Democracy Fund believes that strong local news and a vibrant public square are critical to a healthy democracy. That is why our local news strategy is focused on creating a more connected, collaborative, and sustainable future for public-interest journalism. But we recognize that we can’t do it alone, and that partnerships with other foundations are critical to rebuilding a vibrant public square.
Today we are releasing a new paper that we commissioned to help us learn about how to build effective and equitable partnerships that put local stakeholders at the center of our work to support local news. The paper, “Effective Place-Based Philanthropy: The Role and Practices of a National Funder,” is relevant to funders and nonprofits working on a range of community development and engagement efforts.
We believe that the future of local news is local. That may sound like a bland truism, but it raises important questions for a national foundation who wants to genuinely and authentically support diverse local communities to strengthen their local news ecosystem. Solutions to the crisis in local news need to respond to local context and needs. We can and should learn from what is working elsewhere, but we should also recognize there is no silver bullet and that only through deep listening and partnership can we create meaningful and lasting change.
For this reason, we have designed our local news strategy around deep partnerships with local funders, journalists, and communities. We want Democracy Fund to be a catalyst for expanding locally driven and locally supported efforts to create robust news ecosystems. We recognize that in pursuing place-based philanthropy to strengthen local news, we are guests in other’s communities. We take that role seriously and humbly.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles and practices of national foundations undertaking place-based work and learn from past projects. Democracy Fund commissioned Prudence Brown, a respected leader in place-based philanthropy, to provide her insights as we developed our strategy.
Drawing significantly from recent literature and Brown’s own experience and observations, this paper is organized around key questions that national funders can consider as they develop new place-based partnerships. After each question, Brown provides a brief discussion and concrete suggestions for decision-making and action. While the audience for this paper is largely other foundations, we believe that the lessons here are also useful in empowering nonprofits and grantees.
Many of the themes and considerations in this paper are applicable to other sectors well beyond journalism and media. As such, we are sharing this work with the broader field. We think this is important both for transparency and accountability, and because we hope others can learn alongside us. This paper is just the start of our learning journey. We welcome any comments about lessons learned from other national-local partnerships to LocalNewsLab@democracyfund.org.
Today The Omidyar Group released a paper co-authored by me and two colleagues at Omidyar Network on the role of social media platforms on democracy and the public square. This paper – called “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?” – comes at a moment when there is new scrutiny on the role Facebook, Google, and Twitter played in spreading misinformation and divisive propaganda during the 2016 election. Those debates loom large, however, our analysis goes well beyond any one election to try and understand how social platforms are disrupting core elements of a democratic society.
In June 2017 Facebook raised the question “Is social media good for democracy?” Like them, we have been wrestling with these questions for some time, and while we do not take for granted how these networks provide value to civic life, we are also deeply troubled by the dangers they pose. Their algorithms and their vast storehouses of data gives them fundamentally new capacities abilities to shape discourse, media, and civic and democratic life in American.
As my co-authors – Stacy Donohue and Anamitra Deb – and I reviewed the research of leading voices on this set of issues, we identified six key ways social media is threatening democracy:
Exacerbating the polarization of civil society via echo chambers and filter bubbles
Rapidly spreading mis- and dis-information and amplifying the populist and illiberal wave across the globe
Creating competing realities driven by their algorithms’ intertwining of popularity and legitimacy
Being vulnerable to political capture and voter manipulation through enabling malevolent actors to spread dis-information and covertly influence public opinion
Capturing unprecedented amounts of data that can be used to manipulate user behavior
Facilitating hate speech, public humiliation, and the targeted marginalization of disadvantaged or minority voices
There are no easy answers to the challenges represented above, and any group of potential solutions must account for the diverse interests of multiple stakeholders if we are going to have the public square we deserve. As our founder, ebay creator Pierre Omidyar, wrote today in The Washington Post, “Just as new regulations and policies had to be established for the evolving online commerce sector, social media companies must now help navigate the serious threats posed by their platforms and help lead the development and enforcement of clear industry safeguards. Change won’t happen overnight, and these issues will require ongoing examination, collaboration and vigilance to effectively turn the tide.”
For our part, at Democracy Fund, the potential effects of social media on democracy are closely tied to many lines of our work. This includes longstanding investments on issues ranging from combating hyperpartisanship with constructive dialogue to developing digital election administration tools, and from understanding the impact of fact checking to supporting communities often targeted online. A few examples of this work include:
Politifact, one of the nation’s leading fact checking organizations, has partnered with Facebook to combat the spread of misinformation on the platform.
The Center for Media Engagement, formerly the Engaging News Project, works with newsrooms, social platforms and the public to develop and test ways to make trusted online information more engaging and impactful.
The Coral Project builds open-source tools focused on helping newsrooms build safe, secure and vibrant online communities.
In addition, we supported the Knight Prototype Fund on misinformation earlier this year, which focused on many of these issues. The full list of 20 projects can be found here, but the four projects we funded are:
Viz Lab — Developing a dashboard to track how misinformation spreads through images and memes to aid journalists and researchers in understanding the origins of the image, its promoters, and where it might have been altered and then redistributed across social media.
Hoaxy Bot-o-Meter is a tool created by computer scientists at the Center for Complex Networks to uncover attempts to use Internet bots to boost the spread of misinformation and shape public opinion. The tool aims to reveal how this information is generated and broadcasted, how it becomes viral, its overall reach, and how it competes with accurate information for placement on user feeds.
The Documenters Project by City Bureau creates a network of citizen “documenters” who receive training in the use of journalistic ethics and tools, attend public civic events, and produce trustworthy reports on social media platforms.
The American Library Association is collaborating with the Center for News Literacy to develop an adult media literacy program in five public libraries, focused on how to be a savvy digital citizen in a platform world.
We are going to continue to ask hard questions and support people and organizations who are working to create a robust public square that serves our democracy. We look forward to continuing this work alongside these and other partners. Please email the authors at inquiries@omidyargroup.com if you’d like to discuss how we might work together.
Washington, DC – This week marks the launch of News Match 2017, a $3 million collaboration between Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support nonprofit news organizations that play a vital role informing the public and holding those in power accountable.
News Match is the largest grassroots fundraising campaign to support nonprofit and investigative news organizations. More than 100 organizations are eligible to receive up to $28,000 each in matching funding for all individual donations up to $1,000. Donors can contribute between now and December 31st at www.newsmatch.org—the first one-stop platform for donating to nonprofit news. Donations can also be made directly to participating newsrooms.
Knight Foundation launched the inaugural News Match in 2016, helping 57 nonprofit news organizations raise more than $1.2 million in match donations. This year, in partnership with the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and the News Revenue Hub, Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation will nearly triple the number of dollars available to more than 100 nonprofit news organizations. The Miami Foundation is serving as fiscal sponsor for the fund. In total, more than $3 million has been pledged to support state and local news, investigative reporting, and engaged journalism.
“We want 2017 to be a record-setting year for donations to news to ensure that innovative, nonprofit newsrooms have the resources they need to deliver high-quality reporting to the communities they serve,” said Josh Stearns, Associate Director for the Public Square program at Democracy Fund. “News Match comes at a time when journalists are facing a perfect storm of economic challenges and political attacks. A robust, independent press is essential to fostering an informed and engaged public and vital for a healthy democracy.”
“At a time when trust in media is at an all-time low, nonprofit journalism organizations are directly connecting with people to understand their needs and concerns, while providing vital news and information to communities across the nation,” Jennifer Preston, Knight Foundation Vice President for Journalism. “This initiative will help news organizations that are imperative to our democracy build resources and widen their supporter base, just when they need it most.”
Nonprofit newsrooms depend on donations from their communities to produce public-interest news. In the last two decades newsrooms have lost more than 24,000 jobs. By donating to News Match you can help ensure your community and the issues you care about get the coverage they deserve. News Match organizers are inviting other foundations to join the effort by contributing additional funding, and INN and the News Revenue Hub are providing support for local and regional foundations who want to match donations to newsrooms in their region.
“People are increasingly looking to nonprofit news to fill their information needs,” said Sue Cross, Executive Director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News. “We need to continue that momentum and build an infrastructure that supports organizations that deliver fact-based, nonpartisan, accountable journalism.”
“The accountability and investigative function of journalism is essential for our democracy and it has been under-resourced for many years,” said Kathy Im, Director of Journalism and Media at MacArthur. “News Match endeavors to strengthen a free and independent press and help restore Americans’ faith in the news media.”
Donors can easily find and support trusted reporting in their community and on issues they care about. Organizations participating in News Match 2017:
Alabama Initiative for Independent Journalism; Anthropocene Magazine; Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting; Aspen Journalism; BenitoLink.com; Better Government Association; California Health Report; CALmatters; Capital of Texas Media Foundation; Carolina Public Press; Center for Public Integrity; Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org); Center for Sustainable Journalism; Centro de Periodismo Investigativo; Chalkbeat; Charlottesville Tomorrow; City Bureau; City Limits; CivicStory / NJ Arts News; Civil Eats; Connecticut Health Investigative Team, Inc.; Connecticut News Project / Connecticut Mirror; Current; ecoRI News; EdSource Inc. ; Energy News Network / Fresh Energy; Ensia; FairWarning; First Look Media; Florida Bulldog; Florida Center for Investigative Reporting; Food and Environment Reporting Network; Fostering Media Connections; Georgia News Lab; Grist; Highlands Current Inc.; Honolulu Civil Beat; Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance; inewsource; Injustice Watch; InsideClimate News; Institute for the New Food Economy; International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; InvestigateWest; Investigative Post; Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication; Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch.org; Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting; Maryland Matters; MarylandReporter.com Inc.; Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service; MinnPost; Mississippi Today; Mother Jones; NC Health News; New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University; New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism; New Mexico In Depth Inc. ; Next City; NJ Spotlight; Northern Kentucky Tribune; NOWCastSA; Oklahoma Watch; Orb Media; Philadelphia Public School Notebook; Pine Tree Watch/ Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting; PolitiFact; ProPublica; PublicSource; Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; Religion News Foundation; Rocky Mountain Public Media; Rivard Report; San Francisco Public Press; San Juan Independent; Scalawag; Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University; Searchlight New Mexico; Solitary Watch; St. Louis Public Radio 90.7 KWMU; Texas Tribune, Inc.; The Austin Bulldog; The Center for Investigative Reporting; The Center for Michigan; The Colorado Independent; The Crime Report; The Hechinger Report; The Hummel Report; The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute; The Lens; The Marshall Project; The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting; The Seattle Globalist; The Trace; The War Horse; TucsonSentinel.com; Voice of OC; Voice of San Diego; Voices of Monterey Bay; VTDigger; Washington Monthly; Wausau Pilot and Review; WBUR; WFYI Public Media; WHYY, Inc.; Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism; WyoFile; Youth Radio; 100Reporters; 365 Media Foundation
All news organizations participating in News Match must be members in good standing of the Institute for Nonprofit News. To be a member, an organization must be a 501(c)(3) or have a 501(c)3 fiscal sponsor, must be transparent about funding sources, and produce investigative and/or public-service reporting. Donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law. Visit newsmatch.org for more information.
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About Democracy Fund:
The Democracy Fund is a bipartisan foundation established by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar to help ensure that our political system can withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people. Since 2011, Democracy Fund has invested more than $60 million in support of effective governance, modern elections, and a vibrant public square. For more, visit democracyfund.org.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation:
Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. We invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Our goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which we believe are essential for a healthy democracy. For more, visit knightfoundation.org.
About the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation:
The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. MacArthur is placing a few big bets that truly significant progress is possible on some of the world’s most pressing social challenges, including over-incarceration, global climate change, nuclear risk, and significantly increasing financial capital for the social sector. In addition to the MacArthur Fellows Program, the Foundation continues its historic commitments to the role of journalism in a responsible and responsive democracy, as well as the strength and vitality of our headquarters city, Chicago. More information is available at macfound.org.
About the Institute for Nonprofit News:
The Institute for Nonprofit News is an incubator and support network for nonprofit newsrooms, strengthening the sources of independent, public service information and investigative journalism for thousands of communities across the U.S. INN is the only organization in the U.S. specifically focused on supporting the emerging nonprofit news sector. For more, visit INN.org.
About the News Revenue Hub:
The News Revenue Hub helps news organizations build the trust and financial support of their audiences by providing customized technology tools and proven strategies to create and sustain successful digital membership programs. For more, visit fundjournalism.org
About the Miami Foundation:
Since 1967, The Miami Foundation has used civic leadership, community investment and philanthropy to improve the quality of life for everyone who calls Greater Miami home. We partner with individuals, families and corporations who have created more than 1,000 personalized, philanthropic Funds. Thanks to them, we have awarded over $250 million in grants and currently manage more than $300 million in assets to build a better Miami. As the Foundation marks our 50th anniversary, we are celebrating great Miamians who have championed what matters to them, encouraging all residents to share their Miami stories and unite around the causes they care about. For more, visit miamifoundation.org
Today three foundations are putting up $3 million in matching dollars and inviting the nation to stand up and support local news and investigative reporting. The News Match fund is a collaboration between Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
News Match is the largest grassroots fundraising campaign ever to support nonprofit and investigative news organizations. Across the country, 110 newsrooms are participating. Together we want 2017 to be a record-setting year for donations to news to ensure that innovative, nonprofit newsrooms have the resources they need to deliver high-quality reporting to the communities they serve. Donors can contribute up to $1,000 between now and December 31, and every donation will be matched, up to a total of $27,000 per organization.
Why News Match, Why Now?
News Match comes at a time when journalists are facing a perfect storm of economic challenges and political attacks. A robust, independent press is essential to fostering an informed and engaged public and vital for a healthy democracy. The News Match fund launches today with $3 million but was built as a platform for other foundations and donors to join. National funders can contribute to increasing the matching fund and local funders can partner to match donations just to newsrooms in their area. Find out more about how funders can work with News Match here.
“The accountability and investigative function of journalism is essential for our democracy and it has been under-resourced for many years,” said Kathy Im, Director of Journalism and Media at MacArthur. “News Match endeavors to strengthen a free and independent press and help restore Americans’ faith in the news media.”
New Ways to Support Quality News
Launching alongside News Match is a new website— www.newsmatch.org—the first one-stop platform for donating to nonprofit news. You can search for newsrooms by location or topic, and you can donate to multiple newsrooms with one simple transaction. The site, which is hosted by the Institute for Nonprofit News, is just one way News Match is building the capacity of the field.
The participating foundations have invested more than $750,000 in technology, training and communications support to expand the capabilities of nonprofit news organizations to build a more sustainable future rooted in community support. Building on the success of the News Revenue Hub, News Match participants will have access to new tools, workshops and coaching to fortify their relationships with readers and donors. “This initiative will help new organizations that are imperative to our democracy build resources and widen their supporter base, just when they need it most,” Jennifer Preston, Knight Foundation Vice President for Journalism, said in a statement.
Knight Foundation launched the inaugural News Match in 2016, helping 57 nonprofit news organizations raise more than $1.2 million in match donations. This year, with support from Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, News Match will nearly triple the number of dollars available and almost double the number of newsrooms who are participating. The Miami Foundation is serving as fiscal sponsor for the fund.
In August, my colleague Srik Gopal wrote about the work Democracy Fund has been doing to understand the contours of trust in democratic institutions from elections to journalism and the public square. We have much more to share from that research and the grant making strategy that it is informing. However, even as we were undertaking that research, Democracy Fund and other foundations were investing in people and projects related to these issues.
For example, the Knight Foundation recently unveiled a new commission on “Trust, Media and Democracy,” which will meet around the country over the next year looking for new ideas and solutions to issues of trust. What follows is a snapshot of some of the efforts underway to combat misinformation, strengthen truthful reporting and create more trusting relationships between people and the press. Later this month I’ll be participating in a series of briefings on trust and misinformation for funders organized by Media Impact Funders in partnership with the Hewlett Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation.
A version of this piece originally appeared in the May edition of Responsive Philanthropy, the journal of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
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Today there is real concern about the spread of misinformation and issues of basic trust in our democratic institutions, including the press, our fourth estate. From viral hoaxes disguised to look like news to propaganda spread by automated bots online, we are witnessing a sustained attempt to spread misinformation, generate uncertainty and undermine objective truth. When paired with the kinds of political attacks journalists have faced in recent months these trends raise troubling questions for a free and open society. However, despite the new contours of our current political climate and technological developments, issues of trust in journalism extend far back into our nation’s history. According to polls, trust in the media has been eroding since Watergate, but the impact of misinformation has been experienced unevenly for a long time. Communities of color in particular have been grappling with inaccurate reporting and outright false stories that have had real and damaging consequences.
As such, we have to understand that the challenges we face today are not just technological, but also economic, cultural and political. The scholar Danah Boyd has called this an information war that is being shaped by “disconnects in values, relationships and social fabric.” They are fundamentally human struggles and have as much to do with our relationships with each other as our relationship with the media.
Given this complex web of forces, it can be difficult to determine the best role for philanthropy. This is the kind of wicked problem that systems thinking is designed to help untangle. At Democracy Fund, we have invested in systems approaches because they help us develop multi-pronged strategies that reinforce one another in a complicated and dynamic world. Systems thinking helps us see the often hidden and tangled roots of the issues we care about.
In response to these issues some foundations are organizing rapid response grants and programs designed to invest in new ideas and projects. Some donors are investing in investigative journalism and local news to expand the capacity of trustworthy newsrooms. Others are taking a measured approach, adjusting their current grantmaking or planning with their grantees for the ongoing engagement these challenges demand. The reality is that we need both long- and short-term strategies.
For all the concern about “fake news,” there is still a remarkable amount we don’t know about trust, truth and the spread of misinformation online or the impact it has had on politics and public debate. So much news consumption and distribution happens on private platforms whose proprietary data makes it hard for researchers to study.
Foundations should expand their support for research in this area but should do so strategically and in coordination with other foundations to ensure that lessons are being shared and translated into actionable intelligence for the field.
At the start of this year, New Media Ventures launched an open call for media and technology projects from “companies and organizations working to resist fear, lies and hate as well as those focused on rebuilding and using this unprecedented moment of citizen mobilization to shape a better future.” In about a month, they received more than 500 applications, an unprecedented number for them.
Open Calls as a Call to Action
A few days later, the Knight Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation and Democracy Fund announced a prototype fund for “early-stage ideas to improve the flow of accurate information.” That fund received 800 applications in a month. Finally, the International Center for Journalists just launched a“TruthBuzz” contest, funded by the Craig Newmark Foundation.
These open calls are a way for foundations to catalyze energy and surface new ideas, bringing new people and sectors together to tackle the complex challenges related to misinformation.
Trust is forged through relationships, and for many, the long-term work of rebuilding trust in journalism is rooted in fundamentally changing the relationship between the public and the press. For the last few years, foundations like Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation and others have been deepening their investments in newsroom community engagement efforts.
Negotiating New Relationships Between Journalists and the Public
Organizations like Hearken, which reorients the reporting process around the curiosity of community members, and the Solutions Journalism Network, which encourages journalists to report on solutions, not just problems, help optimize newsrooms for building trust. The Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica and Chalkbeat have also pioneered exciting projects in this space.
Making journalism more responsive to and reflective of its community demands culture change in newsrooms and an emphasis on diversity and inclusion. If we want communities to trust journalism, they have to see themselves and their lived experiences reflected in the reporting. Too often that is still not the case, and foundations can play a vital role in sustaining the ongoing work to renegotiate these relationships.
This typology of misinformation by Claire Wardle of First Draft News identifies the spectrum of fabricated stories and the motivations behind them.
Weaving Fact-Checking Into a Platform World
The growth of the fact-checking field in recent years has been fueled by strategic investments from a number of foundations, including Democracy Fund. These investments have helped strengthen the practices and infrastructure for fact-checking making these platform partnerships possible. However, new challenges demand new kinds of fact checking.
Foundations should not wait until the next election to increase support for these efforts. Now is the time to invest in learning and experimentation to make fact-checking work even better, engage an often critical public, and adapt to the new realities we face.
While fact-checkers hone the science of debunking official statements from politicians and pundits, we need to develop new skills for combating the wide array of unofficial and hard-to-source falsehoods that spread online. A leading organization working on these issues is First Draft News, which combines rigorous research with practical hands-on training and technical assistance for newsrooms, universities and the public. (Disclosure: I was one of the founders of First Draft News.)
Cultivating New Skills for Combatting Misinformation
Most of these efforts work not only with newsrooms, but also human rights organizations, first responders and community groups who are on the front lines of confronting misinformation. Foundations should help connect their grantees to these resources and support First Draft and others to scale up their work in this critical moment.
In April, five foundations and four technology companies launched the News Integrity Initiative at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Designed to advance a new vision for news literacy, this global effort is rooted in a user-first approach to expanding trust in journalism. Today, we the people are the primary distributors of news. As such, it is critical that the public be adept at spotting fakes and debunking falsehoods, and that we cultivate the skills to track a story to its source and the motivation to hold each other accountable.
A New Era for News Literacy
With support from MacArthur, Robert R. McCormick, Knight and other foundations, projects like The News Literacy Project, Center for News Literacy and The LAMP have been working with students for years to address these issues. Similarly, youth media groups like Generation Justice in New Mexico, Free Spirit Media in Chicago and the Transformative Culture Project in Boston, are working with diverse communities on becoming active creators, not just consumers of media. And libraries across the country are hosting workshops and trainings for people of all ages.
In the past, foundations funding health, climate change and racial justice have recognized the need to help people sort fact from fiction. Today, foundations can help expand the field by investing in engaging models of news literacy and supporting efforts to get news and civic literacy into state education standards.
James Madison wrote in an 1822 letter that “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” We are increasingly facing an information ecosystem flooded by misinformation and disinformation being strategically deployed to spread uncertainty and distrust. Those efforts are being amplified by the speed with which information is shared across social media, algorithms tuned for viral views and emotional impact and filter bubbles that increasingly divide us into silos.
Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to address the challenges of eroding trust and the spread of false and misleading information. The interventions discussed above are largely focused domestically but there is more that can and should be done to confront these issues on the global stage. Foundations and donors should invest in approaches that focus on making change across three interconnected areas: the press, in the public square and social platforms.
Given the diverse strategies foundations can pursue in their response to this moment, it is critical that we work together to share what we are learning, invest strategically in what is working, and put the people most impacted by these issues at the center of our funding.
The Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Rita Allen Foundation announced today that twenty projects seeking to improve the flow of accurate information will split $1 million to explore and develop early-stage ideas, programs, and prototypes.
In moments of uncertainty and volatility it can be tempting to gravitate towards a single solution to the pressing problem of misinformation and low public trust facing our media, technology, and democracy. However, when it comes to rebuilding the public square and ensuring what is shared is accurate information there are no silver bullets. As such, the projects receiving funding today represent a wide array of ideas and approaches from cognitive psychology and community engagement to computer science and news literacy.
Many of the winners leverage new technology, such as artificial intelligence, to identify and push back on efforts pollute our information ecosystem, while others turned to techniques rooted in education and organizing. Taken together these twenty projects represent a diverse cohort of individuals and institutions who will spend the next nine months grappling with the many questions that surround the role of truth and trust in our media, politics and society.
Out of the twenty total organizations receiving Prototype Fund grants, Democracy Fund supported four specific projects which will each receive $50,000.
Viz Lab (Project leads: Caroline Sinders | San Francisco | @carolinesinders, Susie Cagle | Oakland | @susie_c, Francis Tseng | Brooklyn | @frnsys): Developing a dashboard to track and visualize images and ‘memes,’ as common sources of fake news, to enable journalists and researchers to more easily understand the origins of the image, its promoters, and where it might have been altered and then redistributed.
The Documenters Project by City Bureau (Project lead: Darryl Holliday | Chicago | @d_holli, @city_bureau): Strengthening local media coverage and building trust in journalism by creating an online network of citizen “documenters” who receive training in the use of journalistic ethics and tools, attend public civic events, and produce short summaries that are posted online as a public resource. City Bureau will create and test a field manual to help others replicate the model.
Hoaxy Bot-o-Meter by Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (Project lead: Filippo Menczer | Bloomington, Indiana | @Botometer, @truthyatindiana): Developinga tool to uncover attempts to use Internet bots to boost the spread of misinformation and shape public opinion. The tool aims to reveal how this information is generated and broadcasted, how it becomes viral, its overall reach, and how it competes with accurate information for placement on user feeds.
Media Literacy @ Your Library by American Library Association in collaboration with the Center for News Literacy (Project lead: Samantha Oakley | Chicago | @ALALibrary, @NewsLiteracy): Developing an adult media literacy program in five public libraries, including a series of online learning sessions, resources, and an in-person workshop to train library workers to help patrons become more informed media consumers.
The other projects include numerous other Democracy Fund grantees and partners working on fact-checking, debunking viral disinformation, and mining digital archives for context. The sixteen other winners are:
Breaking filter bubbles in science journalism by the University of California, Santa Cruz
(Project lead: Erika Check Hayden | Santa Cruz, California @Erika_Check | @UCSC_SciCom): Producing visually-engaging science journalism around topics such as climate change and genetics, to determine whether content delivered by a trusted messenger in a culturally-relevant context has greater reach. The articles will be tested through the digital platform EscapeYourBubble.com, which distributes curated content to users across ideological divides.
Calling Bullshit in the Age of Fake News by the University of Washington (Project lead: Jevin West | Seattle @jevinwest, @UW_iSchool): Developing a curriculum and set of tools to teach students and the public to better assess quantitative information and combat misinformation—with a particular emphasis on data, visualizations, and statistics.
ChartCheck by Periscopic (Project lead: Megan Mermis | Portland, Oregon | @periscopic): Addressing the spread of misinformation through charts, graphs, and data visualizations by fact-checking these resources and publishing results. The team will also build tools to address the spread of these charts on social media and the Internet.
Crosscheck by Vanderbilt University in collaboration with First Draft (Project lead: Lisa Fazio and Claire Wardle | Nashville, Tennessee | @lkfazio, @cward1e, @firstdraftnews, @crosscheck): Using design features to make correct news more memorable, so that people can recall it more easily when faced with false information, using a platform initially developed in France to address misinformation around the French election.
Facts Matter by PolitiFact (Project lead: Aaron Sharockman | St. Petersburg, Florida | @asharock, @PolitiFact): Helping to improve trust in fact-checking, particularly among people who identify as conservative, through experiments including in-person events; a mobile-game that tracks misconceptions about specific facts; diverse commentators who would assess fact-checking reports; and a study of the language used in these reports to determine their effect on perceptions of trustworthiness.
Glorious ContextuBot by Bad Idea Factory (Project lead: Daniel Schultz | Philadelphia | @biffud, @slifty): Helping people become better consumers of online audio and video content through a tool that provides the original source of individual clips and identifies who else has discussed it on the news.
Immigration Lab by Univision News (Project lead: Ronny Rojas | Miami | @ronnyrojas, @UniNoticias): Engaging undocumented immigrants on issues that affect their lives by creating a reliable news resource to help them access and gather information. The project team will do on-the-ground research in communities with a high percentage of undocumented immigrants and learn about their media literacy skills, news consumption habits and needs, and trusted information sources.
KQED Learnby KQED (Project lead: Randall Depew | San Francisco | @randydepew, @KQEDEdSpace): Encouraging young people to ask critical questions that deepen learning and improve media literacy through KQED Learn, a free online platform for students and teachers that reveals ways to ask good questions, investigate answers and share conclusions.
News Inequality Project by Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram (Project leads: Hamdan Azhar, Cathy Deng, Christian MilNeil, and Leslie Shapiro | Portland, Maine | @HamdanAzhar, @cthydng, @c_milneil, @lmshap, @pressherald): Developing a web-based analytics dashboard to help media organizations and community organizers understand how – and how often – different communities are covered in news outlets over time.
News Quality Score Project (Project lead: Frederic Filloux | Palo Alto, California | @filloux): Creating a tool to surface quality journalism from the web, at scale and in real-time, through algorithms and machine learning. The tool will evaluate and score content on criteria ranging from the notoriety of authors and publishers to an analysis of various components of the story structure.
NewsTracker.org by PBS NewsHour and Miles O’Brien Productions (Project lead: Cameron Hickey | Washington, D.C. | @cameronhickey, @newshour) : Developing a tool that combines online news content with engagement data from social media and other sources to help journalists and others better understand the scale, scope, and shape of the misinformation problem. The tool will enable content analysis by gathering data about what is being written, by whom, where it is distributed, and the size of the audience consuming it.
Putting Civic Online Reasoning in Civics Class by Stanford History Education Group/Stanford University (Project lead: Sam Wineburg | Stanford, California | @SHEF_Stanford, @samwineburg): Creating professional development resources for teachers to become better consumers of digital content, in addition to classroom-ready materials that they can use to help students find and assess information online.
Social Media Interventions by Boston University (Project lead: Jacob Groshek | Boston | @jgroshek, @EMSatBU): Experimenting with the effectiveness of real-time online interventions, such as direct messages to users who post or share false information, with people who are sharing known misinformation online.
Veracity.ai (Project lead: Danny Rogers | Baltimore, Maryland): Helping to curb the financial incentives of creating misleading content with automatically-updated lists of “fake news” websites and easy-to-deploy tools that allow ad buyers to block, in bulk, thedomains where misinformation is propagated.
Who Said What by Joostware (Project lead: Delip Rao | San Francisco | @deliprao, @joostware): Helping people more easily fact-check audio and video news clips with a search tool that annotates millions of these clips and allows users to explore both what is said and the identity of the speaker.
Technical Schema for Credibility by Meedan in collaboration with Hacks and Hackers (Project lead: Xiao Mina | San Francisco | @anxiaostudio, @meedan, @hackshackers): Creating a clear, standardized framework to define the credibility of a piece of content, how conclusions about its credibility were reached, and how to communicate that credibility effectively.
This piece was co-authored by Tom Glaisyer and Jennifer Preston at Knight Foundation
We believe that journalism is essential to building informed and engaged communities, and that a healthy democracy requires a robust and independent press. For the last decade, as the digital disruption of the traditional business model for journalism has led to deep cuts in newsrooms across the county, nonprofit news organizations have filled critical gaps by providing vital news and information to communities, delivering investigative and beat reporting with pioneering models.
The future and mission of nonprofit journalism has never been more important as trust in the news media is at an all time low and people are searching for reliable news in their social and mobile streams. Today, the Democracy Fund and Knight Foundation welcome other funders and supporters to join a new matching gifts fund to support nonprofit news. Democracy Fund and Knight Foundation are pledging $2 million in 2017 to kick off a campaign to support nonprofit journalism, with an additional $750,000 committed to help nonprofit organizations build the capability and capacity they need to put them on the path of sustainability.
The new fund builds on the success of last fall’s Knight News Match, which helped 57 nonprofit news organizations across the country raise more than $1.2 million in matching donations from small donors. This year’s effort significantly expands the number of newsrooms eligible to participate and increases opportunities for both place-based and national foundations to support the matching gifts program.
The objective of this fund is to support nonprofit newsrooms delivering local, beat and investigative reporting. To be eligible to participate, nonprofit newsrooms must be full members of the Institute for Nonprofit News in September 2017. The program will begin in the fall so that the matching gifts program can be used as a way to reach new donors and appeal to recent donors during the critical end-of-year fundraising season.
To support the matching gifts program and help put nonprofit news on the path to sustainability, Democracy Fund and Knight have committed $750,000 dollars to support the most effective strategies, tools and best practices for long-term sustainability. These investments will allow the Institute for Nonprofit News, Local Independent Online News, and the News Revenue Hub to help local newsrooms expand their donor base, develop successful membership programs, and make the case for supporting journalism in their communities.
We believe this is a profoundly important moment for journalism in America. Our communities and our country need journalism that reflects and responds to the diverse needs of all Americans. In the face of the hollowing out of the traditional industry, nonprofit news sites offer a chance to restore local coverage and deliver expert beat reporting, but they require the support of their communities. Whether you can give five dollars or five hundred to the participating nonprofit news organization of your choice, News Match will double it.
More details about the fund will be announced in the fall. In the meantime, Democracy Fund and Knight Foundation will continue to invite additional partners to join the fund, especially community and place-based foundations who recognize that news and information is an indispensable community asset, and want to leverage the fund to further amplify support.
At a time when news and journalism are experiencing significant disruption, Democracy Fund is seeking to better understand and equip news outlets and reporters for public engagement. Individual newsrooms are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale transformations in platforms, news economics, and audience habits. Culture shifts are difficult to achieve and often happen from the bottom up or the outside in. We recognize that new solutions are needed across organizations that can be compared, replicated, scaled, and evaluated.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) provide a structure in which this activity can happen adjacent to or outside of legacy settings. This paper examines the theory and evolution of CoPs and explores in greater detail the nascent CoPs developing around engaged journalism. The appendix provides a checklist for building and grouping CoPs.
Democracy Fund is committed to supporting a vibrant media and the public square. By examining how CoPs have developed in the field of engaged journalism to date, we can better understand how a community of practice provides useful structures for learning, growth, and innovation. We can also learn how the ideas can be applied to other communities in journalism, including leaders at local news hubs, media business innovators, and other cohorts where new practices are emerging.
We welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more from you about how communities of practice are being adopted in your newsrooms and communities.
The Democracy Fund’s Public Square program is dedicated to supporting vibrant and thriving media through increasing engaged journalism practices in news outlets across the country. Two of the most common questions we hear about engaged journalism are: what is engaged journalism? And how (once you’ve figured out what it is) do you help the practice spread? To begin answering those questions, we commissioned two papers from Dot Connector Studio. Today, we are releasing those papers publicly for journalists, news organizations, funders, and any others that may find them useful.
The first is “Pathways to Engagement: Understanding How Newsrooms are Working with Communities.” In this paper, we have documented a broad spectrum of efforts that help position communities at the center of journalism by creating a taxonomy of engagement practices. Different approaches are outlined, along with useful examples from the field. We refer to the full spectrum of ideas presented here as “Engaged Journalism.” We undertook this effort primarily to clarify our own thinking, not to enforce a uniformity on others. We hope our taxonomy will be of use to the field, but we also see the value in continuing to push and pull on the meanings behind the words we use.
The second paper is “Communities of Practice: Lessons for the Journalism Field.” Organizations in the field need new solutions and ways to spread, compare, replicate, scale, and evaluate engaged journalism. Communities of practice (CoP) are one way to accomplish that for engaged journalism, and also for other groups. This paper examines the theory and evolution of CoPs and explores in greater detail some CoPs that are developing with those working in engaged journalism. The appendix provides a checklist for building and expanding CoPs for any type of group.
We hope that these lessons and examples—drawn from leaders and practitioners—will challenge and inspire both journalists and those who fund them. These papers are designed to share with your colleagues, newsroom leaders, and even community members. We hope that the paper on Communities of Practice will prove useful not only for those seeking to organize CoPs around engaged and local journalism, but for other funders and organizers in the space aiming to coalesce around other crucial responses to disruption in news.
We welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more from you about how engaged journalism and communities of practice are being adopted in your newsrooms and communities. Please send feedback to localnewslab@democracyfund.org.
Journalists are working with their communities in a range of new ways that are reshaping how newsrooms report, publish, and pay the bills. This emerging trend has roots in past journalism industry movements but has taken on unique contours in the digital age. As Democracy Fund seeks to support new tools and practices that can expand community engagement in journalism, we wanted to understand the landscape of the field in more detail. We commissioned this paper to help us create a taxonomy of engagement practices.
In this paper, we have documented a broad spectrum of efforts that help position communities at the center of journalism. Different approaches are outlined, along with useful examples from the field. We don’t seek to prioritize or rank these different models, but rather understand that each meets different newsroom goals and community needs. Together, we refer to the full spectrum of ideas presented here as “Engaged Journalism.”
Engagement is an emergent practice in journalism although it has been explored and debated for years in other fields, which have invested greatly in documenting, training, and supporting innovation and best practices. But as newsrooms grapple with these ideas anew, it is to be expected that the language they use will be a bit of a contested terrain. It is in language where we hash out the core ideas that shape how we operate in the world.
We undertook this study of engagement to clarify our own thinking, not to enforce a uniformity on others. We hope our taxonomy will be of use to the field, but we also see the value in continuing to push and pull on the meanings behind the words we use. We also welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more stories about how engagement is understood in your newsroom and community.
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