Friday, November 6, 2009
Media / News Bites Is This the Future of Chicago Journalism?
Posted by Michael Miner on 11.06.09 at 12:22 PM
The Chicago Community Trust is scattering half a million dollars in seed money to support 12 innovative local journalism projects. It's a new program, Community News Matters, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation ($250,000) and the John D. and Catherine T.MacArthur Foundation ($100,000) as well as CCT; spokesperson Vivian Vahlberg says satisfying all 86 grant applications would have required $5.7 million. "The amazing thing is there were so few dogs among the proposals," she tells me. "So many good ones, so many interesting ones."
Here's what Thursday's news release has to say about the winning grants:
Projects designed to improve the flow of information in high-need communities
Columbia College Chicago
Nonprofit/For Profit
$45,000
For a Columbia College/Chicago Tribune collaboration using student and professional journalists to cover government meetings, businesses, churches and other institutions in Austin, with content distributed via a new Web site (www.austintalks.com), Tribune's ChicagoNow blog site, a mobile edition, a newsletter and text messaging
Gapers Block Media, LLC
For Profit Business
$35,000
To increase the amount of neighborhood-based, original local coverage on Gapers Block, with priority given to stories about underserved communities and issues that affect them
Loyola University Chicago (School of Communication)
Nonprofit
$45,000
For a partnership between Loyola and Benito Juarez Community Academy to train high school and college journalists to cover Pilsen, with content distributed via a new Web site, "Adentro de Pilsen" (Inside Pilsen), a Spanish language news magazine and (potentially) hand-held mobile devices
South Suburban Publishing LLC
For Profit Business
$30,000
To train and equip citizen journalists to cover news in Markham for a new Web site (www.southsnews.com), using smartphone video reporting and traditional online newsgathering techniques
Projects designed to strengthen information sharing, learning and unique perspectives by and for specific groups
Chicago Association of Hispanic Journalists
Nonprofit
$30,000
For a new Web site to promote the work of Chicago-area Latino journalists, to assign freelance reporters to fill gaps in coverage about issues of interest to the area's Latino community and to train and mentor student and citizen journalists
Chicago Youth Voices Network
Nonprofit
$60,000
To engage several hundred youth journalists in twelve local youth media programs to explore and report on how Chicago teens are faring in the economic recovery, using online polls and social media reporting
Community Media Workshop
Nonprofit
$45,000 total
1. $15,000 to help build and develop a strong, healthy online news ecosystem in the Chicago area through continued tracking, convening, reporting, collaboration with and education of the sector
2. $30,000 to launch (in collaboration with Northwestern University Medill School professor Jack Doppelt) a reporting, story sharing and translation service for ethnic media and their audiences, building on CMW's ethnic media work and Medill's "Immigrant Connect Chicago" program
Projects designed to create and build new business models
Chicago News Cooperative
Nonprofit (to become L3C)
$50,000
To support development of a new L3C cooperative business model providing enterprising journalistic coverage of the Chicago area using various Web, print and broadcast platforms, including a new Web site called "The Chicago Scoop"
Northwestern University (Medill School)
Nonprofit
$30,000
For graduate students to help two local community news ventures develop sustainable business models, with in-depth analysis, prototype development and recommendations for business strategy, audience, content design, delivery, marketing and revenue
Project designed to support investigative journalism and civic engagement
Better Government Association
Nonprofit
$60,000
To train volunteer "reporter monitors" to report on government meetings downtown and in Chicago's neighborhoods for a new "Good Government Virtual Town Hall" Web site
Projects designed to improve technology platforms and aggregation of news and information
Beachwood Media Company
For Profit Business
$35,000
To help the Beachwood Reporter create a sustainable business model through strategic enhancements in technology and content
Brad Flora
Individual
$35,000
To upgrade software used by The Windy Citizen to enable the site to expand and better integrate with other social media platforms
The CCT statement says Community News Matters is intended "to increase the flow of truthful, accurate and insightful news and information in the region and spur development of new business models for news." According to CEO Terry Mazany, “The Chicago area has become a real laboratory for development of the future for community news and information.”
And should anyone be wondering why some familiar names in local news are missing from the list of Community News Matters grantees, the CCT points out its "longstanding commitment to community information" has been expressed for the past 19 years by its ongoing support of Chicago Matters, a collaboration of WTTW, Chicago Public Radio, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Reporter.
Comments (3)
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Is this the future of Chicago journalism? It's estimated, for instance, that the Chicago News Cooperative has enough foundation funding to hang on for about 4 months. If that's typical, then this is indeed the future--about 4 months' worth. After that, who knows?
These and other examples around the country are beginning to look like institutional free-lancing. Instead of individual free-lance journalists trying to scrape up work from for-profit institutions with actual business models, institutions like the CNC with no business model try to scrape up funding from non-profit foundations. Rather a gossamer thread on which to suspend one of the vital institutions of democracy.
This calls to mind the health insurance debate. We could do the rational thing and simply look overseas to our Western trading partners to find a turnkey system with a track record (France, the Netherlands, Canada) and adopt it here--no muss, no fuss, extending superior health care to everyone, cutting per-capita costs by more than half and going a long way toward returning the country to competitive status in global markets. Or we could--as we clearly are doing--extend the massively costly, broken, fraudulent and inhumane system we currently have by bolting on a Rube Goldberg system of mandates and unenforceable rules and regulations.
Must journalism be equally blind? I'd humbly suggest that, just for a moment, we suspend our yankee provincialism and examine how newspapers survive or thrive in other countries. I really have little information on the subject. I know that German newspapers, a few years ago, were on the ropes, mainly due to the loss of classified ads. But they've since recovered. How, I don't know. British papers supposedly depend more on revenue from newsstand purchases and subscriptions than on ad revenue, the reverse of the U.S. model. (It also doesn't hurt that Britain's big papers are competitive on a national scale, engaging readers by offering a diverse read on national and global affairs, a concept completely alien to postwar American journalism.) Across Europe, delivery is much cheaper because readers are in the habit of picking up papers at newsstands rather than having them delivered to their doors. And in France, doesn't Le Monde, the most respected paper and one of the world's best, have some sort of government funding or backing?
For that matter, isn't it curious that in any debate over whatever suppurating-verging-on-gangrenous problem we have here in the States, we so studiously ignore or reject solutions that other countries have found and, sometimes, sustained for generations. In addition to health care and newspapers, we could talk about public schools (lots of countries have superb schools at moderate cost) and the banking crisis (Sweden temporarily nationalized its biggest banks during a similar meltdown in the 1990s and everyone came out ahead in a few years' time).
But no. We insist on coming up with our own unique, shambolic solutions to everythin. With newspapers, what we're witnessing is a panicky shift of talent and resources from a large, proven but currently somewhat unsteady product into alternative media that, after all, have been around a while now and show less and less promise over time. In real estate terms, it would be like moving out of a modest bungalow in need of a little remodeling and into a yurt. True, the yurt is a refreshing change, and it fits the nomadic lifestyle. But after a few years of living like a yak herder, I believe, journalists are likely to miss the old bungalow/newspaper.
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Has anybody dared ask why philanthropic foundations are pouring money into FOR PROFIT corporations?
I am a little hazy on the exact rules but foundations are allowed to support for profit corporations if the work they are supporting meets a certain standard. My understanding is that in these cases, the foundations have an additional duty to monitor how their funds are spent that they do not have when supporting nonprofits.
