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The Media Consortium and Center for Social Media release new media report: Investing in Impact
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The Media Consortium is pleased to release a mini-report in collaboration with the Center for Social Media. Investing in Impact: Media Summits Reveal Pressing Needs, Tools for Evaluating Public Interest Media was developed out a series of “Media Impact Summits” that took place in seven cities around the country throughout the first quarter of 2010.
Jessica Clark of CSM and Tracy Van Slyke of TMC drew together dozens of leading public interest media makers, funders and researchers from Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Boston to address the question that many media makers are asking themselves: “How do you know your media matters?”
Insights from those summits are the basis for Investing in Impact, which outlines the major arguments for assessing impact, synthesizes the five top impact evaluation needs, and proposes five new tools for public interest media assessment. As a quick highlight, the five overarching needs expressed by summit attendees include:
- Getting on the same page: Developing shared categories of impact assessment
- Following the story: Tracking the movement of content and frames across platforms and over time
- Contextualizing the anecdotal : Refining methods for analyzing shifts in public awareness, deliberation and behavior
- Understanding our users: Creating more sophisticated profiles of audience demographics, habits and concerns
- Moving beyond market assumptions: Defining the uses and limitations of commercial metrics schemes for assessing public interest media
And the five proposed tools to help public interest media makers assess their impact include:
- Putting it all in one place: Building a unified social media dashboard
- Chasing the frame: Building a social issue buzz tracker
- Telling your story of impact: Developing model formats and processes for strategically communicating outcomes
- Asking the right questions: Creating common survey tools for evaluation and audience assessment
- Identifying networks: Creating a suite of tools that track the growth, health and effectiveness of networks
We encourage you to read and download the analysis (see below) and share it with your colleagues and peers. We also hope that you feel free to leave comments at one or or both of our web sites. If you would like to tweet about the report, please use the hashtag #mediaimpact.
Investing in Impact: Media Summits Reveal Pressing Needs, Tools for Evaluating Public Interest Media
We hope Investing in Impact begins to answer the questions of many public interest media makers, funders and allies on why and how to define and assess impact. CSM and TMC are both committed to continuing this conversation and working with partners to test out these theories and build out proposed tools.
Sneak Peek: What will the progressive media sector look like in 2015?
A few weeks ago, The Media Consortium held its annual member meeting in NYC. Despite the raging blizzard that hit the city the day of the meeting (what timing!) over 70 individuals from more than two dozen organizations traveled from across the country for the two day event. This meeting marked the fifth anniversary of The Media Consortium, which was a great time to reflect on where we’ve been as an organization and a sector and how we are going to move forward together. The meeting gave us a sneak peek of the big changes to expect for the progressive media sector during the next few years.
Journalism’s Main Priorities in 2010 (And 10 Resolutions)
By Tracy Van Slyke and Josh Stearns
Cross-Posted at SaveTheNews.org
If 2009 was a year of study and debate about the future of journalism, 2010 must be a year of action. We must come together around a core set of ideas to create a better ecosystem for sustainable and high-impact journalism. Based on the various reports and conferences from the past year, we’ve compiled the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and suggest some initial steps to begin moving forward.
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Welcome to The Big Thaw
Welcome to The Big Thaw. The name of this project is an apt metaphor for journalism in the past decade: As the business and editorial structures that have historically sustained media melt away, new innovations in reporting and monetization are rapidly reforming the business. But a key question remains: Can media producers adapt and lead, or will they disappear with Journalism’s Ice Age?
The Media Consortium (TMC), a network of the country’s leading progressive, independent media outlets, commissioned this research and strategy project because we want to lead our members and other independent media outlets into a new era of sustainable and powerful journalism. (more…)