Me this week

Last week, I talked with Rhonda Jones-Gillespie, news editor at the Chicago Defender and I feel like I need to follow up with her.  It wasn’t until after our conversation that I realized why there seemed to be a disconnect around some of my questions.  While the Defender does report about African-American communities in Chicago, a big part of what they do, and what I didn’t really get, is ground city and national news stories in the African American experience in Chicago.  While I’ve been most interested in looking at how a story local to one community might connect with a broader audience, I’ve overlooked the opposite, but equally important, trajectory.  It’s one that journalists have been doing for a long time (though perhaps less so as news organizations become more resource bound) – taking a story and picking out the most important aspects for a local audience or looking at a broader policy’s impact on a particular community.

This week, I  was finally able to sit down with Icoi Johnson and Samuel Vega, the recipients of WBEZ’s Prizker Fellowship, which I had written about previously.  I found the fellows’ backgrounds and  outlooks to be pretty different, which was interesting and probably a good thing for WBEZ.  Vega, who is from Humboldt Park and seemed pretty involved in the community offered some interesting insight into WBEZ’s bureau in the neighborhood.  Vega said he  had noticed the storefront bureau, but had never been inside it until he toured it as part of his training for the fellowship.  He said it often appeared closed and that he was more familiar with the reporter who runs the bureau because of his coverage of events in Humboldt Park.  Vega’s anecdote indicates that connecting with different news  communities may be a little more complicated than simply setting up shop.

Coffee shop newsrooms – a cool idea but you have to pick the right shop

Setting up "bureaus" in coffee shops could help reporters connect with communities. But they have to pick the right one. GOOGLE STREET VIEW

Perhaps a better approach might be the coffee shop newsroom experiments that Poynter wrote about extensively at the beginning of this month.  Placing a reporter in an already trafficked space like a coffee shop may make reporters more accessible to the general public than a space exclusive to the news organization.  Some of the benefits of putting reporters or “newsrooms” in coffee shops seem pretty cool: more transparency/accountability, more audience understanding of the reporting process, developing new sources, getting new framings for stories or new dimensions for stories of which the reporter is already aware and recruiting citizen journalists.

This week I had my own experience with reporting and coffee shops.  I often work in coffee shops because I find them more convenient, and often less distracting than heading down to the Medill Newsroom.  While I use them primarily for convenience, they can still be a good way to connect with sources.  However, you have to go to the right coffee shop.  In reporting a story about LGBTQA youth of color in Boystown and a parking policy proposed by some residents designed to deter the youth, I did a lot of writing in Lakeview coffee shops.  I usually went to one close to my house a little east of Boystown or one close to Boystown but seemingly catering to a more particular customer demographic.  I liked the coffee shops I chose because they were locally owned and independent, there was interesting art on the wall and employees sometimes seemed like they were hanging out with friends or family as much as they were serving customers, creating a casual, comfortable atmosphere.

But, because they were somewhat more expensive and closed around 10 p.m., they didn’t really attract customers who were young people of color coming to hang out in the neighborhood.  The night I spent writing at the Starbucks at the corner of Belmont Avenue and Clark Street, a wide range of customers came in, including folks who could have been sources for my story.  While I could have gone out on the streets searching for people who could tell me their experience of coming to the neighborhood, a common thread in what youth I had interviewed told me is that they often feel profiled by police and neighborhood residents.  Both residents and youth described sidewalk confrontations that escalated and didn’t lead to a productive dialog.  As a reporter, I didn’t want to contribute to these dynamics. Spaces like coffee shops are important for reporting across dynamics like the ones in Boystown because they’re more neutral.  People from a variety of backgrounds can be on equal footing in the coffee shop as patrons and engaged in the same activities, like working on a laptop.  Had I spent the entire quarter working at that Starbucks, I might have been able to meet some sources with a good insight into the dynamic in a way that developed out of a more organic conversation, over music or helping someone reach a power outlet) rather than cornering people on the street.  Also, the public nature of the coffee shop could have attracted other people into the conversation, adding multiple perspectives to the reporting and perhaps even bridging the resident/visitor divide.

My experience with diversity and neighborhood coffee shops may be more universal.  Kim Feller, author of “Wrestling With Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino“, wrote about diversity and coffee shop clientèle on the Colorlines website:

While there are still funky independents eking out a living on the retail margins, most coffeehouses and designer roasters are niche markets, like purveyors of artisan cheeses, hand-painted T-shirts and limited-edition sneakers. They appeal to those on the trendy, cutting edge and survive by exclusivity—by pleasing a small, loyal and financially privileged. Starbucks, on the other hand, has been able to risk expansion from urban business cores and upscale suburbs into more modest settings, where it often provides the only meeting place that is neither a noisy fast-food restaurant nor a bar and that is often surprisingly multiracial.

Mosques and SEO

In terms of stories that sit across a cultural divide, nothing’s been bigger, or representative of journalism’s struggles to bridge those gaps, than reporting about the controversy over plans for a Muslim community center near the site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.  One idea that’s likely inflamed the debate is the use of the phrase “ground zero mosque” in the media, which suggests, incorrectly, that the community center is being constructed at the site of the former towers.  Mark Coddington at Nieman Labs has a good rundown of what a number of media critics have been saying about the use of this term.  While some blame cable news, others point to SEO.  As a term gains traction with the public, online news websites have to choose between using an incorrect term or making their content more difficult to find.  Coddington wrote:

Poynter ethicist Kelly McBride zeroed in on that idea of search-engine optimization, noting that the AP is being punished for their stand against the term “ground zero mosque” by not appearing very highly on the all-important news searches for that phrase. In order to stay relevant to search engines, news organizations have to continue using an inaccurate term once it’s taken hold, she concluded. In response, McBride suggested pre-emptively using factchecking resources to nip misconceptions in the bud. “Now that Google makes it impossible to move beyond our distortions — even when we know better — we should be prepared,” she said.

Coddington also pointed out that Online Journalism Review’s Brian McDermott pinpointed our news consumption patterns as the culprit for the proliferation of incorrect terms for things.  As we move more quickly from media to media, terms like “ground zero mosque” have more sticking power than Park51 or the Cordoba Center.

The tough choice of deciding between content discovery and accuracy is the same one I wrote about regarding the phrase “sissy bounce” and New Orleans artists’ distaste for the term.  In a pretty interesting, but unrelated thread, Anthony Neal, a scholar who studies Black popular culture, posted some tracks from New Orleans in the 1960s that refer to a dance called “The Sophisticated Cissy.”  Still, even if the term “sissy” may have some interesting connections to New Orleans musical history, it’s important to remember that contemporary artists don’t use the term to identify their work.

In the first of a two-part report about Chicago Public Radio’s Pritzker Fellowship, President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia describes the limitations of niche broadcasting, the journalism challenges that motivated the fellowships and his hopes for how the fellows will change WBEZ’s newsroom. In the second part, I plan to explore the perspectives of nominating community organizations and the fellows on reporting across boundaries.

Pritzker Fellows Icoi Johnson (left) and Samuel Vega (right) with Chicago Public Radio President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia. DONTE DEMONE TATUM

Reporting public affairs stories across a city as large and diverse as Chicago is no easy task, but new initiatives at Chicago Public Radio aim to meet this challenge.

President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia said the station has established neighborhood bureaus and is providing journalism training to citizen journalists to both expand the station’s news coverage and audience and change the way its journalists report.

As a broadcaster, the station has always been tasked with serving its coverage area, Malatia said, but given the size and broad interests of this population, the station has chosen to target listeners who are active in their communities, grounded in the region and seeking information about what is happening around them. Even with this focus, the station’s potential audience spans a wide spatial and social geography, though its measured audience doesn’t necessarily reflect this.

“If you look at the makeup of our audience, it leans just dramatically towards white,” around 83 percent, Malatia said, “which the city does not reflect.”

While the information needs for other groups in the city could be served by media targeting ethnic or geographic audiences, Malatia said super-serving such niche audiences has drawbacks. “They tend to reinforce the particular views of the audience that they’re attracting,” Malatia said of specialized media coverage or politics and public affairs issues. While specialized media often provides complex, nuanced coverage of issues within a community, he said, coverage of issues crossing communities, or placing them in conflict, becomes over-simplified.

“People then perceive issues as confrontational, us versus them or difficulties that can’t be bridged,

Malatia said. “You have to somehow find a way to be a broadcaster that is offering a much more inclusive discourse.”

While the station has recognized this need and seeks diversity in its board of directors, management, staff and story selection, inclusive reporting hasn’t always been successful. Trying to understand its audience, the station hired a research firm to talk to people who fit the station’s profile of grounded and community-engaged, but didn’t listen. A frequent response, Malatia said, was that non-listeners found the station’s coverage to be problematic.

“They hit the heart of it right away by just saying we really didn’t know what we were talking about,” Malatia said, explaining that some non-listeners said even award-winning reporting only scratched the surface or didn’t reflect a community’s understanding of an issue.

“There’s nothing worse you can hear from an audience member than you’re just hitting kind of like the Cliff Notes of a story,” Malatia said, “You don’t want that.”

Malatia said this problem stems from a combination of human nature and the parameters of reporting.

“We’re coming from the assumption that, as human beings, we tend to know what is familiar,” Malatia said. “As professionals who are in journalism – which has a kind of rhythm and a kind of process to writing and delivering stories, deadlines, things like that – we tend to also lean towards those techniques that have yielded success in the past.”

As an example of this tendency, Malatia explained that a reporter covering a new story on a topic that the station has covered extensively in the past, such as public housing, may be inclined to contact the same official and expert sources that have been used for past stories.

“If you actually are thinking about it, there’s probably a hundred different ways to cover that story that you’re not going to think about when you’re under pressure to get something done,” Malatia said.

One strategy to break out of reporting patterns is storefront neighborhood bureaus in Englewood, Humboldt Park, West Ridge and Northwest Indiana. Malatia said by starting and ending their days at the neighborhood bureaus, reporters can more easily build relationships with the communities they’re covering.

Just as the station has moved to create a more accessible presence for its reporters in Chicago’s neighborhoods, it is also trying to bring community members into its newsroom. Starting at the beginning of July, Icoi Johnson and Samuel Vega began an intensive mentorship with an experienced reporter. Johnson and Vega are the first recipients of the Pritzker Fellowship, which is offered to those interested in reporting but who have no formal journalism training or experience. The recipients of the fellowship were selected from a pool of people nominated by Chicago-area nonprofit organizations. “Everybody was very excited about the pool of candidates,” Malatia said. Chicago Public Media plans to begin accepting nominations for the next group of fellows in March 2011.

Working toward producing a long-form, in-depth report, the Pritzker Fellows report stories and work with editors in a similar manner to interns from journalism schools, but at a faster pace, Malatia said. While one goal of the fellowship is to offer journalism training to future reporters, he said, he also hopes the fellows will change practices in the newsroom.

“We’ll not only be building journalists who have a very different perspective of how to handle a story, approach a story and what is worthy to be a story. We will also learn from them and expand our horizons about that too,” Malatia said. Journalists from diverse backgrounds, Malatia said, may know of key sources in their communities that a reporter from outside the community would overlook.

Malatia acknowledges that these efforts are an experiment. “We don’t know if it’s going to make a difference, but we just felt we needed to try,” he said. The station will evaluate the impact of the fellowship program by looking for audience demographic changes and polling non-listeners to see if their perceptions of the station have changed.

But evaluating the impact of journalism on communities is difficult, Malatia said. “Can you prove that journalism, even well-done, really makes a more informed citizenry that’s making better decisions? Only history can tell you whether the decisions are good or not. But I believe that and I think a lot of people do.”

Related links:

• Chicago Public Media’s press release about the Pritzker Fellows
• Information about applying for the fellowships

I’ve always wanted to know how to project “stencils” on walls or sidewalks, as a lot of clubs or businesses have started to do.  After a lot of knowledge from the Chicago New Media list, I found out that these projectors are called gobo projectors.  I also found out that IKEA sold an inexpensive version of such a projector called Isbrytare.  Jim Dennewill has a good rundown of the projector.

My impression is that IKEA no longer makes this product.  I’m wondering if there are any other ~$40 projectors that are currently in production.

Photo by Jim via Flickr.

The last two weeks haven’t been very productive for my independent study as I’ve had stories or projects due for other classes.  Though I was too late to shadow youth reporters covering teen depression as part of a Community TV Network summer program, I was able to watch the youth film their introduction sequences, get a sense of the group dynamic and talk to some of the youth who produced this summer’s report.

This week, I plan to follow up with the community organizations who nominated people for WBEZ’s Pritzker Fellowship and finish synthesizing and writing stories based on the reporting that I’ve already done.  I still need to connect with news organizations focused on African-American communities such as WVON, the Defender and/or some south-side bloggers writing about community news.

On the topic of African-American news coverage, I took a look at a Pew Research Center report titled Media, Race and Obama’s First Year, which analyzed media coverage of African Americans during the past year.

This graph shows the way African Americans were covered in the media, “as a group, African Americans attracted relatively little attention in the U.S. mainstream news media during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency — and what coverage there was tended to focus more on specific episodes than on examining how broader issues and trends affected the lives of blacks generally.”

According to the study, African-American angles to broad national stories were covered as part of reporting on health care reform and the economy, though these topics made up less than 10 percent of coverage focused on African Americans.

The Pew Research Center also did analysis on coverage of Gates’ arrest in the African-American press.  According to Pew’s analysis:

the discussion and columns offered here took a starkly different angle than the commentary in the mainstream press. While the mainstream media largely assessed political implications for President Obama, the commentary in the black press considered the broader question of race relations in the U.S.  It was also evident that these papers saw themselves as a voice of the black community.  Even within the opinion columns, there was a clear sense of providing an African American perspective to the story. The tone, however, in many cases, came across as less “us” versus “them” and more of an assessment of steps needed from all sides.

This report gives me some background context for asking about coverage of Chicago stories, such as the slaying of Derrion Albert and how it was covered in different media.  I would love to see similar media analysis just for Chicago, but I think that’s beyond the scope of what I’m able to do.

On Tavis Smiley’s radio show this week, Smiley and CBS correspondent Byron Pitts discuss the need for more diverse news coverage.  Pitts said he was optimistic that the changing demographics of the U.S. would compel news organizations to have more diverse coverage and reporters that reflect the country’s diversity.  When I talked to a team of Tribune reporters, they offered a very nuanced account of race in the newsroom that I’m excited to write up.  The Tribune reporters said that race sometimes mediated their reporting but that a good reporter should be able to navigate racial boundaries on her beat.  Having a similar experience with race, the reporters said, could help connect with sources, but experiences with class could still be dramatically different, and were sometimes masked by assumptions about experiences tied to race.  One reporter said she still found a lack of economic diversity in the newsroom.

On a final race and reporting note, Colorlines analyzed some data about mentions of race in the news and argue that conservative publications explicitly mention race with greater frequency than other news organizations.  The data suggests that race gets mentioned across the media and Colorlines seems to think that controversy over, rather than experience with race gets the most coverage.  It makes me want to take a second look at how or if race was addressed in the Tribune’s reporting on youth violence.

Over the last few weeks I’ve spoken to a number of reporters about reporting outside of their neighborhoods or experience.  One common theme that I’ve heard is the importance of using people’s own language to describe places and institutions in their communities.  Patrick Barry, a senior scribe working with LISC/Chicago, said journalists documenting community development projects had to rethink their use of language when reporting on the low-to-middle-income communities that were the focus of the organization’s New Communities Program.  Even if a reporter’s impression of a neighborhood was that it was a “bombed out ghetto,” Barry said, they needed to be aware that neighborhood residents didn’t use that language to describe their neighborhood and didn’t necessarily think of their community with such an exclusively negative framing.  “We have learned a lot from neighborhood people about how to talk about places,” Barry said.

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a story about New Orleans rappers Big Freedia and Katey Red.  The print version of the story about Freedia ran under the clever headline like “Neither Straight Nor Out of Compton” (I can’t find my copy of the magazine to confirm the exact title).   However, the web version uses the (apparently) search-engine-optimized title “Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’ Gender-Bending Rap” in the title of the web page (the text that shows at the top of one’s browser window) and “New Orleans’ Gender-Bending Rap” on the page itself.  These different versions of the title reflect, perhaps, reflect the contentious use of the term “sissy bounce” to describe the music of Big Freedia and other gay, transgender, lesbian or bisexual rappers who perform New Orleans’ signature hip-hop style of “bounce.”

Jonathan Dee, the story’s author describes bounce like this:

Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it’s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it’s strictly party music, its beat is relentlessly fast and its rap quotient tends much less toward introspection or pure braggadocio than toward a call-and-response relationship with its audience, a dynamic borrowed in equal measure from Mardi Gras Indian chants and from the dawn of hip-hop itself. Many, if not most, bounce records announce their allegiance by sampling from one of just two sources: either Derek B.’s “Rock the Beat” or an infectious hook known as the “Triggaman,” from a 1986 Showboys record called “Drag Rap.” (That’s “drag” not as in cross-dressing but as in the theme to the old TV show “Dragnet.”)

Katey Red is quick to point out that LGBT artists in New Orleans are part of the larger bounce music culture, not a separate genre.  “Ain’t no such thing as ‘sissy bounce,’ ” she said. “It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it.”  In this video interview from Fader Magazine, Freedia expresses a similar sentiment:

Bounce music generally is just bounce music in New Orleans and you may have a gay rapper that does bounce music and you have straight rappers as well.  So I just really want to clarify that bounce music is not sissy bounce it’s bounce generally and you have some sissies that represent bounce music, you know, like myself, Sissy Nobby, Katey Red .  You know, there’s a few more.  It’s not called sissy bounce at home, it’s called bounce music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The story does explain that most artists object to the phrase.  “They have no desire to be typed within, or set apart from, bounce culture; and indeed, within New Orleans itself, they mostly are not,” Dee wrote.  And it also explains the origin of the label “sissy bounce,” New Orleans music writer Alison Fensterstock.  Still, the nuanced perspective of how the artists view gender and sexuality as part of their identities and the identity of their musical community falls under a web page title that acknowledges “their bookings elsewhere in the country are founded increasingly on the novelty of their sexual identities.”  Even if the artists eschew the term “sissy bounce,” the Times seems aware that people may search for information about this music using this term, and they want to make sure that people can find the article.

This forefronts a challenge for journalists when choosing words in their stories – should one use the language of those most involved in or affected by a story or terminology that may be more widely used?  Does using the popular language for something legitimize language that doesn’t accurately frame an idea?    The best approach is probably the one Dee took in the story about New Orleans rap, to explain disputed language, its origins and how it reflects the nuance of the subject.  This is possible, and even adds depth to a longer article, but can a writer do the same thing in a daily news article?

Being aware of and taking the time to explain complicated stories behind language are important obligations for journalists that will only become more difficult in the age of online news.  As more and more people seek news and information on the web and find it through search rather than visiting the news organization’s web site directly, there is greater pressure for journalists to include widely-used language in stories to make the stories discoverable.  One solution may be to link phrases in the story to pages that describe the origin of the phrases.  The New York Times website already allows users to access definitions of words in articles by clicking on the word.  Linking such functionality to user-contributed content, like urban dictionary, may give added insight into the origin of language used in stories, though it could make it more convoluted.

Photo by Incase via Flickr. It’s captioned as a photo of Big Freedia, but the performer more closely resembles Katey Red.

I finally realized that I needed business cards for my reporting at Medill, but I didn’t want to shell out dozens of dollars for hundreds of cards that I probably wouldn’t use.  I wanted to pay a few dollars for a few dozen cards and have the option of printing more.

So, I created my own using the open-source illustration program Inkscape.  My template is based on an excellent Inkscape business card tutorial.  The design is meant to be printed in black and white on colored cardstock, making the text colored and the background black.

It took me a while to figure out (and obtain) the font for the Medill Logo, but according to What the Font, it’s PF Din Text Pro Thin.  I converted the “Medill” text to a path in the template so you shouldn’t have to have the font in order to use the template.

If you want to get really slick, you can generate a QR code with your contact information in vCard format and print it on the back.

Download:

• SVG Medill business card template (editable in Inkscape, maybe Illustrator, uses clones to make it easy to change the design in all the cards in the 10-up layout)
• PDF Medill business card template (should be able to open this in any illustration program, but you’ll have to do more copying and pasting to edit all the cards)

This is a jQuery bookmarklet to extract an attribution string and link from a Flickr photo page.

To use the bookmarklet bookmark this link or drag it to your browser’s bookmarks bar: Flickr Attribution

The code is available at github.

At the time that I wrote this bookmarklet, I was using the the Monochrome Author theme (similar to the Monochrome Pro theme) by Graph Paper Press. It requires that you have an image associated with each post, so I frequently grab Creative Commons licensed photos for posts where I didn’t take a photo. I got tired of building the photo attribution string and link back to the photo by hand, so I made the bookmarklet to generate it with one click.

This is my first attempt at writing a bookmarklet and using jQuery.

I make use of the very helpful jQuery Bookmarklet by Brett Barros with modifications by Paul Irish as well as the zeroclipboard library for copying the text to the system clipboard.

There are probably some bugs with this code as well as lots of room for improvement. In particular, it would be nice to have the z-index of the bar displayed by the widget set so it covers all the FLickr page elements, but I couldn’t set a high z-index without messing up the zeroclipboard functionality.

Percent change per year of children in households facing food insecurity from "A Daily Fight to Find Food: One Family's Story".

Data can give important insight into what’s happening in the world, but charts and numbers alone aren’t always resonant.  One way that reporters ground the numbers in a story is by finding people whose experience matches the trend.  This was the case with “A Daily Fight To Find Food: One Family’s Story,” a report that was aired on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”  The story profiles the Williamson family of Carlisle, PA as an example of the growing number of families who struggle to meet their nutritional needs.  The Williamson family, the report said, “is among those who struggle for food. They’ve been in and out of poverty for years.”  The report goes on to describe a family whose experience includes limited education, teen pregnancy and joblessness due to health issues.

While the report tells the challenges facing the family and the mechanics of how they use a combination of government support and social services to meet their food needs, it doesn’t go very deep into the connections between the different elements of poverty beyond statements like this one from a woman who runs a food pantry in the Williamsons’ community: “But Livas, of the local food pantry, says a good diet is especially important for the poor, as a first step toward addressing their other problems, with things like work, health care and education. She says it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re hungry.” Unfortunately, this left a lot of room for listeners to speculate.

Devon Mann was one of the people who questioned the food the family bought and how they used it:

“Am I the only one that has a hard time believing that you can’t feed 5 people healthy home-made meals with $600/month in food stamps? I know exactly how much I spend on groceries (food only) each month–I buy local produce when available & strictly organic meats. I buy very little canned and essentially no processed/prepared foods. What exactly are these people cooking & eating? Why is there chocolate or pop & ice pops to choose from? We choose water in our home, & yes, we often add lemon to my toddler’s delight. I’m troubled by the ignorance and waste.”

Katherine Bittner made a similar observation that was also echoed in letters responding to story that were read on the air:

“I do not fill [sic] sorry for these people. I think the story would have benefitted [sic] from finding another family where people are really struggling to with food. $600 a month is a lot of money. My family makes six figures and we don’t buy juice (water is free), rarely buy brand name products, and junk food or sweets. We stick to generic store brand food at the local supermarket and clip coupons. Maybe instead of looking for the lean cuts of meat go for the cheaper cuts of meat that you can stretch out to make stews or for less than $20 you can buy 20 pounds of rice. It’s cheaper to buy a whole chicken or whole fish. You can make more meals out of them.”

These comments are judgmental, but also show listeners struggling to understand questions left unanswered by the story.  Did the reporter fall short of an obligation to the listeners and the Williamsons to address these questions?  By anticipating some of the listener responses, the  reporter could have gotten the family’s perspective on the perceived contradictions described in the story such as growing vegetables in a household while giving their thirsty child soda or having a full refrigerator yet sometimes needing to rely on a soup kitchen for meals.  This inquiry may have offered a deeper look into the problem of hunger, not just as a gap in food resources, but also in information and lifestyle.  Asking questions about this could have helped explain this situation instead of letting comments make assumptions about these dynamics.  Given, the emotional tone of some of the comments, it is easy to see how comments can steal focus away from the initial report.

Kathryn Geiszler, another commenter, exposed another challenge with using a single example to depict broader trends:

“I am surprised they need so much food. And, I agree with another commentor [sic] that if she is able to spend so much energy driving around with her food gathering routine, how come she can’t work? I am a single mother of two kids. We get by usually on $50 per week on food. We have no TV servie [sic], no HDTV, old video game consoles, ripped clothes, and taking the car anywhere depends if the gas gauge is near the bottom or half full. My little boy has Autism, so I stay home to school him. Not much luck even if I was a PhD looking for a job. 20% unemployment in my rural county. Moving to a better area would require thousands of dollars I don’t have. Therefore – I make do with the situation I’m in. It would be nice to get government help, but for some reason, I don’t.”

One role of the news is to help  the person reading or listening place herself within the events of the day.  From Geiszler’s description of her experience, her children may be very well be counted in the 17 million children living in households where getting enough food was a challenge.  However, because the report was framed in the Williamsons’ story, she may not feel the Obama administration’s request to Congress for $10 billion in additional spending on child nutrition programs, also mentioned in the report, as something she should engage in, either as a supporter, critic or inquirer.    Listeners may have been better served if the story was told through the lives of more families with different experiences with food insecurity to make it easier for listeners to identify with the issues instead of differentiate their experience from that of the Williamsons.

However, comments like Geiszler’s makes it easy for the reporter to talk to additional sources to get a deeper understanding of a complex issue like poverty.  While it may be unrealistic for reporters to get framings right the first time, it would be unfortunate to fail to take advantage of opportunities to report the stories or nuances that were missed.

Photo by Pam Fessler/NPR.

This has been a busy and productive week for my independent study.

On Tuesday, I interviewed Gordan Walek and Patrick Barry, who are involved with the Chicago Neighborhood News Bureau, a project of  Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC)/Chicago’s New Communities Program.  The program promotes development in 14 low-to-moderate-income communities in Chicago andnews bureau website aggregates news from these 14 communities as well as Chicago-wide news that intersects with community development issues.  Talking to Walek and Barry, I learned that the site is a visible face to reporting that has been ongoing since the start of the New Communities Program.

Our conversation surfaced the nuanced role of news produced by or in conjunction with community organizations instead of news organizations.  The news produced by lead agencies working with LISC/Chicago and by writers working for LISC/Chicago has the dual purpose of informing community members about the development projects happening in their neighborhoods and reporting the progress of these efforts to funders and the broader community interested in neighborhood development.  I thought it was interesting how Walek and Barry spoke about trying to factually report what was going on in the neighborhoods even when the stories are meant to serve specific goals.  As a result, this reporting produced some of the first web content about the communities in the New Communities Program and for communities affected by problems such as violence, some of the only stories about community response or resilience in the face of problems.

During the interview, Barry told me that he and other reporters try to use the language of  neighborhood residents to describe what’s happening there and how spending a considerable amount of time in the communities that they cover gives them a much deeper understanding of community issues and dynamics than reporters covering only the occasional story and even agency program managers.

I thought their initiative showed an interesting example of journalistic practice being applied outside of traditional media institutions and being able to serve information needs and provide insights into communities that don’t always get sustained engagement from the media.

On Thursday, I spoke with four reporters at the Tribune who wrote stories as part of the Seeking Safe Passage project.  They challenged my assumption that the Tribune would automatically cover youth violence in the wake of the street brawl that resulted in Derrion Albert’s death.  Instead, they felt that the Tribune made a very intentional decision to devote resources to in-depth, solutions-oriented reporting on youth violence in the city.

The reporters told me how they were conscious that the audience of the stories they wrote would be read by Chicago residents very far from areas most affected by youth violence and made a point to identify threads in their subject’s stories that the reporters felt were more universally resonant.  They also spoke of being very conscious of the language they used to describe youth and in being sure to describe violence in terms of the actions of the youth rather than being an innate quality of the youth.  As with the writers working with LISC/Chicago, the Tribune reporters also said they tried to use the language used by community members when writing about those communities.

Another thread of conversation in the interview that I found interesting was that most of the reporters said they could identify with some aspects of the experiences of the youth they interviewed but that other aspects were completely foreign.  I wonder if this offers the best possible perspective for a reporter, where someone is able to connect at a human level with the communities they’re covering but also able to maintain a critical perspective.  Deborah Shelton, one of the Tribune reporters, sent me a link to “Cross Cultural Reporting: Pairing Mainstream and Ethnic Media for Better Health Stories”, which describes how a collaboration between two reporters writing about mental health in immigrant communities used the different orientations of the reporters around the story to produce a nuanced story.

Finally, the Tribune reporters, a multi-racial team gave me a really interesting and nuanced account of how race mediates their reporting experience.  They said that a good reporter can get the story independent of racial barriers but that race did play a clear role their experiences reporting.  They also described how being able to spend considerable time reporting in a community gave them the opportunity to learn what they had missed in previous stories.

Preparing for next week, I e-mailed Cliff Kelley about an interview.  In particular, I’m interested in talking to him about cross-media collaborations like the Tribune-sponsored Seeking Safe Passage community forum which Kelley moderated along with his general perspective on his radio show’s role in meeting community information needs.  I also took a peek at the New News report by the Chicago Community Trust.  This report is from last summer, but a new version should be available soon.  It gives a good overview of innovators in the online media space, some of which I’ve already spoken with and some that I should follow up with.  Finally, I plan to get in touch with the coordinators of the youth reporters in the Community TV Network program to shadow the youth as they do their reporting.

Photo by Calsidyrose via Flickr.

For reporting, I often need to fill in my notes with a recording I made of an interview.  This means I need global hotkeys so I can start/stop the player while I’m in my word processor or note-taking program (tomboy or zotero).

VLC has native support for global hotkeys, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get them to work to map <ctrl>+<alt>+<space> to play/pause with Ubuntu 9.10.

My workaround is based on VLC global hotkeys in Ubuntu with Compiz. But, I use VLC’s remote control interface to control the player instead of the HTTP interface as suggested in the howto.

• Make sure netcat is installed. We’ll use this to send controls to the remote control interface of VLC. $ sudo apt-get install netcat
• Open up the CompizConfig: $ ccsm
• Click the checkbox next to Commands and then click on Commands
• In the Commands tab, type echo “pause” | nc localhost 7777 -q 1 in the Command line 0 field (or the first available field if you have other commands). This command tells the play to toggle pausing the playback.
• In the Commands tab, type echo “rewind” | nc localhost 7777 -q 1 in the Command line 1 field (or the first available field if you have other commands). This causes the player to rewind playback a few seconds.
• In the Key Bindings tab, click the Disabled button in the row labeled Run command 0 (or whatever command you specified in the previous steps) and set the hotkey to whatever you want (I use <ctrl>+<alt>+<space>).
• Repeat the previous step for the rewind command (I used <ctrl>+<super>+<left> because <ctrl>+<alt>+<left> was a hotkey used by another program).
• Close CompizConfig.

Then, if I run VLC with both the normal and remote control  control interfaces, setting up the remote control interface on port 7777 on my local machine, my global hotkey will work:

$ vlc --extraintf rc --rc-host localhost:7777

You might want to create an alias for running vlc with these options by editing ~/.bash_aliases or ~/.bashrc:

... alias vlctranscribe='vlc --extraintf rc --rc-host localhost:7777' ...

I’m not quite sure how all the remote control commands work.  For instance, I thought the rewind command would play backwards at the maximum rate, but instead it jumps playback back a few seconds.  I thought the fastforward command would do the opposite of rewind, but instead it slows down playback incrementally.  So, for now, I just have play/pause and jump backwards hotkeys, but that’s enough to make transcribing interview recordings much, much easier.

Gentrification and sustainability are topics for stories that always seem pretty popular in my urban affairs reporting classes at Medill.  In particular, many students, myself included are interested in the way that these issues impact economically under-resourced neighborhoods or certain racial or ethnic groups.  As we begin to report stories on these topics and these areas, we’ve been instructed to scour the archives of publications like the Trib and Sun Times to see how similar stories have been covered in the past, to make sure that the story hasn’t been covered to death or that  we don’t take the same angle and to get background information.

Community-based media isn’t put on our radar as much, and can be harder to seek out (for instance, it isn’t often in the library databases we search), so in this post I want to look at two examples of community media and how they might inform my urban affairs reporting in the context of reporting across social divisions and experiences.

On face, “Who is Logan Square?”, which appears in this weeks Chicago Reader is a nice piece of arts reporting.  Rather than just informing readers about and promoting  the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, it describes conflict between event organizers over how the event represents Logan Square’s diversity.  But, it’s the context of the article within the particular issue of the Chicago Reader that makes it really interesting.

The story quotes artist Victor Montañez over his concerns about the geography of the fest:

And he really dislikes the way the fest map and program divide the approximately three dozen exhibition spaces into two groupings, south and north. “Art should bring people together,” Montañez says. The arrangement looks to him like a “divisive strategy” to create a Wicker Park-esque hipster scene in one area while concentrating people of color in the other. The list of curators and artists showing in the north section is heavier on Hispanic names.

Montañez is also critical of I AM Logan Square, a public-relations centered nonprofit-organization started by Ald. Rey Colón (35th) that was granted the key role in organizing this year’s fest.  In the story, Montañez said the organization’s leadership, from outside of Logan Square, contributed to organizing an event that doesn’t equally reflect different neighborhood demographics.  “This year we got I AM Logan Square – which is a studpid name because there’s no such thing, it’s we are Logan Square,” Montañez said.

Criticism by Montañez is balanced with quotes from the alderman and a volunteer who organized shows on the main stage who both say fest organizers took great steps to prioritize diversity in the event.

While reporting on gentrification and changing neighborhood demographics is done regularly in various Chicago publications, it’s really interesting that it was run in this particular issue of the Reader.  Since the event is next weekend, the article could have still previewed the event had it been run next week.  However, the story appears in the same issue as “The Reader’s Guide to the Pitchfork Music Festival.”

While writer Deanna Isaacs uses the phrase “alleged Pitchforkification” to describe Montañez’ concerns that Latino artists and musicians are downplayed in the Logan Square events lineup, the story clearly appears in a publication that includes readers who are interested in this weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival and may be attracted to similar aspects of the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival.  This confluence of a story about neighborhood conflict and interest in a certain kind of art and culture puts information in front of readers who may attend the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival without examining it through a critical gaze.  It is unclear, however, whether this framing reinforces or challenges the idea that Latino residents of Logan Square and people who enjoy Pitchfork-style programming are mutually exclusive.

Whether or not Montañez is right about his concerns over the arts festival’s organizing, Logan Square is a neighborhood undergoing demographic change and the accompanying identity crisis that often comes with these changes.  The Reader’s reporting and editing do a good job of helping residents and visitors see how this struggle to define neighborhood identity can be reflected in events and entertainment.

Photos via the Chicago Reader.

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It
by Ken Auletta

I had to read Googled: The End of the World As We Know It for one of my classes. The book frequently explains how Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs changed the way that media advertising works. To understand a little better how these things work from a content producer’s standpoint, I’ve added a few ads to this blog as an experiment.

So far, I’ve been disappointed that the ads aren’t very relevant or informative. I’m looking forward to see how NowSpots (Brad Flora’s local ad platform) shapes up.

Photo by adamknits via Flickr.

Full disclosure: I love libraries and they been a big part of my life through childhood. So, it’s hard for me not to find fault in Fox News Chicago’s story “Are Libraries Necessary, or a Waste of Tax Money?” simply on the grounds that it questions the relevance of libraries.

Both the state and many Chicago-area municipalities are facing severe budget problems, so it’s a legitimate role of the press to ask tough questions about how the government spends its money, even though there seems to be some issues with the framing and the balance between information and provocation in this particular report. In the context of this independent study, however, I want to look at how this report fails to acknowledge that libraries (in function and to a lesser extent funding) are local institutions and that what libraries look like and whether their benefits outweigh their costs may vary dramatically between communities.  Given that structure, it’s important to report on libraries as a more local issue or take great caution when reporting about them more generally.

“With cash-strapped states behind on so many bills, it’s quietly, and not so quietly, being debated,” the report begins.  The web version of the story identifies it as part of a special report on the Illinois Budget Crisis.  The story goes on to explain that 2.5 percent of property taxes go to fund libraries, but perhaps makes the assumption that all the viewers understand that property taxes fund local government infrastructure like libraries or public schools and that these funds are largely independent of state money.

The Chicago Public Library 2009 annual report shows that over $92 million of the library’s revenue came from the City of Chicago while around $8.4 million came from the State of Illinois.  Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget recommends about $19.5 million in general fund grants for libraries, down from over $27 million in fiscal year 2009.  So, the elimination of libraries has a much more profound direct impact on local budgets than the state budget.  So, a more appropriate framing for the story would be whether a given municipality should reduce funding for their library system.  Or, the report should draw any link between reducing local budget expenditures to reducing state budget expenditures.

The report included a debate with Jim Tobin, president of National Taxpayers United of Illinois, weighing in on the side of reducing library funding, at least through property taxes.  One of his arguments for de-funding libraries is that new technologies (first lower-cost paperback books and now the Internet) are making libraries obsolete.  Again, the framing of the story doesn’t acknowledge that the role and value of libraries may differ, not just from library system to library system but from neighborhood to neighborhood.

According to a report released in July 2009 by the City of Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology, one-third of Chicago residents used Internet access at a public library.  The same report cited that one-third of these users cited lack of computer at home as a reason for accessing it at a library.  However, library Internet use is not distributed evenly across Chicago’s population.  Young people and African Americans are more likely to use the Internet at a public library.  Furthermore, as this map from the report shows,  residents of some areas are more likely to use the Internet at the library than others.

Library Internet Use by Chicago Community Area from Digital Excellence in Chicago: A Citywide View of Technology Use.

So, while the rise of the Internet as an information source may make libraries less relevent (and funding-worthy) in some communities, it may make their relevence greater for others.  I feel a more useful framing of the story, taking into account this and other differences in the role of library resources for  different communities, could be to ask, “does this neighborhood need a public library?”  or “how do we  best use library funds?”

Last week I spoke with WBEZ’s Torey Malatia about the station’s Pritzker Fellowship program whose first two fellows, nominated by community organizations, will soon begin intensive practice at the station.  Malatia said one of his hopes for the program was to counteract a dynamic where reporters would hit up the same sources again and again for recent developments in areas of ongoing coverage such as CHA tenant issues.  Perhaps, he said, bringing in reporters from different communities or without the training and mentality that comes with a j-school education, would lead to more varied sourcing or different ways of approaching, framing or identifying a story.

One thing that I thought was particularly interesting about Malatia’s analysis of the shortcomings of WBEZ’s reporting was that tight deadlines led reporters to go to the database for sources rather than finding new sources or framings for the story.  This led me to two questions: is there a way to alleviate some of the pressures of deadlines or is this an inevitable constraint of journalism?  Do newsrooms have to make a trade-off between timely coverage of news and in-depth reporting?  How much time does it take to prepare a segment on a show like 848 anyway?  Could someone develop a database that helped avoid using the same sources over and over or helped reporters find the most relevant sources?

Photo by tronixstuff via Flickr.

This is what I use and this is what I want. And its a work in progress.

OS

• Ubuntu Studio 9.10
• Windows 7 (Mostly just to run Adobe stuff now)

Hacking

• Eclipse + PyDev + EGit
• GeoDjango + PostGIS
• gvim – For the times when Eclipse is to heavy, particularly when hacking on my netbook.

Multimedia

• Adobe Premier Pro CS4
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Haven’t really tried other photo management software.  I like the way this handles metadata and has exporting presets which are good for Medill’s finicky CMS.

Writing:

• OpenOffice – Yawar’s live word count script is pretty indispensable.

Communications:

• Google Voice – I forward a Google Voice number to my mobile dumb phone, my newsroom desk phone, and a Skype number.  This works great because I can give out one number to sources and be able to get their call anywhere.  Google Voice is also indispensable because I can easily record the call by pressing 4 any time during the call.  This is a really helpful feature for when I get a call back from a tough-to-reach source and I’m not in a place to take notes on paper or laptop.
• Skype – I use this in conjunction with Skype Call Recorder (by far the best and most intuitive Skype recording software I’ve used) to record outgoing calls.  I configured my Skype account to show my Google Voice number in caller ID so sources don’t get confused about how to call me.  I like Skype Call Recorder because it starts recording immediately, but then reminds you to ask for permission and whether you want to keep recording or delete the file.  So, you never have to worry about accidentally turning recording off.  Also, it just stores the recordings as MP3s in a simple and intuitive file/folder hierarchy.
• Tweetdeck

Information/Notes

• Tomboy – really useful notetaking program that lets me move bits and pieces of information around fast.  I use my Dropbox to sync up my notes across computers.
• Dropbox
• Zotero – I use this for storing and annotating web research and PDF reports.  I’m going to try storing audio recordings of interviews in here too.

Sources

• Delicious – I use this to quickly consume my web research.  I like it because there are extensions for both Firefox and Chrome that make tagging really easy.
• Google Contacts – Google Contacts is not awesome, but it is a central location for contacts and integrates with Gmail, Google Voice and Thunderbird which I use for contacting sources.

Wishlist

• More useful Google Contacts – I would really love a short URL for contacts that I could easily drag into my Tomboy notes or word docs so I can easily link to contact info when I mention sources but not have to pepper my notes with a million phone numbers.  It would be even more awesome to have a better Google Contacts API so someone could write plugins for Tomboy/Open Office to quickly/automatically link mentions of names to their contact record.  The current Google Contacts API really only seems useful for syncing client apps with online contacts.  I’d also like a quick-add that parses out contact information copied from web sites.

Photo by jm3 via Flickr

Since writing my proposal for my independent study, I’ve realized that I need to contextualize and re-frame my inquiry a bit.  First, I want to add a little historical context of the fragmentation of contemporary media that I’ve picked up, then I want to describe some of the mis-assumptions that I’ve made about the nature of audiences in Chicago.  Finally, I want to lay out a new direction for my inquiry.

Fragmented Media, Fragmented Audiences, Fragmented Communities

In his book “Post-Broadcast Democracy“, Markus Prior wrote:

“Accepted generalizations about political behavior – that the actions of politicians and the reporting of the news media affect what people consider to be important political issues, that people can reach meaningful voting decisions even in the absence of comprehensive political knowledge, that party identification is a major determinant of vote choice, to name three – become ingrained in the literature as invariant patterns.  Yet as the environment changes, so might the behavior. “

One critical change in the media environment that Prior identified is the movement away from watching network news broadcasts as cable television brought more viewing choices for media consumers.  This shift, Prior wrote, made political information less accessible to those who didn’t neccessarily seek political information from the media they consumed.  He described this shift this way:

“It is more difficult for the same signal to get through to people who take advantage of increased media choice to avoid exposure to political information.  From the point of view of these entertainment fans the flow of political information has become much weaker in recent years as media choice has increased.”

Changes in the media environment, Prior writes, have polarized information consumers between news junkies and entertainment fans, which in turn affects electoral turnout and voting behavior resulting in more polarized elections.

Even before the nightly network news lost its role as a central point for American consciousness, changes in the media environment split apart more diverse audiences.  In “Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace“, Philip Napoli wrote:

By the same token, advertisers may, for various reasons, transfer their advertising dollars away from a certain medium, which may undermine its financial viability.  For instance, the introduction and rapid diffusion of television led many national advertisers to abandon radio as an advertising vehicle (Baughman 1997; Dimmick and Rothenbuhler 1984).  As a result the overall structure and function of the industry changed dramatically.  Radio stations abandoned their efforts to appeal to broad diverse audiences, because television had become the mass-advertising vehicle of choice.  Instead, radio stations focused on appealing to narrow audience segments, thereby cultivating relationships with smaller or more specialized advertisers seeking niche audiences.  In doing so, radio station content changed dramatically, moving away from broad appeal to content with more narrow appeal (Baughman 1997; Napoli 1998a).  Thus today few radio stations attempt to program to different audience segments at different times of the day or to appeal to a broad audience base throughout the day.  Instead, individual radio stations maintain the same, narrowly targeted program format all day (MacFarland 1997), which reflects their focus on delivering a narrow and specific audience demographic to advertisers.

Many new media innovations that dramatically increase the amount of available information and its pervasiveness and technologies such as the The Huffington Post’s Social News, which helps users identify relevant news content based on the news consumed within their social networks, seem to continue this trajectory of media and audience fragmentation.

In the context of this media fragmentation, what then are its implications for media trying to meet the information needs of a city like Chicago that is fragmented along racial, economic and geographic boundaries (to name a few)?  Even with these barriers, reporting happens.  Stories about violence in neighborhoods on one side of the city get filed by reporters living on another for readers, viewers or listeners in the suburbs.  The plight of the homeless gets covered, even if the majority of those getting the report are unlikely to be directly affected.  These reports seem to reveal an underlying truth not always reflected in the social construction of the city: it is filled with millions of people with diverse experiences who must live together, whether their interests are competing or shared.

Why does this reporting across geographic or social boundaries happen?  Some would say “because it’s news.”  Even if this is the case, the information carried with the news is more than just the who, what, when, where and how.  Along with these things comes a framing of how the audience member understands their city and other people in it.  The news helps people make decisions about how they will (or if they will) vote, what they buy or use, where they live or even how they interact with their neighbors.

As a new journalist, I am told time and time again how these are exciting times,  how the media environment is wide open or malleable.  Given the huge responsibility of media to meet information needs, now must be a time for journalists, particularly new journalists to ask (and hopefully answer) some tough questions about how we report across boundaries.  I’ll get to these questions soon, but first, I want to address a misunderstanding in my original independent study proposal.

Audiences vs. Demographics

In writing my original proposal, I made the mistake of thinking of and referring to audiences and demographics as the same thing.  This is an easy thing to do.  If one views media in terms of an audience marketplace, where audiences are bought and sold to advertisers, there is a tendency to identify audiences by their demographics rather than their purchasing goals.  Napoli wrote, “One study found that when media buyers had access to product-purchasing variables, they largely ignored the information in favor of traditional demographic variables” even when “a growing number of studies show that demographic data in fact do a poor job of predicting purchasing patterns, accounting for as little as 2 percent of the variance in consumers’ purchasing behavior.”

So audiences are best thought of as those looking to do something.  For advertisers, their desired audience is people looking to hire their product.  For journalists, it should be people looking to hire the journalists’ information to do some useful work in their lives.

Even with this clarification, reports across demographics aren’t transparent (or self-aware) about the work the information can do, and who is employing it.  Again, new journalists need to be aware, not only of the utility of the information they create, but also to whom it is useful.

Big Questions

These are the questions whose answers I hope will help me understand why reporters report across social boundaries, the implications of this reporting and how it can do it better.  I hope to write a story around each of these questions this quarter.

Who do we think we are?  Who do we think you are?

Who is Chicago media?  Who do the different pieces of Chicago identify as their audience?  How did they measure this audience?  When and why have they reported about those outside their audience?  Who reports for these media players?  How has the background or experience of these reporters affect the stories?  What information do communities need and how do they get it?

I intend to spend the next week looking into these questions.  I’ve asked a few professors about the existence of a “map” of Chicago media with little success, but I’m going to try to check on the IMC side to see if anyone has anything like this.  I found that Community Media Workshop has created a Chicago Online Ethnic Media Database that I also want to review.  It looks like some folks tried t0 map Chicago media, from an activist perspective, but it seems like the project is likely out of date.  Still, it might be useful to contact the map’s original compilers.  I don’t have very much interest in trying to create or update this work, because of how quickly the information becomes stale, but I do want to look at this to get an idea of who to interview for my inquiry.

What are the hazards (or merits) of reporting across boundaries?

How do reporters report on communities that are not their own?  How do they remain accountable to those communities?  Do different communities think the media does a good job of reporting the things happening in their community to others?  What interest do communities have in this kind of reporting?  How does the format of contemporary media products impact reporting across boundaries?

My interview with Torey Malatia of WBEZ brought up a very obvious, but often overlooked and interestingly circular impact:  he said that a study by the station of non-listeners found a common complaint is that reporters just didn’t get the stories right.  If reporting about an issue or community in a way that doesn’t capture the depth of the issue keeps people from that community or connected to that issue from tuning in, it seems like it will be harder to have accountability and feedback for future reporting or access to broad and diverse sources.

Father Bruce Wellems spoke to one of my classes last quarter and described the impact of MSM reporting about gang violence and teen pregnancy as amplifying those dynamics in Back of the Yards.  I need to review my notes from my initial questions for him and get back in touch to see if he can clarify or put me in touch with youth who can tell me about their experience with media and their community.

I know some folks who have worked with Community TV Network and Street Level Youth Media and these might offer additional perspectives as both organizations aim at empowering youth to produce more relevant independent media.  Why is there the need for such media?  What work should this media do?

Finally, my colleague Zak Koeske did a lot of reporting around an event looking at how the media covered youth violence.  Revisiting some of these sources might be helpful for my study, as would talking to Zak about what he learned.

Many of these leads are youth-oriented.  There seems to be a lot of traction for youth media, but I don’t think youth are the only ones in Chicago who feel misrepresented in the media, or aren’t getting served by media that’s available to them, but other groups don’t seem as visible or vocal.

What does the future look like?

What might a media that does a better job of connecting people through stories and information look like?  What challenges exist in the current media environment for realizing these new models?  What place does existing media (if unchanged) play in new models?

On Thursday, I interviewed WBEZ’s General Manager Torey Malatia, ostensibly about the station’s new Pritzker Fellowships.  Though I have not yet been able to synthesize and transcribe the interview, the conversation did help me clarify how some media organizations frame the questions I hope to explore.  Interestingly, the conversation touched on some of the same themes as a 2008 interview with Malatia reported in this article about Chicago Public Media’s Vocalo project.

Brad Flora of Windy Citizen seems forward thinking (especially with the recent News Challenge win), but I’m not sure if WindyCitizen represents the future that I’m curious about (since the current version of the site still seems to privilege controversial news rather than illuminating news).    Still, I think its still important to talk with him. I wonder what a Windy Citizen mashup with something like News Mixer or  Stack Overflow (which feature different models of interacting with articles or building reputation) would look like?

Finally, Community Media Workshop seems to have spent a lot of time around some of these issues, though their model seems to be more about connecting communities with journalists or amplifying the voices of communities rather than transforming journalistic practice (although I could be wrong about this perception, perhaps reading their New News report will help).  I’m definitely curious about who they see as their audience for the News Tips blog.

Photo by Leonski via Flickr.

Someone, presumably who knows who I am because of Defiance, Ohio asked me what I thought a good strategy to stay informed and conscious about what’s happening in the world without being inundated with biased or incorrect information. This question was strangely aligned with things I had been thinking about and speakers and readings in my How 21st Century Media Work class at Medill.

Here’s my answer:

I’ve been doing some reading lately that has made me think about issues
connected to your question. Jack Fuller, a long-time Chicago journalist
recently wrote a book called “What is Happening to News: The Information
th Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism.” He makes two assertions
that really helped me make sense of the current media moment. First, we
live in a world where we have a ton of information and technology to
push that information at us in a relentless stream. This, Fuller says,
creates a consistent response in the human brain – it puts us in a state
of emotional excitement that makes us respond more to emotional information.

As people who create information (news organizations, advertisers,
musicians) have to compete with more information, they try to leverage
the way our brains work by creating information that we will respond
emotionally to and thus pay attention over all the other noise. The
heated debates between pundits (or wingnuts) on cable news are a good
example of this.

Fuller’s second contention is that we live in a time where people are
less trusting of authority (whether it is information from the
mainstream media, the government, academics, experts, etc). This, he
says, is a huge shift from the generation that came of age during WWII
who saw a structured, hierarchical society as a feature that helped win
the war. This observation was really important to me because it made me
rethink the idea that progressives were necessarily exceptional in our
questioning of authority. We may just be guided within a larger dynamic
of skepticism. Certainly there is as much skepticism on the right as
there is among progressives. The main difference is who those groups
define as the authorities to be questioned.

So far, I haven’t really answered your question, but I think Fuller’s
two points are important for how I now think about news and information
in the world. Before I finally get down to an answer, I want to talk
about what motivates me to seek out information. A big part of that is
the idea of radicalism in the Ella Baker sense of the term:
understanding and addressing the social condition at its root. To get
to this understanding or action, it takes a lot of inquiry, questioning
and dialog, part of which can happen through media.

- From what you wrote, it sounds like knowing what’s happening in the
world and using that information to get a sense of injustice or paths to
justice is important to you. Obviously, consuming information and
talking to people about that information is a big part of that process.
However, many issues are complicated and nuanced and information
providers don’t always do a good job of capturing the things they report
with depth or nuance. Still, I think its important to interact with
information in a critical but not necessarily adversarial way (which is
hard given what I mentioned earlier about a lot of information being
presented in a way that has high emotional impact – in many cases that
means in an adversarial way).

As a journalism student I realized how easy it is to insert bias,
inaccuracy, narrowness, or prejudice into a story, not because the
reporter or news outlet is evil or wants to be manipulative but because
of other factors. Maybe the journalist’s experience (or lack of
experience) keeps her from asking all the questions about a story or
seeking a full range of sources? Maybe sources aren’t willing to talk
to the journalist because of their perceptions about the media or the
journalist (warranted or not). Perhaps there just isn’t time, space or
resources to fully explore the story. In any case, I think both media
producers and others interacting with media and information are best
served by trying to get a complete picture. Instead of asking “is this
right or wrong”, it might be more productive to ask, “what doesn’t make
sense?”, “what questions aren’t answered?” or “how might the
writer/publication’s experience mediate what I’m reading/seeing/hearing?”

Besides providing nformation, another thing that information providers
do is to frame issues. They define what the “sides” are to a debate (or
whether there’s a debate at all) and what the “left”, “right” and
“center” of an issue are. Given the perceived need to make information
have emotional weight, I think its really easy for information providers
to pick voices and framings that are loud and provocative but aren’t
necessarily the most productive or relevant. I think people interacting
with information shouldn’t just assume the framings we’re provided. One
of the best techniques I’ve been taught as a student reporter is to ask
sources, “what person/perspective who is on a different side of the
issue do you most respect?” rather than just picking the most outspoken
voices. If reporters aren’t doing this, then those interacting with the
media need to.

Finally, as much as I feel like a “fuck the news” mentality isn’t very
productive and is sort of the same as prescribing to the idea that
“ignorance is bliss”, I think it’s a mentality that’s completely
understandable. However, I think it’s important to separate concerns
about the accuracy, depth and nuance of information from feelings of
being overwhelmed by information. As I’ve mentioned a lot already, much
of the information that we interact with today is designed to illicit an
emotional response, in many cases, one that borders on stress. This can
be really, really overwhelming. There was a great episode of a Boston
Radio show called “The Theory of Everything” that I heard once that I
can no longer find but maybe you can where the producer talked about
being overwhelmed by trying to stay informed about the Iraq war. I
think it’s okay to take breaks from media and to accept that there are
limitations to how much information we can synthesize both rationally
and emotionally. Failing to do so can hurt our ability to use
information constructively as much as complete ignorance can.

The short answer, as best I can say for myself is this: consume
information in an emotionally sustainable way, ask critical but not
necessarily adversarial questions and seek out additional information
that helps answer your questions.

Photo by martinhoward via Flickr

This is my independent study proposal.  It’s a little messy, but I’m posting it here to get feedback and to connect with other journalists and others invested in communities who have similar concerns about media narratives across social boundaries.

There is great focus in the Medill curriculum on audience. However, information and cultural narratives often gets transmitted beyond the intended audience of a story. Furthermore, the experiences and perspectives of a reporter, the community being covered in a story, and the audience of the story can be dramatically different with regards to race, class and other dynamics that divide a city like Chicago. For instance, does media coverage of youth violence in Chicago help lead to solutions to end violence or does it only solidify incomplete perceptions of different groups of youth and different neighborhoods in the city?

How is the way a story is reported by journalists or interpreted by the audience mediated by these divisions? Are there stories whose impact spans different communities in Chicago? How does one report these stories in a way that resonates across social divisions? How do current publishing models limit broad-reaching resonance of a story? How might emerging models better reach socially segregated audiences? How do people who don’t consume traditional news media get information to answer questions and solve problems in their lives? Can reporting help erode social divisions?

This independent study will explore these questions through monitoring and analysis of the Chicago media ecosystem and documented conversations (meta-reporting) with professional journalists, community-based media and community advocacy or activists groups.

While my experience at Medill has thus far helped me build a solid foundation of reporting skills, I feel like I am not much closer to understanding how journalism can help meet the information needs of communities in overcoming challenges facing them. This is an important personal, academic and professional goal for me and I feel this study can bring me closer developing vision for new models of journalism.

Proposed Syllabus Required Reading

Students will be expected to consume media from across the breadth of Chicago’s media ecosystem every week from papers like the Tribune or Sun-Times, to broadcast nightly news, to public media such as WBEZ’s 848, to independent media such as The Chicago Reporter, local papers such as the Skyline or Austin Weekly News and blogs and Twitter feeds from community groups and members. Special attention should be paid to responses to media including comments, letters to the editor and blogging about media coverage.

Assignments

All assignments will be submitted as public blog posts that will allow other Medill students, instructors and readers in the community at-large to comment on the student’s observations.

Every week students must submit a 300-word or longer response to a story from the student’s readings in the Chicago media ecosystem. The response should explain how explain how the story either effectively or problematically frames a community issue for different groups of people across a variety of experience or how the reporter acknowledges or balances her personal experience and culturally-mediated perceptions (or fails to) in reporting the story.

Throughout the quarter, the student will have conversations with professional journalists, independent media makers, community media organizations, and community action groups about reporting stories across different social experiences. The student will be required to approve the people to be covered with the faculty advisor twice in the quarter.

Students must submit five stories documenting these conversations. Print stories should be at least 500 words long. Two of the five stories must be multimedia stories (audio, photo slideshow, video or other interactive) of 2 minutes or comparable depth for non-linear formats.

Evaluation

The faculty mentor will evaluate media responses based on the clarity of argument, consideration of multiple perspectives and relevance and uniqueness of the story and media outlet selected.

The stories documenting conversations with participants in Chicago’s media ecosystem will be evaluated for quality, originality, relevance and media production in a manner similar to second quarter MSJ reporting courses.

The mentor should post responses as comments on the blog to help encourage other responses.

Week 1 Conversation proposal for weeks 1-5 due
Media response post due Week 2 Media response post due
Story #1 due Week 3 Media response post due Week 4 Media response post due
Story #2 due Week 5 Media response post due
Conversation proposal for weeks 6-10 due Week 6 Media response post due
Story #3 due Week 7 Media response post due Week 8 Media response post due
Story #4 due Week 9 Media response post due Week 10 Story #5 due