Last February, Tracy and I launched the book at the New America Foundation; this month, I spoke there again on a chapter of the book which was excerpted in the recent anthology, Will The Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights, edited by Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard. Watch the discussion here.

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.

Here are a few excerpts from Melber’s piece.

“One of the most striking findings is structural: liberal blogs provide audience participation options at triple the rate of conservative sites. That means visitors to progressive sites are more empowered to contribute entire posts to the “front page,” and more likely to have their contributions or comments highlighted before potentially hundreds of thousands of readers.

According to the authors, the netroots’ early embrace of deeper participation platforms, coupled with progressive bloggers interest in mobilizing fundraising and specific actions, helped prime the tactics and habits that supported the Democrats’ later web dominance (see chart).

The survey data does show that progressive bloggers were far more demanding of their readers.

One out of three liberal sites made direct fundraising pitches, and almost half asked readers to take some political action, according to a section of the study analyzing the top sixty-five blogs. On the right, however, only one out of twenty blogs pushed fundraising, and fewer than one out of five issued “calls to action.”

In the book, we tell the “impact story” of Firedoglake in a chapter titled “Assemble the Progressive Choir.” It demonstrates how FDL has successfully built a site that combines analysis, great acts of journalism, transparency, direct relationships between the bloggers and the community, a community forum, calls for action and fundraising (for the site itself and for political campaigns) to become one of the most successful progressive political blogs today.

I hope that both the blogosphere and the rapidly evolving legacy progressive media take heed from both the study and our book and continues with the much needed experimentation and implementation of community engagement, building and mobilization that will continue to build the overall impact of their journalism and messaging. It’s good for business. It’s good for impact.

This image summarizes the significant differences between the left and right blogosphere analyzed in the new study, “A Tale of Two Blogospheres.” (Click for larger image.)

Jessica and I had a wonderful interview on KPFA’s Morning Show with the wonderful host Aimee Allison (@aimeeallison) (and current Progressive Women’s Voice Fellow!) It was a lot of fun, even when we contended with a couple of tech/new media grumps. Take a listen. It starts at the 1 hr. 35 min. mark..

Cross Posted at The Media Consortium.

A few weeks ago, The Media Consortium held its annual member meeting in NYC. Despite the raging blizzard that hit the city the day of the meeting (what timing!) over 70 individuals from more than two dozen organizations traveled from across the country for the two day event. This meeting marked the fifth anniversary of The Media Consortium, which was a great time to reflect on where we’ve been as an organization and a sector and how we are going to move forward together. The meeting gave us a sneak peek of the big changes to expect for the progressive media sector during the next few years.

For many of those who were been present at the first meeting of the consortium in March 2005, and watched/helped the consortium evolve to where it is now, this meeting marked a significant change. A few years ago, the idea of editorial collaboration among members was a big no-no. Imagine exposing sunlight to vampires. That’s how quick some ran away from that conversation. A few years ago, the understanding around community building/engagement was frowned upon (not just by media consortium members, but by the journalism sector at large). But my, how perceptions have changed.

Now the ideas of collaboration and engagement are not just viewed as important, but are seen as essential to the future success, impact and sustainability of the progressive media sector. These topics were a major focus for the meeting agenda and in small-group and one-on-one conversations among meeting attendees. This drastic change has come about for two reasons.

1) Technology has broken down the barriers of collaboration, fostered more relationships among media producers, and encouraged their actual engagement and communication with their users.

2) The economic situation facing many organizations has given them no choice but to find new creative, collaborative ways to work together and with their users. This may be the only good thing that has come out of the economic troubles that journalism organizations are facing.

2010–>2015
The Media Consortium performed an illuminating exercise with our members where we asked them to project what kind of media organizations they would like to evolve into over the next five years. As a baseline, I laid out four journalism “sectors” that I see developing now and in the future. I created short definitions for each of these sector and their corresponding roles/values each of these sectors provide in a short slideshow.

Next, I asked members to place themselves within these four sectors in terms of 1) where they see themselves now and 2) where they see themselves by 2015.

In 2010, most of the cluster of organizations placed themselves in the “Pure Play” journalism field, but by 2015, this sector is empty. Looking ahead five years, most groups formed a cluster around “Hybrid Media Making” and “Journalism + Action.” Drastic, no?

For many journalism producers and organizations, this is a big break from the traditional role of the press to only “observe and report.” This shift into working/engaging with a community and deliberately moving them towards action will probably be seen by some as the opposite of journalism and its last steps towards dissolution. Instead, I think this reflects the correct next step for progressive media makers. While retaining their journalistic integrity, progressive media makers must demonstrate to their allies AND to their users the social and political impact of their journalism. Users (networked consumers of information/news) are no longer passive receivers of content. They want to be active players in producing and distributing the content. More and more, they also want help in knowing what to do with the content.

What’s Next
Progressive media makers will have to decide for themselves how far they want to take the “action” part of their work. Will they create spaces for users to self-organize? Connect them more strategically with organizations like Care2 or Change.org that suggest and organize actions? Or are there other options to pursue? Time will tell as TMC members and others experiment in this area.

In fact, TMC will be working and experimenting with our members on this idea and others, including moving into mobile, editorial collaboration, revenue generation opportunities, community engagement and more through our 2010 Incubation Lab program. We’ll be reviewing and reporting on the results of these experiments as we implement them. So keep checking in to see how the progressive media transforms itself from the inside out for a new media landscape. We’re sowing the seeds now for progressive media sector of 2015.

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

By Tracy Van Slyke and Josh Stearns
Cross-Posted at SaveTheNews.org

If 2009 was a year of study and debate about the future of journalism, 2010 must be a year of action. We must come together around a core set of ideas to create a better ecosystem for sustainable and high-impact journalism. Based on the various reports and conferences from the past year, we’ve compiled the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and suggest some initial steps to begin moving forward.

Increase experimentation

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” wrote Clay Shirky in early 2009. “The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments … No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

Journalism organizations and individual producers need to carve out the time and people power in areas of journalism, community building and business models. The Media Consortium’s report The Big Thaw: Charting a New Course for Journalism emphasized the importance of experimentation. “By bringing together technologists, entrepreneurs and media-makers to increase experimentation, leverage their collective power and build audiences as communities, independent media can not only rise with technological tide, but also achieve the goals of inclusivity and fairness they espouse.”

In May, Free Press released Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy, (a precursor to its current SaveTheNews.org campaign). A key recommendation was a federally funded research; development fund for journalism. Based on models like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, Free Press argued that, “Just as government invests in medical research to heal the ails of the body, we need government to invest in experimentation with news models to heal the democratic ails of the body politic.”

The Knight News Challenge is one of the only funding mechanisms for new kinds of experimentation. But it is one foundation with limited resources. In the coming year we need a more coordinated funding approach, that brings significant new resources to the table to support journalism innovation and experimentation for both new and existing journalism projects on a local and national level.

Broaden diversity

Roughly 15 minutes into nearly every public future of journalism event held this year, the same thing happened. Someone, somewhere commented (or tweeted) a variation of, “Where are the women and people of color? If the future of journalism is white dudes over 50, we’re screwed.” The repeated lack of diversity at these events is an illustration of the serious disconnect that many media makers still have to their own organizations’ future.

At a recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) workshop, Bryan Monroe, former editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines, argued that new media looks too much like the old media:

“I am going to talk about how white the Web is, and the threat that reality represents to journalism for our increasingly diverse nation,” he said. “Journalism is not dead. Not by a long shot. It is, however, in the process of painfully shedding its old skin for a new one. But, in the battle for its soul between old media and new media, something important is being lost: we are now living in a new America… If our newsrooms lack the broad ranges of culture, backgrounds and life experiences reflective of our society at large, how can we even hope to know what to cover and what appeals to a rapidly diversified marketplace?”

One of the key voices missing from many events and reports this year was that of ethnic media. These media outlets have important lessons to teach regarding the future of journalism. In general, these newsrooms have built strong ties to their audience by giving local people a voice and covering issues that mainstream media consistently overlooks. In his FTC testimony, Monroe points to a recent poll by New America Media that argued “Local, community-based Asian and Spanish language newspapers are also growing — up 16 percent in a recent study — as they cover immigrant and ethnic communities.”

If we are going to build a more diverse media and support new models in ethnic media, we must include diverse (women and people of color) voices at the table when we discuss the future of journalism. We must also engage more strategically with ethnic media and integrate a more diverse set of journalists and bloggers into our journalism endeavors.

Creating engaged communities??

Evan Smith, editor of the newly launched Texas Tribune, describes the project’s ultimate goal as “civic engagement” and has said that he wants their readers to do more than just read; he wants them to get involved. Western Citizen – which launched the same week as the Texas Tribune – seeks to, “Combine investigative reporting with online tools to empower citizens to discover their own opportunities for direct action and to publicly deliberate on finding solutions to community problems.”??

Today’s audiences are not only media consumers. They are active media producers that recommend, share, watchdog, create and more. But there’s a lot of disagreement and confusion about how to genuinely bring audiences into a journalism organization’s DNA.

As The Big Thaw notes, “Traditional journalists often do not like to mix community organizing with journalism because it can contaminate the credibility of the reporting. However, as the competitive landscape shifts from scarcity to abundance of information and voices, the ability to “cover” the news objectively is no longer the most valuable key competency. Building active communities among users is exponentially growing in value.”??

“The Young Turks”, an online television show, demonstrates the power of engaging their audiences in distribution. The Young Turks anoint their audience as “Web Soldiers,” asking for help in strategically distributing the show through social networking sites from Facebook, to Twitter, to Digg. Fast Company recently noted that “The Young Turks” audience is competitive with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, or the now defunct Lou Dobbs program on CNN.

Last, but not least, the great irony for many journalism organizations is that while they employ expert reporters, rarely do they turn the focus on themselves. Journalism producers must get comfortable with actively sharing their impact with their community. One former Rocky Mountain News reporter said it best: “Journalists cannot be objective about our right to exist.”

Cultivate collaboration??

In late November, Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst announced a groundbreaking new partnership that would jointly move the companies’ 50-odd publications across multiple digital platforms. Historically, journalism outlets have fiercely protected their own editorial and business turf (even the idea of linking to other sites was an anathema a few years ago). But with the exponential impact of the online revolution, the insurgence of new voices and journalism projects online, and the crashing economy, the journalism organizations have been forced to reevaluate their opinion.??

It’s important to recognize that there is a fine line between collaboration and consolidation. Over the past year, some local television broadcasters have been quietly pooling news production, and in some cases completely merging news staff and operations. This points out the need for clearer guidelines and oversight of these deals to help foster innovation and collaboration that protects the public interest and supports accountability journalism.??

Fear of losing editorial independence and the scoop or being targeted for spreading “talking points” are all prevailing concerns. But editorial collaborations can be done a number of ways. For example, Publish 2 recently described one such example “..a group of journalists from Mother Jones, The Nation, Grist, The UpTake, TreeHugger, and other news organizations have applied the collaborative newswire model to a major international news story, forming the Copenhagen News Collaborative to curate the best coverage from their own reporters, editors, and analysts covering the event.” Projects like this allow publishers to cross-pollinate their audiences and reach new audiences they might not have had access to before.??

Overall, editorial or business collaborations should allow organizations to share on costs, resources, and information. Editorial collaboration among practitioners can also lead to ground-breaking experimentation, new forms of journalism production, expanded audiences and overall increased impact. In 2010, journalism organizations need to develop lessons to help streamline future collaborations while funders and investors should promote positive and creative collaborations through targeted financial support.??

Make media mobile?

Nieman Journalism Lab recently profiled the New York Times’ R&D department’s experiment with moving content delivery and communication among users and platforms. “The R&D group is obsessed with the ability to seamlessly transition among web-enabled gadgets. They’re not convinced that the future will land on a single, multipurpose contraption,” writes Zachary Seward. “Instead, they predict consumers will connect to the Internet through their cars, on their televisions, over mobile networks, and in traditional browsers, while expecting those devices to interact and sync with each other.”

Nowadays, many journalism producers understand that news and information will increasingly be an “anytime, anywhere, anyone” industry standard. But how content is transferred across platforms, who’s accessing it (and communicating through it) and how much it will impact both the bottom line, is still in play. In fact, moving into mobile must integrate the four previous concepts laid out above: experimentation, diversity, community engagement and collaboration.

Journalism organizations need to experiment with new forms of content production, delivery and interaction to fully embody a news industry that reflects our 21st century environment. They must recognize that diverse communities use and access content on different platforms. And through mobile, producers have an amazing opportunity to not only foster deep interaction with the community, but also interaction among community members, an increasingly important value for users. Teaming up with other journalism organizations, technologists, nonprofits and innovators will be key to ensuring that organizations will be able to move forward in this important arena.

This roadmap for the year ahead is nowhere near complete; we are at a critical fork in the road. It’s going to take new models, and new ways of thinking about the old models. It’s going to take policy changes, and the political will to make them. It’ll take new voices, and a willingness to listen to them. In 2010 we need to move beyond talking points and begin taking action. The future of journalism is bright, but it is also what we make of it.??

Top 10 Journalism Resolutions for 2010

Journalism producers in 2010 must:

1. Use in-person meetings and online spaces to facilitate sharing results of experiments and the how-to’s of collaborations.?
2. Create hubs where journalists and technologists can build new solutions together, just like massive groups of people contribute to open source software.
3. Include more women and diverse voices at the table discussing the future of journalism.?
4. Foster deeper working relationships with ethnic media and a diversity of journalists/bloggers. Support initiatives like the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Parity Project.
5. Fight for the reinstatement of the minority media tax certificate program and update it for the digital era.
6. Develop and share best practices and models for community engagement
7. Invest in telling journalism’s story of impact and the creation of impact definitions.
8. Develop resources to help streamline collaborations and criteria to evaluate their impact on the public interest.
9. Fight for policies that create a level playing field for nonprofit and commercial journalism organizations.?
10. Work with funders and investors to coordinate and increase support for experimentation and strategic collaborations.

Add your resolutions to this list in the comments section or on Twitter with the tag #JRes2010.

So is this what they are up to? It’s so pretty! Makes my little media-nerd heart go all aflutter. No sense of the revenue option/angle here. But dang… look at the clarity, interactivity, sharing and immediacy angles. Ignore the bikinis…

Today ends the Federal Trade Commission’s two-day, (mis)appropriately titled, “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” summit. More appropriate: How Will Journalism Evolve in the Internet Age? Don’t like that? Send in your suggestions.

David Carr’s beautiful eulogy for the old media system and acknowledgment of the new, sums up journalism’s turning point quite gracefully. But from what I’ve been following with the summit yesterday (twitter hashtag: #ftcnews), the old guard was still doing a lot of kvetching.

In tandem with speaking at the summit, Arianna Huffington had a great, no-holds barred, post yesterday on why the old media (read: old white guys) need to get over themselves, let go of the past and start assimilating the possibilities that the future offers. But I think we can take Arianna’s post a couple steps further.

Let’s go in, shall we?

The Current News Ecology+What’s Next
Arianna lays out the reasoning and strategy behind aggregation. While it’s nothing new, it’s a succinct (and fun) description.

…We love it when someone links to one of our posts, or excerpts a small amount and links back to us.

Most sites understand the value of this and the way the link economy operates. It’s why HuffPost gets hundreds of requests from news outlets asking us to feature their material and link back to their site. They understand that the web is not a zero-sum game and that consumers love the freedom to be able to follow where their interests — and the offshoots of a story — take them.

“That’s why I could only roll my eyes when the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson wagged his finger at Google, and complained that it “encourages promiscuity” among news consumers.

Heaven forbid! Let’s be honest, while promiscuity is not good in relationships, it’s great for those looking for news and information. Trying to deny news consumers as wide a range of options and viewpoints as possible seems shortsighted — and ultimately self-defeating.”

Let’s get a little naughtier. We don’t want users just hopping into our bed once. We understand that they might even jump from bed to bed, but we always want them coming back to us again and again for more. And what’s going to bring them back? A little creativity, being a full-fledged partner in the bedroom and the big O! as in “Oh! I really need/like/hate/want to share that reporting/opinion” or “Oh! I want to be/am part of the creative media making process” or “Oh! this is inspiring me to take action.”

So how do we deliver all of that and more? Robust aggregation is the first step. But that’s only solving the issue of bringing together the latest in daily reporting/news. What about what happened a week ago and how that might effect a month from now? How do we work for and with users to stitch this information together that over time will become not just a list of links, but an overarching story that contains links, additional synthesis, data, visuals, reporting and analysis. Media producers need to creatively develop formats and platforms that pull together all the daily bits of news into a long-term narrative for their users that is consistently updating, synthesizing and making sense of news and information over the long-term. This could take many shapes: timelines, wikis, linking, videos, maps or a mashup of all.

For example, it’s been widely acknowledged that Talking Points Memo was the leading journalism organization that broke and pushed the US Attorney scandal story a few years ago. But when you go to their site and search, “Gonzales” (as in former Bush appointee attorney general Alberto Gonzales) all you get is a list of disconnected links to past reporting.

What if news organizations compiled visual timelines of their reporting (as well as aggregating others) that displayed the entire narrative of one issue in one fell swoop? (TPM actually has a basic text timeline of the attorney scandal, but you have to go diffing for it.) Or a wiki that stitched together those critical reporting moments, breaking news and analysis in an easy to read and consistently updatable format? This strategy could also be opportunities to bring users into the mix. Designated members could join in on the fun in putting together the top timeline moments or participate in developing the narrative/information in the wiki and be annointed to make sure it is consistently updated. Or develop an interactive and evolving visualization(s) based on data compiled through the length of the reporting. Any of these formats individually or combined together are appropriate for both short-term news events (i.e. Copenhagen) or long-term issues (the climate crisis).

For example, take a look at the New York Times “skimmer” just launched today as an early prototype. In fact, this is probably just coincidence, bc it is such an important news story yesterday/today, but check out how the top 6 articles relate to each other around Obama’s decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

Now imagine a tool that included a bundle of different Afghanistan-related content organized/threaded together over the last 12 months (or 12 years) that could be searched, reorganized, tagged, constantly updated, synthesized and more.

What does this do for a media producer? Let’s play it out a bit. First, the media producer is solving “filter failure.”, a big issue that both users and media organizations are consistently facing. Second, think about the SEO opportunities which is always good for advertising. Add in the opportunities to develop a deep and committed group of members which enhances to the journalism value chain (Slideshow of The Big Thaw: See Slide 23). And maybe this is the kind of added/needed information that outlets can charge for lead to new opportunities for new revenue generation.

In other words, it could give the media maker and users the big O!

On Business Models/Revenue Generation
As I’ve mentioned before, looking towards the future, we’re not going to find one overall tactic that will change business models forever. Arianna takes a couple paragraphs to knock down the idea of pay walls or micro-payments (different than micro-fundraising) and then notes some of the other experimental options on the table.

Meanwhile, Stephen Brill’s Journalism Online reportedly has 16 different payment schemes that it plans to offer its member publishers. Nieman Lab recently listed six payment models that Brill has trademarked, and that news publishers can employ.

These include: High activity Pay Points (a metered model); Selected Content Pay Points (a partial paywall); Time-based Pay Points (charging for new content only); Enhanced Service Pay Points (charging for special features); Market Access Pay Points (charges based on a users location); and Preview Activity Pay Points (allowing previewing of paid content).

Sure, free news content is not a perfect system but it’s a lot like what Churchill said about democracy: it “is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” That’s the reality. Free content is not without problems. But it’s here to stay, and publishers need to come to terms with that and figure out how to make it work for them.

I like to use the metaphor that revenue models are like cooking a stew.. Everyone has similar stock to start from, but will have to test and experiment with a combination of different of ingredients to create just the right flavor for their users. Or in other words, media producers will have a swath of similar and basic options to start with, but build/test out a combination of different revenue generating options that build on an organization’s strengths, capabilities, and added-values. Of course, organizations aren’t going to know what the perfect recipe is off the bat. It’s going to take some time to experiment and find just right the mix of ingredients.

In addition, when “traditional media” folks talk about business models or revenue generation, they talk about it as if it is completely separate from what’s being done in terms of journalism models, experimentation and community engagement.

In fact, how journalism organizations integrate new models of reporting and storytelling, involve and build its community in the process, respond to what users want/need, and the resulting business models are all the heart of the future evolution and survival of journalism. The Media Consortium’s recent study The Big Thaw: Charting a New Course For Journalism lays out four important questions for media producers to ask themselves:

• How is the playing field changing?
• What new capabilities needed to succeed?
• What needs can be met, problems solved or desires fulfilled?
• How to structure organizations to “capture value”?

The last two questions are key to developing the correct mix (or stew) of revenue generation opportunities.

The Future Is Network-Powered
And last but not least, Arianna starts touching on the heart of our current media environment.

News is no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news. It’s become something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.

In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.

Instead of “community-powered,” Jessica and I have dubbed this new environment “network-powered.” Media producers need to think about how to strategically harness and engage in both informal and formal networks to increase their audience, enhance their relevance and build their impact. (Once again, this connects to a compatible mix of revenue generation opportunities). This is going to require media producers to have new mindsets and capabilities. The user/audience member isn’t always going to come to directly to the outlet. How do you reach the user/audience member? How do you engage them to spread and use the content through their networks of peers, colleagues, etc.?

For Beyond the Echo Chamber, Jessica and I developed a list of “four networks layers” that media organizations must engage. More to come soon on those, but here’s the list and as an added bonus, short descriptions.

• Networked Users: Media makers must learn to work with users who are connected to multiple networks and can create, distribute, amplify, and serve as ambassadors for the media producer’s content.
• Self-Organized Networks: Users can work together to form ad hoc networks around unifying elements such as shared issues and/or breaking news. Media makers can tap into these networks to spread relevant content, follow breaking trends, and cover collective action
• Institutional Networks: Media makers can also harness more durable networks of users–hosted or organized by institutions–to share content, offer crowdsourcing opportunities, and develop fundraising relationshiops.
• Networks of Institutions: Media makers and outlets cna form collaborative networks to jointly report on complex issues, and structure new models for innovation and collaboration.