Report Archives

Report

Communities Of Practice

Angelica Das Edited By Jessica Clark

April 26, 2017

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.

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Report

Pathways To Engagement

Angelica Das, Edited By Jessica Clark

April 25, 2017

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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Report

Progress Report on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration

Democracy Fund

September 1, 2016

The United States’ electoral system has always been imperfect — a work in progress. And yet the health of our democracy depends on the quality of our elections. All over the country, we entrust local officials to run elections as smoothly as possible. In fact, we depend on these officials to oversee more than 8,000 election jurisdictions nationwide — verifying the eligibility of voters, designing the ballots, and counting the votes.

The decentralized administration of elections means there are always new challenges to be addressed and new opportunities for improvement. It is for this reason that the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) was established by an Executive Order on March 28, 2013, with the goal of confronting problems and institutionalizing processes that allow for improvement.

After an extensive six-month inquiry, the bipartisan PCEA, comprised of experts and practitioners, issued The American Voting Experience report, which stated: “the problems hindering efficient administration of elections are both identifiable and solvable.” In the report, members of the PCEA unanimously agreed on a set of best practices and recommendations they hoped would focus institutional energy on a select number of important policy changes, while spawning experimentation among the thousands of local officials who shared similar concerns.

This update highlights the progress made in several areas, since the reports release, notably in the areas of voter registration, access to voting, polling place management, and voting technology.