Over at the NAMAC site, you can read my update on the events that Tracy and I have been hosting around the country in conjunction with our book tour:

On March 18, NAMAC hosted a lively “Media Impact Summit” that drew together leading public and independent media makers, funders and researchers to share and hone assessment strategies. This was one in a series of summits that I have been partnering with Tracy Van Slyke of The Media Consortium to organize since February. So far we’ve held them in five cities: Chicago (hosted by the MacArthur Foundation), New York (hosted by the Center for Media, Culture and History), Miami (as part of the We Media conference), Los Angeles (hosted by the Norman Lear Center) and San Francisco (hosted by NAMAC). We have two more summits scheduled by mid-April: Washington DC (hosted by the New America Foundation) and Boston (hosted by the Association of Independents in Radio).

The goal of these structured discussions is to gather relevant approaches to evaluating public interest media in order to share information and build tools with stakeholders in the field. The research is also designed to inform broader discussions among funders, outlets and policymakers about how best to support public interest media in the networked age.

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Priceless:

We’re finally here! Today we examine and visualize the last of the four layers of networks taken from our book Beyond The Echo Chamber. In this post, we offer not one, but two visualizations that illustrate how media makers can integrate and interact with the final network layer: Networks of Institutions.

As a quick recap, over the last few posts we have examined and visualized three of the four layers including:

• Networked users: See Monday’s post
• Self-organized networks: See Tuesday’s post
• Institutional Networks: See Wednesday’s post

Networks of Institutions bring together all of the previous layers—users, self-organized groups and institutional networks—to form the most complex and powerful of all the networked layers.

With this layer, we break down the walls preventing journalism and media organizations from working together and with other organizations. In fact, we argue, in this new networked media environment, when faced with increased competition and reduced resources, collaboration and cooperation are key to impact.

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Welcome back to the second in our blog series on the Four Layers of Networks. Taken from our book Beyond The Echo Chamber (buy your copy today!), we are not only defining, but visualizing these four layers. They include:

• Networked users: See Monday’s post on this first and foundational layer.
• Self-organized networks
• Institutional Networks
• Networks of Institutions

Today we take a look at how media organizations must strategically think about integrating and interacting with the second layer: Self-Organized Networks.

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Neiman Journalism Lab has a great post this a.m. in reaction to a new Google Lab release: a Google News timeline view,:

which gives users the ability to see and scroll through headlines, photos and news excerpts by day/week/month/year. The sources of this data can also be customized to include not just traditional news sources but also Wikipedia, sports scores, blogs, etc. It’s a fascinating way of interpreting the news — not something that is likely going to replace a regular old Google News headline view, but an additional way of looking at things.

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? (I’m not the only one to wonder this). Why not a newspaper, or even a collective like Associated Press (which seems to prefer threats to creativity)? Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing?”

I had the EXACT SAME REACTION when I saw the Google Timeline yesterday. Progressive media peeps–it’s time to put the creativity hat on. So I have a proposal, something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

I think we should do a multimedia timeline of our collective economic coverage over the past 8 years–maybe focused on a single issue or two (i.e. predatory lending, Wall Street regulation) and input coverage from video, text, audio, blogs, reports, etc. from key progressive media sources. I think this effort could do a couple things:
a) Everyone keeps asking where the financial press was during this economic crisis. Well, the progressive media has been reporting furiously on the economic meltdown for years. Let’s show it. Let’s prove that what the “lefty” press was reporting and predicting came true.
b) We’re wondering how to tell this very complex and sprawling story to our audiences in a way that makes sense of the past and sets the stage for future reporting. A visual, searchable component that connects the reporting together into a larger narrative and makes it comprehensive for our audiences is a critical informative tool.
c) The opportunity factors: There’s an opportunity to start playing/integrating new storytelling and journalism formats. (We need to start figuring it out soon). This is an opportunity to leverage and utilize individual content into a collective, larger story and the opportunity to reach a potentially larger audience. And this could be an opportunity to have our audience be part of the creative process. Can our audience crowdsource to research, identify the reporting to go in the timeline?

What do you think of this idea? What would you add or argue with?