Community Innovation News - Christine Sculati's blog » social media

The reinvention of news in the Bay Area

christine — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 07:01:43 +0000

How do you get your daily news?
Today with the explosion of digital news sites, blogs and social media tools, community storytelling and information are more accessible than ever before.

According to new research by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism, most Americans (92%) use multiple platforms (online, local and national television, print newspapers, radio, mobile devices) to get their daily news. Yet Pew Research also found that 70% of news consumers feel the amount of news and information available from different sources is “overwhelming.”

How can we discern what news and information are credible? Is there enough coverage of arts, culture, education, the environment and other civic issues in your community? Which distribution models and platforms will deliver rich content while remaining financially sustainable?

What does the future hold?

Amid the staggering losses of traditional news outlets and the layoffs of journalists reporting on local culture and public affairs issues, new nonprofit journalism organizations are emerging rapidly to fill the gaps. They are leveraging new digital technologies and community support to get there.

In an article published in the relatively new Bay Area section of the New York Times (published in print on Fridays and Sundays, online and on some mobile applications), Frances Dinkelspiel calls nonprofit journalism the “Bay Area’s new growth industry.” Yet, as she points out, nonprofit news organizations are not new in the Bay Area.

Well-established Bay Area nonprofit news outlets include KQED public media (founded in the 1950s), Mother Jones magazine (founded in the 1970s), the Center for Investigative Reporting (founded in 1977) and New America Media (founded by the nonprofit Pacific News Service in 1996). The nonprofit Bay Nature magazine, based in Berkeley, debuted in 2001. One of the founders of Bay Nature was Malcom Margolin, a recognized community leader and publisher of Heyday books (founded in 1974) and News from Native California.

While some of the established organizations have covered broader geographical areas, some of the newest nonprofit news organizations emerging in the Bay Area are focusing on community and civic news.

In the Bay Area, new ventures include the San Francisco Public Press and The Bay Citizen, which is set to launch on May 26, 2010 with a celebration at the Great American Music Hall for founding members. Built on a what is called a “crowd-financing model,” Spot.us is replicating its nonprofit model in other metropolitan areas including Seattle and Los Angeles. According to the project’s Web site, Spot.us “allows an individual or group to take control of news by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists.”

Nonprofit sustainability
All of these nonprofit news organizations, old and new, rely on foundation funding, individual donors and diverse revenue streams, the goal of most nonprofit organizations. A few are membership-based organizations, a familiar concept to viewers and listeners of public broadcasting.

You may have already noticed that collaborations for content generation and distribution are becoming ubiquitous among nonprofit and commercial media. Just the other day, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article on gray whale migration by Jane Kay, a former Chronicle staff writer. The article was produced for DailyClimate.org, a nonprofit news service that covers climate change. I also recently read a San Francisco Public Press article published in the New York Times. And California Watch lists over 50 distribution partners on its website.

Community blogs are also rising rapidly. One good resource for finding locally-focused blogs here in the Bay Area is the BayNewsNetwork run by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and its Knight Digital Media Center. The site serves as a directory and aggregator of over 244 blogs and sites focusing on specific communities in the Bay Area region (called “hyperlocal”).

If you want to find out more about new initiatives and local projects working to reinvent journalism and public-interest news, this weekend you can attend the “Journalism Innovations” conference, produced by Independent Arts and Media, The University of San Francisco, G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism and the Society for Professional Journalists. On Twitter, follow the conversations with the #JI3 hashtag.

Widgets for civic engagment

christine — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:58:38 +0000

Today I read a new post by blogger Amy Gahran on the News Leadership 3.0 blog of the Knight Digital Media Center (a project of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism). Her article reminded me of how easy it is for changemakers to embed third party widgets and gadgets into their blogs and Web pages to promote civic engagement through volunteering.

In addition to the widgets the author describes in the article – SearchLite by VolunteerMatch, Dosomething.org and Volunteering in America by widgetbox – another widget I recently discovered is made by All for Good, a project of Our Good Works. All for Good makes an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. I initially discovered the All for Good tool on Serve.gov, a site set up in response to President Obama’s call for Americans to get out and serve in their communities. The volunteer database is driven by All for Good.

According to the All for Good Web site, the project is driven by volunteers from Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. As a contributor, Google is hosting the All for Good website and products.

After making a few selections for place, colors and time frame – voila! – here is a dynamic listing of volunteer opportunities available for this week in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Social media for nonprofits: lessons learned

christine — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:22:57 +0000

Some nonprofit organizations that were early adopters of social media and others confused by the myriad options may not be using these tools to the best of their advantage.

Using Facebook as an example, some nonprofits set up Facebook “Groups” instead of fan “Pages,” the former of which might be limiting for those that want to create more visibility through the viral power of the tool. Other nonprofits set up only a Causes page to invite donations. The most problematic example relates to those groups that set up their organizations as individual people for you to “friend” rather than “fan” (I believe Facebook made changes in sign up to prevent this occurrence from continuing).

Mission-minded posts an informative blog post on this subject, which also links to a Wall Street Journal blog article on the benefits of setting up a Facebook fan page (“Page”) for your nonprofit organization instead of a group. The WSJ story highlights advice from Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, who pointed out mistakes made by nonprofits at a social media conference in New York this past summer. Quoting the article: “Relying on groups, which have been available longer, is one of the biggest mistakes nonprofits make.”

To learn more from the experiments of others and the latest best practices in social media, there are many resources available to nonprofits. In fact, I just got an email from my friend and colleague, Kivi Leroux Miller, about a series of webinars she will host over the next month – from writing for social media to integrating your Web site, email newsletter and social media sites.

Other sources are listed in this blog post: The Explosion of Social Networking

The Explosion of Social Networking

christine — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:23:27 +0000

Recently the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a new report on how adults use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. One of the report’s main findings was that the share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years – from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to a December 2008 survey.

Overall they found that social networking is more popular for personal use than professional use, and most adults are using online social networks, like Facebook, to connect with people they already know.

Last week Facebook passed its five-year mark and now has over 150 million users (70% joined in 2008 alone). The company suggests that their rapid growth can be attributed to a safe and trusted environment where everyone can have a “voice to express ideas and initiate change.”

Several nonprofits in the U.S. are using social networking as a way to engage and inform constituents. Green For All, a nonprofit that promotes green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged is on many social media channels, including Facebook, where it has over 3,500 “fans.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a nonprofit newspaper, is using the social networking site Twitter, a platform for sharing quick and short updates. Compared to Facebook’s 150 million users, Twitter, the younger of the two, has about 5 million members, and 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts open daily.

Resources for Nonprofits:

Philanthropy Front and Center blog: A map is worth a thousand words: Guest post by nonprofit technology strategist John Kenyon after a presentation at the Foundation Center in San Francisco on February 26, 2009.
Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media – Creating Your Organization’s Social Media Strategy Map
Twestival – Feb. 12 Twitter event in over 100 cities worldwide to raise funds for charity: water, a non-profit whose mission is to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Read the New York Times article.
The Pew Internet Project Data Memo: Twitter and Status Updating (6 pages, PDF)
Netsquared shares blogs, a Facebook group page and other social media to further its mission “to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.”
Nonprofits on Facebook
Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?
The Chronicle of Philanthropy – How Nonprofits can Build Awareness and Raise Money with Facebook, Twitter and Other Social-Networking Tools (Transcripts of Live Expert Interviews) – Nov. 2008 and Feb. 2009.
Why every nonprofit needs a social media strategy | SPURspectives
We Are Media Project: The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits
The Essential Guide to Social Media

The Foundation Center launches many free online resources for nonprofits

christine — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:24:46 +0000

Since 1956 the Foundation Center has connected nonprofits to free philanthropic resources. For years I have been attending their events in San Francisco including “Meet the Grantmakers” panels and special events with topics from “Fundraising for Small and All-Volunteer Organizations” to “Trends in Bay Area Bank Philanthropy.”

In recent months, the Center has launched several online multimedia resources to make the invaluable information shared in their free events accessible to communities and organizations that cannot attend the lively presentations in Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, or Washington, DC. I just discovered “Philanthropy Chat,” which is a new online audio series featuring interviews with West Coast philanthropists and fundraising experts. Janet Camarena, the director of the Center’s San Francisco library and learning center, hosts the interviews. In the first pilot edition recorded on October 10 she speaks to Ralph Lewin, associate executive director of the California Council for the Humanities. You can listen to the audio recording or read the transcript on the Center’s website and learn about the Council’s current grantmaking programs and how they are using new media technologies.

East meets West in Fremont, California

christine — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 01:00:03 +0000

On June 23, 2007, the Foundation for Self Reliance presented a symposium called “East Meets West: Awakening to the Challenges of Afghans in Fremont” that turned into a monumental event. Over two hundred guests gathered at The Golden Peacock restaurant in Fremont to hear panels in both Farsi and English including a keynote by Dr. Mo Qayoumi, a speech by Rona Popal of the Afghan Coalition and Afghan Women’s Association International, and presentations by Dr. Ronald Takaki on “Multiculturalism in America,” Dr. Hatem Bazian on “Islam in America,” Professor Ghafar Safa on “Violence and Reform in Afghanistan,” Tamim Ansari on “Biculturality: Understanding The Other’” and Fremont Councilmember Anu Natarajan on “Diversity and Public Policy.” Fremont is home to the largest community of Afghan immigrants in the U.S.

The Foundation for Self-Reliance and their community partners, the Afghan Coalition, are already planning a sequel event at the Golden Peacock on Saturday, January 19, 2008.

Press Coverage:

Fremont Conference Tackles Challenges Facing Afghan Immigrants – KCBS

Afghan cultural issues subject of panel, book – San Francisco Chronicle

Digital storytelling and grassroots journalism

christine — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:45:43 +0000

Digital storytelling gives communities and grassroots groups opportunities to share experiences and raise awareness to social change issues and ideas like never before. Open source, free, and accessible technologies have created unprecedented opportunities for communities to build networks and amplify voices of the under-heard.

The Bay Area Video Coalition and The Community Technology Foundation of California collaborated to create the Digital Storytelling Institute, which works with community-based organizations to develop social change digital storytelling programs. The Institute’s Web site provides several free resources on how to plan and produce a digital story. The downloadable PDFs include preproduction and production tips (steps to take, defining your audience, camera movements, interview tips), storyboard templates, other online storytelling and grant funding resources, and distribution opportunities.

How mission-driven organizations are using new web tools

christine — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:35:00 +0000

From blogs and podcasts to social networking, if you are having a hard time sorting out which of the emerging social media tools would be beneficial to your organization, an article published by Idealware might help. The December 2006 article reviews the numerous social media tools nonprofits and social ventures are using to build visibility and raise revenue. And a Philanthropy News Digest article I wrote called the ABCs of Podcasting highlights ways Bay Area organizations such as KQED, Cal Academy of Sciences, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture are using new web-based technologies, particularly podcasts, to tell stories and broadcast their messages to wider audiences.

Every month it seems that a new free web tool emerges. While most are free, it is a good idea to be selective since the free version might include unwanted advertisements and it will take an investment of time to learn how to use the tools effectively and build content and connections. In the San Francisco Bay Area, you can also learn about these new tools at the annual NetSquared conference, which is taking place in San Jose, California this year. Or you can hear presentations by social entrepreneurs at monthly NetSquared events in San Francisco.

I recently learned about an innovative and growing online community called New Routes to Community Health, which is a project funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. With social media, one of their goals is to promote the exploration of cultures, achievements, and challenges of immigrants.

And to listen to a collection of audio recordings about Bay Area changemakers, check out Britt Bravo’s Big Vision Podcast. Britt is also one of the organizer’s of Net Tuesday.