deepening crisis for news media?

* * * * *

Stites got his journalism start at The Kansas City Times in 1962, falling into an internship there after dropping out of Williams College at the end of his sophomore year. “I heard the call loud and clear,” he says.

What followed were a string of reporter and then editor positions — managing editor at The Kansas City Times, Night News Editor at The New York Times, National Editor at the Chicago Tribune — that took him straight to 1990, at which point, he said, “I left newsrooms.”

Was it true? After almost 30 years as a newspaperman? “People asked me why I was leaving journalism, and my stock answer was that I wasn’t leaving journalism, that it had left me.”

Stites says he was “deeply concerned that all the journalism from all the major news organizations was all the same … The Trib and any other newspaper where I might have worked just no longer fit my idea of a newspaper business I wanted to be part of.”

He found himself “yearning for journalism with a voice that diverged from the pack to value democracy and the people rather than the neoliberal policy thought that dominated all the rest of the press — except The Washington Times, which was dominated by neoconservative policy thought.”

Guided by a “chosen” spiritual faith in the Unitarian Church that resonated with his idealism about journalism — “it is nonhierarchical and creedless, stressing in its principles both ‘the right of conscience and use of the democratic process’ and ‘the free and responsible search of truth and meaning’” — Stites took a turn away from newsprint to become the editor, and later the publisher, of UU World Magazine, serving an active, English-speaking Unitarian community worldwide.

So the seeds for the Banyan Project were planted. But they didn’t begin to truly quicken till 2006, when Stites gave a speech that took his ideas out of the realm of individual conscience, and into a much broader dialogue.

* * * * *

I first encountered Stites in June 2006 at the first (and only) Media Giraffe Conference at the University of Massachusetts. He was giving the keynote presentation, a PowerPoint show with the promising, if wonky, title: “Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?”

It was lunchtime. People were chatty, and distracted by food. Yet before long, Stites had them hanging on every word. He was talking about being the associate managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, and how “all the talk among the news management was about editing the paper for the top two quintiles of the income distribution. That means that 40 percent market penetration is the goal, not 100 percent, and that The Trib cares little about 60 percent of the people who might be its readers.”

News media was failing democracy, he said, because the needs of the advertising model were distorting the editorial mission.

“Instead of having sympathy for the poor our newspapers discard them,” he declared. “Newspapers have forgotten that less-than-affluent Americans are also citizens that require easy access to quality journalism that squarely addresses the issues that affect their lives. Unless we do, there’s a good chance that our democracy is doomed.”

This, in the middle of a buzzy conference with panels about citizen media, new technology, and ways to invigorate the ad model. I recall looking at my colleague, Michael Stoll of the commercial-free nonprofit startup The Public Press.

“Who is this guy?” I asked. Stoll blinked, then said, “We gotta get ‘im.”

After the conference, stopping over in Boston before heading back to California, Stoll and I paid a visit to Stites in his offices at UU World. He seemed, perhaps, the tiniest bit bemused by these two young idealists, talking nonprofit startup news projects and serving the underserved. By the end of the half-hour conversation, he said that it was a “joy” to know there was still such inspiration afoot in the journalism world. We invited him to join the advisory boards of our respective projects. Later, when the Banyan Project began to really take root, we returned the favor by becoming advisers to his efforts.

The nonprofit paper-chase followed. Everyone was writing grant proposals, by the ream. We traded “three-pagers” outlining our diverse plans, providing feedback, egging each other on. Amidst it all, Stites pursued studies as a resident fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, and worked as a consulting editor of the Center for Public Integrity. He was editor and principle writer of the Center’s Collateral Damage series about the impact of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy — and the series won top awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Before long, though, Stites had assembled an impressive advisory team, including such leading lights as Dan Gillmor and Charles Lewis, as well as the lead Web developer for YouTube, who agreed to lead the platform-development.

Finally, his project — originally called Rhizome, after the networked root structures that allow plants to put up shoots far from the main body — acquired the name Banyan, for its central “metaphor” of a rich forest that really is just one single tree with a myriad sibling trunks and canopies spreading over the landscape.

* * * * *

What makes the Banyan Project a game changer? Trust. Not just trust in the transaction, but trust in the very processes by which an enterprise makes its product. If commercial newspapers have lost their way, it is because they have abandoned that trust — not their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, nor their sense of pride and quality control in the service. Rather, the nature of that service itself.

What good is a luxury car review to a single mother who’s struggling to make payments on a late-model minivan? What’s the value of a classical music review to a community that can’t afford a night at the symphony, and might not have interest in or even exposure to classical music? Whatever happened to the labor beat? Is it really just about reporting on unemployment statistics, or unions?

Through a mutual connection, Stites was introduced to Gar Alperovitz, a political economy professor at the University of Maryland-College Park, who opened his eyes about consumer co-ops.

“I quickly understood [this] to be the most trustworthy of business forms,” he said. The value proposition goes beyond pure journalism to include the deep relationship between the member and the producer, to drive relevance, dialogue, quality and loyalty.

Banyan is conceived of as a consumer’s co-op, in which members (the readers, the users, the “people formerly known as the audience”) are the owners of hyperlocal news sites that act independently, but are unified by standards and best practices. They serve the local, but also work as a network.

“Hyperlocal is crucial to journalism and at least as crucial to democracy,” says Stites. “It’s at the community level that civic engagement thrives. But journalists keep starting from scratch, or largely so, to reinvent the hyperlocal wheel, over and over and over. And we do this in a world whose economies are politics are dominated by multinational corporations bigger than most nations … Scale matters!”

Banyan, he says, will enable today’s “throng” of journalism entrepreneurs to not only strengthen the hyperlocal model, but also to “create larger-scale forms that have the resources to do quality reporting about far-flung stories of local impact and about issues and policy in ways that actually relate directly to people’s lives. This is the kind of enterprise journalism and democracy need, and need desperately, and need right now.”

Josh Wilson is the co-founder of Independent Arts & Media, and publisher of its Newsdesk.org project.

The Impact Summits Come to We Media: How Do You Know Your Media Matters?

Throughout the spring, Jessica Clark of the Center for Social Media and Tracy Van Slyke of The Media Consortium are co-hosting a series of “impact summits” in Chicago, New York, LA, San Francisco, DC and Boston, drawing together leading public and independent media makers, funders and researchers in each city to share and hone assessment strategies. The summits are designed to inform ongoing Center for Social Media research, as well as broader discussions among funders, outlets and policymakers about how best to support public interest media in the networked age. 

The Miami summit will be taking a slightly different form—as a panel and conversation at We Media (8 am Thursday). First, two innovative media projects—Not in our Town and the Public Insight Network—will share their stories of impact, and then Clark and Van Slyke will turn to the crowd for their best ideas about how to evaluate media projects.

We wanted to provide some questions in advance to jump-start the conversation and we look forward to your comments here and during the discussion both in-person and virtually:

For media makers:
What is the mission of your outlet or project?
How do you define impact?
Can you describe a particular piece or program that demonstrated the impact you’re seeking to make?
What tools are you using to collect data and stories about your impact?
How are you using that information for planning, fundraising, and interacting with your users?
What do you really wish you could measure?

For funders:
Do you require your media grantees to use particular evaluation tools or approaches?
How do those requirements relate back to the mission of your foundation?
What do you really wish you could measure?

For researchers:
How do you define impact?
What tools and approaches do you use to assess the impact of media projects?
Can you describe a particular piece or program that demonstrated the impact you’re seeking to measure?

So far the conversations in Chicago and New York have produced exciting ideas about new tools for visualizing and tracking impact—we expect even more from the innovators attending We Media!

Q: You tell readers they don’t have an excuse to complain about the media because they can now be the media. Why did you write that?

A: “When I first started writing the book, there were so many books on media consolidation, and I love them, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like you can write only so many of those books before you slit your wrists and light your hair on fire . . . No matter what happens with corporate control, there seems to be this human need to express ourselves, and we’ll find the way to get the message out, no matter what the obstacle. . . . It’s a hopeful book.”

Q: Why are you hopeful?

A: “When I was at Reuters, it costs me $500,000, a team and six months to build something . . . Now it takes less money and fewer people to do the same thing. Everything is becoming easier to create and launch. You don’t have to raise millions of dollars from venture capitalists who then own most of what you do . . .  You can have the reach, the immediacy and power of the largest news agencies. It’s a very empowering and hopeful message: anybody can do it.”

Q: You also point out early in the book that this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. What prompted this?

A: “The question is why are we continuing as artists, journalists and musicians to drag these old business models onto the Internet that don’t work, but we’re ignoring entrepreneurs on the Internet already doing this and making millions of dollars? . . . I wanted to state upfront that it’s not that easy and it’s a lot of hard work. And the problem is that we’re all competing against each other . . . First, you have to have quality content, a great message; and No. 2, you have to figure out how to be above the fray and get your fans to link to you and buy your stuff.  But it’s not all about the money – it’s non-profit, community journalism. I don’t want people to be Rupert Murdochs. There needs to be space for local, non-profit  media for voices that aren’t heard.”

Q: We hear a lot about finding the business model that works. What is the model going to be?”

A: “We’re moving from a model of scarcity to a model of abundance. There are only five major media companies, only five book publishers, only a couple of concert promoters – that’s a model of scarcity, and they actually thrive on scarcity. But now we’re in a world of abundance. Just look at YouTube, iPhone, iTunes.”

Q: So if you create it, then will they come?

A: “You have to have good content and awesome fans. The fans are the news managers, they’re the new sales people, the new Best Buy. I’ll take the word of a trusted friend about what music to buy over a $1 million ad campaign. I think it’s always been that way, but now with Facebook, it’s easier to amplify that.”

Q: Will there be a sequel to BE THE MEDIA?

A: “We’re definitely going to come out with part two, and I’m hoping others will help. It will be best practices and case studies. I would love for the next edition to have tons of examples. We’ll have an eight-week BE THE MEDIA webinar. . . .  We’ll continue to do the radio show (every Wednesday at 5 p.m.). We’ll be doing it live from We Media, where I’ll be talking with Michael Wolff, Tom Curley and a bunch of other people.”

David will also moderate one of the invention sessions Thursday morning.

Patrice O’Neill is an award-winning media producer dedicated to telling stories about everyday people transforming their communities. As Co-Founder and Executive Producer/Director of the Oakland-based non-profit strategic media production company The Working Group, she has produced successful national series on PBS for fifteen years and led a multi-platform approach that utilizes documentary film, social networking, outreach and organizing efforts to encourage dialogue and spur action.

Read more about Patrice.

Q: How do you define public media?
A: I think our vision of what public media can be is changing. My definition may be rather broad, but here goes: Public media is non-commercial media that seeks to serve the public, further our understanding of the issues, events and culture of the day and connect people to each other in a significant way. I am so excited about this moment and the openness that exists for those of us that see ourselves as journalists and public media makers. There is an opportunity to encourage and foster participation from the people we (public media makers) are trying to serve. The Internet and mobile technology have opened up not just distribution and interactivity, but our vision of what public “interest” media can be. The traditional public media has tremendous experience and a local/national infrastructure in place that can help coalesce this broader group of media makers—with a new force—citizens as participants. Once we unleash this new resource, and understand the kind of content that we make available affects interaction, it will change the relationship with the people “formerly known as the audience.”

Q: The Working Group’s 1995 story of how the town of Billings, Montana, responded to a rash of hate crimes, Not In Our Town, is said to have set a new standard for television impact. What began as a half-hour PBS special has turned into a national movement. How did you create a national movement?
A: I began as a filmmaker who wanted to tell stories that could empower people to take action. Incredibly, luckily, I found a story that showed us how powerful a simple story could be.It changed how we make films and directed us to a new approach to engagement. After the original film aired on PBS in 1995, people started taking the story of Billings and making it their own. They created their own local methods for responding to hate and preventing hate crimes. All we did to instigate this was to encourage people to hold town hall meetings and provide them the tools to do that. Then, they started forming their own NIOT city forums and events. We felt compelled to document that activity, and present it in new films and videos—which reinforced their actions. Not in Our Town has swelled into a movement. For the last 15 years we’ve been chronicling this incredible local innovation.

Q: The Working Group is using multiple platforms to extend the message. To what extent are you employing digital media beyond TV and how powerful can it be in encouraging citizen participation?
A: We are looking at the tip of the iceberg and there is so much potential underneath. It’s all about connections. With the new niot.org, which we are beta testing now, we want to connect communities across the country and enable them to share stories. Our part in it is storytelling and filmmaking, and that is our strength. How can we surface those stories, both personal and community-wide, that help people learn from each other? People can grab our films offline, throw them up in a town hall meeting, share them with each other and create their own and share them. At the same time we have the new social networking tools where people can engage in deeper conversations about complicated issues. We are at the beginning of an exciting new outburst of connectivity and creativity.

Q: Specifically what are some of the tools you are using?
A: We wanted to visualize the movement and the challenges of hate. So on our site you will see a map of where hate crimes are happening and you can begin to see patterns. But I think the key feature of our map is seeing where people are taking action. You can find stories of people taking action. You can look at where others in your own area are who want to do something about building inclusive community. Action on the map comes in a variety of forms: video, conversation, reporting. We also have a section called Local Lessons, a wiki kind of thing, that presents and builds on lessons that people have learned. We have posted 30 original videos and we are getting more and more user-generated videos. There are group sites that are Facebook-like where you can post events and start conversations in your own community. It will be interesting to see what features of this site will be most useful to people. The point is to have tools help people connect and do something. How do we move it from the online world to the real world? That will be the measure of our success.

Q: Sounds like you believe firmly that the potential for building a dialogue is here.
A: I’ve seen it. Just last week there were people faced with a hate group coming to their town, and they didn’t know what to do. They went online and found videos we had posted about a town on the east coast whom the same group had visited. The video from the first group helped guide the next. Then we posted the second video and another group facing the same problem, in a town in southern California, saw their story. You can see how people learn from each other.

Q: What would you like to see happen at your panel about public media at the We Media Miami conference Thursday morning?
A: I look forward to a conversation about our relationship with the audience and digging deeper with some very talented journalists who will be there. Joaquin Alvarado is brilliant and has an inspiring vision of the future of public media. Jessica and Tracy are raising some exciting questions about how we evaluate media. They have opened up some very important ideas about what success looks like. One of the things I look forward to discussing is how the game has changed. We have to look at things in new ways. Of course it’s challenging, but I think it’s very exciting as well.