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Exploring a Networked Journalism Collaborative in Philadelphia: An Analysis of the City’s Media Ecosystem with Final Recommendations

In the nation’s sixth largest city, a vibrant media landscape exists with niche reporting sites, legacy newspapers and an active community of creative technologists.  But there is also a notable decline in public affairs reporting and little collaboration between these media entities.

The William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia commissioned J-Lab to conduct this study of the city’s media landscape and the state of public affairs reporting and make recommendations for a possible media investment strategy.  This report details J-Lab’s key findings and recommendations.

Overview

Philadelphia is a city with enormous talents and assets that need to be better leveraged to achieve a well-informed electorate, an accountable leadership and a robust sense of place - importantly, a sense of place that acknowledges the New Philadelphia while attending to the Old.

The city’s mainstream newspapers are steeped in a journalism of the 1970’s and 1980’s - even as they acknowledge they cannot do as much as they once did with only half the staff they used to have.

Many of the city’s new media players, meanwhile, have come to understand what they can do. They are launching public policy and niche websites with a gritty entrepreneurship and considerable personal investment. Some are refugees of the city’s traditional or alternative media. Others know the doors of The Inquirer or the Daily News will never be open to them so they are inventing their own futures. A few have thought about creating a citywide public affairs news site.

Philadelphia is home to an extremely collaborative creative-technology community that is well connected and organized. This community, with a forward-thinking anchor in Indy Hall, embraces a mindset that they don’t need anyone’s permission to do what they want to do - and anyone is welcome to participate if they abide by their collaborative values.
 
And then there are the ordinary citizens and every-day news consumers.  For them, Philadelphia’s Golden Era of Journalism is long past. They are weary of the newspapers’ drama of survival and express pronounced antipathy at what remains - even as they credit the city’s two major papers with undertaking some excellent, albeit episodic, enterprise journalism.

These key themes emerged in a four-month study of the problems and possibilities in the news infrastructure of the nation’s sixth largest city. This study, commissioned by the William Penn Foundation, set out to understand gaps in public affairs reporting, map assets, explore opportunities and make recommendations for a possible philanthropic media investment strategy.

Between late June and late October 2009, J-Lab conducted more than 60 interviews of Philadelphia residents, performed content analyses of the city’s two daily newspapers and four commercial television stations, and undertook a scan of the city’s 260 blogs, and hyperlocal or niche websites. We have found about 60 blogs and websites that have some journalistic DNA.  More have launched since the summer. On January 7, 2010, we invited more than 50 representatives of the city’s legacy and new-media outlets and foundations to hear a report on initial findings and recommendations. Input from that meeting is included in this report.

Key Findings in Brief

  • The available news about Philadelphia public affairs issues has dramatically diminished over the last three years by many measures: news hole, air time, story count, key word measurements.
  • People in Philadelphia want more public affairs news than they are now able to get. 
  • They don’t think their daily newspapers are as good as the newspapers used to be.
  • They want news that is more connected to their city.
  • People from both the Old Philadelphia, anchored by the city’s union and blue-collar workers, and the New Philadelphia, representing tech-savvy, up-and-coming neighborhoods, want to be involved in helping to generate that news.
  • The city is awash in media and technological assets that can pioneer a new Golden Era of Journalism.
  • There is strong, but guarded, interest in exploring a collaborative journalism venture.
  • A significant number of Philadelphia’s new media outlets have expressed interest in pursuing a collaborative media initiative.
  • Any collaborative news effort must validate and support the fiercely independent mindsets of the city’s new media makers.

Read the full report and recommendations here.

 

And read an analysis and criticism of the report here:

As part of the Open Technology Initiative's ongoing work in Philadelphia and on the future of media, this response paper is intended to identify some of the omissions in the J-Lab report, point to problems in its starting assumptions and methodology, and discuss some of the implications for the future of journalism.

The analysis of the report cites its exclusion the news outlets and information assets serving the city's poor and people of color. The report omits the city's longstanding African-American, Spanish-language, gay, alternative weekly, and neighborhood papers, along with substantial new infrastructure such as the hard-won cable access channels, a recently-transferred radio broadcast license, a comprehensive broadband plan and funding proposal, and the production and training network developed by Media Mobilizing Project.