Matt Carlson, Associate Professor at St. Louis University

Matt Carlson, an associate professor of communication at Saint Louis University, was set to announce a collaborative research project that would “connect a lot of dots surrounding news metrics and digital distribution platforms.” He wanted to examine journalism’s embrace of real-time audience data by shining a spotlight on “all the different actors involved, from reporters and editors and news management to engineers and salespersons at data analytic firms to the audience on the other end.”

But first, he needed to find a term that tied everything together. “Measurable journalism” was the solution.

In a special issue of the academic journal Digital Journalism, “Measurable Journalism: Digital Platforms, News Metrics, and the Quantified Audience,” nine researchers explore the implications of these technological and cultural shifts. Carlson, who edited the special issue and wrote an introductory essay, “Confronting Measurable Journalism,” explained his interest in this topic in an e-mail to MediaShift: 

“When we think about measurable journalism, we need to keep in mind all the parts that go into it without privileging one over another. Often discussions of news metrics focus on technology, but it is equally about human actions that direct technology to do x and not y.

A concern I have with measurable journalism is when what can be measured takes precedent over what should be measured. These are sophisticated technologies, but they can only ever get to what people do. What we can’t know is what news audiences think or why they do what they do. I am always worried that user data becomes so fetishized that we forget it can only ever be a partial representation. We talk about such complex terms as impact or engagement but then we look for simple measurements.

The idea of measurable journalism can be both promising with the hope of creating journalism that is more accountable to the audience and frightening with the threat of journalists losing control over what is newsworthy. It may bring journalists and their audiences closer together or it might push economic imperatives ahead of journalism’s public service mission. Given these outcomes, what we need is vigilance and a solid understanding of all the forces in play.”

MediaShift discussed these forces in short interviews with the researchers who contributed to the special issue.

Quantified Audiences in News Production: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

Interview with Rodrigo Zamith, assistant professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

There are two main reasons. The first has to do with a professional observation: Journalism is becoming more sensitive to and powered by measurement. We see this in the rise of “data journalism” as well as the proliferation of audience analytics — the latter being the focus of much of my recent work. Those shifts have important implications for how journalism is constructed, performed and rewarded, yet the phenomenon is not yet well understood by scholars (or practitioners). The second reason is personal: I’m a nerd and think in terms of numbers. I find the tensions playing out as quantification and quantitatively oriented actors gain foothold in newsrooms to be fascinating.

What did your research show?

My contribution focused on synthesizing the current literature on audience analytics and metrics, offering new lenses for studying the phenomenon and identifying future research directions for the scholarship. Three arguments stand out in the piece: First, we are witnessing a new wave of audience measurement in journalism (following two waves in the 1930s and 1970s) that is driven by audience analytics (systems that automatically capture information about individuals’ media use). Second, while contemporary journalism is not being driven by quantifications of audiences (i.e., audience metrics), both audiences and quantification are playing far more prominent roles in news production than in the past. Third, scholars and practitioners have become less pessimistic about the impact of audience metrics and now recognize more nuanced impacts on news production as well as opportunities for using them to advance journalistic goals.

I have a new piece out (in Digital Journalism) arguing that we are witnessing a third wave of audience measurement in journalism and synthesizing the knowledge across 5 areas related to news production: https://t.co/G1Fzu3rGwo. Feedback welcome! #ddj #journalism #metrics

— Rodrigo Zamith (@rodzam) March 7, 2018

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Journalists and educators need to take analytics and metrics seriously. The measurement of audiences will only become more sophisticated and news organizations will face further pressures to make use of those data. Journalists should seek out training on how to use their newsrooms’ analytics suites (e.g., Chartbeat) and/or ask for permission to access the system. Educators need to ensure they incorporate analytics and metrics into their curricula and also provide students the opportunity to engage with those suites (e.g., integrating them into student media offerings, at minimum). In both cases, serious conversations need to be had about how to use those data sensibly — from influencing organizational coverage decisions to developing reward structures for individual journalists. I find the argument that metrics should neither be restricted to the business side nor the primary driver of journalism to be especially persuasive. Analytics are tools that can be put to good use, and that means trying to align journalistic aims like satisfying community information needs with the many data points that analytics can offer. At the same time, those tools can be misused and practitioners should therefore maintain a healthy skepticism and promote robust dialogue.

The Audience-Oriented Editor: Making Sense of the Audience in the Newsroom

Interview with Raul Ferrer-Conill, Ph.D. candidate, Karlstad University, Sweden, and Edson C. Tandoc, Jr., assistant professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

In the last decades we’ve seen an increasing quantification of journalism, spurred by the use of metrics and analytics. These metrics are effectively the new way by which news organizations make sense of the audience. Combined with the commercial urgency, the need to entice and engage audiences makes the quantification of audience news consumption a key factor to understand the current news production process. Researchers and practitioners should pay more attention to how journalism production is quantified, measured and understood.

What did your research show?

First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audience-oriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. We provide insight on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The more that metrics are part of news production and the increasing number of audience-oriented editors legitimize and institutionalize metrics. Therefore, understanding the impact of audience measurement on news work requires an analysis of these emerging roles, who act as intermediaries between audiences and the newsroom through their interpretation and valuation of audience data. The reliance on metrics and social media insights questions their capacity to capture the audience. The analytic tools are constrained by what they can measure and rely on likes, shares, number of comments and other audience metrics to define engagement. In this sense, it is user activity and behavior that becomes a proxy for the voice of the audience. This is a limited understanding of the audience, let alone having a dialog with the audience. Editors can assess the performance of their editorial choices as they scrutinize metrics in real time, but they are limited by and reliant on the technological affordances of the tools they use. We argue that this dialog is predominantly informed by metrics and therefore it needs to be understood as such. Metrics are not necessarily a valid way to measure audience engagement and should be used cautiously.

Selecting Metrics, Reflecting Norms: How Journalists in Local Newsrooms Define, Measure, and Discuss Impact

Interview with Elia Powers, assistant professor, Towson University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

My interest is in examining the ways in which journalists think about and ultimately measure their work’s impact. Impact is a buzzword in newsrooms, but there are so many ways to define the term that little can be done to move the conversation forward until there’s more clarity about what journalists mean when they talk about impact. It’s also critical for journalists to feel comfortable publicly discussing their work’s impact, because newsrooms now more than ever need to make the case to audiences and funders that civic-oriented journalism makes a difference in local communities.

What did your research show?

Interviews with journalists from a range of local news organizations in one U.S. city found that they welcome the opportunity to inform audiences and effect change, and they had no issues discussing impact with newsroom colleagues and in promotional materials. However, journalists were generally more hesitant to discuss their work’s impact outside the newsroom — in follow-up news stories, social media posts, interviews, etc. Some journalists were concerned about being perceived as too self-congratulatory or being labeled advocates. There was a perception among some participants that publicizing impact violated journalistic standards of objectivity and detachment. Additionally, journalists had many ways of defining and measuring impact, one of which was audience analytics — although many felt these were more about engagement than enduring signs of impact. Effect-oriented metrics (audience awareness, public discourse, public policy, etc) were widely considered the best to assess impact but among the most difficult to systematically measure.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

First, I propose that measurable journalism should not be limited to quantitative metrics, often the standard by which news coverage is judged. Much of what journalists want to measure has little to do with audience analytics. Second, as I argue in the article, “publicizing the impact of journalism, when facts support such a claim, is central to the journalistic process and necessary for newsrooms to justify their funding…Newsroom policies and professional codes of conduct should clarify that engaging in public discourse on impact is central to the journalistic process, a necessary part of communicating with the public, and a way for newsrooms to justify their funding rather than a sign of self-promotion or
advocacy.”

Dimensional Field Theory: The Adoption of Audience Metrics in the Journalistic Field and Cross-field Influences

Interview with Qun Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Fifteen years ago, I was a TV news anchor and reporter in Beijing, China. I was able to access both quantitative and qualitative audience information due to the nature of the show that I covered: on the one hand, we kept a close eye on the ratings because the show was a signature show in Beijing’s competitive TV news market; on the other hand, we had our ears open to the three hotline phones on which the show relied for audience members to share news tips, feedback and comments like “I don’t like the anchor’s hair!” We sometimes learned a lot from the audience information and sometimes got lost in it. The show ceased years ago, but I have never stopped wondering how the team would deal with today’s audience information in the digital age if the show was still around. This work experience and this particular question have contributed to my interest in measurable journalism.

What did your research show?

In the years that I worked in the newsroom, I already felt that newsroom practices and norms were often a result of the negotiation of different forces. In my study, drawing on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I took a historical and relational approach to embed the journalistic field into a wider media ecosystem. Particularly, the study examines how the adoption of audience metrics in news media has been shaped by influences inside and outside the journalistic field in order to understand the origin, driving forces and implications of this trend. I looked at neighboring fields adjacent to the journalistic field, such as the online advertising and online audience research fields, as well as web analytics services working with news media that I identified as the intermediate field to trace the evolution and influence of these fields. I also looked into the journalistic field itself and identified three dimensions — the techno-economic means, the subject of journalism and the object of journalism — that construct the field and serve as sources of internal influence.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The main takeaway of this study is that the journalistic field is not a static or monolithic arena. Rather, it is a social universe that is subject to and constantly interacts with cross-field influences. Therefore, to understand the root, development and effects of measurable journalism, we may need to inspect our own field and look elsewhere.

Boundary Work, Interloper Media, and Analytics in Newsrooms: An Analysis of Web Analytics Companies’ Role in News Production

Interview with Valerie Belair-Gagnon, assistant professor, University of Minnesota, and Avery Holton, assistant professor, University of Utah

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Journalism has been undergoing a series of fascinating changes for several decades. In particular, social media has challenged the ways in which we measure the success of journalism. Much of that success still rests in financial growth, or at least stability, which itself is increasingly dependent on audience interactions with journalists and the content they produce. We’ve begun moving past a reliance on journalistic or editorial intuition and instead see tangible value in understanding complex web metrics and analytics. So if the latter are beginning to drive journalistic decision making, particularly in news production and professional identity, then they are critical to examine.

https://twitter.com/journoscholar/status/969222955677908992

What did your research show?

Our most recent research shows that web analytics companies seek to understand and address news production values and norms without assuming responsibility as journalists. We think of these companies, or their employees more specifically, as implicit media interlopers. These are journalistic outsiders, more or less, who are bit more welcome in the journalistic process than previous interlopers (e.g., citizen journalists, bloggers) because of the value they add to news products. These companies also foster profit-oriented norms and values in newsrooms by introducing web analytics as disruptive, connective and routinized in news production. By offering a product that needs to be modified on a continuous basis because of changes in the structure of the web and audience behaviors, web analytics companies foster a milieu of constant experimentation with old and new products. This helps place them squarely in the middle of evolving news organizations that are turning more to disruptors and innovators as they grapple for financial footing.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Today, like many other technological innovations in newsroom, disruption increasingly comes from innovations from outside companies and individuals. As journalism evolves, scholars and practitioners need to understand more deeply what the values and practices are that these disruptive innovators bring to journalism. We’re not just talking about web analytics here, but rather programmers, app developers, drone hobbyists, and others who are interacting with journalists and news organizations in ways that are giving new meaning to what exactly journalism is and who exactly is doing it.

Engineering Consent: How the Design and Marketing of Newsroom Analytics Tools Rationalize Journalists’ Labor

Interview with Caitlin Petre, assistant professor, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Way back in 2010, Nick Denton, founder of the now-defunct Gawker Media, said, “probably the biggest thing in internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability.” Superlatives are tricky, but Denton was surely right that the unprecedented ability to measure audience behaviors and demographics is a defining characteristic of digital media — one that has major implications for the working conditions in this industry and the kind of journalism that is produced. Media scholars have an urgent role to play in helping to interpret and explain the causes, manifestations and consequences of measurable media.

What did your research show?

In the early stages of my research on the role of analytics in journalism, I kept encountering the same puzzle. Journalists at a wide range of news outlets would profess a profound wariness or even hostility toward analytics tools, often seeing them as a threat to their professional autonomy and integrity. This by itself wasn’t all that surprising: Sociological research has found that workers (especially those, like journalists, who consider themselves to possess some kind of special knowledge or expertise) often resist the implementation of technologies that quantify their performance and rank them against each other.

But even as they regarded analytics tools with suspicion and resentment, journalists didn’t seem to be resisting them very much. On the contrary, many journalists would describe feeling “addicted” to real-time analytics tools, consulting them more frequently than was required or even encouraged by their managers, and scheming about how to boost their stats.

My article aims to figure out why that is. I find that a big part of the answer has to do with something that often gets overlooked in these discussions: the design and marketing of real-time newsroom analytics tools. Newsroom analytics companies engineer their dashboards to provide a user experience that is strongly habit-forming, flattering and emotionally compelling. The resulting products are so “sticky” that explicit managerial coercion to boost traffic (which many journalists would not take kindly to) becomes unnecessary. Once journalists get hooked on looking at real-time analytics tools, they begin to monitor themselves. They also push themselves to work harder and harder in hopes of gaining ever-higher traffic.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

When we have conversations about analytics in journalism, we tend to focus on which metrics are provided: time spent or page views? Scroll depth or uniques? In other words, we assess the merit of each metric and speculate about the kind of journalism it might incentivize. But my findings indicate that anyone seeking to make sense of the role of analytics in contemporary journalism should be just as attentive to the way the data are presented, and the daily experience of using these tools, as we are to the metrics themselves.

The Elusive Engagement Metric

Interview with Jacob Nelson, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism? 

Over the past few years, a growing number of journalism stakeholders and researchers have argued that newsrooms should make “audience engagement” one of their chief pursuits. This term has many interpretations that stem from one underlying belief: Journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in the first place. However, those who hope to make audience engagement a larger part of journalistic practice need to first settle an internal debate surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and evaluated. Because the term currently lacks an agreed upon meaning — let alone metric — it has become an object of contestation. The efforts to make audience engagement central to news production therefore present an opportunity to learn how journalism is changing, as well as who within the field have the power to change it.

My latest article looks at how @wearehearken persuades newsrooms to adopt audience engagement as a goal, and the institutional obstacles they navigate in the process. https://t.co/cAXzUP5vFf

— Jacob Nelson (@jnelz) March 6, 2018

What did your research show?

My study draws on an ethnographic case study of Hearken, a company that offers audience engagement tools and consulting to about 100 news organizations worldwide. Findings show that news industry confusion surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and measured has left Hearken unable to quantify the benefit of its offerings. The news industry currently privileges measures of audience size, so newsrooms face economic incentives to pursue audience growth (which they can measure) rather than audience engagement (which they can’t). Instead, Hearken’s pitch to newsrooms relies primarily on appeals to intuition. Its employees argue that their interpretation of audience engagement will lead to a better quality of journalism, which will inevitably result in increased audience revenue as well. Though some newsrooms refuse to invest in Hearken’s offerings without proof they will yield some measurable return, others seem eager to take the chance. The success of Hearken’s faith-based approach indicates that many in journalism innately believe the profession should improve its relationship with the audience.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics? 

Hearken’s effort to spread its interpretation of audience engagement is just one piece of an ongoing public contest to determine journalistic practice. There are countless conversations about audience engagement that occur annually at a variety of journalism practice and research conferences. These conversations tend to include editors, reporters, and publishers, but rarely include employees of companies like comScore and Nielsen who are in the business of understanding how audiences behave. What makes this omission confounding is the fact that these firms are having their own conversations about audience engagement. The fact that these conversations are taking place shows that the major players within the news media environment believe that how audiences engage with media is worthy of consideration. On the other hand, the fact that these stakeholders with disparate interpretations of audience engagement have yet to come together reflects just how convoluted the term has become. How the term is ultimately defined and measured will have consequences not just for how journalists produce the news, but also what they expect of public – as well as what the public expects of them.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post What Research on ‘Measurable Journalism’ Tells Us About Tech, Cultural Shifts in Digital Media appeared first on MediaShift.

“Our plan was to take our skills as national journalists and apply them in our own backyard,” said Raja, the editor and publisher. “Let’s test the waters to see what type of appetite there is for in-depth magazine or alt-weekly-style reporting. The experiment we’re going to run is whether there’s even an audience for this thing before we then start running experiments about revenue and sustainability.”

The results of the editorial experiment were clear: Readers wanted more content and asked how they could donate. Raja and Groskopf put their reporting on hold last fall so they could focus on the revenue experiment. They held a series of business strategy retreats at their house. Raja sought out journalists who had worked at hyper-local digital startups, and business and community leaders with experience navigating the philanthropic landscape in Tyler. Those conversations gave Raja and Groskopf clarity on their direction.

“Pretty much instantly, we decided [The Tyler Loop] is going to be non-profit, not just because it plays more to our personal strengths, but also I want to challenge the city of Tyler, where we live, to show that East Texas can and will support a publication like this,” Raja said. “I want that story to then resonate nationally.”

Across the country, digital journalism startups with a hyper-local, regional or statewide focus face many of the same questions as The Tyler Loop: Is non-profit or for-profit the best fit? Within these categories, what type of classifications and arrangements are common? What revenue streams are available?

A growing number of people who lead news outlets and organizations supporting local journalism have thought deeply about these questions. Their firsthand experience and advice are instructive for anyone thinking of starting a news operation from scratch or reinventing an existing publication.

Make full-size for an interactive map of journalistic outlets and info about their business approaches (map by Elia Powers)

“It’s a Tax Status, Not a Business Model”

Matt DeRienzo is commonly the first call for journalists looking to launch a digital news outlet. As executive director of Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), a national organization that supports local journalism entrepreneurs, DeRienzo often fields questions about the pros and cons of choosing for-profit or non-profit status.

He first likes to make one thing clear: “It’s a tax status, not a business model.”

For-profits pay taxes on their net income, while 501(c)(3) non-profits are tax-exempt. A 501(c)(3) organization’s activities must be directed toward its exempt purpose and serve a public interest rather than the private interest of an owner, a shareholder or other organization. This means individuals associated with non-profits cannot share in any net revenue produced.

Being a non-profit does not relieve the pressure to build sustainable revenue sources to support organization activities. It does, however, relieve pressure to satisfy owner or investor expectations for profit that may impact journalistic and operational decisions.

That message was consistent among those who advise journalists starting news operations.

“The truth is that either [for-profit or non-profit] amounts to running a small business,” said Sue Cross, executive director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN).

Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, works with many hyper-local newsrooms in New Jersey. She said there is often a perception among for-profit journalists that “if I could just be non-profit it would be easier, but once they start getting into the weeds, they realize it’s not easier by any stretch.

“Being nonprofit in many ways is the same as being for-profit in that you have to build a business model and you have to figure out where your revenue is going to come from,” Murray said. “What we tell people is that it really depends on your community and what you think you can build there.”

“Choose a Path That Fits Your Vision and Your Skills”

Three journalists began building Berkeleyside, a news outlet covering Berkeley, California, and the East Bay, nearly a decade ago. Like Raja and Groskopf at The Tyler Loop, the Berkelyside co-founders saw a gap in local news coverage, spent six months writing news stories as a side project and focused on building a sustainable business model once it became clear that they had a sizable audience.

Unlike The Tyler Loop, Berkeleyside went the for-profit route. Co-founder Lance Knobel said he was confident that Berkeleyside could become a sustainable business. He liked the idea of “being totally in control of our own destiny” rather than having to consult with a board of directors as a non-profit. And he had concerns about finding sustainable foundation support.

“We knew what we were doing as a for-profit business as opposed to the non-profit world,” Knobel said. “Grant writing and developing a relationship with foundations weren’t things that any of us knew how to do or were eager to do.”

Knobel’s advice for journalists facing a similar decision: “Choose a path that fits your vision and your skills. Not every journalist is good at the other stuff and you need to have an honest assessment of what you are good at and what you want to devote your time to.”

Becoming a for-profit can be the path of least resistance. “We see a lot of the news organizations we work with go the for-profit route immediately because it’s so much easier for them to get started,” Murray said. “They can incorporate as a business and essentially start doing their work.”

DeRienzo, the LION executive director, said the decision often hinges on the long-term goals of the team launching a publication.

“If they really do think they have an entrepreneurial opportunity that they can make money from, you want for-profit and the freedom that comes with that,” DeRienzo said.

Knobel and his co-founders saw an early opportunity with local advertisers eager for a place to reach online audiences.

Jay Allred, publisher of the Richland Source, a news outlet covering North Central Ohio, found a similar opening to help small businesses reach local readers. Both he and the publication’s founder had experience working at for-profits. “That’s all we knew,” Allred said. “We understood that better and looked at [the Richland Source] as a for-profit from the beginning.”

Another important consideration is how long a publication’s founders plan to stay involved. Cross, the INN executive director and CEO, said entrepreneurs who “want to start something to re-sell are most likely to go with the for-profit model.”

Added DeRienzo: “If you really have a vision for something that may outlive you, then the nonprofit model might serve you better. There’s not huge profits to be made at this, and so you can earn a decent living but you aren’t necessarily going to flip it and sell it to somebody. If you build a nonprofit with a board of directors who cares about it, that could be something that could be around beyond you if you build it right.”

Yet another factor is who will be selling the news outlet’s vision to potential funders.

“If you get more excited about making a pitch to donors than you do selling advertising or services, the nonprofit route might be better for you,” DeRienzo said.

That was true for Raja, whose experiences in non-profit journalism before launching The Tyler Loop — reporting for Mother Jones and helping to launch The Bay Citizen — taught her what it takes to make a pitch to potential supporters.

“Getting them to invest in you and take you seriously, all of that feels very familiar to me as an editor and as a reporter,” Raja said. “It felt like I know how to talk to my readers and I know how to sell my story to the readers. That translates to me into I know how to sell a story to potential funders.”

Emily Dech in the Richland Source newsroom. (Image courtesy Jay Allred)

Added Allred: “If I’m coming out of a newsroom I’m a trained storyteller. I understand how to craft a narrative, and so much of grant writing is telling a story.”

Yet it’s too simplistic to say that founders with a journalism background most often prefer to start as non-profits and those with a business background as for-profits.

“I’ve seen very strong business-oriented people become non-profits,” INN’s Cross said. “Sometimes they are most clear-minded that this is not a viable commercial business if you are producing public-service news.”

What’s the “Core Mission”?

News outlets that have a public-service mission and primarily do original reporting often prefer to be non-profits.

“Many commercial news organizations have a public-service component, but it’s not their core mission, it’s part of their mission,” Cross said. “Non-profits tend to start with [a mission] and figure out how to make enough money to support it.”

John Bebow of Bridge Magazine

Bridge Magazine, an Ann Arbor-based news outlet with newsrooms in Lansing and Detroit, has a civic-oriented mission that’s common among non-profits. Phil Power, the founder and chairman of The Center for Michigan, a 501(c)(3) organization that publishes Bridge, previously owned community newspapers in Michigan and the Upper Midwest. John Bebow, the center’s president and CEO, spent the vast majority of his career working at for-profit newspapers in the Midwest. Both came to the same conclusion about how to support statewide news coverage.

“Non-profit is really the answer to public-service journalism,” Bebow said. “I think the for-profit model is irrevocably broken.”

For-profit newspapers have de-emphasized time-consuming and resource-intensive investigative journalism and public affairs coverage. Some of the newer digital-only for-profits are attempting to fill that gap.

One way for-profits can signal their public-service mission is by becoming a Benefit Corporation, which Berkeleyside describes as “a type of for-profit corporate entity that includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment.” Knobel, Berkeleyside’s co-founder, said the decision to become a certified “B Corp” was a no-brainer because the publication is driven by a civic mission.

DeRienzo said the vast majority of LION members are mission-driven for-profits, making the B Corp designation a potentially good fit.

“[Our members] are doing public-service accountability journalism and in exchange for that they aren’t expecting a 25 percent profit margin to go to some shareholder,” DeRienzo said. “They don’t have that money –they’re bootstrapping this. All they are trying to do is make an OK living doing journalism in their community. When they get profits beyond their budget, they hire another reporter. It’s almost like a nonprofit model.”

Finding Funders Who “Understand the Value of Local News”

Both for-profits and non-profits often rely on early individual investments. Berkeleyside secured funding from an angel investor who still maintains a stake in the corporation (its three co-founders plus an early employee control the majority of voting shares).

Bridge got a major early boost from The Center for Michigan’s founder and chairman, whose family continues to provide significant annual support. Bebow recognizes his good fortune.

“If you have an angel funder it certainly helps you initially,” he said. “In Michigan we are also blessed with a very healthy and generous foundation community.”

That’s an important asset for non-profits, which typically reach out to foundations for early financial support. “If you have a local community foundation that’s willing to put up seed funding for the first two years of your operation, that’s a great incentive to consider the non-profit model,” DeRienzo said.

But securing foundation support can be difficult. National foundations rarely give operational funding to local outlets. Murray, the Center for Cooperative Media director, said in New Jersey there aren’t many foundations that support local news. But she is optimistic that will change.

“I think we’re going to start to see a sea change over the next two to three years that we will see more local, place-based family and community foundations that will support more media outlets through creative ways,” Murray said.

Allred said if the Richland Source launched now as opposed to five years ago, he would give serious consideration to going the non-profit route. “There’s so much more awareness now of what a vibrant local news ecosystem means to a community,” he said. “In 2013 you had to make that case. Now people at the local foundation level understand the value of local news.”

Added DeRienzo: “There is potential for more place-based foundation support of journalism. Those foundations recognize that local journalism is key to fulfilling their other charitable goals.”

Steve Beatty, a LION consultant and former publisher and chief executive officer of The Lens, a New Orleans-based non-profit outlet, said foundation funding is always precarious for non-profits with an investigative bent.

“Local foundations usually are led by people in the local power structure, and people in the local power structure are the ones who get written about by a watchdog organization,” Beatty said. “Eventually you’re going to burn all of your foundation contacts one way or another.”

That’s less of an issue for small donors and members — key revenue sources for local news outlets. Non-profit news outlets, in particular, have benefitted from News Match, a campaign to encourage individual donations to newsrooms.

Sensing increased fundraising opportunities in their communities, some for-profits have switched — or considered a move — to non-profit status. “That has happened in some cases where for-profits have converted into non-profits because the community has stepped up and said we want to make sure you continue and we are going to provide some funding,” Cross said.

“The Lines Are Blurred”

But converting may not be necessary for news outlets to achieve their financial objectives. DeRienzo said many for-profits in recent years are “pushing heavily into non-profit-like endeavors” such as voluntary paid memberships.

Berkeleyside, for instance, has roughly 1,200 paid members who give at least $5 a month. It has also raised $850,000 through a direct public offering that allows readers to become investors. Knobel said that while the direct public offering requires a larger individual investment and may not be viable in every community, the membership model is replicable.

Non-profits are also tapping into “for-profit-type revenue streams,” DeRienzo said. This includes advertising, events and services.

“Increasingly, the lines are blurred in terms of activities,” DeRienzo said. “People assume that non-profit is more restrictive than it actually is in terms of revenue streams.”

Added Cross: “There aren’t a whole lot of firm barriers to revenue streams for non-profits.”

A non-profit can obtain only limited revenue from activities that are unrelated to its exempt function, such as advertising appearing on the organization’s website and the sale of merchandise. Taxes must be paid on any such income. And according to IRS guidelines, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations can’t “attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”

Non-profits can start raising money before they are recognized as tax-exempt by the IRS. One arrangement is fiscal sponsorship, in which a non-profit organization serves as the “home” for the news outlet, helping in ways such as administering charitable contributions and providing financial oversight.

“Fiscal sponsorship is increasingly common,” Cross said. “It’s a really efficient way for businesses to get started in a non-profit model.”

Cross and DeRienzo said they are increasingly hearing interest in hybrid models in which a for-profit entity owns a non-profit, or vise versa. But these remain rare in the news industry.

“It’s new, so most organizations if they are small, I encourage them not to do that,” Cross said. “With all the structures and requirements, it’s like having two business models, which increases the workload.”

Added DeRienzo: “I think most people are exploring the hybrid model not for the question of what do we do with profits but more the question of how do we have the freedom of a for-profit while being able to accept grant money or tax-exempt donations. It’s more about the money coming in than the money going out.”

Another option available to for-profits in some states is becoming a low-profit limited liability company (L3C), which makes it easier for socially oriented business to receive funding from charitable organizations and private investors.

The number of options for entrepreneurs is growing. Knobel’s advice: “I wouldn’t get too caught up in ‘Am I a Mac or a PC…’ There’s no single right solution. The burgeoning of non-profit news sites is a fantastic thing. I think the burgeoning of for-profit news sites is a fantastic thing. We need all of them.”

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post How Digital News Startups Choose Between For-Profit and Non-Profit Status appeared first on MediaShift.

Facing unexpected free agency, Bedard considered working at a competing national sports outlet or returning to his local sports roots at a Boston publication (he covered the NFL for The Boston Globe before his SI tenure). But he feared a repeat of the past: financial turmoil leading to layoffs.

“I just kept thinking, ‘If I take one of these jobs I’m just kicking the can down the road,'” Bedard said. “Nobody out there that I’m talking to has the answer as far as sports journalism and what’s next…I thought, ‘Well, why am I going to do that when I have a chance to be my own boss, to do things the way I think they need to be done?’ I figured, ‘Why not me?'”

So Bedard launched Boston Sports Journal, a subscription-based outlet that, starting today, will cover Boston sports through a website and accompanying app. To help solidify his game plan, Bedard turned for advice to another local sports journalism veteran from another sports-crazed town: Dejan Kovacevic, who founded the subscription-based local sports outlet DK Pittsburgh Sports in 2014 after a long career as a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter and columnist.

In the growing field of media startups seeking to attract the avid local sports fan, another major player is The Athletic, founded in early 2016 by Bay Area entrepreneurs who raised significant seed funding and have already launched subscription-based websites/apps in Chicago, Toronto, Detroit and Cleveland. A Bay Area site, led by former San Jose Mercury News columnist Tim Kawakami, is set to start at the beginning of August. The Athletic, which has focused primarily on professional sports, is moving into college coverage, including a just-announced college football vertical led by Stewart Mandel and college basketball vertical led by Seth Davis.

Adam Hansmann, co-founder of The Athletic, said it’s been an active summer on the sports journalist recruiting trail.

“The displacement of talent in the past couple of quarters –SI, ESPN, FOX, and now VICE Sports just to name a few — is unprecedented and we intend to be aggressive in hopefully filling the void,” he said in an e-mail.

These new ventures are among the few bright spots during a dark period for print-focused sports journalists who have become used to hiring freezes and layoffs justified with corporate jargon (“pivot to video” has a place in the layoff euphemism hall of fame). Whether they will be sustainable depends largely on how well they can leverage their key resources (well-sourced local sports journalists with institutional knowledge of the teams they cover) and their advantage over legacy publications (no rush to hit the 10 p.m. print deadline). Their success also hinges on how strong the appetite is for local sports coverage and whether fans are willing to pay for content after years of getting it online for free.

Greg Bedard. (Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff)/MET

During his job search, Bedard said several Twitter followers pointed to Kovacevic’s proven model — locally focused, exclusively digital, independently owned, funded in part by website/app subscriptions — as being replicable in Boston.

“The more I dug into it, the more I thought, ‘I need to be doing that — that’s the future,'” Bedard said.

Kovacevic’s decision to voluntarily leave a newspaper job to launch his own digital venture was, in his words, “much more about business than it was about journalism.” Pittsburgh, at the time, was one of the few midsize cities with two daily newspapers. “We didn’t come along to fill a hole or vacancy,” he said.

“What we did that was different than anyone else in the U.S. or Canada was we produced a sports-only website aimed at one market that offers content aimed at digital,” said Kovacevic, the outlet’s owner and columnist.

Finding Their Niche in the Local Sports Landscape

Local sports journalism was long dominated by newspapers. But cutbacks in recent years have meant fewer reporters assigned to beats, limited travel and, in some cases, teams without coverage. As the fortunes of newspapers fell, national sports outlets — most notably ESPN — tried to compete for local audiences in major markets like Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles by launching regional websites and assigning writers to cover popular teams. Those ambitions have waned — ESPN, for instance, still has some team beat writers but has all but dismantled its regional websites.

That has opened the door for newcomers like The Athletic, which started in Chicago and has since branched out to the other locations.

“We looked at the national scene and saw all the players like ESPN and all the big networks that have digital properties and said it’s going to be very expensive to compete here and we aren’t going to know who our customer is,” Hansmann said in an interview. “At the end of the day we felt like where we’d know our customer best is local.”

The Athletic. Screenshot.

Hansmann and co-founder Alex Mather, the company’s CEO, have hired several dozen journalists across four sites (Chicago and Toronto, the original two, are the most staffed). The plan is for seven to 10 journalists — beat writers, a columnist and an editor — in each city to produce content full-time in addition to freelancers.

The company’s first hires, including Chicago editor and lead columnist Jon Greenberg, came from ESPN Chicago.

“We knew there would be less coverage in Chicago [from ESPN and local newspapers],” Greenberg said. “I absolutely thought we could fill a hole. The main reporters we started with, people knew us because we already had been covering the teams.”

Both Greenberg and Hansmann said they consider local newspapers to be The Athletic’s main competitors. But they don’t want writers thinking like traditional newspaper reporters who file a game story and reporter’s notebook.

“Print is still what drives the editorial strategies of newspapers with deadlines,” Hansmann said. “We want to release the constraints that have been placed on a lot of local sports writers and free them up to write more analytically, to write more longer-form stories, to do open-ended interviews with players or coaches or front-office executives.”

Greenberg said reporters do traditional beat coverage — they are credentialed by teams and spend time in press boxes and locker rooms at home and on the road — but tend to focus more on in-depth analysis. “Insights over information” is one of Hansmann’s favorite phrases to describe the company’s editorial mission. “We try to lean in a lot more with personalities and opinions while still maintaining a journalistic set of values,” he said.

Bedard, who has the hat trick of job titles (owner, editor and columnist), is launching Boston Sports Journal with recognizable Boston sports journalists covering the Patriots and Red Sox. He plans to have Bruins and Celtics reporters in place soon. Bedard said he expects a heavy focus on analysis — “everyone sees the games and the press conferences,” he said — and audience interaction through mailbags, in-game chats and tweet-ups. Bedard has conferred often with Kovacevic and his colleagues in recent weeks about their editorial strategy. The two outlets may look similar, at least at first: Boston Sports Journal purchased a copy of DK Pittsburgh Sports’ publishing platform for its website and app.

That platform has allowed DK Pittsburgh Sports to publish a range of digital content — live game coverage, analysis, long-form features, audio and video — much of which is geared toward the app (which accounts for roughly 75 percent of traffic). DK Pittsburgh Sports, with 10 full-time reporters, has become known for its comprehensive coverage of pro and college sports, including journalists who travel with the local teams.

DK Pittsburgh Sports office. Courtesy photo.

Kovacevic, like many of his colleagues who came from newspapers, was glad to be freed from print journalism restrictions.

“We focus on the why much more than the what,” Kovacevic said. “If that means taking one single play and examining the hell out of it and spending that extra time in the locker room that you can’t when you’re on deadline, waiting out that assistant coach in the hallway for an-hour-and-a-half to get that best possible, unique interpretation of a moment or a play or an incident, then that’s what we do.”

It was more than just the early deadlines that bothered Kovacevic about working at a newspaper.

“I was very uncomfortable with the idea of going to work every day knowing that no matter what I did the decline [of newspapers] was unstoppable,” Kovacevic said. “You want to feel like you are making a difference for your employer. No matter what I or anyone did, nothing was going to reverse what was happening there.”

“Now you can have the opposite feeling,” Kovacevic said. “With certain stories, writers know they made money for the company – they grew the business. You know what that feels like in journalism? It’s a pretty weird feeling for people like me who have been doing it for awhile.”

Greenberg takes much the same approach. “I tell my writers, ‘Everything you write that’s beyond the daily filler, think — is this going to get me a subscription? Not is this going to make our subscribers happy, but is someone who is on the fence and isn’t a subscriber going to think I want to pay money to read this?”

Placing a Bet on the Subscription Model

Greenberg said the subscription model was “scary” to him when he was hired because the website had yet to launch. “Even though it took awhile to build subscriptions, I was quickly enamored with the concept,” he said. “The only way you are going to make money long term in this industry is with subscriptions.”

Hansmann, who has a management and consulting background, said he viewed local sports journalism as “more conducive to the subscription model” than national coverage. “Local fans want to know every single day what’s going on, and that lends itself more to a service you’d want to pay for,” he said.

The Athletic’s subscription ($5.99 monthly/$39.99 annually) gives readers unlimited access to website and app content. Hansmann said that as of this summer, the Chicago and Toronto sites will be profitable, meaning that revenue is enough to cover staff costs.

Kovacevic said revenue from DK Pittsburgh Sports subscriptions ($3.99 monthly/$29.99 annually) covers staff costs. Advertising and sponsorships are also sources of revenue.

When he began thinking more than three years ago about how to fund his new operation, Kovacevic said he wanted to show that sports fans would pay for coverage.

DK Pittsburgh Sports. Screenshot.

“The single dumbest thing in the history of journalism is when newspapers decided to send the message to the public that what we as journalists do has no value,” Kovacevic said. “There is a whole generation of people in their 30s and 40s that will still bite your head off at the mention of paying for something on the internet. Whereas our experience with our subscribers is if they are a lot older they are comfortable because they have always paid for their news.” The younger generation has grown up in an era of paywalls and digital subscriptions, he said.

After a week of being free, the Boston Sports Journal will begin charging readers ($4.99 monthly/$34.99 annually). Bedard said he hopes to add advertising and sponsorship revenue.

“If you’re going to be primarily focused on written journalism, and I think there’s still a value in that, the [advertising] model isn’t going to work by itself,” Bedard said. “If you want quality journalism and a good user experience, you’re going to have to pay something.”

Self-employed sportswriters have even tried crowdfunding to subsidize their work — a model that may be sustainable for a select few but is unlikely to work at scale.

A Scalable Model?

Dejan Kovacevic.

Whether readers across the country will pay for local sports news remains an open question. Hansmann said he considered signals such as fan social media buzz and TV ratings of local sports teams when determining which markets to enter.

The Athletic’s initial focus was on the northern middle part of the country because “there tends to be less of a fickle fan there,” Hansmann said. He looks for places where there is a passion for sports and “generational fandom.”

Winning teams don’t hurt, either. “In hindsight we tell everyone we knew the Cubs were going to win the World Series,” Hansmann jokes about the decision to launch in Chicago.

Added Kovacevic: “Has it helped that the Penguins won two Stanley Cups and the Steelers went to an AFC championship game? Of course.”

Kovacevic thinks the subscription-based model can work in many sports markets.

“A lot of people from the journalism community have looked at us and said, ‘Yeah, but it’s Pittsburgh and those people are crazy about their sports teams, and I don’t know if that will work here and if our market is big enough,'” Kovacevic said. “To me the market size makes zero difference — it just has to be at the right scale.”

What’s critical, Kovacevic said, is that potential subscribers have “that deep, I-love-my-hometown mentality and an attachment to teams.” The model may not work in sports towns filled with transplants who are not emotionally invested in the local teams, he said.

That does not describe Boston. And Bedard is bullish on his chances to make inroads in a crowded sports market.

In a letter to potential subscribers, Bedard wrote: “If [Kovacevic] can do that in Pittsburgh, why can’t we do that in Boston? Well, we’re going to give it our all to make it happen or die trying.”

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post The New Sports Journalism Playbook: Premium Local Coverage for a Low Cost appeared first on MediaShift.

It’s a daunting task given the cottage industry dedicated to peddling fiction, our complicity in spreading hoaxes on social media and our inability to agree on basic facts. Add to those concerns the glut of online information that isn’t wholly false but is intentionally misleading, our entrenched confirmation biases that limit the effectiveness of fact checking and research showing that students — the primary target of news literacy education — have difficulty evaluating the credibility of online information and can be easily duped.

Sensing the severity of the problem, many interested parties have taken up the call to action. News outlets have published lesson plans on how to evaluate sources and sniff out fake news. Press research and training groups have curated news literacy curricula and increased their own offerings. Facebook, which came under attack for not doing enough to stop the spread of fake election news, has promised to work with news organizations to push news literacy. Google last week announced a news literacy initiative.

“Democracy demands media literacy” — @BrianStelter says it’s time for new investments in news literacy https://t.co/JKlQCbundt

— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) February 19, 2017

Two national leaders in this effort, groups that have news literacy in their titles and began training students to be skeptical news consumers long before fake news and filter bubble became buzzwords, have spent recent years trying to increase their reach by investing in e-learning and other digital resources for educators.

The Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, initially focused on classroom-based news literacy instruction at its New York campus and hosting in-person training for educators, has become a clearinghouse of free online lesson plans and resources for teachers looking to start their own news literacy course. Earlier this year, the center launched a massive open online course (MOOC) to “help consumers decipher fake news from reliable information.”

The News Literacy Project, an education nonprofit that works with educators and journalists in several U.S. cities to teach news literacy in middle and high school classrooms, has a new Facebook-backed public service advertising campaign to “raise awareness of the importance of being a skeptical and responsible consumer of news and information.”

NLP’s biggest recent investment is its checkology virtual classroom, designed to teach news literacy skills to middle- and high-school students. The e-learning platform mixes short video presentations from journalists and other media experts, case studies, interactive practice exercises and assessments such as a “check tool” designed to help students evaluate the credibility of information they select from an online source. Modules include filtering news and information (how to sort information and know what’s news); exercising civic freedoms (the First Amendment and journalism’s watchdog role); navigating today’s information landscape (dissecting rumors, the role of algorithms and branded content); and how to know what believe (recognizing bias and checking credibility).

The launch of checkology was fortuitously timed. The blended-learning platform debuted in spring 2016 and was updated in time for the start of fall classes — and the height of a presidential campaign that produced news literacy lessons by the day.

“As the presidential campaign really wound up and people starting talking more and more about fake news and misinformation and news and media literacy, we saw increased interest,” said Peter Adams, News Literacy Project’s senior vice president for educational programs. “We also got a lot of media inquiries about news literacy education and misinformation.”

By the end of the 2016-17 academic year, roughly 6,250 teachers had registered to use checkology. Teachers collectively reported that they expected roughly 945,000 students to use the platform, Adams said. NLP is providing premium-level access to the platform, which includes unlimited, free student-user licenses for the 2017-18 academic year.

Adams is tasked with overseeing checkology, as well as other classroom programs and digital resources. In this interview, condensed and edited for clarity, Adams discusses the opportunities of teaching news literacy on a large scale, the challenges of keeping the curriculum timely, one way he measures success in news literacy classrooms, and how to handle lessons on hot-button issues such as fake news and news personalization.

Q&A

What did your k-12 teaching experience (middle school in New York City; high school after-school program in Chicago) teach you about the need for news literacy education?

Adams: When I was in the middle school classroom in New York, students would go and get a source and copy information. They didn’t understand that copying and pasting wasn’t research. When I was with high school students, I heard a lot of viral rumors, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and I tried to take them up on where they were hearing this stuff. The other thing was trying to encourage skepticism but helping them not stray over to cynicism — not thinking everything is an orchestrated, agenda-driven, institutional conspiracy, which is something that teenagers of any generation are susceptible to. I think cynicism about institutional media is a real problem.

What was the impetus for teaching news literacy through a virtual classroom? 

Peter Adams: It was really scale and efficient use of resources. We have always been a tiny organization. The mission is so big. News literacy is such a vital 21st-century skill for students, the information landscape is changing so quickly and it’s a real challenge for educators to teach this stuff because it’s changing all the time. So we knew that if we were going to see news literacy embedded in the American educational experience, which is one of our big goals as an organization, e-learning is the way we’d have to go.

How did you intend teachers to use this educational resource?

Adams: We wanted to create an e-learning resource that educators could use in whatever way they wanted. So if you want to flip it [so that students complete lessons as homework and then discuss topics in class], we want it to work. But we also want it to be something you can use in the classroom. We want it to be accessible for teachers who have never taught news or media literacy or have never done any blended e-learning, and for folks who are news literacy savvy and have taught this before. It’s not intended to replace classroom instruction — it’s indented as a supplement.

There’s a real focus in the curriculum on how to fact check or evaluate the credibility of information as journalists are trained to do. It’s an important but time-consuming process. How do you also teach students to quickly assess whether something online is bogus? 

Adams: We are working on that right now. [In the current iteration], students go through a very detailed, very granular process that leads you through a lot of steps. Our intention was to have students cognitively chunk those steps — who created this, for what purpose, is there a byline, what do I know about this organization, publication or website? The hope is that at some point that becomes one thought — where is this coming from? What’s missing is a more consumer-centric, functional, day-t0-day process like if I am info grazing, if I’m flipping through social, if I read a little bit of a piece, then lateral reading across the web, looking at Snopes and FactCheck.org isn’t always realistic. We are looking at making a quicker tool or process that’s more functional for consumers.

How much of a challenge is it to teach students to pause when they see news or information online that raises a red flag in terms of its credibility, accuracy or authenticity rather than breeze past it?

Adams: It is a challenge. Part of it can be addressed by helping students understand the stakes of credible information and sharing something that isn’t credible. A lot of social media users period — teens may especially have this attitude — think that sharing isn’t endorsing and sharing isn’t saying it’s true. But if you have suspicions or you know it’s not true and if you share it and don’t say it’s not true, it could be misunderstood. Students don’t always think about that. There’s also an attitude that credibility doesn’t matter if it’s going to be engaging. I don’t know if this video is staged or not but it’s awesome. Getting students to think about the stakes of exposure to information that’s inaccurate is important.

Have you found any effective ways to get students to understand these stakes? 

Adams: One approach we use is tapping into students’ sense of outrage at being lied to. I think young people have a preserved or not-yet-jaded view of injustice. They are really outraged at injustice in a way that adults may not be. If you can tap into the fact that teenagers hate to be deceived — they are genuinely outraged at injustice that affects other people, especially if they have experienced some injustice in their life. [As an educator] you can form that association and hopefully make it matter so if someone shares something that isn’t true, the goal is to make them want to correct it on social media. That’s a big challenge for news literacy educators.

How did you develop these online lessons in a way that would allow you to keep examples and case studies timely? That strikes me as an immense challenge given the extremely short news cycle and the abundance of ready-made news literacy lessons created almost daily during this last presidential election cycle.

Adams: About two-thirds of lessons have a somewhat similar trajectory or architecture. You meet a subject-matter expert who introduces initial concepts, you actively apply those concepts to learn them, the expert comes back to give you a snippet of guided instruction, sometimes to deepen or complicate those concepts or synthesize them with something else, you apply and practice those concepts, the subject-matter expert comes back one last time and then you end with a compilation for mastery where students apply that fully synthesized, developed skill at the end. Those example compilations allow us to chop off the end and replace it with something that’s more timely. We designed the lessons to be updatable to keep them timely. The challenge is with so many students using the platform across the country and now across the world, when we change something, if you’re a student and you finish the first lesson and we go in behind you and remove and replace a chunk, the system is going to say you haven’t done that lesson. At least once a year we’re going to swap out examples. We do know from feedback that timeliness is something teachers value.

Since you launched the program just over a year ago, what has changed in our politics or the media landscape that needs to be reflected in the updated curriculum?

Adams: Not in terms of examples, but there are some things that have happened in the last year that we’ve certainly noticed and thought, ‘gosh is this going to change the way we teach this’? For instance, the difference between the [Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta e-mail leaks and the [French President Emmanuel] Macron campaign leaks is there were faked raw documents mixed in with the real raw documents in the French leaks, which was a shift. We teach students about raw information. Do we need to think about or warn students that this is a tactic that purveyors of misinformation are using? The same lessons can often be drawn from examples that are two years old, a year old or that happened yesterday. It’s just more relevant to students’ lives if it’s something that has happened recently.

Checkology came out before “fake news” became a household term. What’s your take on that term, and are you planning to incorporate it (or similar language) into future lessons? 

Adams: It would be a useful term to describe a very specific type of misinformation, but it has also been co-opted and weaponized and politicized and corrupted in so many ways that it almost means everything and nothing depending on the context. It’s lost its meaning. It’s too bad, because the intent behind the term originally was very specific — something that is entirely made up, designed to drop into an actual context, designed to get clicks and drive ad revenue. The other side of that term is that it’s an oxymoron — if it’s news then it can’t be fake. We use it in quotes to set off the fact that there’s technically no such a thing as an untrue fact. [Fake news] is designed to look like news, and there’s a lesson to learn there that’s valuable. When people say let’s give up on the term and not talk about fake news, I want to make sure we still talk about that particular kind of misinformation and the strategies that drive it because there’s a lot to consider and a lot we need to teach students about.

Early in many lessons you ask students to evaluate media content like news articles and advertisements that you select for them. But you also regularly ask students to think of their own examples or find their own news online to evaluate. What drove this decision? 

Adams: Giving them case studies is an important part of teaching them the concepts. But we do want students to move from this closed environment where they are learning things from pre-selected examples that are designed to highlight certain concepts or issues to a place where they apply them and use the skills in a way that’s more authentic. We needed something to help students draw these skills and concepts together, and then jump the rail out into the information landscape. It’s something we are still working on and thinking about. What kind of pathways can we build for students that are guided enough give them something to do but also let them figure out where to go on their own?

It does seem easier when you are teaching or assessing students to stay in a walled-off environment where you have control over the examples you use. Do you have advice for teachers who want to open up the classroom but who are concerned that students may bring up examples that aren’t so neat and clean?

Adams: Having the guided instruction with pre-selected examples that overtly highlight key concepts is necessary. But once those concepts are in play, and once you push on them hard enough and throw out enough examples, any categorization system will begin to break down. If you get to that point with students, it means you got them past the basic stage and into the advanced stage. I would say if students are confounding the paradigms that you initially introduced them to with examples, that’s something you should celebrate and then embrace. You don’t have to have all the answers, and sometimes there is no authoritative example on topics like bias or news judgments. If students are pushing at the limits of those questions, that to me is success.

You teach units on news personalization (the use of algorithms to tailor content to our personal tastes) and sponsored content (material that is meant to look like news but is intended to promote a product, company or organization). Usually when I teach these concepts I find myself adopting a very negative framing: Beware of the filter bubble! Sponsored content is out to deceive you! But your message was more nuanced. Was that intentional?

Adams: My impulse was to say that sponsored content is trickery and to lean toward a negative framing. There was some back and forth internally and we landed on a bit of a softer position, not to pander to advertisers or special interests, but because there is meaningful sponsored content that is possible if it’s adequately labeled and transparent about what it is. Then it can be more valuable to consumers than a traditional ad. With algorithms, we never had a super-negative approach to it. There are obviously pitfalls — it’s important to know when algorithms are curating things for you. But we want students to be aware of the fact that you wouldn’t want to search Google without any parameters, without it making any assumptions about you.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post How to Teach Media Literacy in a Virtual Classroom appeared first on MediaShift.

Using that framing seemed problematic (teachers tend to have a sixth sense about what questions will elicit blank stares), so I decided to start with a broad icebreaker: “Tell me what you know about how the News Feed works.”

Students spent the next few minutes explaining the basic mechanics of Facebook – friending and following; scrolling, scanning and clicking; liking, commenting and sharing. They clearly were familiar with the Facebook interface and their options for interacting with content. But they said little about how their actions affected the composition of their News Feed and whether Facebook prioritized certain posts.

Not only did the terms personalization, algorithm and filter bubble rarely come up in conversation, comments like “I think Facebook just posts the most recent stories at the top” and “I’m probably just missing my friends’ posts if I don’t see them” indicated that many students had a fundamental misunderstanding of how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm filters and prioritizes news.

The Implications of News Personalization

Facebook is one of many digital media sources that use personalization algorithms to tailor news to users’ tastes. As Pariser explained in his 2011 book, and as journalists and Facebook itself have documented in recent years, the News Feed algorithm tracks a range of user signals – interactions with a friend or page, status updates, likes, shares, etc. – to prioritize hundreds of stories (out of a much larger potential pool) to show each day.

When I explained this to students, many seemed genuinely surprised. When I showed them how they could minimize personalization by manually selecting “Most Recent” rather than “Top Stories,” or how they could “take control and customize” their News Feed (Facebook’s own words) by editing their preferences to prioritize who to see first or unfollow people to hide their posts, most were unaware of those options.

When I asked them why this all mattered, what the implications are of news personalization and why it’s important to be aware of tools available to modify whether and how news filters are applied, the room fell silent (my sixth sense about avoiding blank stares is imperfect). One student broke the silence by describing a virtue of personalization: helping to lessen information overload, and identifying status updates and news stories of likely interest.

Photo by FACEBOOK(LET) on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

I followed up with the more troubling implications: the emergence of filter bubbles that may lead to consuming a narrow selection of news sources and perspectives, the use of non-transparent factors to select and rank news, and the potential for algorithms to introduce invisible biases. Algorithms are not value neutral, I told students. They are embedded with human judgments – sometimes at the center of high-profile controversies – made by Facebook editors, engineers, curators and users paid to provide feedback on how they use the platform. Tweaks to Facebook’s algorithms can vastly change the composition of users’ News Feed and trending topics section.

Given Facebook’s popularity among young people and its dominant status as the gateway to finding news online, students need to understand how news has been filtered using personalization algorithms. “These type of algorithms create a news literacy issue because if readers don’t know they are influencing content, they cannot make critical decisions about what they choose to read,” Jihii Jolly argued in Columbia Journalism Review. “In the print world, partisan media was transparent about its biases, and readers could therefore select which bias they preferred. Today, readers don’t necessarily know how algorithms are biased and and how nuanced the filters they receive content through really are.”

With anecdotal evidence of students’ lack of awareness of news personalization, and with an assist from a pithy Pariser Ted Talk, I began incorporating a lesson into my college classes – and any classes I could visit as a guest lecturer – about how personalization influences our media diet.

If I couldn’t pop students’ filter bubbles, at least I could introduce them to news personalization and the implications of algorithmic filtering.

Still, I wanted more tangible evidence of students’ (lack of) awareness of personalization to bolster my argument for why it deserved attention in college classrooms, and to inform my teaching of the topic. So I decided to conduct a two-part study, recently published online by Digital Journalism.

Interviews Reveal Limited Student Awareness of News Personalization

Part one of the study involved interviews with 37 college students about the ways in which the sources they use to begin a news search apply editorial judgments and track user data to determine news selection and prioritization. Conversations focused on the places where students most often seek out or come across news – portals such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit, as well as news outlets such as CNN, The New York Times and The Huffington Post that produce at least some of their own content.

Personalization is commonplace on social media platforms, news aggregators, search engines and news outlets that want to show readers more of what they like and less of what they don’t. I asked students what they knew about how news is selected and prioritized on the websites they use as news gateways, and whether their (or other users’) digital media habits affect what is shown or how news is displayed. To avoid priming students, I never used the terms personalization or algorithms.

Here’s what I found: “Interview results show that most students who began news searches on portal sites that use personalization algorithms were aware that user data are collected but could not give specific examples, and were unaware of the role that editorial judgments played in news selection and prioritization. Those who began their news search at a news outlet were largely unaware of whether user data were tracked and what editorial judgments beyond popularity were applied.”

• Students who began their searches on news portals rarely referenced the use of algorithms and most were unaware of how personalization takes place. Among the common responses: “I know there’s an algorithm involved [in Facebook] but I didn’t know what it entails” and “Google collects data from what you search…I’m sure that helps them somehow.”

• Students who started searches at news outlets were mostly unaware of the news selection process, and largely unable to correctly identify whether the outlet they go to for news tracks their digital media habits to personalize news (most incorrectly thought that no personalization occurred).

Survey Finds Students Are Largely Unaware of Personalization on Facebook, Google

Part two of the study used an online survey to examine how aware college students are of news personalization, and specific actions and criteria that affect news selection and prioritization on Facebook and Google, two highly influential news gatekeepers.

These 147 students (not the same ones who previously sat for interviews) answered questions about how Facebook and Google track user data to deliver personalized content. Once again, no questions explicitly referenced personalization, customization or algorithms to avoid priming students.

Here’s what I found: “Results show that students were largely unaware that these influential news portals tailor news to their tastes and almost never referenced the use of algorithms or personalization. They were most aware that their actions and those of their friends affect news selection and prioritization, and least aware of the influence of human value judgments.”

• When asked, “Does Facebook’s News Feed always show you every news item posted by the people or organizations you follow?” few (24 percent) were aware that Facebook prioritizes certain posts and hides others from users’ feeds. Most either believed every post is included (37 percent) or were unsure (39 percent).

• When asked, “If you and someone else separately entered the same search terms for news at the same time on Google, are you both likely to get the same results?” few (25 percent) said the results would likely be different. Most either believed that they would be the same (59 percent) or were unsure (16 percent).

• A majority of students (61 percent) were aware that Facebook lets them adjust their News Feed preferences to affect the posts they see and in what order, but a minority (23 percent) were aware that Google News allowed them to customize the news they see and in what order.

• A majority of students (61 percent) were aware that their actions or usage history on Facebook (following, clicking, liking, etc.) and (69 percent) the actions their friends or organizations they follow take on Facebook (commenting, sharing, etc.) affect news selection and prioritization. Few (18 percent) were aware that actions that Facebook users they don’t follow take (aggregate page views and shares) or (30 percent) actions taken by Facebook engineers, editors or curators (tweaking the algorithm, considering editorial judgments made by news outlets) also affect the composition of their feeds.

• Likewise, a majority of students (61 percent) were aware that their actions on Google and (52 percent) their actions on websites other than Google affect news selection and prioritization. Few (26 percent) were aware that actions taken by other users or (31 percent) actions taken by Google engineers, editors or curators affect the news results.

Students were often aware of the more visible and intuitive ways that personalization algorithms operate  tracking user behavior and preferences such as past searches, clicks, likes and shares to prioritize news of likely appeal. But they were often unaware of the less-visible elements of personalization – namely actions taken by users not in their social networks and the influence of human judgments in shaping personalization algorithms.

Lessons for the Classroom

As I argue in the study: “It is unrealistic to expect young adults to learn what personalization is, how it works, and why it matters without specific exposure to the topic in school curricula. Given the complexity of the subject matter, it is logical to address news personalization in college, where courses on computer –human interaction and news literacy are often offered.”

One of this study’s main takeaways is that students learn some important lessons about personalization by interacting with content on Facebook and Google. However, as I note, “deductions made are incomplete and often inaccurate.”

This study set out to examine what aspects of news personalization are poorly understood by students and, thus, deserve greater attention in the classroom. Among the lessons I recommend:

• An overview of algorithms
• The implications of news personalization (including filter bubbles)
• The specific types of user data collected (most notably difficult-to-observe factors such as geolocation and aggregate page views)
• The human judgments that go into programming algorithms and evaluating news sources
• Customization options on portal sites such as Facebook (managing account settings or preferences) and Google News (selecting the types of news or sources to include)

There’s still plenty to learn about the best ways to teach these topics, and whether exposure to such lessons affects students’ news consumption habits or perceptions of news sources that use personalization algorithms.

This two-part study was conducted before the 2016 U.S. presidential election that raised concerns — expressed by Pariser shortly after Election Day — about fake news/misinformation and the filter bubble. Given the current political climate and challenges facing the news media and educators, I’m as motivated as ever to teach students about the implications of news personalization.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and non-profit journalism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.

The post New Research Shows Students Are Largely Unaware of News Personalization appeared first on MediaShift.

One line in the first chapter is particularly prescient given the recent influx of fake news (wholly false stories) and misinformation (false or inaccurate information): “Citizens have more voice, but those who would manipulate the public for political gain or profit — be it corporations or the government — have more direct access to the public as well.”

Rosenstiel could never have predicted the details of how this would soon play out: teenagers in Macedonia, among others, profiting off fake news they created about the 2016 presidential election that spread quickly through social media. How would he amend his book given all that’s happened in the last year?

“The problems of misinformation, rumor and confirmation bias were not created by a team in Russia and Macedonia,” Rosenstiel said in an interview. “They were exploited by a team in Russia and Macedonia.”

“Fake news isn’t like a leaky pipe where you tighten it with a proper seal and then it’s fixed for 20 years,” Rosenstiel added. “Fake news and the problem it represents are more like crime and you are a police force. You can police it better or worse, but you are fighting it perpetually. You need better techniques and better technology to do it.”

Plenty of people are responding with technological solutions and lists of false and misleading news sources. Rosenstiel, a longtime journalist and press critic, founder of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, and executive director of the American Press Institute, isn’t in the business of creating new technology. But he has plenty of thoughts about techniques journalists and journalism educators can use to combat fake news and misinformation, and provide appealing alternatives for news consumers.

His thinking is informed by not only his professional experiences but research sponsored by API that examined the effectiveness of fact-checking and how to improve its practice in newsrooms. Funded by the Rita Allen Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Democracy Fund, the studies were part of the Fact-Checking Project, aimed to improve and expand political and accountability journalism in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Part one of this series examined how foundations spent recent years investing in such projects, as well as public-interest journalism and news literacy education, in an effort to promote factual journalism that competes with misinformation and fake news. After a campaign that was filled with plenty of falsehoods, many are wondering what comes next for journalism and journalism educators. Part two takes up this question by looking at recent research, and asking those involved in the projects what they have learned and what may come next.

Tom Rosenstiel of API. Photo by UT Knight Center on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

Just the Facts

When API surveyed more than 10,000 journalism and communication graduates last year about what they viewed as the biggest challenges facing journalism, the most common answer wasn’t the economic model of news or the public’s interest in quality journalism. It was, by a sizable margin, opinion and false information on the internet.

“That answer surprised me,” Rosenstiel said. “That’s a very strong response — there’s just too much junk out there.”

Research from API’s Fact-Checking Project, all completed before the 2016 presidential campaign began in earnest, provided plenty of grist for supporters of fact-checking. Among the findings:

• Fact-checking coverage greatly increased during the 2012 campaign, with the growth mostly concentrated in newsrooms with dedicated fact-checkers. Findings suggest that efforts to create or extend dedicated fact-checking operations and to train reporters are the most effective ways of growing the practice.
• The public has a positive view of fact-checking, although Republicans, as well as people who are less informed, educated and politically knowledgeable, view the format less favorably. Fact-checks generally help people become better informed and knowledgeable about the issues under discussion.
• Readers prefer fact-checking that uses a graphical meter or truth scale (think pants on fire or Pinocchio) along with a written analysis of claims, rather than just latter. Both approaches proved equally effective in challenging political misinformation.
• Fact-checking — even a single correction — can substantially reduce misperceptions, even in the long-term.
• Tweets correcting falsehoods or retweets of those corrections are “completely swamped by the tweets making or repeating the claim,” although the amount of misinformation decreases over time. Sentiment toward fact-checking on Twitter is largely positive, and the targets of fact-checking are seen in a mostly negative light.
• Political professionals anticipate fact-checking and regularly “weaponize” fact checks by citing them in advertisements and campaign material to undermine their opponents’ credibility and refute attacks. They ignore fact-checks that go against their core message, and sometimes attack the fact-checkers.

Other research co-authored by Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist who co-authored several of the API project studies, revealed mixed results. Studies found that correcting people’s false beliefs can be ineffective or lead them to hold onto their views even more strongly. But other research suggested that fact-checking can be effective.

Nyhan’s most recent co-authored study, which he wrote about in The New York Times just before Election Day, found that correcting Donald Trump’s false claim that the national crime rate is rising reduced the prevalence of people’s false beliefs. The study found partial evidence that questioning the validity of the correction undermined its effects on Trump supporters. Results prompted Nyhan to conclude that “Despite all the hand-wringing, we do not seem to have entered a post-truth era.”

Post-election, Nyhan argued that journalists should not give up on fact-checking Trump’s false claims but should be careful not to play into his hands. “These stories have to de-emphasize the claim itself, emphasize the news value of the president-elect being so widely irresponsible,” he told ProPublica.

Rosenstiel said he remains confident in the importance and efficacy of fact-checking.

“I think the notion of a post-fact or post-truth world is a gross misunderstanding of what happened,” Rosenstiel said. “The point of fact-checking is not to determine who lied less but to inform voters of whether or not and where political actors are stretching the truth.”

“The election has foregrounded this question of a lack of trust,” said Tom Glaisyer, chair of the Democracy Fund’s public square program. “The lack of a newsroom-community connection, i.e. a lack of trust in news, has to be rebuilt.”

Glaisyer points to News Voices: New Jersey, a project it co-funds, as one promising model. The pilot program aims to build interest and engagement in local news by holding forums for journalists, activists and other New Jersey residents to discuss — and potentially collaborate on — issues of local concern.

All of these post-its represent people in Asbury Park who have concerns and ideas and want a voice #newsvoices pic.twitter.com/tXiUde6K64

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) March 24, 2016

Jennifer Preston, vice president of journalism at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, said such initiatives are important.

“We have a tremendous opportunity to use this challenging moment to rebuild trust,” she said. “Journalists and journalism need to do a better job listening to our communities, to engage more deeply with the people we cover, bring them into the newsgathering process and involve them in our reporting,”

One way journalists can give readers a window into the newsgathering process, Rosenstiel said, is to increase transparency and documentation. Writing for Brookings Institution, he argued that the presentation of reportorial news needs to change. “The atomic unit of news in the past was the ‘news story,’ the lovely narrative, beautifully written… The new atomic unit of news must actually be the reporting — what the story learned — and the proof that establishes it. News people must now adopt forms, templates, and structures that make that proof — the evidence — become more explicit.”

He envisions a prominently displayed box that presents questions such as “What is new about this story? What is the evidence? Who are the sources? What proof do they offer? What is still missing or unknown?”

“It will raise the bar for the verification that people put into their reporting,” Rosenstiel said in an interview. “If they have to lay these things bare and answer questions for readers that a skeptical editor would ask, that will make the reporting stronger.”

Increased transparency, coupled with clearer labeling of what’s news, opinion and news analysis, will also help readers become more discerning, Rosenstiel said

“You’ve taken news literacy and you’ve put it out into the public,” he said. “You are training readers to ask these questions. The curriculum is potentially embedded in the technology. I actually think you can teach news literacy potentially at scale by building the stories differently.”

Glaisyer, the Democracy Fund’s public square program director, said classroom-based news literacy education is important but has limitations in its scope.

Added Larry Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation, which makes education grants: “Civic education and media literacy are good as far as they go, but they just don’t go very far. This is a mass society problem.”

Kiesa said she considered this concern in her research. “Beyond schools, where are the other places where people are implicitly learning things?” she said.

Her proposal for broadening the reach of news literacy education includes targeting after-school programs, youth organizing groups and youth media organizations. Jessica Clark, director of research and strategy at Media Impact Funders, said news literacy education could be weaved into agricultural extension programs or public broadcasting stations in rural communities in order to reach areas with less access to existing training.

Another idea, similar to Rosenstiel’s, is to “explore what publishers and tech companies can do to explicitly or implicitly teach skills through what they are doing,” Kiesa said. News outlets and fact-checking groups have already contributed tipsheets on how to spot fake news.

These disparate ideas share common goals: Increase demand for trustworthy information and train news consumers to be skeptical about what they see online.

“You have to build a strong public will to take responsibility for consuming credible news,” Kramer said. “You’re never going to be able to control the flow of information.”

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and non-profit journalism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.

The post How to Fight Fake News and Misinformation? Research Helps Point the Way appeared first on MediaShift.

As The New York Times recently wrote: “It remains to be seen if the higher level of individual giving will continue, or if it will extend to big donations through grants and wealthy individuals, who provide the bulk of the funding for groups like ProPublica and others.”

Foundations that have long supported public-interest journalism, fact checking, news literacy education, media innovation, and research on civic engagement and trust in the press will play a crucial role in promoting factual journalism that competes with misinformation.

Ask media funders how to combat fake news and you’ll get answers as varied as the foundations themselves. But there are several points of widespread agreement, each of which provides a window into how funders view this much-publicized problem, how they plan to address it and what they still are trying to sort out.

Fake News is Not the Preferred Term

Terminology is a hot topic of conversation. Several funders noted their dislike of the phrase fake news, which has become common shorthand for false information online.

“News requires reporting,” said Tom Glaisyer, chair of the Democracy Fund‘s public square program. “I prefer the term bogus information.”

Jennifer Preston, vice president of journalism at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, said she uses the term “bad information.”

“There’s a backlash against the concept of fake news,” said Jessica Clark, director of research and strategy for Media Impact Funders, a network of grantmakers interested in impact. “Is it false news? Is it biased news? What is the actual category?”

Fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined. Screenshot of BuzzFeed News article.

Fake News is Not New. But the 2016 Campaign Was a Wake-up Call.

The Knight Foundation has long looked for ways to support trustworthy journalism and combat misinformation. “Fake news is not new,” Preston said. “Anyone who has ever stood in a supermarket checkout line has seen the National Enquirer for decades.”

Preston said the foundation spent the past year planning for ways to address, among other issues, concern over the spread of inaccurate information online. The warning signs were there: the rise of social media platforms as news gatekeepers, an influx of new online sources, a decline in original reporting and diminished trust in the news media. Still, Preston admits that she was caught off guard by how quickly these forces — and others — converged to create the perfect storm.

“The only surprise is that it’s happening now rather than years down the line,” Preston said.

Other funders echoed that sentiment. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist who earlier this month gave a $1 million donation to The Poynter Institute through the Craig Newmark Foundation, said he was already concerned about fake news and was “nudged by the election” to take action.

Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, said the election was a turning point in his thinking about the spread of misinformation.

“What the campaign did for me is made me realize that the problem is much farther along than I had recognized,” Kramer said. “You saw this coming and you saw that if you don’t solve it then people’s ability to distinguish truth from fiction is going to be degraded, but we are way farther down that line than I had recognized.”

Added Elizabeth Good Christopherson, president and CEO of the Rita Allen Foundation: “It’s become top of the collective agenda. Key to all of our work is thinking about what the evidence is and then how people engage with that evidence and how we can continue in the public interest.”

Clark, the Media Impact Funders research and strategy director, said the presidential election confirmed her concerns about “the pernicious impact of faux journalism,” the topic of a recent news analysis.

“In some ways it’s an affirmation of what we were already worried about,” Clark said. “If the civic engagement and civic information infrastructure collapses and there is this other thing that’s not monitored that’s taking its place then people aren’t well informed.”

Fake News is Only Part of the Problem.

Thinking big picture comes naturally to media funders, so it’s no surprise to hear them take the 30,000-foot view of the fake-news phenomenon.

“I see the focus on fake news as a symptom of the larger concern, which is the lack of trust in journalism and media today, and that’s a problem that journalists and journalism have to tackle,” Preston said. “Change is happening so rapidly that what we need to do as funders is to be nimble and respond and make sure that we’re supporting quality journalism.”

Added Kramer: “I think fake news isn’t the big problem, and it’s unfortunate that it’s getting all this attention. There’s a continuum with classically good journalism on one end and fake news on the other end. The bulk of the problem is in the middle — wildly distorted versions of actual information.”

Distorted information is more pervasive than fake news and is harder to regulate or weed out, Kramer said.

Newmark said he is concerned about both. In a statement to announce the Poynter grant, he vowed to “stand up for trustworthy journalism” and “stand against deceptive and fake news.”

“As a news consumer, I just want news I can trust,” Newmark said in an interview.

Rebecca Morrison/Education Plus’s Learning Division

There’s No Silver Bullet. But There are Plenty of Worthy Causes.

Funders don’t see an easy fix to this problem, and they acknowledge that a major part of the equation — the response of social media platforms like Facebook — is outside of their control. They don’t view any single grant as a sufficient solution. But there are many ways for them to address the underlying problems.

“The places where funders can put their dollars most effectively to use are schools — especially centers that are focused on news literacy — non-profit organizations designed to support reporters, and high-profile non-profit news sites or partnerships with for-profit news sites,” Clark said. “Those are the places that are already geared to accept foundation dollars and where they have the most leverage in existing relationships.”

One choice that funders face is whether to target the demand side, the supply side or both.

The demand side includes efforts to train news consumers to sort fact from fiction and, as the name suggests, create a demand for reliable information — both central missions of news literacy education. The Knight Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and the Ford Foundation have in recent years funded efforts by two major players in the field, the News Literacy Project and the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, to develop curricula, provide training to educators, create digital resource centers, and teach news literacy to high school and college students.

The supply side includes supporting causes such as public-interest journalism, fact checking, training for journalists and applied research. For example:

• The Knight Foundation on Monday announced the Knight News Match, which aims to help non-profit news organizations expand their donor base and increase fundraising. Through Jan. 19, the foundation is pledging to match donations from individual donors to 57 non-profit outlets up to a total of $1.5 million. “Quality journalism matters,” Preston wrote in the announcement. “It is a buttress against the torrent of fake news we’ve seen explode in the past year, and it can help rebuild the diminishing trust many people have in society’s core institutions.”
• The Democracy Fund earlier this year announced an investment up to $500,000 in PolitiFact to expand its fact-checking efforts — the latest in its series of donations to fact-checking groups. “We have invested a significant effort in support the [fact-checking] field’s growth and continue to see it as a valuable component of a response to the lack of trust in news,” said Glaisyer, the fund’s public square program director.
• The Craig Newmark Foundation’s five-year, $1 million donation will allow Poynter to fund a faculty chair in journalism ethics, with a focus on fact-checking and accountability in journalism. Newmark said he was drawn to the institute’s focus on training journalists to produce verified news and push back against misinformation. Poynter referenced the challenge of combating fake news in its announcement, writing that “Newmark’s gift comes at a challenging time for journalism. The spread of propaganda masquerading as news, turbocharged by social media, has led many to confuse fact with fiction.”
• The Rita Allen Foundation gave a planning grant to First Draft News, a non-profit coalition formed to provide practical and ethical guidance in reporting and sharing of online information (addressing both supply and demand). Among its goals is to lessen the spread of hoaxes and fake stories generated for financial gain. Christopherson, the foundation’s president and CEO, said she is excited about the mixture of applied research about the spread of misinformation, the creation of new verification technologies and training for journalists and other fact-checkers.
• Several foundations (Rita Allen, Hewlett and Democracy Fund) funded research sponsored by the American Press Institute that examined the effectiveness of fact checking and how to improve it in newsrooms leading up to the 2016 election. The project also included fact-checking boot camps for journalists.

Kramer, the Hewlett Foundation president, said that while he considers fact checking and watchdog reporting important causes, “just supporting good journalism won’t solve the problem” of widespread misinformation. Funders, he said, need to think outside the box.

“The usual kinds of solutions that foundations find are not enough,” Kramer said. “We need to think of different solutions, and I have to be honest we don’t have them yet — and I don’t think anybody does.”

Measuring Impact May Prove Difficult.

Once those solutions are identified, measuring impact is the next logical step. But that’s no easy task given the complexity of the problem.

“Showing that people can pick out 10 false stories is useful, but if you only focus on that it’s not enough,” Kramer said. “The bigger problem isn’t easy to measure. What does it mean to say how informed someone is?”

Clark agreed that it’s difficult to isolate people’s news habits and problematic to rely on self-reported data. “You’d need a large-scale survey over many years,” she said.

Christopherson said she’s taking the long view and doesn’t expect immediate answers. Newmark said he’s not sure how he would measure the impact of his foundation’s grant to Poynter. “It’s a leap of faith,” he said.

Glaisyer said ideally he would measure impact by the ability of the public to identify bogus and credible information, the level of trust in journalistic institutions and the number of people reached by Democracy Fund-supported programs. Several of its funded research projects have examined how to reach these long-term goals, and that’s the subject of part two of this series.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and non-profit journalism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.

The post Foundations Take Myriad Approaches to Combat Misinformation, Fake News appeared first on MediaShift.

An eclectic collection of speakers representing documentary film, journalism, virtual reality, advertising, academia and non-profit advocacy groups shared highlights from recent media projects intended to spark social change. They were invited by American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact to a two-day conference showcasing innovative storytelling techniques and platforms. Their stories examined timely social justice topics – poverty, immigration, transgender rights, criminal justice reform.

“We are in the middle of this profound movement of social justice protest and grassroots movement building,” said Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media & Social Impact and executive in residence at AU’s School of Communication. “We are having these really overt conversations about racial justice and so many other issues that have to do with the portrayal of ‘the other’ or dominant narratives getting in the way of any kind of social progress. So we wanted to take a sharper focus on the social justice issues that are the most profound at the moment and bring together media makers who in the last couple of years have made impactful media projects.”

The inaugural Story Movements conference, held late last week in Washington D.C., was an expanded re-launch of the annual Media That Matters conference, spearheaded by Center for Media & Social Impact founder Patricia Aufderheide. When Chattoo and Brigid Maher, an associate professor of film and media arts at AU, became co-directors of the center last year, they decided to keep the event’s longstanding focus on media innovation and social impact, and remake it to reflect their interest in social justice.

After six hours of case study presentations, and four hours of group brainstorming and story pitches, here are three takeaways from the conference.

Empathy Helps Drive Social Change

Caty Borum Chattoo. Photo courtesy of CMSI.

In her opening remarks at the conference, Chattoo signaled the importance of empathy, which she described as “what happens when we are deeply transported into a story and connect with humans rather than othering them.”

During a TED Talk-style session organized around the theme of empathy, the creators of the virtual reality experience Injustice explained how they sought to increase empathy toward victims of racial profiling by putting users in the place of a bystander who “witnesses police brutality in action” and is forced to make ethical decisions on the fly. The co-creator of another immersive experience, a text-based online game called SPENT, presented evidence that users often emerge with greater empathy for people living in poverty after adopting the identity of a recently unemployed worker who must survive 30 days on $1,000 by making in-game choices about whether to put off paying bills, ask family and friends for money, and send a sick child to school.

Even during sessions not directly addressing empathy – such as those about changing dominant narratives, exposing injustice and empowering community – speakers frequently referenced the importance of connecting emotionally with their audiences. Two separate filmmakers, for instance, said that one of the ways they evaluate the success of their projects is whether viewers develop compassion for their films’ subjects – transgender and gender nonconforming youth, and people released from prison.

Empathy was also an overarching theme during the day-two exercise in which participants were placed in groups, assigned a social justice topic and issue brief, and given several hours to build a narrative and determine the appropriate storytelling platform. Groups pitched ideas such as a virtual reality experience that puts the user in the day of the life of a transgender person, a game modeled off The Sims in which users control a city budget and learn about the high costs of mass incarceration, and a game in which people assume the role of both police and civilians facing tense, racially-charged scenarios.

“The theme that cuts through all of this is empathy,” Chattoo said. “Empathy is not only a known factor in driving people to change their perspectives and attitudes, but all of this about changing the dominant narrative is ‘please, see me as a human. And if you see me as a human it would be very hard to hate me, discriminate against me, not care if I go to jail for the rest of my life.’ ”

Personal Narratives are Powerful

One effective way to build empathy is through the use of personal narratives. Jenny Nicholson, co-creator of the game SPENT, said the projects showcased on day one of the conference and the ideas generated during day two share a common a storytelling device.

“The reason these all were powerful is that they were telling individual stories,” Nicholson said. “The reason SPENT works is that it takes you down to the perspective of one person facing what happens in [his or her] everyday life.”

Nicholson grew up poor and had long wondered how to help people understand what it’s like to be on the brink of homelessness. As creative director at the advertising agency McKinney, she took on as a pro-bono client the Urban Ministries of Durham, a shelter and emergency services agency in North Carolina. Her first attempt at raising awareness and money for the agency was a traditional advertising campaign. When that didn’t gain traction with viewers, she decided to pivot to the interactive game, which was released in 2011. SPENT has attracted millions of users — including secondary school and social work students assigned to play the game — and plenty of press attention.

Katie Galloway, an investigative reporter and filmmaker who spoke at the conference, said that “close-to-the-bone, in-depth narrative storytelling” from the perspective of subjects (often without narration) is an effective way to change the dominant narrative about social issues. “The Return,” a film she co-directed, follows former inmates who had expected to serve life sentences for non-violent offenses but were given a reprieve after California voters in 2012 approved Proposition 36, which amended the state’s “Three Strikes” law. Bilal Chatman, one of the subjects of the film, was featured in a segment about prisoner re-entry on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” and invited for a rare sit-down interview on the show. Chatman’s story has resonated not only with advocates, the news media and the general public, but also with current inmates, Galloway said.

To raise awareness about another component of criminal justice reform, lowering the rates of people entering jails, the Vera Institute of Justice created a multimedia project (first-person essays, photography, video) called “The Human Toll of Jail” that tells the stories of the people who have served jail time and individuals involved in the reform movement. Mary Crowley, the institute’s vice president for communications and public affairs, said the intention is to “show the human face behind the data.”

Chattoo bookended the conference with commentary about the importance of personal narrative. In her opening remarks, she pointed to Trayvon Martin as the story that “launched a hashtag and a movement that has profoundly changed the narrative and the conversation and the call for reform about racial justice in America” and the photo of the drowned toddler found on the shores of Turkey as the image that “galvanized the world to a refugee crisis in Syria.”

“Social change almost never happens without the role of narrative and media amplification,” Chattoo said.

There’s No One Way to Measure Social Impact

How, exactly, do you measure social change? It’s a question that Chattoo has addressed through her research, including a 2014 report she co-authored on assessing the social impact of issues-focused documentaries. That report defined social impact as “a broad umbrella concept that can include change to individuals, groups, systems and institutions … Social impact assumes a public interest foundation — an improvement of a state of affairs around a social issue.”

Traditional social science research methods — focus groups, surveys and experiments, among others — can be used to measure social change, the report explained. Chattoo reiterated at the conference that “social impact depends on what the social issue is. There’s no one way to measure social impact. It should remain a broad area for people to define based on their projects and issues.”

Conference presenters were asked on stage — and in interviews after their sessions — how they defined and measured the impact of their projects.

Galloway, the co-director of “The Return,” said one way to measure success is immediate gratification from legislative victories. Prior to the film’s 2016 premiere on POV/PBS, she worked with advocates supporting Proposition 36 and created a short-format New York Times “Op-Doc” (short for opinion documentary) called “Three Strikes of Injustice” and a series for Mother Jones that, according to focus groups, helped increase support for reform, according to Galloway. Among the ways she will measure the success of “The Return” are whether the film helps spur job creation for recently released prisoners, and whether it leads to improved public perception of that population.

Katie Galloway. Photo courtesy of CMSI.

Galloway said it’s difficult to demonstrate cause-effect in these cases, and instant gratification is rare.

“I don’t think any of us who make films and believe in the kind of work that was shown [at the conference] would argue that you have to have an immediate legislative change to know that it’s really making change,” Galloway said.

Added Jonathan Skurnik, a documentary filmmaker and founder of The Youth & Gender Media Project: “I love when our films have an impact on policy, but I also love when we help change one person’s life.”

Jonathan Skurnik. Photo by Max Taylor.

Skurnik used as an example a middle school student who, after watching his short film about gender non-binary youth, volunteered his thoughts about gender stereotypes and his own identity. That student, the teacher later told Skurnik, had not raised his hand all year.

Funders often require quantitative measures of impact — for instance, whether students are more accepting of transgender youth, and whether teachers and principals are more confident in their ability to discuss the issue in the classroom after watching him short films. “The impact I love is more qualitative,” he said.

Nicholson said she mostly relies on anecdotal feedback to determine the impact of SPENT. “We put the game out in the world and lots of people saw it, and I assume that a big chunk of people must have been moved by it,” she said. “One of the things that’s cool is seeing the online forums about the game. Even the people who aren’t moved by it bring an interesting level of complexity and energy to the discussion.”

Anecdotal feedback from policymakers and others who viewed the Vera Institute’s data visualization of jail incarceration rates across the United States is one way to track impact, Crowley said. Another important metric, she said, is news media traction — the number of local and national news outlets that analyzed the data, and the accompanying report “Incarceration’s Front Door,” and published articles and editorials on local incarceration rates.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and non-profit journalism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.

The post The Power of Empathy, Personal Narrative and More Lessons from the Story Movements Conference appeared first on MediaShift.

Both provided plenty of fodder for conversation: Was it smart for the Bears to trade up for their first-round draft pick? Why was a Medill reporter’s post about the trade attracting attention, along with posts on a checkers-playing wide receiver, the fate of the Oakland Raiders franchise and the draft dreams of J.J. Watt’s brother? Was a tweet from the NFL’s vice president of football communications with a link to a student’s story driving traffic?

For Scott B. Anderson, an assistant professor at Medill and managing editor of Medill News Service and Medill Content Lab, the audience metrics raised a different question, one facing many college newsroom instructors: What is the proper role of analytics in the newsroom-as-classroom?

Read the first part of this series on the different approaches j-schools take to train aspiring engagement editors.

“What I tend to lean toward is celebrating the stuff that does well — sending out e-mails or telling people individually that you had a top-five story or you got a lot of pickups on Facebook,” Anderson said. “I try to focus on the how and the why versus telling everyone here is your scorecard for the week.”

Using analytics can help students evaluate and improve their journalism. But it can also throw up roadblocks through low readership numbers, chasing metrics before grasping the basics of reporting or making broad assumptions from limited data.

The result is that college newsrooms — training centers, outlets of record and content distributors — are still debating what audience engagement metrics and other measures of impact to use.

Prospects spent #NFLDraft morning at Shriners Children’s Hospital. Great video @MedillChicago https://t.co/qrHfdBBmMi

— Michael Signora (@NFLfootballinfo) April 29, 2016

Working with Small Audiences

Medill Reports Chicago, part of the Medill News Service, is like many university-operated, student-powered publications. It exists to showcase student work and highlight the school’s teaching hospital training. Professors who run these outlets aim to replicate a professional newsroom — except, in many cases, when discussing audience metrics.

“Our mission isn’t to get millions and millions of page views for Medill,” said Anderson, who spent much of his career in major metropolitan newsrooms. “We focus on the primary mission, which is did the student do a good story? It’s not about building a big brand or big business ultimately.”

That, many professors say, is their goal — teach students about the importance of engagement metrics and making an impact without overstating the need for their relatively small, niche news organizations to attract huge audiences.

Jessica Pucci, a professor of practice at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has a nuanced message for students.

“I tell them a story can be good in many different ways, but if no one reads it can you really say it was good?” she said. “Everyone knows what our audience goals are, but we definitely wouldn’t shame anyone who has a low engagement rate. We look at the lows and say why did that happen? What could we have done differently? It’s a teaching moment.”

Pucci, who leads social media and analytics for Cronkite News, the news division of Arizona PBS, said that “not only are we not encumbered by the size and scale of larger media organizations, as a public broadcasting network we aren’t ad-driven, so we are not driving for page views.”

In fact, few university-run newsrooms face external pressure to report their numbers. At Capital News Service, the news organization operated by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, page views are not the most important audience metric, said Sean Mussenden, director of the CNS Digital Bureau. He prefers advanced measures of engagement such as share of returning visitors, time spent on site and social media traction — and he wants students to think critically about what metrics matter most to them.

Analytics Software in College Newsrooms

The most common analytics tools used at universities are Google Analytics and Chartbeat, which charges a monthly or yearly fee. This fall, Capital News Service plans to add another platform to its arsenal: Parse.ly. The service, which typically costs money, is free for Maryland and other schools (including Northwestern, Arizona State and the University of Florida) as part of the University Partners Program, which began with four schools last fall, grew to seven in the spring and will reach 13 schools by fall.

Ben Probert, who runs the Parse.ly program, said the idea is to provide independent student publications and university-operated news outlets access to its dashboard so that faculty and students can discuss what metrics are most important to track and what they learned from analyzing audience data. Schools must report these findings at the end of the semester, and this fall the schools with the top projects will be rewarded with an invitation to extend the free partnership.

Projects already published on Parsely’s website reveal the range of data that universities have sought to gather, including the days and times that are best to publish articles and social media posts, the ideal story length for reader engagement and how social interactions and social referrals impact website traffic.

Pucci, who participates in the University Partners Program, advises students to focus on different audience data depending on the publishing platform and story type. Scroll depth is important for stories with graphics, she said, while Nielsen ratings and YouTube views matter for broadcast stories.

Measuring Impact, not Page Views

Quantitative metrics are not the only way for student journalists to measure audience engagement. Jere Hester, director of news products and projects at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, encourages students to think about whether their stories have — directly or indirectly — made an impact on the communities they cover as beat reporters.

“If we declare victory, it’s going to be where our stories brought action,” said Hester, who runs NYCity News Service, CUNY’s primary outlet for student work.

One such victory came in 2014, when student reporters teamed with New York Daily News reporters on a three-part series about how the city failed to respond to mold complaints in public housing. The articles sparked a city council hearing, a city investigation that confirmed the reporters’ findings and the appointment of a “special master” to oversee the city’s response.

One of the ongoing debates at CUNY is how the curriculum should address the variety of ways to measure this kind of real-world engagement and impact.

“We have a social media tools class that is more focused on distribution and audience growth,” said Carrie Brown, director of CUNY’s graduate program in social journalism. “It’s a tension point because we think that’s where the industry is now but not where it’s going. The whole rest of the program, we barely talk about that stuff at all. We talk about how will you show impact on your community?”

Brown encourages students to interview people from the communities they cover about what impact the stories had on them. Elsewhere, however, that kind of data is only anecdotal and not systematically gathered.

The Impossibility of Offsite Metrics

Similar limitations apply when measuring offsite metrics. When stories are republished, how do audiences engage with that content and what kind of impact does it have? It’s an important question for university-operated news services that regularly feed student work to news outlets with a much broader reach, but also a question no one can answer.

At Cronkite News, the inability to track offsite analytics is “probably our biggest pain point,” Pucci said. She uses Google Alerts to tracks which media outlets run student content, but some outlets do not link back to the original story (they aren’t required to) and she has no systematic way of gauging how her reporters’ stories perform on other news sites.

Matt Sheehan, director of stories and emerging platforms at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, agreed that tracking the offsite performance of stories is “not an easy bridge to cross.” The college’s model of “report once, publish everywhere,” means that student work appears not only in college-controlled media properties but also in outside news outlets.

Tracking media pickups of CNS stories is not an exact science at Maryland’s Capital News Service, either. Mussenden uses a mixture of news alerts and personal communication with the 40-plus news organizations that run students’ stories.

“We get a general sense of how a story does,” but nothing beyond that, Mussenden said. “We have been thinking about ways to track outside mentions better, but we haven’t figured out a way to do that without placing a big burden on our clients.”

Nor is there an way to track offsite for those in the University Partners Program. Parse.ly provides plenty of on-site data but is limited in the outside data it can collect.

“The only way we are getting anything back [from other websites] is if our code is on the page,” Parse.ly’s Probert said. “[News outlets] can see what other websites are referring traffic back to them, but only if there are links. If it’s just a reader going to that site and only that site unfortunately we can’t track that.”

Medill students covering the NFL draft on draft night. Photo by Scott B. Anderson, Northwestern University.

What’s the Real Goal for University Newsrooms?

The reality is that for many schools, the teaching hospital model is first and foremost meant to give students experience in a working newsroom. That’s the measure of success. Attracting huge audiences is secondary.

Mussenden and other professors said they try to focus on the data they have rather than lament the data they could have.

“Our first priority is going to be on-site content,” Mussenden said about CNS. “It’s important for us to know and measure impact, but from a teaching perspective, it’s more important that students have real metrics, real traffic, a real user base to pay attention to and we have that with our own platforms. It’s a bonus when people use our stuff.”

Added Pucci: “I want [students] to get a really clear picture of how content works on one site. Adding someone else’s site introduces so many other variables into the equation. Would it be great to have that data for every single story? Absolutely. But I just chalk it up to, well, if they can’t get the entire picture then at least they can get a really clear picture of the story’s performance on our site.”

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and non-profit journalism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.

The post Practicing What They Preach: J-School News Services Track Engagement and Impact appeared first on MediaShift.

She earned that unofficial title four years ago as a master’s student working at the student-powered news organization run by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

“I looked around and asked, ‘Why aren’t we using our social media accounts consistently? Let me come up with something and we’ll make this happen,’” Auxier said.

What happened to CNS’s social media presence in subsequent semesters largely depended on whether the new crop of students included any aspiring engagement editors who volunteered to guide the news organization’s social distribution strategy.

Getting Serious about Teaching Metrics

This ad-hoc approach to audience engagement troubled Sean Mussenden, director of the CNS Digital Bureau.

“We came to the realization within the last few years that we need to be paying attention to this in a much more serious way,” Mussenden said. “Not just to grow the news organization but also to deliver a better educational experience to students, because increasingly this is the universe they are going to walk into where everybody needs to have some facility with being able to dive into analytics software, be able to read engagement reports or think in a somewhat critical way about what the right measure of engagement is.”

So in recent semesters, Mussenden assigned at least one student each day to be social engagement editor, tasked with selecting stories to promote on social media, crafting social-friendly headlines and tracking audience metrics on CNS platforms. Students indicating an interest in audience engagement as a possible post-graduation career path took the lion’s share of these shifts.

This fall, Maryland is going one step further by creating what amounts to a fifth CNS bureau that focuses exclusively on social journalism and audience engagement (the working title). Four years after first wrangling the social media accounts, now with outside experience as a social media strategist, Auxier will finally get an official title at CNS: bureau chief.

Maryland’s decision to make social journalism and audience engagement a well-defined part of the curriculum is a sign of growing recognition among journalism schools that demand is high for graduates with these skill sets. Training students for this emerging line of work, increasingly performed by full-time engagement editors, is a balancing act for schools that adopt the teaching hospital model where learning happens in the newsroom and classroom.

Jessica Pucci, professor of practice at Arizona State University. Photo courtesy of the subject.

Practicing Analytics in University Newsrooms

The learn-by-doing approach means that students’ exposure to analytics dashboards and social media management tools often comes while they are working at university-operated news organizations. That’s the case at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where students producing content for Cronkite News, the news division of Arizona PBS, can find real-time updates on story performance from a screen showing Chartbeat data in the newsroom.

Jessica Pucci, a professor of practice at Arizona State who leads the school’s efforts to integrate data analytics and audience engagement into the curriculum, said her philosophy is to give students in the Cronkite News class who produce multiplatform content a realistic newsroom experience. That means using analytics to inform editorial decisions and assigning the digital production staff to run newsroom social media accounts.

While Cronkite News students learn lessons about social media and analytics on the fly, students in Pucci’s digital analytics and the audience course do a deeper dive into audience data.

“It’s rare that we’d ever have a day at Cronkite News and say, ‘Hey, let’s sit down for an hour-and-a-half and really dig into our analytics like we would in a classroom,” Pucci said. “The sheer attention to analytics is going to be higher in a lab setting then in a very frenetic, real-time model.”

University of Florida has a similar approach, with students in the news center practicum course who produce broadcast and digital content for the university’s media properties (including local NPR, PBS and ESPN affiliates) getting on-the-job training in analytics and engagement. One assignment asks students to track story performance using analytics software.

Matt Sheehan, director of stories and emerging platforms and a lecturer at the University of Florida, said the professional news directors and college faculty who oversee student work use analytics reports as teaching tools to discuss audience engagement. Sheehan said it’s often a mindset shift for students to understand that they are doing work that resonates beyond the classroom.

“It’s much easier for students to conceptualize that what they are doing can impact someone’s life by monitoring analytics and seeing how people are using and consuming their content,” Sheehan said.

Students discuss these topics in greater depth in the social media analytics and strategy courses at Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. The social media and news course, for instance, requires students to take shifts in the newsroom, known as the Innovation News Center, monitoring analytics for the university’s distribution channels and affiliated websites. As Deb Wenger wrote in MediaShift last year, Florida’s PR campaigns course worked with editors in the news center on using analytics to better understand its audience.

At Northwestern University’s graduate student-powered news organization Medill Reports Chicago, part of the Medill News Service, students can volunteer but are not required to help with the social distribution strategy and monitor site analytics. Away from the newsroom, graduate students can take a mini-course on analytics, said Scott Anderson, assistant professor at the Medill School of Journalism and managing editor of Medill News Service and Medill Content Lab.

Students who write for NYCity News Service, the distribution platform for student work at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, track site analytics and use social media to promote longer projects, said Jere Hester, director of news products and projects and founding director of the news service.

Working with Real Data in the Classroom

To create a more immersive experience, CUNY in 2015 launched a graduate-level social journalism program. Carrie Brown, the program’s director, teaches a community engagement course.

“From the beginning we tell students this program is about engagement and impact,” Brown said. “We ask students to show us evidence that over the course of the year, in covering a community, their reporting has made an impact.”

CUNY students take a course called metrics and outcomes, taught last term by ProPublica community editor Terry Parris Jr., who gave students access to the nonprofit news outlet’s audience data.

Finding data to analyze is often one of the greatest challenges in teaching students about analytics, Pucci said. Cronkite News audience data is a good start, but she said she also wants students to have experience analyzing metrics from newsrooms that are advertising-supported.

Jordan Branch and Ryan Connors managing social accounts on primary election day at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland. Photo via Facebook and used here with permission.

Distinguishing Audience Metrics from Data Journalism

Gathering audience data for students to analyze is one of the tasks facing Auxier, Maryland’s incoming social journalism and audience engagement bureau chief. The eight students expected to enter the bureau this fall will be in charge of social distribution and aggregation strategies, analyzing audience metrics, and other tasks. They will work closely with Mussenden’s data journalism and graphics team in the digital bureau, but they will be in a separate section.

“Separating the social and engagement (newsroom responsibilities) from the data journalism, graphics and web development made sense,” said Mussenden, a lecturer in digital media, data visualization and computational journalism at Maryland who is co-teaching the engagement section. “There aren’t many jobs where part of the time you manage the Facebook account and part of the time you do data journalism.”

And there aren’t many settings other than journalism school teaching hospitals where there’s access to  actual audience data and time to discuss engagement in a meaningful way.

“Our job is to get students to think critically about what is the right thing to measure and what is the right way to measure,” Mussenden said.

Added Anderson: “We have the luxury of being a little more philosophical with the students and say here’s what really matters.”

What audience metrics and other measures of impact should matter for news organizations that serve a variety of roles — training centers, news outlets of record and content distributors? Part two of this series takes on that question.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and non-profit journalism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.

The post J-Schools Try Different Approaches to Training Aspiring Engagement Editors appeared first on MediaShift.