Posts tagged with 'future of journalism'
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.
New Value Chain of Journalism
While media organizations are trying many different revenue models, the models that succeed in the long run will find a place in a new value chain of journalism. A “value chain” is a chain of activities, in which each activity adds value to a product or service. The financial success of any business model depends on the ability of an organization to capture value they create. (See graphics below. The value chain is also featured in our Big Thaw slide show.)
Journalism’s old value chain was delineated with clear roles and exchanges of value. The new value chain reflects more roles. One organization often plays multiple roles. In the old model, advertising also had clearly defined roles. It mostly concentrated on publishing and broadcasting. In the new model, advertising is spread across more players. (more…)
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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The Future?
The Big Thaw began with David Weinberger’s question: “How much more of the game needs to change, really?” In some ways, this is the future we have been waiting for. Independent media has successfully amplified independent voices and empower communities for many years. The online world has made this more possible than ever before. But in other ways, it might not be the future we had expected.
While people interviewed for The Big Thaw were optimistic about online journalism, they were uncertain regarding how it would affect quality and availability of investigative journalism, how consumers will behave, how the biggest players in the game will act, and which new strategies and business models succeed. (more…)
Two Causes of Dissonance
In our last post, we discussed strategic dissonance, which describes the tension caused by differing opinions about how an organization can best react to changing industry dynamics. For more information about strategic dissonance and the model below, click here.
