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.

The panel I moderated at the Free Press conference was featured on the O’Reilly Factor! (Of course, they were far more interested in Robert Greenwald then me.) But to get such a reaction from Mr. O’Reilly about the conference and the “lunatic left”-this is what we call impact! Or under our impact measurements–we’re calling “Poking the Bear.”

Definition
Poking the Bear: Purposefully mocking or baiting a conservative figure in order to create pushback that generates buzz.

Robert opened his presentation by letting the audience know that Fox News was taping in the room. “They’re going to try to aggressively attack some of the high-profile guests here, so get to know them…say hello to the liars, distorters and people at FOX news…and a particular word to Bill O’Reilly, who’s too frightened to come out, ‘Hi Bill.’” And guess what they did?

Check it out. 30 seconds in.

Sitting in the opening plenary for the National Conference for Media Reform, where Free Press Executive Director Josh Silver just gave a rousing call to action. Next up: Adrienne Maree Brown, executive director of the Ruckus Society, callling for “media that exists not to inform us, but to reform us.”

Brown says we need to move from reaction to proaction. This is the 5-year anniversary of the coining of the term “media justice,” which she says is fundamentally about who is producing media. The upcoming Allied Media Conference, says Brown, is all about bringing tools and skills back into the community: video-blogging, creating web zines, low power radio production, etc.

Policy battles are going local: The Media Action Grassroots Network serves as a hub for smaller media justice and communications rights groups. Brown called for mutual respect between the organizing and media reform communities. To the journalists, she says “ambivalance and complacency only serve injustice.”

And now (drumroll) Larry Lessig:

A bit of humor–he starts with a parable about a flaw in an Intel chip. What’s the deep connection between this flaw, and a the deep flaws in the operating system for our democracy: the Constitution?

The question: How does our OS handle “2+2=4″ questions about the government.

Lessig spent the last decade fighting one flaw in the operating system: the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He filed a lawsuit which made it to the Supreme Court, but it was a “total bust” despite the fact that there were opponents to the bill on both the right and the left. After a decade he had a “flash of genius”–government also screws up elsewhere, as in the case of nutrition recommendations or dealing with climate change. These seem like easy answers, 2+2=4 questions, yet the government still gets them wrong. How come?

The founders of the country wanted independence from corrupt governement, notes Lessig. They sought independent representatives. But they failed. “Many who were drawn to government went for the most venal reasons,”  says Lessig, “There’s no golden past here.”  And while the politicians may be better now, the problem is worse for the nation, because government is more pervasive. The return from good legislation is higher than the return from good competition. The number of lobbyists has doubled because there is now more opportunity.

Nationally, he says, only 19 percent have a favorable view of Congress: “The people’s house is not. This is exactly the dependency our framers were worried about.”

The powerful using their power to capture their government is the problem, and as long as there is private funding of public elections that problem will continue: “Crony capitalism.”

So what does that have to do with media reform? He asks: When we succeed here with media, will the problems go away? Or, can we succeed with media if these problems of dependency don’t go away?

No.

Government corruption is key to media reform, says Lessig. Public funding of public elections needs to succeed alongside media reform. That’s why he has helped to launch the Change Congress project.

Dependency: Lessig says, think of an alcoholic. The alcoholism isn’t the most important problem; it’s just the first problem he needs to solve before he can solve all of the others. Our alcoholism: “a dependency on the way money has corrupted this government.”

On to Bob McChesney:

Remember the days before 2003? “No more!” says Bob. “We stand here understanding that we have won numerous victories to slow down our adversaries,” he says. Now it’s time to look to the future, to see where this media system is actually going to go.

He introduces Congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in history elected to the House of Representatives. He shows a clip of Glenn Beck asking Ellison if he is “working with our enemies”–an example of corporate media run amok.

Ellison says we can’t be an informed public if all we’ve got to listen to is “that guy.” “A strong, independent, diverse media is a key to a strong democracy,” he says. He talks about the history of the conservative movement: starting think tanks, backing scholars, creating studios to “pump out the message,” creating what the world will one day know as “hate radio.” This organizing came to fruition during the Reagan years, but as “much as he made me sick,” says Ellison, he’s nothing compared to today’s “CEO president.”

The problem isn’t just FOX, says Ellison. The problem is that there are not enough actors out there in the marketplace of ideas. He wants to support LPFM, even newspapers. “It’s not a mistake that the First Amendment contains within it the “freedom of the press”…once the people have the information, they know what to do with it.”

“I think Congress is finally getting it,” says Ellison, citing the recent Senate decision on media ownership. “Politicians tend to see the light when they feel the heat.”

Ellison is convinced that we are at a pivotal moment of change. “Welcome to the beginning of a great movement in our country that is emerging that is all about the common good…you all are the vanguard.”

“This is not the New Deal, this is not the ’60s; this is something brand spanking new,” he says. “We have to go forth together to create a new America that our forefathers could only have as an aspiration.”

Ok–this is too much.  Can’t we call monopoly? 

Update: Today’s New York Post has more details.. Here are a couple choice quotes.

But the complexity of the different scenarios being discussed – which range from a Yahoo!-AOL tie-up that would outsource search advertising to Google, to a new company spawned from Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN assets and News Corp.’s MySpace – has got Wall Street hoping for the simpler Microsoft-Yahoo! merger to prevail.

Regulatory issues are also at the forefront of any deal between Microsoft, News Corp. (which publishes The Post) and Yahoo!, but sources said figuring out a structure for the $42 billion deal is a larger concern.

The recent announcement that the FCC is pushing up a vote on media ownership in local markets to mid-December has sent the media reform movement into overdrive.

A related piece from the Publish2 Blog, “The New Media Consolidation,” might explain some of the urgency of commercial media owners to grab up new outlets. It notes in part:

What Google discovered was that consolidating all of the search behavior on the web is actually a form a media consolidation. It used to be that the content and the distribution were one and the same — newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. — Google was the first media company to successfully arbitrage the separation of content from distribution.

But search is only half of the equation. Search has consolidated the allocation of attention for people who know, generally or specifically, what they are looking for. The other half of the attention allocation equation for media is people who don’t know what they are looking for — they just want to know what’s NEW. I may be interested in technology, or celebrity gossip, or foreign affairs, but I’m not looking for anything in particular. I just want the news.

This is why the online news market is heating up. This is why Google has started to develop the Google News product after letting it run on automatic pilot for so many years. This is why Digg has captured everyone’s imagination — it has the attention allocation power of search, but applied to news.

But there’s a problem with these two approaches to media consolidation — they remain separate.

In one corner you’ve got all of the capacity to create content, from traditional media brand networks to citizen media consolidators, all the way down the long tail to independent blog publishers.

In the other corner you have the aggregators, from search to audience-powered social news, increasingly dominating how attention gets allocated to all of this content.

It seems unlikely that the the big media players are going to be content with half the pie.

And so this separation is starting to dissolve, e.g. Conde Nast acquires Reddit, Google starts hosting news wire content, Forbes acquires Clipmarks, Digg hosts massive comment threads that dwarf what you find on the original content items.

This is where consolidation converges, where content creation meets attention allocation — new media companies are realizing that they have to do both.

This is why, as Jeff Chester notes in a recent Nation article, the idea the the Web can serve as an antidote to consolidation is naive at best. “The growing consolidation at the core of the digital media business, ultimately will result in a handful of companies controlling the revenues for all of online media–blogs, social networks, search engines, mobile communication and (especially) news and information sites. This should be of concern, especially to progressive idealists who hoped that the Internet could pose a challenge to the ‘old’ media monopoly.”

Here’s my point: both of these versions of consolidation are largely bypassing the progressive media sector. While individual progressive media projects have benefitted from traffic driven to them via search engines, digg, etc., legacy progressive media outlets have had limited success in either penetrating the ranks of consolidated commercial media or partnering with the digital powerbrokers. There’s work to be done.

a short monthly column on media and politics that Tracy and I coauthored for In These Times:

Media Pundit or Media Critic?

In his new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, Jeff Cohen, founder of the preeminent media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), offers readers an insider’s look at the soulless world of corporate media.

Cohen’s book, a fun read, bucks the dryness of most media criticism. It’s chock full of stories about his interactions with TV pundits (you’ll find yourself cheering at some of the transcripts), examinations of the corporate media’s self-interest, and his own struggles to work in and outside the system at the same time.

Starting in the ’80s, Cohen and FAIR fought tirelessly to fact-check the corporate and right-wing media. After initially reluctant guest appearances on CNN’s “Crossfire,” he eventually embraced his role as an on-air personality. His mission: balancing out the din of the right-wing and centrist pundits on cable news with strong and true progressive voices.

“For two decades, I’ve been preoccupied with one issue above all others: that both ends of the political spectrum get their say in the media,” Cohen writes. “The issue haunted me at FAIR. It haunted my TV career. It haunts my dreams. One reason (among many) that I worked so hard to retire George W. Bush in 2004 was my nightmare that a defeated John Kerry would be hired by cable news to represent ‘the left’ day after day on a TV debate show.”

In 1995, after being considered for one of Crossfire’s new co-hosts and then shunted aside for a less progressive voice, Cohen joined Fox News’ “News Watch” as a regular guest. He then embarked to MSNBC, where his work for Phil Donahue was spiked over post-9/11 fears that the show was too liberal and antiwar.

While the influence of the Internet is steadily growing, cable news and their offspring (CNBC and CNN Headline News) continue to be the places where political messaging is shaped. Cohen’s book reminds us that a battle still needs to be fought on the television airwaves and, through his victories and mistakes, he shows how to confront the challenges we face.

a short monthly column on media and politics that Tracy and I coauthored for In These Times:

TxtPower

Wondering what tools progressives can use to increase political engagement in ’06? Check your pocket. The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press reports that 66 percent of American adults now have cell phones, and 32 percent of those between 18 and 29 say they “couldn’t live” without them.

According to MobileActive.org, a group that tracks cell-phone activism around the globe, “Mobile phones have emerged as a campaign organizing tool across traditional socio-economic and cultural boundaries.” Callers have used text-messaging to sign petitions, coordinate seemingly spontaneous gatherings (known as “smartmobs”) and engage in citizen journalism. In San Francisco, Mobilevoter.org is working with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee to launch a cell-phone assisted voter registration drive, And FrontlineSMS.com helps NGOs reach out to targeted communities in developing countries. Check out the Mobile Messaging Awards at 160characters.org in late May for a glimpse at emerging text message applications.

Our So-Called News

Just when you thought television news couldn’t get any worse, information has surfaced that there’s a good chance you haven’t been watching the news at all.

The Center for Media and Democracy has identified 77 television newsrooms over a ten-month period that have broadcast Video News Releases (VNRs) produced by such corporate types as General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One—without disclosure to the viewers.

According to the group’s report, “In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients’ messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research.” Combined, these 77 television stations reach more than half the U.S. population.

In an effort to clamp down on fake news, the media reform organization Free Press has started an online petition to demand that the Federal Communications Commission strengthen disclosure requirements and penalize news outlets that violates such regulations. To sign the petition, go to http://action.freepress.net/campaign/fakenews. To read the full report, go to www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary.