Systems Archives

Local News and Participation Systems Map

June 21, 2016

Original reporting, informed dialogue, and sharp debate all contribute to a healthy democracy in local communities. But local news outlets are dwindling as audiences and advertisers shift to digital and mobile platforms, often with a smaller footprint — leaving media deserts in locations where coverage once flourished. At the same time, promising local journalism experiments are cropping up across the country. Foundations and for-profit players are investing in innovative outlets as well as tools and models that reduce reporting costs and support civic engagement around breaking news.

How can these promising “green shoots” be widely planted and fully cultivated? More broadly, how can we better understand and effectively address the dynamics that shape how people learn about local issues, and about ways to participate in the civic life of their communities?

We believe that using systems thinking to map the Local News & Participation system can bring new understanding to all who want to support active citizens and vibrant media as vital elements in a healthy democracy.

With input from local news analysts, editors, journalists, funders, and other stakeholders, the Democracy Fund has generated a map of this system — starting with the reality that the Internet is transforming the dynamics of local news and providing remarkable new opportunities for public engagement.

Version 1.0 of the map centers on the powerful economic shifts that have jolted the local news landscape, and on the innovative efforts to create and sustain digital approaches for reporting and public dialogue. The map is grounded in our assessment of the key factors that affect the health of democracy and the local public square.

Understanding Our Analysis

Local News and Participation: Role of the Public Square

In a healthy democracy, people need reliable information, a watchdog to hold the powerful accountable, and opportunities to express and compare opinions on the issues of the day. Original investigative reporting, informed dialogue, and sharp debate all feed democratic engagement at the local level. Together these form a public square – a venue for citizens to learn, organize, engage, and be heard.

The State of Local News in 2015

In the U.S., our public square sits at a crucial turning point – facing important opportunities and threats to the ongoing vitality of political participation in our communities and nation. The Internet’s massive disruption to local news ecosystems has produced both significant opportunities and real threats to the health of our democracy. As powerful economic shifts have jolted the local news landscape, innovative efforts to create and sustain digital approaches for reporting and public dialogue have also emerged. The Internet is transforming the dynamics of local news and providing remarkable new opportunities for public engagement. Promising local news experiments are cropping up across the country. At times, these new platforms are meeting community information and participation needs more effectively than legacy news institutions had been able to in the past. At the same time, local legacy news outlets are shrinking as audiences and advertisers shift to digital and mobile platforms – leaving news deserts in locations where coverage and vigorous conversation once flourished. How can we better understand and effectively address the dynamics that shape how people learn about local issues and ways to participate in the civic life of their communities? Mapping the dynamics around local news and participation brings new understanding to all who want to support active citizens and vibrant news media as vital elements in a healthy democracy. The Democracy Fund Engagement Program team has generated a visual map of the dynamics influencing the public, news outlets, journalists, and others concerned with community information needs. Our framing statement is: “You can’t understand how local journalism enables or inhibits a healthy democracy unless you understand ________.”

Critical Dynamics

In many places, news outlets are shrinking, disappearing, or splintering into disparate units. However, at the same time, some outlets and individuals have successfully built new business models that have not only helped maintain a flow of quality, relevant news and community information, but also helped increase civic engagement. This successful experimentation has bolstered the viability of some news organizations and encouraged other outlets to experiment further. This is the core story that emerges from our map and to understand it, we explore a number of related topics that we believe the media field must grapple with if we are to address the challenges facing our communities:

The Public as Publishers

Through technology, the financial barriers to entry into the media landscape have come down, and pathways for two-way communication between content producers and consumers have opened up. Internet technologies have increased the ability of individuals to create and distribute their own content as well as the content of others, fueling new interest and opportunities for civic engagement and increasing the amount and range of information available. At the same time, however, this has increased overall noise and raised new concerns about verification.

The Rapid Adoption of Mobile

Consumer practices and preferences, including an explosion in the use of mobile devices, are changing how news is produced, packaged, and promoted.

Shifting Economic Models for Local News Providers

Local news outlets used to have an overwhelming advantage in attracting and retaining local advertising dollars. This has shifted in the Internet era. Large digital platforms are pulling advertisers and advertising dollars away from local outlets and becoming increasingly adept at personalizing advertising in ways that cement their hold on the marketplace. Mobile technologies also have led to changed advertising and distribution models that are driving a decrease in the level of resources available for local reporting, ultimately reducing the quality and coverage of local topics.

As the traditional advertising-based model of revenue has been dismantled for local news outlets, new sources of financial support have emerged. Individual subscriber/membership models, the backbone of public radio, are becoming an increasingly attractive option for other types of local news outlets, especially new nonprofit outlets. In addition, philanthropic support is becoming an increasing part of the revenue stream for local news via online nonprofit outlets. While government support is primarily used for infrastructure such as physical plants and broadcast equipment, occasionally public broadcasting funds are also used to support specific content including local or regional beats. Taken together, however, these new sources of income are not adding up to replace previous levels of support.

Ongoing Disruption of the Industry Players

Innovative outlets are replacing less nimble players who fail to maintain audiences or seize new opportunities. In this environment, new as well as established organizations find they must evolve rapidly or experience deep decline. In response to these trends, new entrants and incumbents alike are experimenting furiously with new revenue models and only sometimes succeeding; all but the largest face steady erosion of their viability.

Maximizing the Impact of Journalism and Government Transparency

As the quantity, quality, and relevance of local news increases, so does the production of news that exposes corruption. Access to more government data and records, for example, can expose corruption and increase public interest in open data. When this is done in a way that also provides solutions and actions to resolve a problem, public engagement in civic affairs is increased. When this output fails to provide solutions to problems, however, the public becomes more cynical and less engaged.

Partisanship in News Production and Consumption

Audiences are now increasingly able to select news that matches their own biases and beliefs, a behavior encouraged by the ability of large sites and social feeds to target content specific to these interests. In turn, outlets become more polarized and specialized to build and retain their audience base, increasing engagement among hyperpartisan audience members while making more centrist and undecided audiences more cynical about news and politics.

Newsroom Isolation and Community Disengagement

Journalistic practices can sometimes isolate newsrooms. In particular, journalists can appear detached or insensitive to community priorities when seeking a measure of objectivity or asserting independence.

Newsroom diversity, however it is defined – in terms of ethnicity, gender, age, ideology, or other factors – also matters to an outlet’s ability to engage the public. Having a range of perspectives and experiences within any news organization is vital to the generation of new ideas and connection with new sources, but diversity efforts have been a casualty of economic decline in much of professional news media. At the same time, the rise of digital media has created new ways for a wider range of community voices to be heard.

As the diversity of sources, stories, and staff decrease, so do the quantity, quality, and relevance of local journalism. This diminishes the engagement of the public in civic affairs and newsrooms. As the public becomes less engaged with the newsroom, it becomes more isolated, and diversity of sources, stories, and staff continues to dwindle.

Conversely, newsrooms that are more diverse and able to connect with and report on different constituencies increase their engagement with community, which contributes to better reporting, editorial, and accountability practices. These contribute to an increase in the quality and sometimes quantity of information.

New Priorities in Communications Policy

Public interest media and communications policy encompass a variety of issues and structures related to the ability of citizens to communicate with one another, express their own perspectives, access communications technologies and services at a reasonable or even subsidized rate, and protect themselves from libel or slander. Communications policy also regulates many of the actors who provide civic information and spaces for public dialogue, including Internet service providers, the owners of newspapers, radio and television stations, public access media facilities, cable companies, and others. Media and communications policy has a significant influence over the ability of local news ecosystems to support civic information and participation. For example, policy encouraging an open Internet and access to high-speed broadband can further increase the creation and sharing of user-generated content and lay the groundwork for experimentation in local news, while policy supporting local public media can strengthen state and local news media organizations with direct dollars for infrastructure and beats.

Journalism Practice in Transition

Changes in the journalism environment drive new priorities for continuing journalism education. The decline of traditional print and broadcast newsrooms and the rise of both small online newsrooms and even more decentralized citizen reporting via social platforms, has chipped away at the overall level of journalistic professionalism and integrity. Up-and-coming and citizen reporters are learning the trade from scratch, and are not necessarily aware of existing resources and institutions, while reporters trained for print and broadcast are struggling to adapt to the ever-quicker and more porous practices of producing online news. Skills once transferred through informal mentoring and on-the-job training, or through more formalized journalism education are now either missing, or being reconstructed so that they can be applied in a more participatory media environment.

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Systems Thinking Glossary

June 21, 2016

Communications and Network Plan: A defined approach to connecting with people and organizations to foster collaborations, coalitions, and partnerships that align and advance action across a system.

Complexity: A situation that defies predictability and makes linear planning and replicating successes difficult. Often found in contexts where the complex interrelationships of many factors and the dynamics between these factors and their wider environment make it necessary to understand not just individual elements, but the larger system itself.

Core Story: The overarching narrative that responds to the framing question for a system map. The most powerful dynamics driving the system.

Dynamic Relationship: The causal connection between two factors, demarcated by an arrow. Arrows are accompanied with “+/–” demarcations, which indicate the direction of change as the first factor affects the second. For example, “A+ ¬ B–” will be read as “As Factor A increases, Factor B decreases.”

Factor: A node on a system map that represents a quality or condition in a system that is increasing or decreasing as part of a feedback loop.

Framing Question: A guiding question that is used to focus and bound the analysis of a system in order to enhance an organization’s ability to positively affect that system.

Learning Agenda: A plan to better understand a system and strengthen change strategies over time. A learning agenda contains research questions to expand knowledge of the system, as well as questions aimed at monitoring our impacts on the system, reflected through the indicators of progress of the results framework.

Leverage: The ability of interventions in a system to have disproportionately large impacts. Leverage opportunities are made up of a collection of related factors, connections, and dynamics that together can impact the equilibrium of a system.

Loops: The representation of cause-and-effect within a system captured as a complete feedback cycle. Loops can be vicious (leading to ever worsening outcomes), virtuous (improving outcomes over time), stagnating (keeping things from getting better), or stabilizing (keeping things from getting worse).

Regions: Clusters of loops organized around major themes within a system map.

Results Framework: A set of measurable indicators designed to track whether progress is being made in changing a system. A results framework is central to a learning agenda and underpins monitoring and evaluation plans.

Stakeholder: An individual or organization that seeks to influence, and/or is influenced by, the dynamics of a given system.

Strategy: A plan for the set of activities that aims to shift dynamics within a system to produce positive change. Activities might include grants, advocacy, research, partnerships, communications, and other approaches.

System: A diverse set of parts that interact with each other and their environment in ways that are dynamic and often hard to predict — and that can be studied, mapped, and influenced. In systems mapping, the boundaries of a system are shaped by a framing question.

Systems Map: A visual representation of a collection of patterns of behavior in the form of causal loops that are interconnected and illustrate why a system currently operates as it does. The systems map represents the most significant dynamics driving a system. While no map is ever considered “finished” (because a system is constantly evolving and any group’s understanding of a system is always partial), a systems map represents our best understanding of a system as it currently functions.

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Systems Mapping Overview

June 21, 2016

Our democracy is a complex political system made of an intricate web of institutions, interest groups, individual leaders, and citizens — all connected in countless ways. Every attempt to influence and improve some aspect of this complex system produces a ripple of other reactions. While some of these reactions may be predictable, many are not. This reality makes it difficult to anticipate what will happen when we try to help U.S. democracy work better.

Systems thinking can offer insight into the dynamics of the various fields where the Democracy Fund is active. It is a methodology used to gain a deep understanding of a given field or topic within the whole. By supporting comprehensive analysis, systems thinking offers a way to better identify the root causes of problems we want to address, and to find intervention points that offer great opportunity to advance change. This approach has a long history in fields as varied as ecology, engineering, urban planning, family therapy, criminal justice, organizational development, and conflict analysis and resolution. Systems thinking employs a variety of tools and frameworks for analysis, most notably systems mapping. In 2015, we began mapping several of democracy’s component systems related to our programmatic priorities. Each map is developed in collaboration with stakeholders in the field being examined — and each welcomes continued input and improvement from an ever-wider circle of participants who bring new perspectives.

The Democracy Fund exists to help ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges and continually deliver on its promise to the American people. In short, we work on things that make democracy work better. Embracing systems thinking can assist us and our partners in this activity. Just as we know that democracy will face new challenges, we know that any systems map will change — becoming more accurate as new stakeholders add their perspectives, taking new form as evolution, or disruption shifts its factors and their relationships.

Context: Our Mission And Measures

In the near-term, we will measure success based on modest changes in the areas where we focus, particularly those parts of a system where we believe we can move quickly. In the process, we will capture knowledge based on both intended and unintended outcomes. Over time, and with our partners, we expect to leverage short-term wins and lessons learned to create needed motion in other parts of the system. We hope these changes will cumulatively advance how our democracy serves the American people.

To apply systems thinking in our work at the Democracy Fund, we will listen, examine, and learn and adapt.

The Systems Approach In Action

Listen: With the stakeholders involved in creating a map, we seek to hear and capture the story of how a system works. Together, we can try to make sure the map is comprehensive and reflects the nuances and intricacies of the system it describes. As a result, we believe mapping is best done with a broad and inclusive set of players and perspectives.

Examine: We study a map’s factors, their relationships, and the dynamics in play. We can then pursue questions that will allow us to identify areas where there is the potential for high leverage in the system. We will also consider where the system might “push back” on efforts for change, and explore potential unintended consequences of our actions. This analysis will lead to a program plan that addresses our role at the Democracy Fund in tandem with others working to move the system.

Learn and adapt: In collaboration with our partners, we will implement strategies over several years and track progress against the map. We can identify indicators to measure impact, and build in regular points for rigorous reflection. We will compare our lived experience to the map and to our plan, aiming to quickly identify lessons learned and adapt our approach for greater results. As we learn more about a system and how change occurs, we will update its map to reflect new knowledge and emerging realities.

At the Democracy Fund, we believe there are three primary benefits from systems mapping:

Communicating and collaborating. First and foremost describing a system can generate shared language as well as rich content for stakeholders — creating new opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and ideas that can improve outcomes in a given field. This shared understanding can clarify the perspectives of others and reveal new possibilities for effective collaboration.

Making sense of complexity. We want to capture the elaborate set of relationships and dynamics that characterize a field. We recognize that changemaking is not a linear process, and we want to gain deeper understanding to make informed decisions about our investments and interventions.

Building a basis for action and adaptation. A map’s content informs how we strategize and implement approaches within the Democracy Fund and in conjunction with our partners. The map is a tool that helps us challenge and test our assumptions as well as track and learn from our actions. It serves as a living frame that we revise and build on as we gain insight over time.

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Strengthening our Systems Thinking Muscles

Donata Secondo

April 20, 2016

Democracy Fund’s President, Joe Goldman, recently wrote on our blog about some of the benefits and difficulties our organization has found while integrating a systems lens into our work. He noted how systems thinking, designed to help us grapple with complexity, can at times be awfully complex itself. As a member of the Impact and Learning team, I’ve been helping Democracy Fund make sense of what it means to be systems thinkers, and Joe’s words rang particularly true for me.

Working with the incredible systems and complexity coaches at The Omidyar Group, the Impact and Learning team has been supporting program staff in developing their systems maps, and shepherding their systems-based strategic planning processes. We’ve been alongside the teams grappling with what’s been hard—but we’ve also had a front-row seat to see the wins. Like our evaluator, I’ve seen our teams’ pride in their work, and try everyday to help the teams further recognize how much we’ve learned and how our systems skills have developed.

I had a strong moment of recognition of this progress recently when Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) released their Guide to Systems Grantmaking. This resource is designed to provide grantmakers and nonprofits a toolkit of essential systems assessment tools, frameworks, and best practices—and it is yet another piece of evidence of the growing community of philanthropies taking an interest in systems thinking. As it does on other topics, GEO can continue to be a convener for this group, collect our stories, and help us share our lessons learned.

GEO’s Systems Grantmaking Resource Guide suggests, just as we’ve found, that it takes time to understand and internalize a systems mindset. At first glance, I was overwhelmed by the wide variety of tools and practices it recommended. I learned of several new approaches I’m eager to play with in our work, augmenting the causal loop systems mapping we’ve started with. But, after I dug a little deeper, what struck me more was the complementarity and interconnection of these tools. I realized that we’ve already been engaging in many more systems practices than I’d been aware. SAT analysis, leverage points, and systemic action research are already part of our approach, flowing naturally from one another as we mapped systems. Even aspects of our grantmaking approach I had considered distinct from our systems work—our interest in scenario planning, for example—are logically tied to the systems thinking frame.

When introducing new staff to Democracy Fund’s systems practice, I describe it as fundamentally a sense-making process. While systems mapping is a great tool for new learning—particularly when designed, as our process has been, to be deeply participatory—it has also been powerful in helping to bring into sharper focus what we already knew and to align assumptions across our organization and with key partners. GEO’s Guide to Systems Grantmaking, it turns out, served the same purpose for me. It brought to life what has been hard to see in the sometimes tedious day-to-day of map-building: just how strong our systems muscles are becoming.

We’ve got a lot yet to learn to get to “expert” level on GEO’s self assessment, and I know the challenges our evaluator observed will continue into the future. But, armed with new tools and deeper connections to others in the field, I’m all the more confident we’ll get there.

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Mapping to Learn: Applying a Systems Lens to Local Journalism

Tom Glaisyer

March 28, 2016

This week we released a visualization and accompanying narrative that seeks to represent the dynamics facing local news institutions and levels of participation of the public in civic affairs.

Original reporting, informed dialogue, and rigorously argued differences of opinion all support engagement in our democratic processes in communities across the United States. Over the past decade, however, local news outlets have struggled. Audiences and advertisers have gravitated to digital and mobile platforms — and the economics of local news has declined. We are being left with media deserts in locations where coverage once flourished.

At the same time, promising local journalism experiments have cropped up across the country. Foundations and venture capitalists are investing not only in individual outlets, but in tools and models that can cut reporting costs and support civic engagement around breaking topics. How can such promising innovations be seeded widely and cultivated fully? These are the issues that the Democracy Fund’s Engagement Program has been grappling with.

Our Journey

Over the past year, we have consulted dozens of journalists and scholars of media and communications in an ambitious effort to create a map that reveals the many dimensions of local journalism’s disruption.

This process flows from the foundation’s larger commitment to understanding democracy as a complex system. At the core of our process is an extensive process of analysis and graphical mapping of the dynamics facing this space. As Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman explains “a systems map describes the dynamic patterns (or feedback loops) that occur in a system, whether they are vicious or virtuous cycles of behavior and reaction.” It is not, as Joe writes “a network map that describes how different individuals or organizations are connected to one another.”

The process of identifying and vetting such loops has been both long and profoundly iterative. Participants in the initial workshop held in March 2014 sketched some 43 loops representing different dynamics surrounding the failure and success of local news outlets to adequately inform and connect with their communities. Over a series of internal and one-on-one meetings, the Engagement team — Program Associate Paul Waters, Graduate Research Fellow Jessica Mahone, myself, and a dedicated set of fellows and consultants — winnowed the map down to tell a “core story” about key factors and connections.

Like panning for gold, these multiple conversations allowed the team to sift through many different layers of the problem to identify valuable elements. The result is not a picture of the optimal local news environment that we might want, or the debatably better environment we might have once had. Instead, it’s a multi-dimensional model of the intersecting forces that shape the markets, missions, and practices of outlets seeking to provide coverage that can help to drive democratic decisionmaking by both audiences and policymakers around the country.

Where We Are

The current map, which comprises 17 loops, hones in on the powerfully disruptive economic shifts that have unsettled legacy journalism outlets, and the hopeful but still nascent creative efforts to build sustainable digital tools and platforms for reporting and civic dialogue. The map identifies Internet adoption and evolution as the key “input factor” disrupting this system, and pinpoints three key factors central to a healthy local information ecosystem:

The shift in audience attention;
The relevance, quality, and quantity of state and local journalism; and
The engagement of the public in civic affairs.

Several related loops hone in on economic dynamics. Perhaps the most important is the decay in income from advertising as a result of news outlets no longer able to obtain the same rates or deliver the same audience reach they once did. In addition, large digital platforms are more able to capture significant portions of the remaining advertising revenue with increasingly sophisticated targeting technologies. The result these dynamics is that membership and philanthropic support for small to mid-sized news projects is increasingly important as is the role government dollars play in maintaining public broadcasting.

Other factors are at work, however, including the rise of user-generated content, the strength of connections between newsrooms and community members, and the fate of journalism skills in an era of mass newspaper layoffs. The map raises questions such as, can audiences trust reporters to recognize and represent their interests, and uncover corruption without sliding into sensationalism? Will outlets with small slices of the public increase hyper partisanship with narrowly targeted content aimed at reinforcing viewpoints rather than informing?

The map also recognizes the importance of policy decisions around online access and how they have fostered the growth of the Internet over recent decades. All of these dynamics and others are captured in this system map, and each loop is bolstered with research, case studies and both supporting and countervailing evidence.

Overall, we have to recognize that the local public square, which has for decades been sustained by a small number of newspapers, television and radio stations, is in turmoil and though it isn’t clear what will replace what was for decades a stable equilibrium it is very clear that change will be a constant over the upcoming decade.

Looking to the future

Like the dynamics it captures, the map is not static. It is a work in progress, designed to serve as tool for discussion and strategy not just within the foundation, but across the field. With this in mind, the Engagement Program worked with the American Press Institute to convene another room full of news experts, editors and reporters this past October. Many had seen the map more than once in its various iterations; others were “map newbies.” We led the room through each loop—probing for points of confusion or competing interpretations of various factors and connections. For us this was just the first step towards more engagement with communities of experts seeking to better inform and engage the public at the local level in our democracy. Ultimately, we hope this contributes to a stronger shared understanding of the field.

How can you assist?

We recognize that as a relatively small organization we will gain a better understanding of the field by soliciting input from others. We also realize that this is a quickly shifting field and we intend to stay in learning mode as the map evolves. This prompts us to continue to engage with the widest range of people working in the realm of local news and participation: What else does the Democracy Fund need to know or understand to better illuminate the dynamics of local news ecosystems?

If your work relates to local news and participation, we welcome and encourage you to take some time to explore the map and dig into the definitions of the loops, factors, and connections. Help us improve its breadth and accuracy.

Please send us your ideas and feedback by emailing newsmap@democracyfund.org.