News Co/Lab: a progress report
So a lot has happened in the month-plus since we announced the News Co/Lab, an initiative of Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
My co-founder Eric Newton — the Cronkite School’s innovation head — and I have a fundamental goal: to help the public find new ways of understanding and engaging with news and information, by protecting and expanding a trustworthy information ecosystem in a time when truth and reality are under attack.
Summary:
- We have three announced funders so far: the Facebook Journalism Project, the News Integrity Initiative, and the Rita Allen Foundation.
- One project is under way: working with newsrooms and communities to elevate what we’re calling the “news awareness” — what is also known as “news literacy” — of the community via experiments in newsroom transparency and engagement. A “best-practices” scan and survey will start soon, and we’ll be on the ground in three of the McClatchy media company’s cities early in the new year.
- Another project in the works aims to help the public be better able to sort out the good from bad in the flood of information about science and medicine, where believing misinformation can be literally life-threatening.
- We’ve hired a project coordinator, and are looking for a managing director.
- We’re talking with various partners and colleagues, inside and outside ASU, about work we might do together.
- We’ll be getting a website up soon, and secured (currently) bare-bones Facebook and Twitter pages. Meanwhile Eric and I have talked about the lab in a number of interviews and public events.
Now some details:
Funders
In October, the Facebook Journalism Project became the lab’s launch funder. This was, as I noted in a post at the time, an outgrowth of a Facebook-ASU “News Literacy Working Group” we held last March in Phoenix. We fall under two elements of the journalism project: working to improve journalism, and working to give users of information better tools and techniques for sorting it out.
A day later, the News Integrity Initiative joined as a funding partner. NII, based at City University of New York’s Graduate Journalism School, aims to “foster informed and engaged communities, combat media manipulation, and support inclusive, constructive, and respectful civic discourse.”
Then, last week, the Rita Allen Foundation announced its support for our lab as well. The foundation has a longstanding interest in civic participation, a vital element of the work we will be doing and promoting.
We’re talking with a number of other potential funders, of course. (If you’re interested in supporting our work, let’s talk!)
Projects
Even as we staff up and find office space, we’re moving ahead with several projects.
The first will help newsrooms work with their communities to develop innovations that increase transparency, engagement, mutual understanding and respect. Three McClatchy newsrooms will participate in the pilot phase: the Kansas City Star, the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, and the Modesto (California) Bee.
We visited Kansas City earlier this month, and had great conversations with Star journalists and executives. The Star has a deep reservoir of respect in the community it serves, in part because it still produces work like a stunning series of articles this week on the Kansas state government’s mania for secrecy — a policy that amounts to telling its citizens to get lost when they want to learn what politicians and bureaucrats are doing in their names and with their money.
We heard from Star staffers about their views of journalism; their concerns about the plague of misinformation that’s attacking our civics infrastructure; their own futures in a time when local journalism’s business model has crumbled; and much more. Many of the people we met are eager to try experiments with us to boost the local information ecosystem and, we all hope, their own value in it.
We also spoke with members of the community including a representative of the public schools system and a political operative who, like us, are concerned about misinformation’s role in public life. On return visits we’ll look forward to meeting a diverse cross-section of community people, and to see what they and the newsroom can do together.
Next month we’ll be visiting Modesto and Macon, on similar missions. The newsrooms there are much smaller than the Star’s. Then again, so are most of the newsrooms in the United States. As in Kansas City, we’ll be listening as much as talking.
We have another newsroom partner of note in this initial phase: ASU’s own Cronkite News, a 150-student newsroom based at the school. It’s also the news arm of Arizona Public Broadcasting, and I’m not exaggerating when I say the students, working with outstanding faculty instructors/editors, are doing outstanding things. We’re looking forward to working with students and their faculty editors/instructors on a variety of experiments.
In preparation for the newsroom/community projects, we’re commissioning research in two areas. The first is a scan and survey of existing newsroom practices in transparency and engagement (a subset of the latter). A great deal of information is already available about engagement, notably from a new project called Gather. That’s less true in the transparency realm.
We’ll present a “cookbook” of ideas and how to do them, and then work with the newsrooms to make some of them happen. We’ll also be creating metrics measuring what the community understands regarding news awareness/literacy. Without baseline metrics, we won’t know if our experiments are making any difference.
Meanwhile with the Rita Allen Foundation’s support, we’re starting separate (though related) work in another part of the news/information ecosystem. This project has a specific goal: to help people sort out information on science and medicine when so much of what they read, hear, and see is junk science and junk medicine.
This project stems from our belief, based on what people in larger media-literacy field have been saying for years, that it’s not enough to just add news literacy to people’s overall knowledge base. It’s better, we are convinced, to embed it into specific topic areas. (Are you worried about misinformation in your own area of interest? Let us know.)
People
Eric and I are fortunate to have the more-than-able assistance of our new project coordinator, Lisa Jackson. She’s getting us way better organized. Whew!
We’re also in the process of finding a managing director for the lab. This person has to keep track of and juggle a lot of moving parts — staff, contractors, funders, and of course the projects — including me and Eric.
And, not least, we’re looking forward to working with Cronkite students and faculty as we get up to speed. As noted, the building is full of talent, and we hope to lure some of it into our experiments.
Partners
When we launched, we mentioned some of the people with whom we plan to collaborate. As I wrote at the time, we’re not trying to copy the fine work of other people and their projects. We want to help them do more of it.
If you’re working in this space and think there are ways we can productively collaborate, let us know. Keep in mind that we’re looking for interesting experiments to launch or help.
Talk/Press
Our first few weeks have been what Silicon Valley people call a “soft launch” — getting going with a minimum of public fuss and a lot of work. Apart from the press releases, we’ve gotten some attention from journalists who cover this arena.
Meanwhile, Eric and I have talked about our goals in several public events. At a Korea Press Foundation conference in Seoul last week, I was among the few people talking about the demand side of media. But the message resonated. Quite a few people told me they agreed at improving the public’s news literacy was a vital mission for journalists in the future.
I believe in what the News Co/Lab will do. For me it’s an opportunity to pull together much of what I’ve worked on for the past 15-plus years. Democratization of media is a vast and fertile new field for the journalism trade, a gift to those who see how turning news into a conversation is best for everyone involved.
But democratization has also been the opportunity of a lifetime for bad actors. They have been poisoning our info-ecosystem, and will prevail if we don’t address demand at least as urgently as supply — to help the users (not just “consumers”) of information upgrade themselves.
