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The Knight Foundation has released an assessment of the impact of the first two years of the News Challenge program, of which The Next Newsroom Project was one. I received my grant during the first year, in 2007. And while my grant only ran one year, the lessons I learned and the people I met during that time still guide my thinking about the future of news.

You can read the full report here. The above slide deck contains a summary of some of the data related to the projects, and their impact. And there’s a neat infographic here.

And if you don’t have time for all that, the Knight Blog has a summary here.

It’s especially good to see Knight posting some of the lessons the foundation learned, including the need to speed up the grantmaking process, and helping applicants build better budgets.

Otherwise, the lessons learned are worth reading for anyone thinking about launching a venture to address the future of news and journalism.

The Carnival of Journalism is back for month two, under the guidance of ringleader David Cohn. The question this month:

“Considering your unique circumstances what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?”

I expect there are a nearly limitless number of ways to approach this. I’m going to start with an example close to home: Oakland, CA. And I’m going to suggest we lean on an actor that tends to make most folks in journalism nervous: Government.

I’m often struck, living out here in Silicon Valley, about the disconnect between what people believe is available in terms of information online, and what the reality is.  I can’t even recall how many times I’ve been speaking to a group about the future of journalism, and someone will say something like, “Well, now that all the information is available online, why do we even need journalists? Can’t we just do everything you do with better tags and filters and feeds?”

The answer: No. And we are perhaps decades away from anything that resembles that fantasy world.

But there are things we can do to move in that direction. Let start to explain with a story. Two years ago, my car was stolen. I had to go to the Oakland Police Department to get a copy of the police report for the insurance company. As I approached the window to talk to the attendant, I watched her working on her manual typewriter, stopping to fix a mistake with some white out. Eventually, she paused to help me. She fetched the paper copy of my report and then went to the copier to make me a copy. There were some parts of the report, such as where the car was eventually found, that never made it to the file.

This was the Oakland Police Department in January 2009. Now, the Oakland cop shop does eventually digitize some information and make it available on its own mapping system. And one group, Stamen Design, has created a more elegant version of that information here. But both versions provide only the barest of details about the incidents. There is no narrative, no names of the people involved, and no identities of the police who responded. It’s a baby step forward, but only just.

As a former cop reporter, I can also say that these systems require us to depend on the accuracy and the truthfulness of the police. While I hate to be cynical, even when I was reading through stacks of police reports in the mid-1990s, the real scope of an incident or the real impact was not apparent until you cornered a cop and got them to talk. And even then, their stories, in certain circumstances, differed from witnesses, especially where accusations of police brutality were involved.

Technology can’t fix all of that. But in following Mr. Cohn’s advice to “Bite small, chew well,” I’ll start with the Oakland Police’s dilemma. What is needed is a massive investment in their infrastructure, something that would increase their efficiency as a department, but also expand their capacity for transparency. That, in turn, would bolster the amount of crime information they can put online, which in turn would amplify the effectiveness of services like the Oakland crime maps.

Take this small example, and now expand it around the San Francisco Bay Area, to the dozens of police and sheriff’s departments that are still only just barely in the digital age. And now widen the lens to include all aspects of local and county governments. Big investments in the infrastructure are needed to get the information of these agencies online, and in formats, like structured data, that would open them up to wider consumption and interpretation.

As the reach of metro and local papers continues to ebb, I’m guessing many of these police departments haven’t seen a cop reporter in years. So this type of investment seems like a great opportunity to dramatically increase the flow of information that is also urgently needed. Of course, that flow would quickly become a flood, creating a secondary challenge of finding ways to filter it, provide context, and make sure there was community-wide access for all citizens. It would need to be packaged in forms that make for easy and convenient consumption. But that shouldn’t be a reason to not try.

However, the more immediate problem, of course, is who will pay for this? State and local governments across the country are facing historic financial problems. Many state governments are bleeding red ink. The federal government seems the best bet, despite the current focus on cutting the budget. President Obama has taken some steps to promote a Government 2. 0 agenda, and in his recent State of the Union address, he called on making strategic investments in infrastructure to “win” the future.

Over time, such a program would cost billions, if not trillions, to bring every government into the digital age. But in terms of impact on increasing sources of news, it strikes me as one of the smartest investments we can make.

Welcome to the Carnival of Journalism, which has been reincarnated courtesy of David Cohn. While I recall the carnival in its heydey of three or four years ago, this is my first time as a contributor.

This month’s topic as posed by Mr. Cohn:

The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community: One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.”

Okay – great recommendations. But how do we actually make it happen? What does this look like? What University programs are doing it right? What can be improved and what would be your ideal scenario? Or is this recommendation wrong to begin with? No box here to write inside of.

I’m going to tackle the second part of the Knight recommendation: Digital and media literacy.

In recent years, as enrollment in journalism schools has continued to grow, I listen as amusement as various folks scratch their heads in amazement. What could these people possibly be thinking? Don’t they know the media is dying? Why are they signing up for a dead-end major?

But I see it from a different view: To various degrees, everyone will be a content creator in the coming years. At the same time, as the number of content creators swells, and the platforms and volume of content explode, people will need to be equipped to wade through, evaluate, and critique what they read. People need to learn how to be both better creators and better consumers of media. These skills become more essential, more vital with every year.

We talked about this idea back in 2007-8, when I was knee-deep in the Next Newsroom Project, I was spending a lot of time at Duke University. I felt that one of the most progressive things Duke could to would be to create a digital literacy requirement. When I attended Duke (1987-1991), we were all required to take a freshman writing class, to ensure that we came out with a baseline of writing skills, something considered essential for our professional success.

But two decades later, in the same respect, students in higher education need a baseline of digital creation skills: editing video and audio, creating a blog, etc. We could debate the list of practicals skills, and they would always be shifting. Still, they will be vital.

At the same time, students need to be sharp critics of media, able to sift through and evaluate the reliability and reputation of sources, and quality of content. Much of the content will be unfiltered and without context. It will be up the consumer to find their way through this.

Knowing university politics, instituting a new requirement is bound to get all sorts of turf battles going. And I know there is a real cost: Creating enough facilities to have the capacity to train all these students. And you likely need a large number of grad students to do that teaching.

But the need is there. And institutions of higher learning that grasp this opportunity will be giving their students a huge advantage in whatever field they choose to enter. Strong digital literacy needs to become somthing our society considers a basic life skill.

I just caught this interview with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz from a USA Today event. She discusses a wide range to topics with USA Today’s David Lieberman. About half way through, they come around to the subject of Yahoo’s move into building local news sites:

Q: You are starting a local news operation for San Francisco. Tell us about your plans to offer local information.

A: We all live in a place. You live in small communities, and you are very interested in what happens in those communities from police blotters to what happened in the city council or the neighborhood watch. It is interesting to the consumer.

And it is interesting to the advertiser because it is the ultimate target. Statistics are 95% of our purchases are (made) within 2 miles of our house, 5 miles of our house.

Q: There are a lot of people in local news. AOL has Patch. Local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations are online. Where do you fit in?

A: We have partnerships with local publications and an association with newspapers. They send us news feeds. We send viewers back to their dot-com locations. So we actually are very symbiotic with people like that.

But to answer more the spirit of your question, why can we succeed? I will give you the CEO answer: We do a better job. A better job in being a partner with local advertisers. A better job partnering with people actually writing from the community, not about the community. We have a lot of experience in this.

A friend passed along this job listing for Yahoo’s expanded local news site in San Jose, which will be launching soon. The company has been getting ready to roll these out for some time as part of their strategy to invest in more original content, and the Bay Area is one of the first areas on the list. Looks like it’s going to be taking AOL’s Patch on pretty directly.

Here’s the listing:

Hi Guys — Yahoo! is looking for a sharp, experienced Web editor for a Local editor position in San Jose. This is a full-time, permanent position.

Job description is below and at http://bit.ly/bXHV59

Please feel free to forward. I know the hiring manager, and he’d like to hire ASAP.

Yahoo Local Editor for San Jose

Yahoo! is looking for an expert online editor to raise the level of our content served to the residents of San Jose. The ideal candidate will be a seasoned editor with a passion for news, new media, and their local market. He or she will synthesize content from a number of sources and publishers into a relevant, addictive offering for residents. You should be flexible, quick-thinking, energetic, efficient, and able to work independently under pressure while maintaining attention to detail. Real-world journalistic experience managing digital news on deadline is a must.

In this role, the editor will be responsible for:

• Knowing your local community, including tastes, customs, passions, and sources
• Choosing which stories to highlight, and which to ignore
• Crafting clever and SEO-friendly headlines, writing tease copy, choosing and cropping appropriate images
• Sourcing and managing content from partners
• Reporting and writing engaging and exceptional news stories and blog posts from primary or secondary sources on deadline
• Incorporating data and audience feedback in programming decisions
• Monitoring blog comments, surfing similar sites for story ideas
• Familiarity with SEO, RSS, Twitter, Facebook and other social media
• Qualifications for this role include:
• Bachelors degree, preferably in journalism or media
• Minimum 3+ years online and 5+ years overall experience at a major media outlet in your market
• Minimum 1+ year experience syndicating content
• Comfort with online publishing tools including more than one at a time
• Basic HTML and Photoshop skills
• A thorough understanding of editorial best practices, and an authoritative grasp of the AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style

Kim Moy

Director, Y! Front Page Programming

kimmoy@yahoo-inc.com

(408) 349-5049