Katie Donnelly , Research Consultant

This year was slated to be our year of impact. We started off with a bang in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where we released Decoding Media Impact: Insights, Advice and Recommendations, our impact report summing up seven years of research in the media impact space.  Read More

A host of new tools allows journalists and independent researchers to analyze important trends across media including airtime, advertising, digital privacy, and political spending. (h/t to Nancy Watzman of Lynx LLC for sharing the first four): Ad Observatory: Launched last week, this new tool from NYU Tandon School researchers helps journalists and researchers find trends in Facebook advertising in their states. A complimentary browser plug-in tool, Ad Observer gives the public a way to donate information safely on how they are being micro-targeted by these ads. Online Ads Portal from the Center for Responsive Politics is a searchable database to find political advertising on Facebook and Google, and so much more. (Open Secrets remains the go-to source to track “dark money” and other connections in lobbying, foreign agents, and other political spending databases.) Wesleyan Media Project tracks and analyzes political spending across media platforms, including TV, providing a high level view of how political money is flowing into ads. TV Kitchen is an open source tool to get data out of local TV streams–starting with captions, and in the future political ads, chyrons, talking points, and more. Participants can… Read More

As protests for racial justice continue in cities across the U.S., more and more institutions are publicly reckoning with their own roles in perpetuating systemic racism. In the journalism space, a debate about the concept of objectivity is raging: whose view is considered “objective”? Do “both sides” of an issue always demand equal weight? Some journalists are questioning the concept of “objectivity” altogether, and opting for “moral clarity” instead. Within philanthropy, foundations are being called upon to explore and correct their roles in upholding inequity. Read More