Ari Melber has written a great synthesis for The Nation about the new study “A Tale of Two Blogospheres” produced by a consortium of researchers from Harvard, Yale and Berkeley.

The study details the the structure (and resulting impact) of the left vs. right blogosphere or as they put it, “evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs.” This study completely coincides with the theories we lay out and the stories (and lessons learned) of Firedoglake, Feministing and Talking Points Memo that we detail out in our book Beyond The Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media.
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Please help spread the word! Send this flyer to your S.F. pals…

Join me and Tracy for a conversation with three high-impact independent media producers about how social media platforms are powering vibrant, diverse journalism experiments. On hand will be Steve Katz, the publisher of award-winning investigative magazine Mother Jones; Kevin Weston, the Director of New Media and Youth Communications at ethnic news network New America Media, and Susan Mernit, editor and publisher of community news hub Oakland Local. Learn how these pioneers are thriving in the rapidly shifting media environment and shaping independent journalism for the future.

Time: 6:00-7:30 PM Thursday, March 18th
Location: The Women’s Building, Audre Lorde Room, 3543 18th Street

Special thanks to our co-sponsors:

Media Alliance, G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, Bay Area Video Coalition, Mother Jones, New America Media, Oakland Local

Conversation about the book continues to build as we recover from our Chicago party and gear up for the next bash in New York on Thursday:

• Our old digs—In These Times—excerpted the book’s “Beyond Pale, Male and Stale” chapter.
• Over at RH Reality Check, feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte interviewed Tracy about the importance of the netroots for the weekly “Reality Cast” podcast
• Leonard Doyle of UNFree Media considers the international implications of the media models we describe. “Beyond the Echo Chamber has the potential to change the US national conversation about progressive media and the future of journalism and it has lessons too for the world outside,” he writes. “Britain’s newspapers are so loud and opinionated that they [leave] little room for bloggers to stand out. But by sneering at participatory media, these outlets risk being left behind by emerging players.The same is true around the world where online media is still relatively in its infancy and progressive journalists, bloggers, producers, activists, readers, and policymakers are only now emerging.”
• On MediaShift, I suggest how our model of the four network layers might help media makers understand how to better evaluate the impact of their work.

We wrote the book to spark conversations about media strategy and evaluation, so it’s exciting to see people taking up our ideas and grappling with them. Stay tuned for more feedback!

Over the past week we’ve been featuring a series of visualizations that examine how media makers can work with various layers of networks to increase their impact. These layers include:

• Networked users
• Self-organized networks
• Institutional Networks
• Networks of Institutions

For our last visualization, we’re taking a closer look at how outlets can engage and collaborate with users at every stage of production, from conceptualization to distribution to evaluation.
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Hello again! We’re on the third layer of our Four Layers of Networks taken from our book Beyond The Echo Chamber where we are not only defining, but visualizing how media makers can interact with each of these networked layers for maximum impact. So far we’ve described and visualized the first two layers:

• Networked users: See Monday’s post.
• Self-organized networks: See Tuesday’s post.

The next two layers move from ad hoc networks to more durable and deliberately organized networks.

• Institutional Networks
• Networks of Institutions

Today, we zero in on “Institutional Networks.

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