By Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund and Google News Initiative

Access to accurate, fact-based news and information is critical for the well-being of individuals, communities and local government. As local news outlets face business challenges, philanthropy is helping fill gaps by supporting organizations who provide vital local information.

While tactics for providing this support may vary, many local news funders struggle to assess whether that community’s information environment is actually becoming healthier.

In response, the Google News Initiative, Democracy Fund and Knight Foundation commissioned Impact Architects to develop a framework and playbook to help communities assess the health of their local news ecosystems.

The new report “Healthy Local News & Information Ecosystems: A Diagnostic Framework,” presents an assessment approach tested and refined across nine U.S. communities of various sizes. Accompanying the report is a playbook designed as a tool to help funders and other community organizations evaluate strengths and opportunities in their locale.

While each local market presented unique conditions and challenges, this timely study found some common themes across communities:

• Communities with greater racial and ethnic diversity tended to have lower trust in journalism, suggesting stronger relationships among legacy media and communities of color are of crucial importance.
• Increasing access to news through collaboration and strong ecosystem backbone institutions can lead to higher trust in journalism, which in turn can lead to more community support for local news organizations.
• Greater news access can have a positive impact on voter turnout and resident satisfaction with their community.

Building on extensive existing research and incorporating perspectives from industry stakeholders, this project moves beyond documenting the presence or absence of news organizations (i.e., “news deserts”) to include a more holistic look at dimensions such as business models and staff composition. It includes easy ways to use existing, publicly available data to measure community members’ relationships with journalists. Ultimately, the playbook is designed as a “plug and play” solution to evaluate 35 indicators across three interconnected categories: news and information providers, community information needs, and the relationship between newsrooms and the community.

This new report includes case studies from the nine U.S. communities where Impact Architects applied the framework: Boulder County, Colo.; Charlotte, N. C.; Chicago; Detroit; Macon-Bibb County, Ga; New Mexico; Oakland, Calif.; Philadelphia; Youngstown, Ohio.

Insights from this effort reinforce the central role local news plays in the civic health of communities. They also show how local funders can use this framework to more effectively direct critical support for local news to areas of greatest potential impact. As new community initiatives are implemented, the framework can also be used over time to observe and assess progress toward healthier communities.

We look forward to seeing how funders, newsrooms and others use this framework to better understand and track the state of the local news ecosystem in their own communities.

Photo (top) by Matt Donders on Unsplash

Originally published on March 3, 2021 at kf.org.

A new tool to measure the health of local news ecosystems was originally published in Informed and Engaged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Just a few years ago, Americans were overwhelmingly optimistic about the power of new technologies to foster an informed and engaged society. More recently, however, that confidence has been challenged by emerging concerns over the role that internet and technology companies — especially social media — now play in our democracy.

In a series of new reports, Gallup and Knight Foundation explore the shifting landscape and how policymakers and technology companies might adapt to face evolving challenges concerning a host of issues, including how to control the spread of misleading and harmful content as well as false political ads online.

Our research:

• JUST RELEASED: Free Expression, Harmful Speech, and Censorship in a Digital World: As the COVID-19 crisis deepens, Americans realize the threat of misinformation to people’s health, and the country’s democracy, however are undecided on how best to remedy the problem while preserving their deeply-held value of free expression. Download the executive summary and report. View the data and questionnaire.
• Techlash? America’s Growing Concerns with Major Technology Companies: For Americans, the techlash is real, widespread, and bipartisan, the report finds. The research highlights the areas of deepest concern, including the spread of misinformation, election interference and data privacy. Download the report.
• Most Oppose Micro-Targeting of Political Ads: While the presidential candidates pour hundreds of millions of dollars into digital advertising for the 2020 election, the research finds that Americans overall favor stricter regulation of ads, and that there is a widespread, bipartisan skepticism for the tech companies’ current handling of political advertising online. View the research.

Our Findings:

How do Americans view current issues in internet technology? Here are the main findings across all of our research.

1) Americans have largely negative views of major internet and technology companies’ impact on society.

Their top concern relates to the amplification of misinformation on the internet.

• 74% of Americans are very concerned about the spread of misinformation on the internet. Despite a partisan gap, majorities of both Democrats (84%) and Republicans (65%) are very concerned about this issue.
• 68% are very concerned about the privacy of personal data stored by internet and technology companies, and 56% are very concerned about hate speech and other abusive or threatening language online.

2) The public believes internet and technology companies have too much power — a sentiment held across all demographic and political groups.

• 77% of Americans say major internet and technology companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have too much power.
• Americans are equally divided among those who favor (50%) and oppose (49%) government intervention that would require internet and technology companies to break into smaller companies.

3) Americans across the political and demographic spectrum say political leaders are not paying enough attention to technology issues.

• 59% of Americans believe elected officials and political candidates are paying “too little” attention to issues dealing with technology and technology companies.

4) Americans prefer social media apps and sites to be places of open expression.

• Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) favor allowing people to express their views on social media, including views that are offensive, over restricting what people can say on social media based on societal norms or standards of what is fair or appropriate (35%).

5) Americans do not trust major internet companies to make the right decisions related to harmful content, but they trust the government less.

• Americans marginally favor major internet companies setting policies about what people can post on their websites and apps without government involvement (55%) rather than government setting limits or guidelines about such content (44%).

6) Even as Americans voice a preference for open expression, there are several forms of online content that many say should be restricted or never allowed.

• Nearly all Americans (98%) say child pornography should never be allowed on social media, and particularly important today, 85% say misleading health information also should be prohibited.

7) Americans’ opinions of content oversight boards are largely favorable, tending to prefer them to social media companies or the government to make decisions about what can and cannot appear on social media websites and apps.

• More than 8 in 10 Americans say they think a content oversight board is a “good idea” (54%) or “very good idea” (27%), while 12% say it is a “bad idea,” and 7% say it’s a “very bad idea.”

8) Americans are somewhat divided on the impact of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which largely shields major internet companies from liability for content posted on their websites and apps by third parties.

• Fifty-four percent say the law has done more harm than good because it has not made the companies accountable for illegal content on their sites and apps; however, almost two-thirds (66%) of Americans say they support keeping the existing law that shields major internet companies from liability.

9) Americans support banning false online political ads.

• Solid majorities of Americans say that political ads containing outright falsehoods — including targeting supporters of an opposing candidate with ads that give the wrong election date (81%) — should be banned by social media platforms.

10) Americans favor increased transparency and an end to microtargeted political ads.

• Seventy-two percent of Americans say political campaigns should not be able to target users for ads based on their data; rather, all users should see the same ads.
• Fifty-nine percent support requiring political ads to disclose who paid for them.

Graphics by Valerio Pellegrini

Further reading:

• A pivotal moment for free expression online
• When It Comes to Managing Online Content, Americans Want It All. Can They Get It?
• Solve the Underlying Problem: Treat Social Media as Ad-Driven Companies, Not Speech Platforms
• Oversight Boards are a "Bold New Approach" to Tackling Today's Problems
• Digital Platforms' Power Over Speech Should Not Go Unchecked
• Americans Would Probably Love Section 230 - If They Understood It
• Americans Support Free Speech Online but Want More Action to Curb Harmful Content
• Techlash? America's Growing Concern With Major Technology Companies

Originally published at https://kf.org.

By Steven Waldman

The appetite for a “public service” approach is strong but the on-the-ground challenges in newsrooms are real

Report for America has grown rapidly. The program — which places emerging journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities — went from 13 corps members in 2018–19, to 59 in 2019–20 to 250 in 2020–21 (starting in June).

We’re expanding that fast because the size of the crisis demands it. But that means we will be making plenty of mistakes along the way, and have to constantly learn and reassess. Here are some of our key lessons learned after three years of running the program.

The passion to cover local news is intense.

We just closed our application window for journalists and can now announce the results (drum roll): a 95 percent increase in submissions over last year! We had more than 1,800 applicants for about 200 open slots.

Another indicator: About 90 percent of the current corps members renewed for a second year. And about half our current group of newsrooms have also requested additional reporters.

In short, there is a massive demand among young journalists to be local public service reporters. We’ve known for a while that journalism schools were oversubscribed but it’s notable that emerging journalists have specifically embraced the idea that the crisis in local journalism is a crisis for democracy. This isn’t about joining the resistance; it’s about serving communities.

Yes, to some extent it shows the shortage of available journalism jobs. But something else is happening. These are young journalists who rather than gravitating to glitzy jobs in New York or Washington, want to go out into local communities. The gauzier message — that local reporting isn’t just an important job, it’s a public service — is resonating.

The median age of our corps is 26. So the dominant type is not a college senior (a la Teach for America) but rather someone with a few years of professional experience. This is a good thing because the point of the program is to create great journalism, not (primarily) just to train new journalists. Yes, it creates challenges. Older journalists need to be trained differently (more intermediate and specialized training). They understand the value of good editing and so bristle when they don’t get it. They may be less patient with the low pay; but they’re not so old that their idealism has been ground out of them.

This also forced us to adapt in another way. We did not want the presence of all these somewhat experienced emerging reporters to wipe out the chances for the amazing reporters just graduating from school. So we created an informal second track — weekly newspapers, small dailies, small radio stations. These are organizations that can well use superstar recent grads and give the reporters valuable experience. The work that these reporters are doing is phenomenal and the news organizations seem thrilled too. Of course we look for the smaller news organizations that are nonetheless a primary or crucial source of journalism in their area.

In news deserts, even a little water can have a big impact.

In the second year of Report for America (RFA), there was an average of 200+ percent increase in the number of stories in the identified issue and coverage gaps. This year’s class of 59 reporters produced 1,000 stories in just their first three months. Some have had dramatic impact. Last July, Report for America corps member Obed Manuel reported for the Dallas Morning News that Francisco Erwin Galicia — an American citizen born in Dallas — had been detained by Border Patrol for three weeks without clear cause. His family feared that he’d be deported. The story went viral and Obed was interviewed on CNN. The next day, Galicia was released from ICE custody.

Samantha Hogan’s investigation for Pine Tree Watch uncovered sweeping errors in the financial oversight of the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services. Multiple state investigations have been launched as Maine considers a public defender system.

In August, Zak Podmore, an RFA corps member with the Salt Lake Tribune, got taxpayers in San Juan County, the poorest in Utah, a $109,500 refund after discovering that a law firm had overcharged and double billed for legal work related to the Bear Ears Park. That one story, in other words, generated for taxpayers an amount more than twice Podmore’s annual salary.

We’ve inadvertently created a third model: commercial body with nonprofit prosthetics.

The philanthropic world tends to imagine there being two models: the (noble but dying) commercial model and the (rising but fragile) nonprofit model.

But we’re also seeing the evolution of a third model — a commercial organization incorporating nonprofit elements. Chris Fusco, the managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, was asked how he decided to deploy his two Report for America reporters, Carlos Ballesteros and Manny Ramos. He said he’d like to be able to put Carlos and Manny on the latest local crime story, the latest shooting — but he promised Report for America he wouldn’t. The terms of their acceptance into the Report for America program — a nonprofit program backed by philanthropy — was that the reporters would focus on non-crime stories in the South and West Sides of Chicago.

So Report for America had, in effect, erected guard rails around the beats of Manny and Carlos. I suspect Chris was complaining about this with a twinkle in his eye — a sort of “throw me in the briar patch” plea. He is a great editor who understands full well the need for this kind of journalism.

In addition, the presence of Report for America has forced, encouraged and helped the commercial entities to develop muscles that they should be building anyway. We make them define and measure the biggest coverage gaps in the community — and then measure the impact (or not) of the reporter. We make them attempt to raise money from either local foundations or the community, through small donations. I think of it as injecting vitamins into the bloodstream. The hope is that the benefits are pervasive and ultimately energize the whole body.

Local philanthropists (of all giving levels) are beginning to see local journalism as community service and a public good.

Local philanthropy is starting to come off the sidelines. Report for America encourages local news organizations to raise part of their share of the cost for a reporter from local donors, large and/or small.

We will be announcing our 2019 results at the Knight Media Forum but here’s the sneak peak: Scores of newsrooms have raised local philanthropic dollars for their Report for America positions, including some who have never raised such funds before.

We’re just getting started in earnest on this part of the program. We hired Todd Franko, the former editor of The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio, to be the Director of Local Sustainability.

The Salt Lake Tribune conducted a successful crowdfunding program, raising almost $52,000 to support two Report for America corps members. This funding came from many $10 to $100 individual donations. The goal was to raise $40,000. The Blue Grass Community Foundation is covering the local share for the Lexington Herald-Leader’s corps member Alex Acquisto, who is reporting on public health.

What our outreach is showing is that news organizations are finding fundraising success when they actively engage their local funder community with best practices. In many of the fundraising successes, it’s a new activity for the newsroom and the local donor community. They are not companies and communities used to this practice.

The service project may turn out to be a more impactful element of Report for America than we originally expected.

We require corps members to do a community service project, such as working with local high schools to launch or enhance a school newspaper. We did this originally because we wanted to underline the idea that local journalism is a public service. We thought it was a good way to teach media literacy, and we thought it would be a way for the reporter to get into the community that would help them build trust.

But we’re seeing more benefits than expected. First, it’s really stimulating activity on the high school and middle school level. The service projects range from restarting a defunct high school newspaper in Dallas, to launching an interview-style student podcast in Wisconsin, to helping the children of migrant workers in eastern Oregon create a bilingual newsletter for their parents.

The corps members themselves learn from the students. “My students have painted a different picture of this place, one that adults rarely talk about, at least not in explicit terms,” corps member Samantha Max wrote in a piece for USA Today about teaching students in Macon, Ga., how to make a podcast. “One week, a student told the class that he struggles to balance his schoolwork and late-night shifts at Burger King. Another shared that he had been kicked out of his first elementary school when he was 6 years old for bringing his older brother’s BB gun to school.”

The corps members aren’t required to work with students, but most do. This year’s projects are serving more than 700 students. And imagine the impact as Report for America scales. When we have 1,000 reporters, in four years, we will be working with something like 14,000 students per year.

The challenges facing local news organizations are deeper and more multifaceted than we expected.

We all understand that local news organizations have too few people. But we didn’t fully understand how this reality ripples through communities.

First, the erosion of reporting has been joined by a crisis in editing. The most common problem we see in news organizations is that reporters don’t get sufficient editing. This will eventually make local journalism shallower and sloppier.

Second, it’s not just that there are too few reporters; it’s that the commercial news organizations are often in a perpetual state of downsizing. Each time the patient stabilizes, it’s time for a new blood-letting, which can undermine confidence in the news organization’s future and jeopardize its hold on talented reporters and editors. Meanwhile, nonprofit news outlets are growing but often still frail.

Third, beats have eroded. Typically, when news organizations get smaller, they either move to more general assignment reporters or they stack beats. The person who used to cover higher education now covers education and health. The more that beats are stacked, the less opportunity there is for depth, source-building and trust building. This has prompted us to be more insistent that Report for America reporters are doing well-defined and reasonably sized beats.

Fourth, there’s a wisdom-drain. We all know that too many news organizations lay off or push out (through buyouts) the more experienced reporters because they’re more expensive. That’s its own tragedy. The wisdom that these reporters built up, about topics and craft, is one of the most important elements of value in the enterprise. We are attempting to partly address this with our new mentoring program with 58 journalists supporting our Report for America corps members.

Diversity is hard work — but we’re finding success.

We’re exceedingly proud of our record so far on diversity. Almost 40 percent of the corps members are journalists of color. If we are able to maintain roughly that ratio in the 2020 class, that will mean 100 new journalists of color working in the field, a significant movement.

But we have a long way to go. We need to be more sensitive to the unique issues presented to diverse reporters who might be the only African American or Latinx in their news organization. And we’re hearing an alarming rumble: The collapse of high school journalism opportunities may be drying up the pipeline of talented diverse journalists. Efforts to improve diversity need to start earlier.

Many Report for America slots cover communities of color, and a third of newsrooms asked for reporters who speak Spanish. We have also made a major commitment to covering Native American affairs — with 19 reporting positions focused on that topic.

We’ve learned a lot, and have a lot to learn. But all in all, the lessons have given us more hope, not less for the future of local news.

Steven Waldman is co-founder and President of Report for America, which is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project.

Originally published at kf.org.

Report for America: What We’ve Learned So Far was originally published in Trust, Media and Democracy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Alan C. Miller

After I was asked to write this piece about trust and local news, I recalled that CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite was, for years, described as “the most trusted man in America,” based on the results of a 1972 survey. As I looked for more information, I discovered, thanks to articles in The New Yorker and Slate, that the survey was flawed: Cronkite was the only non-politician listed (others included President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and assorted candidates for president, senator and governor).

The idea that this description persisted throughout the venerated newsman’s career and beyond intrigued me, because my work at the News Literacy Project is focused on helping students decipher fact from fiction. Had I not checked, I would have inadvertently spread misinformation.

That said, Cronkite was trusted by many Americans, for good reason. His was the voice we turned to during trying times — the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, Watergate. And, with an average nightly audience of between 27 million and 29 million viewers, it’s no wonder that many Americans found him to be a reliable source of information.

In 1980, when Cronkite announced his retirement, the combined ratings for the national evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC totaled 42.3 (ratings are the percentage of households with a TV tuned into a program). By 2005, that figure had fallen to 18.9 — and the latest Pew Research data shows that evening news programs averaged 5.3 million viewers in 2018. Americans were no longer having a shared news experience and getting a consensus national narrative of the big events of the day. The proliferation of cable news networks, online news sites, social media, podcasts and blogs enabled many more perspectives to be heard.

In many ways — such as the increased diversity of backgrounds and experiences of those delivering the news — this development was positive. But it also contributed to the rise of hyper-partisanship, as audiences were increasingly able to watch, hear or read the news presented by outlets that reflected their own ideological leanings.

How do we combat this polarization? Here’s one idea: Keep local news organizations strong.

A study published in December 2018 in the Journal of Communication connected the dots. The authors posited that because the internet offers an unlimited stage to national media outlets. This means that national political news — which often focuses on partisan conflict — is inescapable. So they followed a hunch: If people are consuming more nationalized news when their local newspapers decline, they might become more polarized themselves and vote accordingly.

To test this, they compared voting patterns in the 2012 election in counties that had lost a local newspaper and ones that had not. Their conclusion: “Local newspapers provide a valuable service to democracy by keeping readers’ focus on their communities. When they lose local newspapers, we have found, readers turn to their political partisanship to inform their political choices.”

The destruction of the business model (advertising and circulation revenue) that sustained local newspapers for decades has caused hundreds of publications to fold in recent years, and many of the survivors have experienced repeated rounds of layoffs, gutting the news staffs. Yet in spite of those cuts, people continue to trust their local news organizations. The 2018 Poynter Media Trust survey (PDF download) found that “76% of Americans across the political spectrum have a ‘great deal’ or a ‘fair amount’ of trust in local television news, and 73% do so for local newspapers.”

With that strong foundation in place, we can build on the public’s trust in standards-based news organizations by creating a new generation of news readers, viewers and listeners — one that understands and appreciates quality journalism and the factors that distinguish it from the information (and misinformation) that competes for, and often overwhelms, consumers’ attention.

This is what the News Literacy Project does. We equip and empower educators to teach students the skills they need to become smart, active consumers of news and other information — and engaged, informed participants in civic life. Our approach helps young people build the critical-thinking skills that will last them a lifetime.

For example, our Newsroom to Classroom program gives journalists the opportunity to visit schools and talk about what they do, how they do it and why it matters. These visits, either in person or virtually, allow students and educators to engage with journalists in a mutually beneficial dialogue on topics of interest to both sides. Ultimately, this kind of engagement creates knowledge of how the process works and a greater transparency that encourages trust. (In fact, the idea for the News Literacy Project grew out of a visit I made to my daughter’s school in 2006, when I was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times.)

Supporting news literacy education at the local level will lead to deeper interest in the work of local news outlets — the ones that hold local businesses and local elected officials accountable. When news consumers learn how to verify the credibility of information, they become empowered. Our students tell us that as a result of lessons in our Checkology® virtual classroom, they plan to become more engaged in civic issues and more active in their communities.

It’s essential that we maintain trust in our institutions — particularly our local news organizations, which are accessible, accountable and best equipped to inform us about what’s happening in our communities.

Walter Cronkite’s signature signoff was: “And that’s the way it is” (you can look this one up!). We believe that if we make news literacy a part of every young person’s education, we can have greater confidence that the next generation indeed will be able to determine “the way it is.”

Alan C. Miller is the founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project. Visit newslit.org to find out how your newsroom can work with NLP to build news literacy skills.

Originally published at https://kf.org.

• Local and Nonprofit News
• How Training Can Improve Local News, Make It More Inclusive
• How to Build a Sustainable Local News Organization

News Literacy Boosts Trust in Local News was originally published in Trust, Media and Democracy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On November 20, Knight Foundation released a new report, “High School Student Views On The First Amendment: Trends in the 21st Century.” Joan Donovan shares insights below. For more insights, read this post by Knight’s Evette Alexander and this post by Dr. Emily Chamlee-Wright.

By Joan Donovan

In the recent Knight Foundation report on “ High School Student Views on the First Amendment, “ researchers surveyed U.S. students across different demographics to gain an understanding of how they view First Amendment protections. Overall, they find that for the last 15 years, student support for First Amendment has increased; however, if you look closely within different groups, support wanes among girls and students of color. What could explain these differences?

Since the first survey in 2004, students have grappled with the role social media has come to play in their lives. Social media is roundly considered a crucial place for self-expression, and in the last 15 years, important social revolutions have taken shape through social media. But the online world has also introduced tremendous individual harms as young people struggle with racism, sexism, LGBTQ discrimination and religious intolerance.

According to a study conducted by the Data & Society Research Institute, women, LGBTQ and people of color have shouldered much of the burden of online harassment in comparison to their white male counterparts. In 2016, students also saw the rise of a national white supremacist movement, who contorted the principal values of the First Amendment to justify calling for what is effectively genocide. We don’t have the same norms for online speech as we do for offline.

While students have not been routinely surveyed on their views about extremist speech online, the preliminary findings from Wihbey and Foucault Welles are telling:

It is not necessarily contradictory that students both support First Amendment protections for hate speech, while also calling on social media companies to use their algorithms as gatekeepers. Social media platforms provide the illusion of free speech.

While the concept of “speech” presupposes that someone is listening, posting to social media is no guarantee that anyone will see your post. That is to say, while anyone with an internet connection can use social media, algorithms largely determine who engages with particular posts. It is not the case that speech is unmitigated online, but rather speech is mediated by technological design. It is plausible that students expect social media companies to take up similar editorial roles that news organizations held in the past.

Further, the researchers find:

Future studies should ask more questions about the role anonymity plays in shaping conceptions of free speech historically. Within the U.S., anonymity is thought to insulate citizens from consequences for unpopular political speech. Online though, anonymity also provides a cover for harassment. While shaming is a normal response to disagreements during face-to-face conversation, online it is difficult to hold others accountable for derogatory behavior.

However, despite popular belief, anonymity is increasingly harder to maintain with social media companies’ data collection practices. If students are concerned with the new gatekeeping role of platform companies, they should also understand how platforms sometimes rely on First Amendment in order to avoid governing speech entirely, which leaves the responsibility on users to sort it out. And yet, these high schoolers are right to be cautious, due to the lack of norms for speech online, some individuals do go too far by attacking or dragging others when spreading harassment campaigns.

Because this is the first generation of students to grow up with widespread access to broadband internet and social media, they are confronting a whole new world of communication, where the norms of speech are in flux. None of us logically expected speech from five or 10 years ago to be available within a few clicks. As such, new conceptions of liberty and freedom must reckon with the long-tail of accountability and justice, where the things we posted in high school might come back to bite us.

Despite the First Amendment’s promise to protect speech from government interference, speech has never been free of social consequences. Many restrictions on speech come from the contexts that govern our behavior at a given time. For example, in a classroom, we are expected to remain quiet and observing; to speak when asked for a reply; and to raise a hand to signal a question.

Social media is a new context for many young people, and the rules of behavior there have yet to be fully established. Because of the First Amendment, it may not be the government’s place to set those rules, but it’s in society’s interest to have them.

Dr. Joan Donovan is the Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy

Photo (top) by freestocks.org on Unsplash. Originally published on Nov. 20 at kf.org.

• High School Student Views On The First Amendment: Trends in the 21st Century
• Hear us roar: High schoolers are more supportive of the First Amendment over time, but girls and…
• There’s a right way to teach the First Amendment, and protect it

High school students, social media and the illusion of free speech was originally published in Informed and Engaged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A new report released by Knight Foundation shows that young adults are concerned about the impact of news on democracy and unity in the country, expressing that news sources divide and polarize citizens.

Conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, the report analyzes the findings of a survey of 1,660 adults between the ages of 18 and 34. It includes large samples of African American and Hispanic participants in order to explore beliefs and behaviors across races and ethnicities.

The report found that young adults interact with the news frequently with 88 percent accessing news at least weekly, including 53 percent who do so every day. As such, it holds important findings for news organizations and journalists as they try to build their influence and reach among the next generation.

Here are six findings that stood out to us:

1. Young adults are worried about the impact of news sources on democracy and the unity of the country:

Fifty-eight percent of young adults believe their favorite news source helps democracy. When it comes to their least-liked source, 64 percent say it hurts democracy. In addition, 73 percent say their least-liked news source divides the country, and only 47 percent say their favorite source helps unite it. When comparing partisan attitudes, 51 percent of Democrats say their favorite source unites the public, while 42 percent of Republicans say the same.

2. Many young adults believe that news sources, even their favorite, have a liberal or conservative ideological slant:

Overall, about 45 percent of young adults say their favorite news source does not have a political slant. 42 percent label their favorite news source as liberal; 13 percent say their favorite news source is conservative. 48 percent of young adults say their least-favorite source has a conservative slant.

3. Young adults largely believe that their race or ethnicity is not covered regularly in the media:

Thirty-one percent of young adults say that people of their race, or issues that affect people of their race, are rarely covered in their most-liked news sources. Forty-seven percent say the same thing about their least-liked news sources. Hispanics and African Americans are especially likely to say both their most- and least-liked source fail to regularly cover issues that affect them.

4. The majority of African American and Hispanic participants do not feel like media sources accurately or fairly portray their groups, when they do get coverage:

Only 45 percent of African Americans and 40 percent of Hispanics say their most-liked source very accurately portrays their groups. Around 6 in 10 in both groups say their least-liked source portrays them slightly or not at all accurately.

5. Young adults who are highly partisan rely on news to make decisions:

Forty-one percent of young adults who identify strongly with a political party will use their favorite news source to make decisions about candidates, and 49 percent of these young adults will do the same when making decisions about policies to support.

6. Political affiliation has a big effect on perceptions of a news organization’s ideological slant:

Democrats are especially likely to perceive an ideological slant to their most- and least-liked/favorite sources. Fifty-seven percent of Democrats see their favorite news source as liberal, while 36 percent of Republicans perceive their favorite news source as very or somewhat conservative. Also, more Democrats say their least-liked source is very conservative than Republicans say their least-liked source is very liberal (75 percent vs. 68 percent).

To view the full report, visit kf.org/newsviewsreport.

Image (bottom): this is a derivative of a photo by MoteOo on Pixabay and using the Pixabay License. Image effects added by Knight Foundation.

Six reasons young adults think the news media is dividing our country was originally published in Trust, Media and Democracy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As concerns over free speech, declining trust in news and the impact of misinformation surge, a new report explores how high-school students’ attitudes about the First Amendment are evolving and what that means for the future of our democracy.

Released today, the national study of 9,774 high school students and 498 teachers is the eighth in a series of surveys of high school students and teachers commissioned by Knight Foundation over the last 12 years. This year’s survey incorporated several questions from Gallup’s Free Expression on Campus survey of college students released in 2018 in order to compare the two.

High school students show strong support for the First Amendment, but what those rights mean is increasingly up for debate. Technology, along with changing perceptions of the media and who gets to deliver news are creating gray areas. These competing views and habits can have an effect on the freedoms that the First Amendment guarantees. Understanding them will help to preserve our most fundamental rights into the future.

Here are seven findings that stood out to us:

Students express strong support for the First Amendment, but do favor some limits to free speech: An overwhelming majority of students support the right to express unpopular opinions (89 percent), however only 45 percent of students believe people have the right to speech that others consider offensive. Still, when forced to choose which is more important, students by a 5-to-1 ratio (65 percent to 12 percent) say protecting free speech is more important than protecting people from offensive speech.

News engagement and trust has declined: In addition to low levels of trust in news, students report lower news consumption and engagement. The sharpest drops were reported for consumption of local TV news and cable TV news. Thirty percent reported watching local news often in 2016 versus 14 percent in 2018. Similarly, 26 percent reported watching cable news often versus 12 percent in 2018. Engagement with news on social media also dipped. Only 46 percent of students say they often use social media to get news, compared with 51 percent in 2016.

Student trust in citizen journalism is on the rise: In 2016, 26 percent of students said they trusted content — pictures, videos and accounts — posted by people more than traditional news sources; this number grew to 40 percent in 2018. Teachers also show large increases in trust for citizen journalism efforts.

Students believe social media has had a negative effect on free expression: About half of high-school students (53 percent) believe social media stifles expression because people block those with opposing views and because the fear of negative encounters makes people less likely to share their views. A greater share of college students in the Gallup survey agree (59 percent) about these negative effects on free expression.

Students believe that the internet is fueling hate speech: Seventy-percent of high school students believe the internet is responsible for a significant increase in hate speech, though college students are more likely to think this way (82 percent). College students (68 percent) are also more likely than high school students (47 percent) to believe that social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, have a responsibility to limit hate speech on their platforms.

Students don’t view “fake news” as a threat to democracy: Less than a quarter (21 percent) of high school students view fake news as a significant threat to democracy. In contrast, 40 percent of teachers view it as a threat our our democracy. Most students say they have come across fake news stories, yet only 20 percent say they are very confident in their own ability to recognize inaccurate news. A majority of students believe that both the government and social networking site operators bear some responsibility to prevent fake news.

High school students are more likely than college students to believe hate speech should be protected by the First Amendment: Though less than half (46 percent) of high school students believe hate speech constitutes expression protected by the First Amendment, this is significantly greater than the share of college students (35 percent), who responded to a separate survey.

Download the full report at: kf.org/fofa18.

Originally published at knightfoundation.org.

Seven ways high-school student views on free speech are changing was originally published in Trust, Media and Democracy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Arts and culture have been a centerpiece of Miami’s transformation for more than a decade. From the Art Basel art fair — a mecca for international curators and collectors — to several new world-class facilities, Miami has seen an explosion in artistic, creative and cultural activity since 2005.

A new report commissioned by Knight Foundation looks at this transformation. It reveals the wide impact the arts have had in a decade, becoming part of the fabric of the city, expanding opportunities in the creative sector and taking on an important role in connecting people. Produced by research firm TDC, the report draws from existing data and extensive interviews with local artists, residents and others to track progress made in Miami’s creative sector and explore continuing gaps. It offers important lessons for cities with burgeoning arts scenes as they examine the impact of their own arts ecosystems.

Report findings also helped to inform Knight’s new $37 million investment in the arts in Miami. The support will build on momentum in the sector, helping anchor arts organizations flourish and experiment with new, high-quality programming, while encouraging the city’s small and midsize organizations, as well as individual artists, to create bold art, take risks and innovate.

Art is general in Miami — the last decade has proven its inextricable link to the city’s growth and identity. In charting its journey and supporting its progress, we hope to strengthen the permanence of art in the city and the community that drives it.

Here are six ways the Miami arts scene changed between 2005 and 2015:

1. The arts have had transformative impact in Miami: Of the 276 arts organizations operating in Miami in 2015, 20 percent were formed since 2005.

“Miami has changed in the last 10 years — feels like a renaissance has taken place. There is so much vibrancy.” — Local leader in Miami

2. There was major growth in artistic activity and participation: Total spending by Miami arts organizations increased by 168 percent from 2005–15. Arts attendance has increased dramatically (27 percent) in both the city and county from 2004–15. This growth is also reflected in the spending levels of arts organizations in Miami, which declined during the recession but rebounded in 2015 to surpass 2005 levels. This progress was seen even in the face of declines in population and economic recovery.

3. Job growth in the arts sector has grown: Arts and culture have also served to bind people to the city and create professional opportunities. Creative jobs grew by 21 percent, from 168,780 in 2011 to 203,649 in 2016.

4. Total revenue grew: Program revenue within arts organizations grew by 21 percent between 2011 and 2015, implying revenue generated through increased attendance. Contributed and other revenue grew only incrementally.

“It’s grown enormously. There are many more organizational players, and anchor organizations have come into their own. Miami feels bigger than it used to be; there is so much more to do here.” — Local leader in Miami commenting on the arts sector

5. Foundation giving saw a huge increase: There was a 1,265 percent increase in foundation giving from 2004–15, driven by Knight Foundation. Cultural spending by Miami-Dade County rose by 107 percent.

6. There are still some challenges, especially financial sustainability: The city’s arts sector still faces challenges that call into question its long-term vitality. The percentage of arts organizations with less that 2.5 months of unrestricted net assets increased from 42 percent in 2005 to 50 percent in 2015.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT HERE.

Originally published at knightfoundation.org.

Making art general in Miami: Six ways the city’s arts sector changed in a decade was originally published in Informed and Engaged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Oct. 31, 2018, Knight Foundation announced a $20 million investment to strengthen the arts in Detroit. Learn more about the announcement here.

The Great Recession hit Detroit’s arts community hard, just as it did nearly every sector of the city’s and the country’s economy. The real story is what came after.

The city came together around the arts. Through the “Grand Bargain,” philanthropic and public capital helped Detroit move through bankruptcy quickly, and corporations and foundations doubled down on their commitment to the sector as a whole. Residents, too, rallied around the arts, whether to attend a new performance, or donate to their local theater.

A new report commissioned by Knight Foundation looks at this growth. It reveals how the arts sector in Detroit not only expanded in the wake of the financial crisis, but became more vibrant, provided more economic opportunity for arts professionals and shaped the story of the city’s transformation.

Produced by TDC, the report draws from existing data and extensive interviews with local artists, residents and others to track progress made in Detroit’s creative sector and explore continuing gaps. It offers important lessons for mid-size cities with burgeoning arts scenes as they examine the impact of their own arts ecosystems.

Report findings also helped to inform a new $20 million Knight Foundation investment in the arts in Detroit. The support will build on momentum in the sector, helping arts organizations experiment and reimagine the way they interact with the public, as well as explore new business models to sustain their high-quality work.

Knight believes the arts have the power to inspire, challenge, bring wonder into our lives, and ultimately connect us to each other and the cities where we live. A thriving arts ecosystem requires talent and collaboration, as well as investment and community support. In charting the journey of arts in Detroit and supporting its growth, we hope to contribute to a stronger future for the city’s great art and artists.

Here are seven ways the Detroit arts scene changed between 2005 and 2015:

1. The arts had a transformative impact on Detroit: While Detroit’s population and economy took major hits, the arts helped create a common identity in the city. Of the 432 arts organizations operating in Detroit in 2015, 16 percent were formed since 2005. Growth in the arts sector helped burnish the city’s image as a hive of do-it-yourself, creative activity.

“WHEN DETROIT WAS AT ITS LOWEST POINT, THE ARTS DOUBLED DOWN ON COMMUNITY INVESTMENT WHEN EVERYONE ELSE WAS GONE.” — DETROIT RESIDENT

2. Artistic activity and participation grew notably: Arts attendance has increased dramatically (17 percent city-wide, 28 percent by Knight grant recipients) in both the city and county in the last ten years. The growth is also reflected in the spending levels of arts organizations in Detroit, which declined during the recession but rebounded in 2015 to surpass 2005 levels.

3. The arts has become part of the fabric of the city: Both the interviews with Detroit art influencers and the research highlight that arts and culture have become part of the fabric of Detroit and have taken on an important role in connecting people both to each other, and to the city. It has also been core to its reinvention.

“A GROWING NUMBER OF GALLERIES, ARTS ALLIANCES, ARTISTS WORKING IN GROUP SHOWS, DIVERSITY IN THE KINDS OF ART BEING SHOWN. THERE IS JUST MORE!” — DETROIT RESIDENT

4. Total revenue generated by arts organizations rose significantly: Revenue contributed from individuals and the public and private sectors, as well as earnings from programming, sales, rentals and investment grew by 40 percent between 2011 and 2015. Contributed revenue still accounts for well over half of all revenue generated by arts organizations, but program-related revenue and other revenue sources both increased substantially.

5. The number of jobs in the arts sector rose: Arts and culture has also served to bind people to the city and create professional opportunities. From 2011 to 2015, a period when Detroit experienced a net loss in jobs, there was still a 10 percent employment growth in the cultural sector.

6. Foundations and corporations have helped expand a vibrant arts scene: Foundation funding (47 percent) and corporate giving (21 percent) for arts in Detroit grew considerably from 2011–2015. Individual arts giving grew by 12 percent, but trailed the national growth rate of 27 percent for individual arts giving. Government funding (-13 percent) was the only contributed funding source to decrease.

7. There are still some big challenges, especially financial sustainability: Individual artists are still struggling to earn a living wage and arts organizations have little unrestricted capital. The percentage of organizations with less that 2.5 months of unrestricted net assets increased from 27 percent in 2005 to 38 percent in 2015. A growing number of them — about 38 percent — lack cash reserves or an adequate endowment. They must fundraise every year just to support operations.

Download the full report here.

Originally published at knightfoundation.org.

Seven ways the Detroit arts scene has changed — and transformed the city was originally published in Informed and Engaged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If news and information are part of the fabric of democracy, then the fabric of U.S. democracy is in tatters. That’s the conclusion that leaps off the map in the 2018 The Expanding News Deserts report, which shows that 171 U.S. counties do not have a local newspaper, and nearly half all counties — 1,449 — have only one newspaper, usually a weekly.

The report by Penelope Muse Abernathy, Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina, shines the light on a silent phenomenon, the disappearance of 1,800 newspapers since 2004, and drop by half of the number of reporters covering local news.

“The historic role of newspapers — informing, nurturing and improving communities, both large and small — is vitally important in the digital age,” Abernathy writes on the website of UNC’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. The belief that informed and engaged citizens are vital to healthy democracy is also deeply held by Knight Foundation, a supporter of the Center.

The broad story of the collapse of the business model for local news is well known. Print advertising revenues have plummeted, while proportional gains in digital revenues have been captured mostly by Facebook and Google.

This report, which builds on the first News Deserts report in 2016, delves much deeper into the story. It explores the impact of hedge funds and private equity investors in hollowing out newspaper staffs, and the impact of consolidation on local coverage.

If there is good news, it’s that more than 500 digital news outlets have sprung up across the country, filling part of the void. Many of these news outlets were founded during the recession in 2008, by investigative reporters who wanted the public service mission of journalism to continue. These journalists grew into their role as publishers, but they and their fledgling organizations now need to take the next steps toward maturity. They need . the resources and skills that will help them establish a permanent presence within their local news ecosystems.

Building their capacity and sustainability is a major area of focus for Knight, which is among several partners that supports NewsMatch. This matching grants program for nonprofit news sites, many of them local, works with partners such as the Institute for Nonprofit News and the News Revenue Hub. NewsMatch also works to raise awareness on the need for communities to support news, journalism and civic information, in the same way it would support any other public good.

Recently, we teamed with Democracy Fund to provide a planning grant to the American Journalism Project, an ambitious plan to raise a venture-like fund to invest in revenue-generating capacity of nonprofit news sites to provide civic news on the local and statewide level.

Knight Foundation staff recently returned from LION Publishers Summit 2018, held in Chicago this past weekend. This event brings hundreds of locally focused independent digital news organizations together to focus on training, education, and peer-to-peer learning around sustainability, excellence in journalism and building community. Workshops focused on topics like advertising rates, events production, libel law, and audience engagement.

In addition the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative is helping dozens of legacy newspaper brands strengthen their local coverage by sharing best practices for digital, as well as elevating innovation by local and regional TV stations, a key source of local news. Knight Foundation also supports the
Investigative Reporters and Editors to produce regional trainings to strengthen the broadcast and digital journalists in television newsrooms. The next one will be held in Philadelphia in early 2019.

It is true that digital platforms have, in a large part, been responsible for swallowing much of the ad market,; however they can also be a vital part of the solution for local news organizations. To this end, the Facebook Journalism Project and Google News Lab are increasingly focusing on tools to help local news organizations get their reporting out to the public, which in turn helps them attract more funding .

But as the report points out, much of this news innovation is taking place in metro hubs and wealthier communities, while information dries up in rural areas.

“The residents of America’s emerging news deserts are often its most vulnerable citizens. They are generally poorer, older and less educated than the average American,” the report notes.

Local news sits at the heart of democratic engagement, providing people with the information they need to contribute and shape their communities. Without it the future of our democracy is in peril. That’s a call to action for us all.

Karen Rundlet is director/journalism at Knight Foundation. Follow her on Twitter @kbmiami.

Originally published at knightfoundation.org.

As news deserts expand, new approaches to local news are taking root was originally published in Trust, Media and Democracy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.