2011 Meeting Notes
The Media Consortium 2011 Annual Member Meeting
Harnessing Our Collective Power, October 13-14, 2011, Oakland, CA
Contents:
- Meeting Goals
- Top Takeaways
- Building a Sustainable Future
- Celebrating Success: 18 months of TMC Programs
- Slides and Notes from Presentations
- Ignite Presentations
Meeting Goals
- Impact the public conversation during 2012 by developing an infrastructure for deep editorial collaborations among TMC members.
- Explore whether and how we can develop partnerships between TMC members and advocacy/policy allies in order to better source stories and create impact.
- Emphasize innovation and experimentation through presentations on new products and techniques, and by fostering collaboration and shared best practices.
- Move the Media Consortium out of its start-up phase by creating a long-term sustainable business model for the organization.
Top Takeaways
“We are the Media for the 99%”
The Media Consortium was founded in 2006, in part because members were frustrated that independent media had not had a greater impact during the 2004 presidential election. This year, energized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, our members are determined to harness their collective power to ensure that the message of the Occupy movement is heard over the noise of the 2012 elections. That means giving the American public an alternative to the corporate-run infotainment media. Though the combined revenue stream of TMC members is close to 1% of the total revenue attained by the top 15 media corporations (Disney, Viacom, News Corporation), our independent media outlets reach over 100 million Americans with stories that speak directly to their lives. We are the Media for the 99%.
After two years of testing editorial collaborations, from the Wisconsin protests to our current Campaign Cash work, Media Consortium members decided at our annual meeting to build a Consortium-wide campaign to make sure the American people’s voices are heard during this election year. To make that campaign happen, we recognize the following principles:
- Editorial Collaborations Require Infrastructure: Each media outlet comes to a collaboration with its internal needs and vision. To ensure that these needs are honored while achieving the goals of a collaboration requires a networking, content production, marketing and evaluation infrastructure run by full-time staff who are deeply familiar with the outlets and their work. Practically, this means the Media Consortium is more necessary than ever, and so at a facilitated meeting we discussed concrete ways to put TMC on a solid, sustainable financial footing so that it can provide this infrastructure.
- Partnerships with Advocates can Increase Impact: Advocacy and policy organizations have been and will continue to be sources for media. With advance planning, such organizations can also push out media content in a way that benefits their own message while creating a larger audience for media and, most importantly, moving that audience from being passive consumers to actors, thus creating impact. How to create this partnership without infringing upon the independence of Media Consortium outlets, and how to create a collaborative infrastructure across very different types of organizations, will require much more work and thought.
- Impact Must Be Measured: Media outlets tend to rely upon audience metrics to calculate impact, but these numbers only tell us who saw/heard our stories, not whether they acted upon their content. If we want to change the public conversation, we have to learn how to measure whether our content moves people to think and act differently. The good news is that advances in metrics now make such measurements possible.
Even as we focus on the big vision, TMC members are very clear about the practical matter of running media organizations. Even after six years, independent media outlets remain dogged by the two factors impacting the entire media field: adapting to a quickly changing digital space and finding a sustainable revenue model. To harness our collective power, we must find solutions for these issues so that we are working together from positions of individual strength and stability.
- Adapting to New Digital Devices: In 2010, we focused on moving into mobile. Yet the mobile space itself continues to segment into smart phones and tablets of many types and operating systems. In order to be functional across devices, TMC members are now seeking to understand and implement responsive web design, which allows a website to adapt to any kind of digital device. In 2012, TMC will create webinars and mini-labs for TMC members to learn about html5, responsive design, and other multi-platforming strategies in a hands on environment.
- Revenue generation: But where to find the money to support this work? One answer members will test is a collaborative fundraiser, now scheduled for February 15, 2012. After a presentation about the fundraiser at the meeting, members are gearing up for this experiment. If your organization would like to participate, please fill out this short form.
Building a Sustainable Future
After six years, the Media Consortium has passed out of the start-up stage. At 50+ members strong, we’ve shown that there is an independent media sector, and we’ve proven that each member grows stronger when we work together—on digital innovation, on shared business practices, and on editorial collaborations. To expand and deepen our network, it’s time to review our own best practices as a consortium. What is the business model of the consortium itself? What do we need in order to make the consortium grow and thrive? Those questions formed the basis of Jo Ellen’s presentation and the facilitated discussion that followed.
Harnessing our Collective Power
Click here for a list of ideas to support TMC.
Celebrating Success: 18 Months of TMC programs
During this short presentation, Erin Polgreen gave a short overview of TMC successes in 2010 and 2011. Highlights include the Incubation and Innovation Labs and over 1,000 pieces of content produced through 5 editorial collaborations.
Celebrating Success: 18 months of TMC Programming
Slides and Notes from Meeting Presentations
Metrics 3.0: Measuring Collective Impact
What if we could go beyond measuring clicks to track the spread of an idea through the digital space? Funders increasingly want to know about the impact of our work—so how can we find clarity? Meeting attendees learned about an new, exciting, Consortium-wide experiment to measure the impact of our work. Presenters:
- Hanaa Rifaey, President and Publisher, The American Independent News Network
- John Schwartz, Instructional Telecommunications Foundation
- Prof. Gary King, Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
Metrics for Progressive Media’s Impact
Innovation and Incubation: Trends in Tablets and Mobile
What are the latest trends and ideas shaping news organizations’ presence on mobile and tablet devices? This session focused on the future of mobile and tablet design, how mobile tools are impacting reporting, mobile business models, and how to build successful mobile strategies. Moderator: Rod Arakaki, Audience Development Director, YES! Magazine
Panelists:
- Adriano Farano, co-founder, Tactilize and OWNI.eu
- John Knight, Executive Editor, Once Magazine
- J. Miranda Mulligan, Digital Design Director, BostonGlobe.com
Tactilize: Application Development Software
Boston Globe: Responsive Web Design
Innovation and Incubation: Building a Collaborative Fundraiser
As a direct outcome of last winter’s revenue generation lab, TMC members are launching a collaborative fundraiser in February 2012. But what is a collaborative fundraiser and how can your organization opt in and benefit? During this session, Revenue Generation Lab participants explained how TMC members can harness our collective power during a one-day, supercharged fundraising effort. Moderated by Dan Dineen, Associate Publisher, In These Times.
- Jason Barnett, Executive Director, The UpTake
- Maya Schenwar, Executive Director, Truthout.org
- Justin Wredburg, Community Builder, Razoo
Razoo: Collaborative Fundraiser
Storytelling Pioneers: New Tools, Trends, and Techniques in Visual Journalism
From data visualization to hand illustration, today’s journalists are utilizing new tools and techniques to depict the news on the visual spectrum. During this panel discussion, editors and reporters who are breaking new ground in content delivery discussed the plusses and pitfalls of experimenting in the visual space. Moderator: Erin Polgreen, The Media Consortium. Panelists:
- Dan Archer, Comics Journalist
- Tasneem Raja, Digital Interactive Editor, Mother Jones
- Hatty Lee, Art and Production Manager, Colorlines.com
- Leslie Thatcher, Literary Editor, Truthout
Ignite Presentations
During this session, TMC members got a series of 5 minute sneak peeks at tools and products in social networking, data visualization, and more.
Junar is transforming how Internet users discover and use data. It is a crowdsourcing platform that allows for data curation, visualization, sharing and use in spreadsheets. Diego May is the CEO of Junar. Prior to working with Junar, Diego worked in venture capital in the US and Latin America. He also worked with tech companies such as Intel, Verizon and Lucent. He is active in the angel investing community in Latin America and passionate about Data democratization. Diego is an engineer by training and holds an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.
HootSuite helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audience, and distribute targeted messages across multiple channels. Using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics.
Launched in Dec. 2008 by Invoke Media, HootSuite’s rapidly growing user base includes governments, artists and organizations like The White House, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, SXSW and Zappos. Accolades include awards from Mashable’s Open Web, Canadian New Media, and Shorty Awards.
Newscloud is a free, open source software platform for building Facebook-connected websites that foster engaged online communities. It is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Follow us @newscloud. Jeff Reifman is a social media consultant, writer and organizer. He founded NewsCloud in 2005. He’s also the guy who helped catch missing Wired-writer Evan Ratliff. He resides in Seattle, Washington. Follow him @reifman. Newscloud Ignite Presentation
NewsForward is a mashup of the latest breaking news, investigative reports and political opinion from independent news sources, cable news outlets, liberal bloggers, top progressive tweeters, advocacy organizations, elected officials and political insiders. Unlike other news and politics aggregators built on RSS feeds, NewsForward employs Twitter as a platform.
The app, available for free, includes the latest breaking news and opinion from thousands of curated sources, including MSNBC, Talking Points Memo, Current TV, Media Matters, Think Progress, SEIU, ACLU, Amnesty International, Obama for America, Daily Kos, Colorlines, Mother Jones, AlterNet, RawStory, The Nation, Firedoglake, Ms. Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Guardian (UK), PBS, Washington Post, New York Times, Salon, Greenpeace, and MoveOn.
Newsforward Ignite Presentation
The Public News Service is an American news network founded in 1996 in Boise, ID to attempt to alleviate the burdens budget cuts placed on shrinking newsrooms. PNS founder and CEO Lark Corbeil saw a growing problem as media consolidated and newsrooms were pinched through budget cuts. Through 15 years of growth, PNS now serves communities in 33 states providing local news to under-served communities and giving a microphone to many voices that had previously been silenced.
Public News Service Ignite Presentation
The UpTakeʼs video data core will be The Getty Images for Political Video. If you can’t find and license video, you can’t show it.
This project from The UpTake aims to create an important piece of infrastructure that will help journalists and others tell important political stories that are currently not done because finding and licensing the video is too difficult or too expensive.
The video to tell these stories often exists thanks to technology that’s made shooting video easier. The same technology has now made just as easy to download and license video and images online. Getty Images, istockphoto and others do a booming business licensing photos and video. They just don’t do political video because it’s harder to collect and manage. That’s where we step in.
The UpTake has deep experience in gathering political video. We’ve successfully stored and tagged years of it. We now want to unleash that experience so our progressive partners and clients across the country can benefit.
Our system would:
- Put video from many partners and clients under one roof
- Organize and tag the video in a way that’s useful to journalists, clients and our partner organizations.
- Allow organizations to profit when their video is licensed
- Lower the cost of of licensing video so smaller non-profit organizations and bloggers can afford it.
- Allow the public to upload video and earn a split of the profit much like a seller does on ebay
The power of such a system is immense. The stories it generates could help reframe the national narrative to benefit progressive action. Best of all, It’s sustainable because it has a revenue stream.
The UpTake has been at the forefront of technology and journalism since our founding in 2007. We’ve advanced the frontier of news gathering through social media and cutting edge technology, attracting national attention through our coverage of the 2008 political conventions and the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount and trial. The UpTake was recognized as a top-ten website of 2008 by the Center for Public Integrity and won a number of awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. Our mission is to provide a deeper level of transparency for information the public demands. We do this by training the public to become
journalists themselves, as well as by providing our content directly to other news organizations.