Three Approaches to Assessing News Impact at ONA14

Tracking the impact of journalism is a bit like reporting a story. The first facts to establish on the ground are “Who, what, where, when?” — and even that’s not always easy. “How?” and “Why?” take quite a bit more digging, and the deadline pressure is always on. The hardest question to answer at all — Sunday magazine level hard — is “So what?” Methods for evaluating news were high on the docket at last week’s Online News Association Conference (ONA14), where nearly 2000 journalists gathered to discuss new practices, platforms, and tools. Read More

“Soon the television cameras will get packed up,” reflected Alex Altman for Time the day after Michael Brown’s funeral, “leaving a town that has become the latest shorthand for America’s racial divide to figure out how to translate the energy, intensity and anger of the past two weeks into concrete change.” Read More

Collaboration and invention were key concepts for the mid-afternoon sessions at the 2014 Media Impact Forum, which honed in on how cross-platform public media initiatives are filling holes in local news and healthcare coverage and influencing audiences and policymakers. View highlights from this discussion below, or go to our YouTube page for the full session. Media Impact Funders Executive Director Vince Stehle moderated the discussion on innovation in local journalism, which featured Laura Walker, the president and CEO of New York Public Radio; Laura Frank, the executive director of I-News and vice president for news at Rocky Mountain PBS, and Clark Bell, the director of the McCormick Foundation’s Journalism Program. Walker heads up a clutch of award-winning public stations—WNYC-FM, WNYC-AM, WQXR, WQXW, and New Jersey Public Radio—which, along with related digital properties and programs, reach an average 14.2 million people each month. She spoke about the importance of partnerships in building better local coverage across the region, especially in New Jersey, where major outlets have collapsed. With support from such funders as the Charles H. Revson Foundation, The Gates Foundation, The Wyncote Foundation, and the Jerome L. Read More

Steve Waldman was the lead author of “Information Needs of Communities: the Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.  He wrote on the Knight blog about the recently released report by the Foundation Center—and supported by the Knight Foundation—on the growth in foundation funding for media. Read More

Media Impact Funders is pleased to share a benchmark new report, Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States, in collaboration with the Foundation Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The research offers a far-reaching exploration of philanthropy’s role in media funding between 2009-2011, and is part of a new taxonomy project to better track and understand trends in media-related funding nationally. Read More

The Council on Foundations, with a generous grant from the Knight Foundation, convened the Nonprofit Media Working Group following the Federal Communications Commission’s “Information Needs of Communities” report, authored by journalist and then senior advisor to the FCC, Steve Waldman. In that report, Read More