February 22, 2012 – 9:05 am
In December, The Patterson Foundation and the Investigative News Network invited representatives from national foundations that have been supporting independent and non-profit journalism to participate in a February conversation about financial sustainability for journalism’s startups. The idea for this meeting grew out of a relatively new connection between Kevin Davis, INN executive director, and me [...]
By janetcoats
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Tagged Block by Block, Investigative News Network, Oakland Local, The Knight Foundation, The Patterson Foundation
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January 26, 2012 – 9:25 am
I’ve heard it over and over and over again: There’s no financial model for intensely local news. The group of 12 independent community news publishers we’ve been working with at The Patterson Foundation are demonstrating just how untrue that particular little truism is. And I want to say that it has been nothing short of [...]
By janetcoats
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January 18, 2012 – 10:54 am
The holidays ate this blog. That is the only reason I could come up with to explain why I’ve been away so long. I had promised I’d get back to this right after Christmas. Which became right after New Year’s. Which became as soon as the first week of January is behind me and I’ve [...]
By janetcoats
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December 15, 2011 – 7:40 am
Part of what makes working in news so seductive is the instant gratification factor. There aren’t many jobs where you see the impact of your work so quickly. Every day, sometimes several times a day, you publish your work and the community responds to it. That has been one of the biggest adjustments for me [...]
By Janet Coats
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Tagged Journalism Accelerator, Lisa Skube
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December 6, 2011 – 7:00 am
There’s been a lot of reaction in journalism circles to an article written by Dean Starkman in the Columbia Journalism Review called “Confidence Game: The Limited Vision of the News Gurus.’’ In his piece, Starkman takes on what he calls the Future of News Crowd – he names Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky [...]
By Janet Coats
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November 29, 2011 – 8:19 am
During the last couple of months, most of my posts here have focused on the New Media Journalism Initiative’s work with the Block by Block community of independent news publishers. That’s understandable, given how much activity there’s been in this aspect of our work. The Block by Block Community News Summit in September was a [...]
By Janet Coats
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Tagged Block by Block, Journalism Accelerator, Lisa Skube, Reynolds Journalism Institute
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November 23, 2011 – 8:03 am
We’ve come to think of Thanksgiving as the ultimate family holiday – a time when we gather around a common table with those we most love to share a meal and our gratitude. But of course, Thanksgiving has its origins as a celebration of community. That first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Mass., in 1621 was a [...]
By Janet Coats
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Tagged Joy Mayer, St. Louis Beacon, University of Missouri
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November 15, 2011 – 11:36 am
The New Media Journalism Initiative has been at work now for two years. We began life in a conference room at The Patterson Foundation in November 2009, when we assembled a group of thought-leaders to help us chart a course aimed at enabling innovation in journalism. That course has taken us in several different and [...]
By Janet Coats
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November 8, 2011 – 9:04 am
Part of our journey in the New Media Journalism Initiative has been embracing a willingness to change as we go. That value of embracing new ideas to address a constantly changing world is a core part of The Patterson Foundation’s mission. We see this value being lived daily as part of the Block by Block [...]
By Janet Coats
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Tagged Block by Block, The Patterson Foundation
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November 3, 2011 – 10:41 am
If there is one core value underlying the New Media Journalism Initiative, it is innovation. When The Patterson Foundation’s CEO Debra Jacobs asked me to work on this initiative, she gave me a relatively blank slate. But her one charge to me was to focus on innovation. We’ve tried to do that, as we’ve worked [...]
By Janet Coats
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Tagged Block by Block, The Patterson Foundation
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