Question:

What kind of election coverage do you want to bring to your community in 2012?

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The 2012 elections are already underway. For many publishers, elections present an opportunity to cement community ties – to go beyond horserace coverage, to tap into local knowledge and to root out information people are hungry to have before voting.

How can news sites best respond to community needs around the election? What tools, resources, and collaborations are worth trying? What financial and ethical questions around elections do publishers want answered?

This question has a lot of answers—to view by way of RSS, click here.

Answers: Remember to refresh often to see latest comments!

236 answers so far.

Emily Harris says:

January 13, 2012 at 2:53 pm

Drawing your attention to developments around a key issue we talked about some in this thread: The vast amounts of money that will be spent this election. This surfaced in another JA forum.

Should TV stations be required to put public information about political ads online? Right now information about ad buys is public, but in paper files. The FCC is considering requiring online reports.

Steven Waldman, author of the 2011 FCC report “The Information Needs of Communities” is asking on-the-ground journalists to weigh in the FCC by next Tuesday, January 17.

The FCC is also considering more disclosure of “pay-for-play” setups, when advertisers have influence over editorial. It’s the same proceeding, #00-168. You can find out more and comment here. Your comments carry more weight than you may realize.

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Ikaika Hussey says:

December 14, 2011 at 1:57 am

Hi everyone,

Sorry to be late to the party — it’s been a crazy, but great week.

I’m really excited about how our 2012 election coverage is shaping up. Our approach is to try Jay Rosen’s “CItizen’s Agenda in Campaign Coverage. And we’re bringing on an excellent, experienced political reporter to anchor our coverage.

We’re repositioning our site as a civic and community network; as part of that process, I’m reaching out to elected officials, nonprofit leaders, advocates, business leaders, and our awesome readers, to be part of a series of discussions online and in person about the issues that should constitute the ‘citizens agenda.’

I haven’t nailed down all the revenue opportunities for the season, but the broad strokes are:

– Targeted campaign ads
– Issue ads
– and other ideas I glean from this forum… this is great!

Thanks!

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Jacob Caggiano says:

December 11, 2011 at 7:41 pm

Hey all, this is a rich thread, glad to see all this participation.

Some of you may have heard, Jay Rosen and his students in the Studio 20 Program are working with The Guardian US (who recently launched http://guarddiannews.com which operates from New York City and geared towards a US audience) to change the arc of campaign coverage toward a “citizens agenda” and away from horserace personality based “who cut the candidates hair” style coverage.

More info here: http://pressthink.org/2011/12/the-citizens-agenda-a-plan-to-make-election-coverage-more-useful-to-people/

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Emily Harris says:

December 9, 2011 at 12:47 pm

For much of this conversation, we’ve been talking about ad revenue around elections. What about other opportunities?

Some possible candidates – voters guides, community events, candidate forums, consulting arms, paywalls for exclusive interviews, pre- or post-election special publications, pre- or post-election data analysis…Just brainstorming – do any of these present revenue opportunities? What would be the associated challenges?

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1. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 1:03 pm
  
  We are really proud of our work over the last couple of years – particularly around collaboration. Last year’s election season we had planned a lot of direct collaboration with volunteers, interns and staff. It was the perfect opportunity to capture that work on video because the planning was already in place.
  
  We are now editing a couple of videos – one as a guide for other local operations about how we work, and another shorter video to use when selling advertising. It gives advertisers a sense of what we do around here during elections and everyday.
  
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2. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 1:10 pm
  
  Absolutely. Some of INN’s members have found community events–even explainer coloring books–to be key ways to engage with the community. It’s a new world.
  
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3. Michael Ventura says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 1:18 pm
  
  I think there are definite revenue possibilities here. Some challenges I see: If you devote reporters to create specific premium election content, can you be sure to see a return on that investment? Maybe not, if there isn’t a hot race in town. Also, getting campaigns to direct their campaign funds away from the same old TV and print buys remains a challenge. Still, I’m of a mind that if you’ve got compelling quality content that attracts readers, advertisers should follow.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 9, 2011 at 11:52 am

Dick – you mentioned right off the bat that the 2012 elections present a major advertising opportunity for hyperlocals. What do you think is the perception of hyperlocals among advertisers, in particular, political advertisers? A must-buy? A second, third, or fourth thought? Not on the radar? Is there any sense that information provided by hyperlocals can have a real impact on elections, so campaigns have to be there?

And what percentage of the vast sums spent might go to hyperlocals? Does TV still get the most?

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1. Dick O'Hare says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:58 am
  
  Hyperlocal sites are going to be most appropriate for the truly local, local elections. As elections get broader (county level or higher), campaigns will want greater reach to span broader geographies. That need will limit the value a stand alone hyperlocal publisher can deliver. Mini networks of hyperlocal websites exist and can broaden reach. For the truly independent hyperlocal site, you may consider how to join forces with other sites around your geography top give a broader reach value proposition for the next level higher campaigns.
  
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2. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:00 pm
  
  What would you advise hyperlocals to consider if they wanted to explore joining forces with other sites around election advertising? Can we create a handy checklist?
  
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3. Dick O'Hare says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:08 pm
  
  Hyperlocal websites represent probably THE best platform for a highly engaged community audience. The general trade off with advertising is engagement with scale. As media offers higher scale, engagement can diminish (which depletes advertising value). A smart, cluster of hyperlocal websites could deliver both broader scale (and therefore more opportunity for broader political ad dollars) at high engagement levels. It is the fundamental premise behind what we are doing at LYM.
  
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4. Dick O'Hare says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:21 pm
  
  To do this manually will take some effort. First, the sites should be complementary to each other geographically (ie, not a lot of overlap from community to community). Next, who will be selling this and to whom? Coordination would need to happen on the sales side. Third, the sites would need to agree on a general package value and how this will get divided. As you have read, this is a lot of work. What can streamline this is to join a common platform where campaigns could be done in real time. Ie., LYM. Sorry, honestly not trying to plug us here, but it this engagement vs. scale equation we are out to help solve in the hyperlcoal market.
  
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5. Michael Ventura says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:28 pm
  
  Agreed.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 9, 2011 at 11:34 am

Evelyn, how do you look at the opportunities in election coverage, from the helm of coordinating an investigative network (whose members presumably do less covering of pre-planned events and more digging) that’s trying to help members monetize?

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1. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:49 am
  
  Hi, Emily.
  I’m glad you asked. What I’m looking for are opportunities to leverage the power of the network by teaming up members to produce national or regional stories rooted in communities. The idea is to maximize impact, reach and brand, while conserving resources.
  What’s happening in one community is probably also happening in other communities in the network. Collaborating on some of those stories can produce powerful packages.
  Monetizing those packages can come in a number of ways–from grants to syndication deals, to partnering with commercial media outlets for the national story.
  
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2. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:55 am
  
  I don’t know if all those options are available to publishers not in such a robust network . . . but what would you suggest people consider as they look at a) big projects (election or otherwise) and b) options to monetize. How should a hyperlocal evaluate grants v. syndication deals v. partnering? What questions should they ask?
  
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3. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 1:00 pm
  
  For individual newsrooms, partnering up with others is a both a big challenge and a big opportunity. A collaboration is a relationship and working out those deals can take time. For new site, sometimes all you want out of a deal is a larger partner’s reach. A larger newsroom may be willing to pay for professionally produced content from a hyperlocal. Each partner has different needs and strengths, so you should go into it with a clear knowledge of what you want and what you have to offer–and be willing to compromise.
  A big piece of advice here is: don’t leave things up to chance. What I’ve learned from INN members who are veterans of collaborations is that you have to think through the details–down to how each reporter and newsroom will be credited–and get it all worked out on the front-end. It’s the thing you didn’t think about until later that can give the most headaches.
  What’s the old saying–good neighbors make good fences? Well-thought out agreements make good collaborations.
  
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Ben Ilfeld says:

December 9, 2011 at 11:28 am

Another opportunity for us is increased participation on our site. Last election cycle we made use of volunteer photographers, interns and our staff to cover everything we possibly could at the local level. By focusing on what we do best and not state or national issues we had the opportunity to collaborate with amateurs who wanted to help cover election results and parties.

This kind of reporting is important, but fairly basic as you are collecting quotes, submitting pictures and accounts of pre-planned events. The really tough part is the planning stage and coordinating a group of pros and amateurs working together.

For us, the more community participation, the more of an ownership stake our community feels in our publication. It is a major selling point to advertisers and leads to increased referral business.

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Dick O'Hare says:

December 9, 2011 at 11:11 am

The 2012 elections represent a great advertising opportunity for hyperlocals. By definition, hyperlocals are creating content literally down to the precinct level, which is an attractive targeting opportunity for local elections. The tough work comes in knowing all the facets of the local elections and finding your way to the campaign mangers/marketing folks behind the campaign. Once there (which will take some work), you need to give these folks simple packages that are easy to understand and “buy”. Eg., “The Election Impact Package. The package includes the following ad units, impressions, start and end date, etc.

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1. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:17 am
  
  Dick, ethical questions about accepting political ads came up yesterday – even for for-profits. What’s your take?
  
  Also – how much money do people running for school board, county commissioner, or soil district have to buy ads?
  
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2. Dick O'Hare says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:37 am
  
  This can be a hot topic with all political advertising, let alone local politics. From my big media days at Yahoo et al, large media companies needed to present themselves as unbiased when it came to advertising. My understanding of some of the policies are that equal allotments of impressions, air time, etc. need to be made available to each party (position) to make sure both sides had equal opportunity for their ad message. Local politics can get pretty emotional depending on the issue and some hyperlocals may even take a position on certain topics. My opinion is if you are looking to maximize political ad dollars, editorial neutrality will best position you for success. This is a decision the individual hyperlocal publisher needs to make for themselves.
  
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3. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:40 am
  
  Agreed about neutrality. I believe it’s impossible to run a hyperlocal site and endorse candidates while accepting political advertising.
  
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4. Jeff Lennan says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:43 am
  
  Another critical factor is the changing nature of online advertising in general. With online ad networks and demand side platforms that enable behavioral targeting based on cookies, it is less prevalent that a campaign “buys ad space” on a particular publication.
  
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5. Dick O'Hare says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:46 am
  
  Ben brings up a strong point about political advertising laws. From my days at big media like Yahoo and AOL. Equal opportunity needed to be given to each party (position)…ie., same amount of impression, air time, etc. needed to be offered to both sides. Local politics can get pretty emotional depending on the topic. And, some local bloggers may even take a position on an issue. Local bloggers, media companies need to understand the political advertising laws in their particular state as a first step toward creating adverting opportunities. The more unbiased a publisher is, the more opportunity they should have to maximize political ad dollars.
  
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6. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:04 pm
  
  One thing we don’t do and may never do is endorse candidates. I find it bizarre that news outlets do this while remaining unbiased regardless of the money they take.
  
  Interestingly, our former Editor in Chief did write an editorial that supported a particular bid for redevelopment of a city block. I found that interesting, but it was appropriate given that we had been covering that issue better than anyone else. The decision was made by the city council. While the group that won the bid was not an advertiser, one of the properties they helped to build has become an advertiser, but I don’t think the two were connected.
  
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7. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:08 pm
  
  This is absolutely true for those sites that accept network ads from RTB systems.
  
  The Sacramento Press is not one such site and we don’t see offering up our ads as commodities in that way in the near term.
  
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8. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:12 pm
  
  RTB= real time business…Ben, why not?
  
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9. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:31 pm
  
  1. we want to only show local ads. If we start showing ads with weak relevance or ads that follow people around the net they tend not to trust us and they tend to click on our ads less frequently. The best thing we can do is to think of our ads as content. We do not aggregae content or get it from wire services. 100% of our content is original and local. Same with ads.
  
  2. CPM is too low. Even if we could find a solution to #1, the practical issue is that we do not generate so many impressions that we have significant remnant inventory. There was even a time last year when I had to stop selling ads for The Sacramento Press because we were sold out. Our ads bring us over $10 CPMs and national remnant solutions don’t come close to touching that.
  
  What many of us have built is special. These sites are, in a sense, hand-crafted collaborations with our communities. They produce amazing results for us and for advertisers and remain extremely valuable.
  
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Cornelius Swart says:

December 9, 2011 at 11:08 am

Hi folks. I’m one of the coordinators for The Oregonian News Network http://www.oregonlive.com/onn. Bob Payne and I both run similar programs. The Oregonian’s project is newer and still in beta. Right now we have eleven news partners. In the coming months we hope to roll out the Alpha program which would have up to 50 blogs. These additional blogs would be largely lifestyle focused. For us the benefit of the partnerships is that it allows us to post more content to our site, more frequently. It drives traffic to our partners at no cost to them. We also try and offer training and educational events to as part of enrollment in the network. It doesn’t pay off in traffic to us at the moment, but we do see it as engagement program.

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1. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:11 am
  
  How will you leverage this network for better election coverage? Will you put resources toward the bottom of the ticket?
  
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2. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:12 am
  
  Hi, Cornelius. Sounds like a great project!
  So is your idea to build an audience and then monetize your product down the line?
  
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3. Cornelius Swart says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:28 am
  
  We have not done any collaborative coverage with our partners so far. If we were to, I would think we’d chose a topic that allows for a lot of planning and using a story that is not developing quickly infront of your eyes. The logistical challenges with coordinating coverage with outside partners on a moving target like an election can be immense. We have partners on the Oregon Coast and in the Willamette Valley, area’s outside the Oregonian’s normal coverage radius. I could see partners watching the polls in their communities. But because we vote by mail in Oregon, I’m not sure how compelling that would be. I don’t know how much a general audience like ours, cares about local elections outside their communities.
  
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4. Cornelius Swart says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:43 am
  
  We are not really looking at the money side of this project right now. There is a huge firewall between the newsroom and the advertising department with us. Cost vs benefits on ad hubs can be highly speculative. I have not seen a mature and stable ad system that works across networks, or at least, across the kind of network we have built. We are watching something that our partner Neighborhood Notes is doing. http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier_database/2011/10/neighborhood-notes.php But it is not clear that OregonLive would or could emulate this. Our role might just be to help connect our partners with ad and revenue models that are working and show them best practices.
  
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5. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:57 am
  
  Agreed–collaboration can slow projects down quite a bit. But it doesn’t have to. It seems like the bottlenecks usually form at the front end–getting everyone on board and putting the project on the front burner. After that, it can go as fast or faster than a one-newsroom story/project…..
  
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6. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:27 pm
  
  That ad-editorial firewall is part of legacy media – much, much less so for new publishers. Not to re-tread a familiar issue, but I’m curious, what ethics guidelines there are that hyperlocals turn to?
  
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7. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:36 pm
  
  You’re right – a wall is imappropriate and ineffective.
  
  The guidelines must be full transparency with readership and an informed, skeptical newsroom. Everyone must know who is spending money on what.
  
  For the election season we will likely require our advertisers to allow us to report to the public what we have been paid and by whom to support issues or candidates.
  
  The idea of a wall is to keep perceptions of impropriety down, not to address actual issues of bias. Openness and collaboration tend to work better when dealing with these issues, but as our guidelines remain untested I cannot say for sure.
  
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8. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:43 pm
  
  That alone would be super valuable. Some of these operations are practically one-man bands and it’s really, really hard to be both a good journalist AND good businessperson. Helping them find how to to monetize their good work can be a Godsend.
  
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9. Dick O'Hare says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:55 pm
  
  Bringing network scalability to the hyperlocal market can help publishers and advertisers alike. In order for hyperlocal sites to tap more revenue, they need to find creative ways to tap into more scalability.
  
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10. Cornelius Swart says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 1:50 pm
  
  I was the publisher of a hyperlocal owner-operated news site and paper for five years- http://www.portlandsentinel.com. As far as ethics of ad-editorial conflicts, we took political ads and did not make endorsements. J-Lab, who funded the start of the Oregonian News Network, put out a great booklet on the ethics of small hyperlocal sites. interesting http://www.j-lab.org/publications/rules-of-the-road-navigating-the-new-ethics-of-local-journalism. As far as ad strategies go, I found the real challenge was just getting an ad product that was popular and profitable at the very low price point most that small advertisers were willing to pay. I think the NeighborhoodNotes model is interesting because it is targeting this very low price point market.
  
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11. Breeze Richardson says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 2:53 pm
  
  However it may be helpful to add in a success story of partner-based election coverage work, at Chicago Public Media we produced an election project in early 2011 we called “Dear Chicago” which was extremely successful collaboration that yielded content that many considered valuable IN ADDITION to the other coverage our newsroom was doing.
  
  NCME’s Stories of Impact project just published about it:
  http://mediaengage.org/storyexchange/story.cfm?sid=156643
  
  And you can see the content itself and learn more about how I put the project together here:
  http://chicagopublicmedia.org/content/elections-2011-dear-chicago
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 9, 2011 at 11:00 am

Welcome back to the JA forum on maximizing your yield from 2012 election coverage. Today we talk money! As you plan election (and other) coverage and extras, how do choices you make affect your bottom line? What are the pros and cons of being non-profit? Either way, should you take election ads?

This is an open forum and everyone is welcome to jump in anytime.

We’ve asked a few folks to help us start and shape this conversation: Dick O’Hare, CEO and founder of the hyperlocal online ad marketplace Local Yokel Media, Ben Ilfeld, founder and COO of Sacramento Press, Michael Ventura, Managing Editor of DNAinfo.com, covering Manhattan neighborhoods and Evelyn Larrubia, Editorial Director of the Investigative News Network, graciously stepping in for CEO Kevin Davis, who had to bow out this morning.

Let’s start with this: Do elections present a particular opportunity for hyperlocals to earn money? What should publishers be considering now?

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1. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:06 am
  
  One thing I find interesting about hyperlocals and elections is that newspapers across the country are not doing as thorough a job covering small-town elections as they once did. They simply don’t have the resources. (Some would argue that they never had the resources or interest to cover the hyper-local races.)
  And yet, people want guidance when they step into the polling both and face a choice for who they want running their town–or their kid’s school. I think there’s a real opportunity there for hyperlocal news outlets to inform the public.
  And every good business model starts with identifying a market need.
  
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2. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:08 am
  
  Voting booth that is!
  
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3. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:09 am
  
  This raises a point brought up earlier this week. Charlottesville Tomorrow publishes and MAILS (yep, USPS) a voters guide – strictly non-partisan. See executive director Brian Wheeler’s rationale here.
  
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4. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:12 am
  
  Q1: In terms of opportunities to make money, advertising opportunities do exist with local elections, but strict guidelines must be installed to avoid legal and ethical questions.
  
  One guideline in California is that we cannot charge one candidate more than another for similar service and we cannot actually charge a higher price for political ads than non-political ads. So our sales team had to be trained on these laws. We do not discount and so this was fairly easy for us, but you can imagine how tough this might be for an alternative weekly as their rates are fairly negotiable.
  
  Another issue is one of perceived editorial bias. I’m not sure how that will play in our community. We might post a story asking our readers how they would like us to handle it. It is likely that we will take political ads this upcoming season and I want to be as open as possible with our readership through the entire process.
  
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5. Michael Ventura says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:13 am
  
  Hello everyone! We cover the neighborhoods of Manhattan and the issues that people in them care about. Politics is one of them, but so are education, transportation, crime, safety, etc. We believe there’s an opportunity to sell ads targeted to candidates looking to reach our hyperlocal audience, which has specific issues in mind. Right now, we’re gearing up to localize issues raised in the 2012 presidential election, and also preparing to cover City Council and other more local elections here in the city. And as the year develops, our sales staff will be working with candidates on their advertising campaigns.
  
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6. Evelyn Larrubia says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:23 am
  
  Hi, Michael.
  I imagine the candidates would be grateful that you’re covering their races–and so would love to buy ads.
  Or do they find that the coverage is robust enough in the larger dailies?
  
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7. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:27 am
  
  Hi Ben – great insight. Anyone know if the laws are the same or different in other states?
  
  You started the year of the last presidential election, right? So you’ve probably been through local elections – sounds like you haven’t taken political ads though? What would lead you to take them this year?
  
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8. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:42 am
  
  We have taken political ads, but we did not show them on our site – we served them through the SLOAN network. We also ran a social media campaign for a proposition.
  
  The issue for us was that we did not have any policies and had not researched what taking these ads would mean for our contributors. We have a better understanding now and are ready to accept political ads on our site, but as I mentioned we will be asking our readers to help us as understand what it might mean for them as well and if there is something they want us to do to remain unbiased.
  
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9. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:43 am
  
  You’ve got a very sophisticated platform – multiple neighborhoods, topics giveaways, deals, guides. Do you have specific strategies based on your platform around how to target or position those local ads – experience that might be helpful to others?
  
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10. Michael Ventura says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:44 am
  
  Hi Evelyn –
  That’s what we’re looking to see. We’re a start-up, and have been around for two years. This will be the first election where we’re a more established media brand here. So it will be interesting to see what happens.
  
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11. Michael Ventura says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:50 am
  
  Yes, that’s what unique about advertising with us. A candidate, say, on the Upper East Side can buy ads that run just on our Upper East Side neighborhood page and targeted to our UES stories. We also have newsletters for each of our neighborhoods that they can sponsor.
  
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12. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:08 pm
  
  Here’s the link for SLOAN, a network of Sacramento-area sites, if people want to check it out.
  
  You bring up an interesting point – making money by running social media or other parts of campaigns. Was that something the Sacramento Press did, or another arm?
  
  And do you have actual written policies in place around ads for the Sacramento Press site now? Or you plan to work them out with your readers?
  
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13. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:31 pm
  
  Do you have ethics guidelines around accepting political ads? See exchange above…
  
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14. Ben Ilfeld says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 12:46 pm
  
  Some of our policies in regards to our editorial stance have been written. Others are just ideas and others are yet to be proposed, but I guarantee our readers will share some.
  
  As for the social part, it was part of The Sacramento Press operation at the time, but is now a different division, Agency M. That said, we never co-mingled our work. For example, we did not tweet or message using our SP accounts to spread paid political messages.
  
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Alan Rosenblatt says:

December 8, 2011 at 2:16 pm

Instead of simply playing what one candidate says against the other and calling that a story, I want to see reporters provide investigative value. Contradictory assertions by two candidates leave the voters uncertain as to who is correct and who is incorrect on the facts. It’s the responsibility of journalists to answer these questions after playing the opposing quotes.

In many ways, it’s this abdication of substantive reporting for “he said/she said” reporting that motivated the rise of blogs. Citizens got fed up listening to the news and learning no facts behind the quotes. So they started trying to fill that void.

As a result, traditional journalism is on the decline and risks extinction.

As I see it, it is precisely the vapid reporting that has become the bread and butter of the MSM that has, to a significant extent, created the demise of the industry.

One of the most important things the media can do to save itself is to return to real reporting; to provide the info we need.

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1. Alan Rosenblatt says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 2:23 pm
  
  Collaboration has great potential… but it doesn’t address the fundamental fact that the quality of political reporting simply sucks. Reporters are supposed to provide the who, what, where, when and why of a story. When you leave it to the candidates to provide that information, you get distortions designed to win votes, not to inform citizens.
  
  There is simply no shortcut here. Journalists have to work harder, research the facts behind the claims in the quotes they are reporting. Otherwise, they are simply facilitating confusion and disinformation.
  
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Bob Payne says:

December 8, 2011 at 1:00 pm

Sorry for jumping into this late, but hopefully I can address a few of the topics that have come up so far. I coordinate our local news network at the Seattle Times.

We now have 47 local sites in the network, with 27 neighborhood sites and 20 that focus on specific topics, such as health or gardening.

We have had two collaborations in the last couple of years, one about graffiti and another about family homelessness. By collaborations, I mean that the Times and partners that opted to participate shared plans on reporting about the same topic, then published their pieces on the same day and crosslinked. My thoughts about these:
– I love the potential that multiple minds are better than one, and that together we can present a more wide-ranging picture of an issue.
– Coordinating these packages is no slam dunk, and with multiple contributors, it can be challenging getting everyone on the same timeline.
– Most of our partner sites focus on smaller-scale news items, so it can be hard …

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1. Bob Payne says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 1:06 pm
  
  … For them to switch geara to something with a further-out pub date.
  
  To be honest, only a handful of partners seemed interested in these king of colaborations.
  As for elections, the most we’ve done is compile partner-coverage links on election nite on ST.com, as part of our election blog. I’d be open to something broader if someone had a plan for how such a collaboration would benefit all of our readers.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 8, 2011 at 12:50 pm

Here’s a question for everyone on the thread and those watching: How do you measure the impact of collaborations? Either afterward, or as you’re evaluating whether to join in on a project?

Teresa Wippel addressed this a bit in the thread.

Publishers – what’s your experience? Tool creators – do you have any tools to offer?

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1. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:55 pm
  
  For me, whether I collaborate depends on several things, including how much time it will take out of an impossibly jammed day; will it help drive site traffic/advertising sales; will it benefit the community; will it give me an edge over the competition.
  
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2. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 1:02 pm
  
  Measuring with any exactness the reach of FCIR’s journalism is one our biggest challenges. We can measure our own website audience, obviously, and there are tools to measure pageviews of our stories on partner sites (assuming their tech people allow us to embed code with the story). But we know many Floridians get our journalism through print editions or radio broadcasts. On our reports, we’re forced to measure our audience with a mixture of specific analytics data and anecdotes. This is another problem for which I don’t see a solution in the near term.
  
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3. Breeze Richardson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 2:49 pm
  
  As I thought about how to answer this question, it was connected to WHY the collaboration in the first place… so for Chicago Public Media, we are here to create content & therefore collaborate to create content (for broadcast, online, and as live event programming)… it seemed a valuable metric to measure how much content is produced.
  
  Here is more about what we’re measuring and why:
  http://www.rjionline.org/blog/measuring-community-engagement-case-study-chicago-public-media
  
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Matthew Barry says:

December 8, 2011 at 12:27 pm

How are others using collaboration to sustain local contributors? How do you reinforce connections and encourage participation without pushing too hard (or not hard enough)?

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1. Ted Han says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:38 pm
  
  The parts of this process, imo, are what are you asking people to do, how easy is it for them to accomplish, and lastly, how are you going to gratify them when once they oblige you?
  
  I’d like to see more of an effort not necessarily to engage, but to think of how to build a process for collaboration that is pleasant for the user, and gives them something back for participating.
  
  A super low tech example of this is Andrew Sullivan’s blog. The only way that users can interact w/ Sullivan and his writers/researchers is via email, but that process is clear by virtue of previous quotes from emails that it is a viable channel for communication, and if a user contributes, then they will potentially be rewarded with helping to guide the conversation. One should never underestimate the power of appreciations and thank yous in this regard.
  
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2. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 1:10 pm
  
  I know you’ve heard this from me before, Matt, so bear with me, but perhaps for the benefit of others:
  
  When I was at The Rapidian, a pure citizen journalism news source in Grand Rapids, MI, we came to the consensus that most people want to participate, but at different levels. We came up with this ladder of participation and a volunteer page based on time, and we came up with various projects to lower the barrier to creating content on the site (concrete asks, formats, etc.), from photo projects to content format that would also hopefully move them along the ladder of engagement to contributing a full article. Also seeing how we could layer their own talents and passions on top of the platform (editorial that touches on one subgroup, but that philosophy led to pieces like this stop motion video and this performance review in comic format). I believe this approach can be carried over into election coverage and inviting the audience into the reporting process.
  
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3. Jordan Wirfs-Brock says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 2:02 pm
  
  Denise, thanks for sharing the ladder of participation and volunteer activities broken out by time available. Those are super useful!
  
  Because the citizen journalism projects we’re working on at Piton are data-intensive, we anticipate having contributors with a broad range of data skills. Creating a data-skills ladder or something similar might be a good way for us to engage users ranging from the data averse to the data savvy.
  
  Which brings me to a follow-up question: What are some of the most effective ways of building skills among citizen contributors? I’d especially love to see examples that go beyond simple tutorials and encourage learners to create something new. Instead of “reproduce this canned example” as you learn, how about “make something that other people will want to read/view/interact with,” as you learn.
  
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4. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 5:37 pm
  
  I would definitely use the canned format selectively; only around topics where you think you would still get unique results (i.e.: interviewing neighbors). The sense I’ve gotten is that for the effort people put in, most of them already want to “make something other that people will want to read, etc.” but don’t necessarily have the familiarity with storytelling techniques and tools that can make their stories more compelling. That sensibility is something that grows over time. Some people will take to those tools immediately while others can be nudged a little further each time. It’s meeting people where they are, and that takes care and attention.
  
  Which is why, in my mind, ownership is the most important thing to cultivate because even if someone might not contribute on that highest level of engagement, their feeling of pride/ownership in the project might pique the interest of someone who will use your tool and contribute in the way that you had intended.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 8, 2011 at 12:15 pm

I’m getting a bit ahead of ourselves, since we’re focusing on money tomorrow. But can anyone give us examples of how you have either made money, or saved money, through collaboration?

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1. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:24 pm
  
  While most of FCIR’s funding comes from foundations, revenue from media partners is an important part of our business plan. In many of our collaborations, traditional media pays FCIR for content or a service, such as data analysis. For certain stories we want to give broad distribution and increase impact, we will provide those stories for free — but that’s a minority situation for us. Our business model is to be a content and service provider as well as an independent, nonprofit investigative news organization.
  
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2. Michelle Powers Godfrey says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:34 pm
  
  We’ve saved money by collaborating and working with technology partners like NationBuilder.com who offer integrated CRM and Social Media with their web services. Our need to integrate engagement tools for the public into the project web site was evident from the outset, but coming up with the resources for designing and developing a more custom solution to meet our needs may not have been possible for us.
  
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3. Mark Glaser says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:55 pm
  
  At PBS MediaShift, we have a number of content-sharing deals with sites such as KQED MindShift, European Journalism Centre and J-Source. While we don’t get money for stories they run of ours, or vice versa, these deals do generate money in another way. We get quality content that, when it hits the sweet spot for our audience, gets a lot of views and engagement. That engagement means that more people are on our site, creating more page views that we sell to sponsors.
  
  For the elections, we usually do a CoverItLive chat, where we invite journalists, pundits, political consultants and others to join us as the election results come in. Not exactly a collaboration, per se, but it does include a lot of people in our community of readers, and we do it with close communication with PBS, who promotes our stuff on their social nets and home page.
  
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Matthew Barry says:

December 8, 2011 at 11:49 am

It’s worth seeking out any existing neighborhood “data intermediaries” in your area. Particularly, localized journalism efforts have the ability to tie sometimes abstract policy arguments to the reality of how they play on the ground. Substantiating stories with data more them even more compelling. In most larger cities, there are neighborhood data providers who’s interest in democratizing data marry’s perfectly with journalistic goals. They are often seeking ways to leverage their data assets and many of you have the stories that could carry their information into a broader conversation.

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1. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:59 am
  
  You’re an expert in storytelling through data. I’m curious about a couple of things:
  
  1. Do you have examples of how news outlets have effectively used some of the data from the Piton Foundation (also a neighborhood data provider – check out some of the tools they’ve created to make raw data relevant to residents)?
  2. Do these neighborhood data providers collaborate with news organizations to develop these tools (I’m thinking the tools would be easier to adapt if they were kept in mind as one of the main users )?
  
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2. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:05 pm
  
  What do you mean by neighborhood data providers? Do you mean community foundations, or something else? At Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, we’d like to collaborate more on data projects — but we do have concerns about the motivations and interests of some organizations collecting data in Florida. That concern has so far prevented us from partnering in this way with some organizations, but I this is still an area that interests us. Do you have any advice on vetting partners who provide data?
  
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3. Matthew Barry says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:19 pm
  
  Good question Trevor. Most of the organizations I’m aware of are not foundation based but instead include a mix of NPO’s, universities and foundation. Check out: http://www.neighborhoodindicators.org/partners/profiles. All of the organizations on this site would be good candidates to provide data for your analysis. Once you get into partnering with them on analysis they may introduce their agenda (if they have one). My first advice in vetting would be to ask them for the raw data itself without any analysis. If they’ll provide it, they’re more likely to be a strong candidate as an objective research partner. If they’re hesitant to share without mandating they layer on their own insight, I’d be concerned.
  
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4. Matthew Barry says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:40 pm
  
  1a. We had a great relationship with the rocky mountain news and worked with them very closely to develop a first-of-its-kind analysis of families leaving Denver Public Schools. The five-part series titled Leaving to Learn examined why one in four school-aged children in Denver are not enrolled in the city’s public school system and where their families are choosing to go instead. In response, DPS board members and then-Superintendent Michael Bennet published a letter acknowledging, “We will fail the vast majority of children in Denver if we try to run our schools the same old way.”
  1b. We’ve also partnered with the Investigative News Network to build the Colorado Data Commons http://www.coloradodatacommons.org and the Citizen Atlas http://www.citizenatlas.org projects.
  2. I think co-developing tools is a great (and untapped) idea. Many of the neighborhood data providers have developers/technologists on staff.
  
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Mary Turck says:

December 8, 2011 at 11:37 am

Here’s an idea from Jay Rosen, who’s announcing some kind of NYU/The Guardian collaboration that sounds very interesting at http://pressthink.org/2011/12/the-citizens-agenda-a-plan-to-make-election-coverage-more-useful-to-people/ One snippet:
“The alternative to who’s going to win in the game of getting elected? is, we think, a “citizens agenda” approach to campaign coverage. It starts with a question: what do voters want the candidates to be discussing as they compete with each other in 2012? If we can get enough people to answer to that question, we’ll have an alternative to election coverage as usual.”

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1. thomas.j.lee says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:50 am
  
  I had the chance to hear Rosen describe this idea at a conference last weekend. It sounded like an interesting frame through which reporters could approach coverage. Certainly both studies and tools like the White House’s “We The People” petition site underscore the fact that horserace coverage priorities and the public’s stated and observed interests are often divergent.
  
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2. Michelle Powers Godfrey says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:02 pm
  
  I’m working on a project with The Center for Public Integrity and Global integrity to bring corruption risk report cards and an extensive amount of supporting data to each state. Direct collaboration with civic organizations, journalists and other influential public sources who are using Social Media channels has greatly affected early engagement with the project. Collaboration with these groups has also affected the relatively fast growth of our influential online community of supporters. We’ve recently asked the orgs, journalists and our public community to weigh in during the development phase for the tools we will build to display and share our data and the state report cards. Most had great ideas for what would make the tools most beneficial for the public (in support of education on existing policy/practice issues) and for journalists to use to support their election coverage and policy issues.
  
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3. Michael Skoler says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:04 pm
  
  For those of you using the Public Insight Network, this question would be a great frame for coverage. I founded PIN with Andrew Haeg and this is an example of how we aimed to get public experience and insight as a guide for newsroom coverage. If you aren’t using PIN, just use your social media networks to ask the question. By asking and listening, you create a group of people ready and wanting to see the coverage that you do on it.
  
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4. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:04 pm
  
  With several partners, how do you decide who does what?
  
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5. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:08 pm
  
  Sunlight Labs works on a whole lot of tools around federal politics (I’ve played with some, and some can be localized). Are there any Sunlight Labs tools that come to mind immediately which could aid in election coverage beyond the horse race?
  
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6. Michelle Powers Godfrey says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:14 pm
  
  With this particular partnership, the overall project was split into three core areas of responsibility. Each partner is responsible for managing one area, but all partner organizations are responsible for collaborating within smaller groups during the execution of a project deliverable. PRI is responsible for public engagement on the State Integrity Investigation. You can learn more about the data gather and data review process here: http://www.stateintegrity.org/about.
  
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7. Cole Goins says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:21 pm
  
  Check out Sunlight’s Campaign Ad Monitor, which lets citizens submit information about political ads they see: http://sunlightcam.com/
  
  During the 2010 midterm elections, reporters at the Center for Public Integrity wrote short posts about the money and issues behind ads that users submitted: http://www.iwatchnews.org/politics/elections/you-report-election-2010
  
  We’re gearing up for a similar initiative going into 2012. What suggestions would you have on how to make this kind of information/reporting more relevant to voters?
  
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8. thomas.j.lee says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:32 pm
  
  We feel that a lot of our tools will be relevant to the 2012 cycle. Some are getting improvements just for it, in fact:
  
  – Influence Explorer (http://influenceexplorer.com) brings together a wide variety of datasets that illuminate patterns of influence in our political system. This cycle, we’ll be adding daily FEC totals to candidates’ pages, improving the system’s latency and relevance to daily reporting.
  
  – Our Politiwidgets platform (http://politiwidgets.com) will be gaining support for challengers, not just incumbents. We think these widgets can do a lot to supplement stories.
  
  – Our reporting group also maintains an Outside Spending Tracker (http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/outside-spending/) that will be of interest to anyone trying to stay on top of the campaign spending picture post-CU.
  
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9. Cole Goins says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:54 pm
  
  For an example of how we used the Public Insight Network for an election-related piece, here’s a story we did earlier this year forecasting small donor sentiments ahead of 2012: http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/03/15/4048/small-donors-vs-big-money-2012
  
  We emailed the following query to around 2,500 folks and received more than 200 responses back about their donations and current political opinions, which helped drive the reporting narrative: https://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/form/iwatch-news/81aff7e453a7/did-you-donate-to-a-presidential-candidate-in-the-2008-election
  
  You could easily do something similar by creating a Google form and embedding it on your site and/or sending it out to your social networks, as Michael suggested. But don’t stop there: come up with more creative ways to distribute the form. Email local organizers, post the form to active community blogs, message boards and listservs to solicit submissions from a diverse group and expand your audience in the process.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 8, 2011 at 11:33 am

And Teresa, you’re part of a network of sites collaborating around the Seattle area, right? How does it work?

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1. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:40 am
  
  I am one of 40-plus online sites that are online partners of the Seattle Times. Mostly, that means that the Times provides links from their site to ours, but occasionally they will suggest partnership opportunities in which we collaborate on stories. That hasn’t happened yet on the elections — at least in the last two years that I’ve been a partner. However, I have an informal partnership with three independently owned community sites in my general geographic area and we do share stories and have even co-sponsored a few forums on candidates/issues that overlap our coverage areas.
  
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2. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:57 am
  
  Any challenges in the setup?
  
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3. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:43 pm
  
  The main challenge in collaborating via our larger Seattle Times partner network is that we are geographically dispersed over a fairly large area — so there isn’t always an ability to find common ground to partner on election coverage, unless it’s at the state level. The other challenge is just time — collaboration means thinking through the strategy and who will be involved and who will do what. When you are acting solo, you just DO IT!
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 8, 2011 at 11:25 am

Ben Berkowitz, do you consider what you do at SeeClickFix collaboration? Or just people recognizing the value of what you do?

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1. Benjamin Berkowitz says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:44 am
  
  I definitely consider it collaboration. Without the journalists paying attention to content the issues get less attention from your readers.
  
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2. Benjamin Berkowitz says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:45 am
  
  I definitely consider it collaboration. Without the journalists paying attention to content the issues get less attention from your readers. As well, news orgs filter and display our maps in different ways giving context to the conversation.
  
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3. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:51 am
  
  Is it a two-way collaboration? Do they usually cite SeeClickFix? Do you get any financial benefit from being a source?
  
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4. Benjamin Berkowitz says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:59 am
  
  Sometimes they sometimes they don’t. Obviously its best to site your sources so you ca create a solid feedback loop but journalists do forget to reference the issue id and link sometimes.
  
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Teresa Wippel says:

December 8, 2011 at 11:14 am

I’d be curious to know from other online community publishers, do you ever wonder if people think your coverage is being influenced by which candidates are purchasing ads on your site? It’s one thing to sell an ad for a business that you may or may not ever write a story about. But with politics, you are committed to covering those races no matter what.

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1. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:20 am
  
  My understanding is that this is potentially dangerous ground for nonprofits, such as FCIR. The lawyers who assisted with our 501(c)3 application specifically warned us against allowing political advertising, saying that this would potentially violate IRS rules. As a result, we have not allowed such advertising, and a benefit of that is not having this particular bias concern. However, a number of nonprofit organizations, including MinnPost, do allow political advertising.
  
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2. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:29 am
  
  I’m not a nonprofit (at least, not in theory!) so I don’t have to worry about that part. But I do wonder about perceptions.
  
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3. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:30 am
  
  We’re going to get into this more tomorrow when we talk about money too. And on the money subject – can people share how, in their experience, do collaborations impact revenue?
  
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4. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:37 am
  
  I suspect you’ll always find someone who questions influence. But I also think traditional media, by accepting so much political advertising, have trained readers not to assume that advertisements by a particular candidate or cause influence editorial coverage.
  
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5. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:42 am
  
  I think that’s a great perspective, and truthfully that’s how I feel about it. We had six or seven candidate ads over the course of the election, and a least a couple were for the same race, so after a while, I wasn’t even paying attention who was advertising.
  
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6. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:45 am
  
  To an extent I think collaborations can increase your credibility, which can influences whether someone advertises with you. And by their nature, they are likely to increase your site traffic because you are reaching members of several different groups, which also can make your advertising more valuable.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 8, 2011 at 10:56 am

Welcome to collaboration day! Laura Frank of iNews sets us up well with this comment from yesterday’s conversation:

“…while the journalism crisis means there are fewer journalists to dig deeper on stories, the other side of that coin is some journalism organizations are really thinking more carefully about how to best use their resources – and collaborate to leverage those resources.”

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1. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 10:58 am
  
  This is an open forum and everyone is welcome to jump in anytime. See who is participating here. For today we’ve asked a few people to help us get started – Trevor Aaronson with the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, Matthew Barry of the Piton Foundation, Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix and Teresa Wippel of MyEdmondsNews.
  
  Why don’t we start by asking people to share an experience of collaborating – with legacy media, community groups, bloggers, or others…for better stories, to share data, to make more money, or another goal. What are the benefits? What are the pitfalls?
  
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2. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:02 am
  
  During our 2011 mayoral and city council elections in our city of 40,000, I collaborated with our local League of Women Voters and our Chamber of Commerce to provide livestreaming video coverage of candidate debates. I’m hoping to do more of that in 2012 with other elections on a local level.
  
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3. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:05 am
  
  Tell us more. What do you think you got out of that?
  
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4. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:06 am
  
  Collaboration with traditional, Spanish-language and ethnic media is an essential part of how the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting does journalism. Collaborations allow FCIR not only to tell stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told, but to reach audiences FCIR wouldn’t otherwise reach. While we’ve enjoyed steady traffic growth on our website since launching in September 2010, FCIR reaches more readers, viewers and listeners through media partners, such as the Miami Herald and Florida NPR as well as community and ethnic newspapers.
  
  In many ways, it’s remarkable how little resistance we’ve received from media partners. In Florida today, most newspapers, television stations and public radio stations are open to collaborations. But, of course, these partnership can be difficult. Every media organization has different goals and target audiences. Producing a story with multiple media partners can often be an exercise in herding cats.
  
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5. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:08 am
  
  What have you found works to herd? 🙂 Can you give us an example?
  
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6. Ted Han says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:11 am
  
  One of the things i’ve been very curious about is the extent to which journalists are keeping tabs on partisan tools being built for this election that have never existed before. What influence will Freedomworks’s FreedomConnector have? Does it differ from the sort of organizing that people have tried through DailyKos and such?
  
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7. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:14 am
  
  For us, flexibility has been the key. If we were always set on having one story version published on one specific day, we’d likely only have one or two partners at most per story. As a result, we often produce localized versions of stories for specific media partners and provide flexibility for those media to publish or broadcast when best for them.
  
  Our best example of this so far was an investigation of deportations to Haiti:
  
  http://fcir.org/2011/11/13/u-s-deportees-to-haiti-jailed-without-cause-face-severe-health-risks/
  
  We produced long (2,500 words) and short (1,200 words) version of the story, as well as localized versions in partnership with California Watch and Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. Then we provided flexibility on publication. During the launch week, various Florida media ran the story on different days, and Florida NPR aired the radio companion the next week.
  
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8. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:15 am
  
  Can you tell us how FreedomConnector works and what kind of organizing you’re thinking of with DailyKos?
  
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9. Michael Skoler says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:25 am
  
  Trevor, just checked out your work on the deportations. Fantastic. How did you keep various media partners from feeling that they had been scooped by national coverage or other local coverage if stories came out on different days?
  
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10. Ted Han says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:26 am
  
  Sure! Freedom connector is basically a social networking site that was set up by Matt Kibbe & Co at Freedomworks, and marketed quite heavily by Glenn Beck and several others. Ostensibly, it’s a tool for conservatives to organize events and keep in touch with each other. The extent to which social networking *is* a domain which can be turned partisan is an interesting question. DailyKos on the other hand has done things on a slightly more manual basis organizing things like GOTV efforts via blog posts and comments essentially. I don’t know whether there are people who track GOTV efforts (given how important political organizations think they are).
  
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11. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:28 am
  
  Sounds like trying to track the political impact of those networks would be a great 2012 elections reporting project! Maybe a collaboration…
  
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12. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:29 am
  
  Michael,
  
  We released the package to interested media about a week before the embargo date and gave them the option of picking the publication date (the first available of which was a Sunday, the best day for dailies). For media concerned about being scoop, they had the option of running it that day. But surprisingly, many chose not to do that. The Miami Herald ran it Thursday, for example. El Sentinel, the Spanish-language sister paper of the Tribune Co.-owned Sun Sentinel, ran it the following week. I think giving everyone the same options lessened concerns about competition and being scooped.
  
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13. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:33 am
  
  Certainly the livestreaming (and subsequent archive of forums) drove traffic to the site and also cemented my role as a community publisher willing to go to the extra effort to provide the livestream.
  
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14. Teresa Wippel says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:35 am
  
  The livestreaming also was just one element of very comprehensive election coverage I provided, including 30 minute live and archived interviews with each council and mayoral candidate that could be accessed via my site. None of my five competitors did anything like that, and I was seen as providing the most comprehensive coverage in my area.
  
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15. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:39 am
  
  I agree, Emily. That would be a fascinating story—the increase of social networks and politics intersecting. I wonder if there’s an actual way for journalists to track that or if it’s really something that the keepers of those networks have access to in the form of raw data that they can pull from, sort of like Facebook.
  
  It would be a fascinating story though. I could see a larger investigative news network partnering with tech groups and community publishers to quantify the impact for an audience.
  
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16. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:39 am
  
  How did you pick your collaboration partners? How did you share costs?
  
  And – for a triple barrelled! – is there any way you can think of to quantify impact of a collaboration like this? Sounds like excellent impact on the site’s reputation.
  
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17. thomas.j.lee says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:42 am
  
  At the Sunlight Foundation, we spent a lot of time looking for partner organizations to help promote and use our tools, data and stories. For us, it’s as much about getting attention as anything else. We report stories, but we are also an advocacy organization — albeit one with a mission (greater transparency & access to information) that’s unusually compatible with journalistic norms and ethics.
  
  The downside to this is that we often have to surrender our editorial calendar to others. If we can get the NYT or AP to write about a finding of ours, it’s fantastic. To work with them on such a collaboration for weeks and then have it killed — leaving a stale story for us to publish ourselves behind — is not as great. But that kind of inefficiency and delay is unfortunately an at-times unavoidable part of collaboration with other orgs.
  
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18. Ted Han says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:47 am
  
  Well, the FreedomWorks guys claimed that there’d be an API to their platform. If that is the case one could in theory mine the network for information. I don’t know what limits they’d place on doing that however.
  
  DailyKos’s API is pretty poor however. These are hard things to track i think. But i think it’d be interesting/worth seeing how GOTV efforts actually work.
  
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19. Trevor Aaronson says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 11:48 am
  
  We’ve had similar headache, though fortunately none so great yet that it resulted in a story being killed. But we’ve had to push back deadlines, certainly, in order to accomodate a partner running behind schedule. That, in turn, forces us to contact other partners and push back their editorial calendars. The process can be frustrating and daunting, but I think you’re right — I don’t see a solution in the immediate term. Getting partners to work together can be like getting guests at your dinner party to sit down at the table at the same time.
  
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20. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 12:51 pm
  
  @Tom: You say that you look for partner organizations to promote and use the tools, etc. Do you look for partner organizations (especially news orgs) to test the tool and give feedback as you’re developing them? (I think there’s a parallel here in what Michael Skoler said earlier about “By asking and listening, you create a group of people ready and wanting to see the coverage that you do on it.”)
  
  Trevor’s point about the dinner table also made me think of a point that Ted Han from DocumentCloud brought up in a conversation we had. He said “news people have been customers for so long and not collaborators” when it comes to developing tools. Would this be as difficult as getting the dinner party to sit down at the same time? BUT is it worthwhile since we have the same intent to inform and thereby improve civic health?
  
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21. thomas.j.lee says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 1:05 pm
  
  It really depends on the tool. We have a number of journalists on staff, which can help us shape how our tools develop (many of those tools are ideas dreamt up by that team, in fact). And we do a lot of trainings on our tools through IRE/APME/etc. So we do gather a lot of feedback.
  
  But of course not all of our tools are designed for journalists. And people — even journalists — aren’t always great at correctly identifying what they want versus what they think they want. And other times we might be going for a specific interface that demonstrates one principle or interface possibility that we think is innovative and will make waves. Putting Recovery Act project data into an augmented reality interface is a good example of that.
  
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Christian Espinosa B says:

December 7, 2011 at 9:38 pm

Acá unas pistas http://www.coberturadigital.com/2011/05/09/%C2%BFafiebrados-o-desinformados-twitter-como-observatorio/

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1. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 8, 2011 at 7:01 am
  
  I believe I have the gist of what you shared on your site, and what an admirable use of Twitter to keep the electoral council accountable (from my understanding, this group is counting the votes of any election/referendum and required to make real-time updates on the site as they count). This seems to have happened organically, and now I’m curious: News publishers, besides making sure you reflect what the community cares about, are you planning to invite your audience to participate in your coverage somehow, whether via a Twitter campaign, sharing photos of their election experience, gathering bits of data or stories (perhaps of past elections) from many people to weave together a bigger piece?
  
  For those who find it useful, a translation of Christian’s article filtered through Google Translate.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm

Thanks, all, for a great livechat! Some terrific how-tos and ideas. Great questions to vet tools, a fun concept for a post-election community debrief…and more.

The conversation’s on simmer; please watch your inbox as other people add thoughts and questions. And if you haven’t yet, check out who else is in the conversation so far and cement your connections.

Tomorrow at 11 – collaborations! What has worked for you and what hasn’t? Is there a cooperative venture you’d like to try in Election 2012?

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Joy Mayer says:

December 7, 2011 at 2:12 pm

There are some great resources listed here, many of which I was not familiar with or had forgotten about. I’ve been adding them to my Delicious.com “election” tag, which I’ll share here in case it’s useful for anyone else: http://www.delicious.com/mayerjoy/election

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Joy Mayer says:

December 7, 2011 at 2:03 pm

I’m really interested in fact checking. Do any of you have experience with tools to keep track of campaign statements and promises on the local level?

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nlangworthy says:

December 7, 2011 at 12:31 pm

Has anyone tackled the bottom of the ticket elections? (i.e. judges, soil and water conservation, etc. I’m sure they’re different in every community) These positions, in my experience, do not get press at all. Even as a fairly informed person and community journalist, I’m finding no info on what issues are at stake much less what the candidates views are on them.

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1. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:34 pm
  
  I’d like to add school board elections to the mix in our work, but its a resource challenge for us to expand beyond city council and board of supervisors. Many of our school board races are regularly unopposed and I think more attention would increase competition.
  
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2. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:35 pm
  
  These are a lot tougher, Nate. As a former lawyer, I can say that “issues” do not and should not drive judicial elections … in fact, if a judicial candidate ran because s/he had a particular stance on an issue, I’d vote against that candidate. So it gets down to personal qualification – smarts, judicial temperament, basic fair mindedness … all of which are difficult to know about unless you have pretty frequent interaction with the person.
  
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3. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:39 pm
  
  School board races are definitely a challenge, but also critical positions affecting the entire community. Carefully reporting what candidates say should give voters clues to who is well-informed and capable, and who’s not, but that only works if voters read through a lot of coverage. This is a key area where coverage is essential in helping voters identify who NOT to vote for – such as candidates who are passionate but uninformed.
  
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4. nlangworthy says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:47 pm
  
  Yes, I was kind of lumping bottom of the ticket stuff together, where “issues” and their views on them may be pertinent to the soil and water conservationist, they shouldn’t be to judges. How would to make these candidates known to the public in whatever capacity is appropriate is a better question? Is it worth doing?
  
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5. Project Vote Smart says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:55 pm
  
  It might be helpful to look at evaluations that already exist for judicial candidates, which generally get at the qualities you are talking about Mary, rather than issue positions. Bar associations seem to be the most common place for this information. This is also a good place to start: http://www.judicialselection.us/judicial_selection/campaigns_and_elections/voter_guides.cfm?state=
  
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Brian Wheeler says:

December 7, 2011 at 12:24 pm

On community engagement, we were fortunate in the 2011 local elections to have just hired our Community Engagement Coordinator. For non-profit hyperlocals, the election is a great opportunity to engage and build your audience. One event that went really well was a post-election “News and Brews” where we invited the community to join us and debrief the campaigns and the impacts. About 30 people came to a downtown restaurant (in the pouring rain) including several candidates and their campaign managers. On election day, we also engaged people directly at the polls where we set up tables and get new subscribers.

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1. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:26 pm
  
  Curious: How will your community engagement coordinator manage info about people in the community? Are you using a CRM of some sort?
  
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2. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:29 pm
  
  CRM = Customer Relationship Management. . . a term I (a journalist) only recently learned. Here at the JA we think of it as Community Relationship Management. We spend a lot of time thinking about how publishers might find a CRM strategy useful to building and maintaining audience. More here – analyzing CRM around our October forum.
  
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3. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:37 pm
  
  We use iContact for email communications and an MS Access database for fundraising. Both datasets have a shared key on each person so we can import/export. We started in 2005 with a full-blown CMS (Get Active, which became Convio), but it had more power than I could afford or take advantage of.
  
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David Herzog says:

December 7, 2011 at 12:24 pm

In every election, not just 2012, journalists have great opportunities to dig into data to uncover stories and show what’s really going on in their communities.

One of our J-school students, for a story in the Columbia Missourian, mapped local election data to show how two city council incumbents would have benefited under an unpopular redistricting proposal.

There are all kinds of data and all kinds of possibilities for stories: Look at election results over time to do context stories. Build on that context on election night by analyzing election returns as they roll in. Voter registration data can tell you who the regular voters are and where they live. Also, you can see who’s registered but failing to vote. Interview them and find out why.

Block-level demographic data from the 2010 Census gives a lot of information about voting-age pop, race and ethnicity.

Of course, campaign finance data from your state and the FEC can tell you who’s contributing to your local candidates.

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1. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:26 pm
  
  I think redistricting is a major story in this election, but it’s hard to get a handle on it, and hard for people to understand what’s going on with redistricting and what difference it will make.
  
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2. Michael Skoler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:31 pm
  
  Data presented simply and well can drive a lot of interest and can really build trust for a news organization, especially when charges and countercharges are flying in an election.
  
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Anne Galloway says:

December 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm

Ironically, I’m actually writing a story right now about the GOP candidate for governor, Randy Brock, who announced his bid about an hour ago … 🙂 We’re covering it with video and the story I’m writing presently.

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1. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:22 pm
  
  Anne, multitasking like publishers everywhere! I know you’ve looked at loads of tools and resources at workshops, etc…Do you have any thoughts about the single thing tool developers or resource creators could do to make it easiest for publishers to use? What vetting questions do you have when you evaluate new things to try?
  
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2. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:25 pm
  
  That’s a great question. What new tools are people here using either to produce journalism, or distribute it? Tumblr, Posterous, Storify, etc.?
  
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3. Anne Galloway says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:36 pm
  
  We’ll definitely use Cover it Live again. I want to try out Storify, timelines, polls and forums. These are tools we haven’t tried yet. What made our general election section “Guber 2010” successful last year was its very simple design and concept. We had the two candidates on one page sharing equal space, with links to all of their TV ads (they were all posted to you tube), all of their press releases and all of the stories we’d written about their races. We had the major stories listed by topic — the major issues. We wrote long in-depth pieces about their stances on health care, the environment, energy and education. We also carried audio and video from debates. In addition, we posted intensive campaign finance investigations.
  The questions I ask myself when vetting new tools are: Will it work on our WordPress site without causing major disruption? Will it really feed readers into our reportage? Does it have news value? Will it further an ongoing substantive debate about the issues
  
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Michael Skoler says:

December 7, 2011 at 12:08 pm

The election is an opportunity to look at whether government is working for people and if it is honest and fair. At least, that is the result I want from my vote. Many folks are fed up with promises and politicians who can’t get anything done.
Our project can help if you want to cover this angle. The State Integrity Investigation (www.stateintegrity.org) is a collaboration with PRI, The Center for Public Integrity (investigative reporting group) and policy group Global Integrity.
We are ranking every state on its risk of corruption on more than 300 questions. We can provide an advance copy of the report card, which will have letter grades in 14 areas including campaign finance, ethics laws, and lobbying regulations. We’ll provide a widget that lets people look into the state laws and practices that work and don’t work. News partners will also receive a summary analysis of the state’s score – written by a journalist in their state. And we’ll help brainstorm story ideas.

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Mary Turck says:

December 7, 2011 at 12:02 pm

Thanks for the link to http://www.followthemoney.org/
I think that a list of resources such as this would be useful not only for those of us reporting or editing the news, but as a tool to offer to readers. Another nomination: PolitiFact’s Truth–o-meter at http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements
Ohers?

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1. Frank Muraca says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:10 pm
  
  For Virginia state and some local elections I use Virginia Public Access Project (http://www.vpap.org/). It’s a non-profit that publishes all the campaign contributions to candidates, and organizes them in various different ways. It’s a fantastic resource and is packed with information.
  
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2. Project Vote Smart says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:12 pm
  
  If you are looking for information such as voting records, speech transcripts, issue positions, and biographical information, and other resources, http://www.votesmart.org has all of this easily accessible. Specifically for state legislature, gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential candidates.
  Followthemoney.org and opensecrets.org provide us with our campaign financing data at the state and federal level.
  
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3. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:16 pm
  
  As Frank knows, VPAP is one of Charlottesville Tomorrow’s election partners. We work with them to ensure all campaign finance filings (even the ones still coming in on paper) are loaded into VPAP’s state database. Then we write news stories about the fundraising sources and provide links to this data in our online publications. VPAP is providing a tremendous service and we applaud their expansion to many local elections in Virginia.
  
  Sample local candidate:
  http://www.vpap.org/candidates/profile/home/103466
  
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4. Michael Skoler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:36 pm
  
  Just looked at your site – terrific information. Do you partner or have widgets that enable newsrooms to use your tools on their sites?
  
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5. Project Vote Smart says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 1:03 pm
  
  Here are some of the tools we offer journalists:
  
  Our widget allows your website visitors to enter their zip code and find out information about who their current candidates are as well as who represents them. This can easily be embedded on any website simply by copying and pasting the code found here: http://votesmart.org/share/widgets
  
  We also offer our content via an API, which allows you to create custom applications using some or all of our data: http://votesmart.org/share/api
  
  Our newest application, VoteEasy, was built off of our API for example, and by using the issue positions we’ve researched for candidates, it helps match voters to the candidates most like them. News sites can have this application link directly from their site by using one of our many banners found here: http://votesmart.org/share/link-to-us#voteeasy
  
  Finally, we offer RSS feeds of key legislative votes on both the state and federal level: http://votes
  
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6. Project Vote Smart says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 1:13 pm
  
  We also offer free research assistance to journalists via our hotline 1-888-VOTE-SMART or by emailing [email protected].
  
  We’ve had hundreds of media partners over the years from local to national media outlets in an effort to get candidates to tell their positions on the issues that mean the most to voters and are most likely to come up in the next legislative session. Each election cycle, news organizations support our programs by both informing their audience about Vote Smart’s candidate information, and by encouraging their candidates to provide relevant issue information through the Political Courage Test. Previous election-year Test results show, when local news organizations speak out in support of the Political Courage Test, candidates are more likely to provide answers. Candidates’ subsequent answers to Test questions are offered in advance of public release to collaborating news organizations, in order to enrich their campaign coverage.
  
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7. Joy Mayer says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 1:54 pm
  
  Wow — I had no idea bout this resource. Thanks!
  
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Project Vote Smart says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:49 am

This is Carly Griffin, Communications Coordinator with Project Vote Smart, a non-partisan 501(c)3, research organization, checking in. We’re not a news organization but rather a trusted source, researching and publishing facts on the candidates & officials in one places, free and readily available to the public. Facts such as voting records, speeches, campaign financing, and more, all at votesmart.org.

Every election year we are looking to share our resources with journalists through the use of APIs, and real-time research assistance. We just want to make sure you all know about us as a resource for your election coverage, and that we want help in anyway we can.

I also wanted to clarify everyone’s use of the word “local” because our researchers define local as city, county, township, parishes, etc. and our information is very minimal in this area. We are comprehensive when it comes to state and federal level elections, candidates, and officials.

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1. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:52 am
  
  Here’s a question for everybody – in light of Carly’s discussion of “local.” How much effort / resources do you decide to put toward state legislature, or more local, vs. Congressional up?
  
  Anybody have a sense of – or data about – coverage impacting turnout numbers in school board/county/parish elections?
  
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2. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:56 am
  
  We do a lot of local coverage – city, county, school board, legislature, and less state and federal.
  
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3. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:01 pm
  
  The voter turnout data for our localities is not positive. Comparing similar local elections (2011, 2007, 2003), we have not been able to move the voter turnout numbers significantly even with our concerted effort to share more information. But we are not giving up…
  
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4. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:02 pm
  
  Is that an explicit goal?
  
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5. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:07 pm
  
  It’s not a goal that we have targeted for a specific degree of improvement, but it is something we hoped would occur if more people knew who was running and what they were all about. The initial goal was to fill an information void for those who were participating and paying attention already. But when only 26% of the voters participate in a local election, I score that as “needs improvement.”
  
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6. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:13 pm
  
  Mary, how much do you see the economy being the big issue in local elections – compared to national?
  
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7. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:23 pm
  
  I think the economy is a big issue at all levels, but it plays out differently in local elections. In Minnesota, for example, this year’s state government shutdown and state budget issues are big. So is the continuing shift of school funding.
  
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Tom Glaisyer says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:47 am

I’m a bit skeptical of tech-first projects, but my sense is that an app for Android and iPhone users that serves up content on the basis of geolocation as well as date and time could transform how effectively information is shared. It could also engage a demographic (since phone usage will skew young) that is less engaged. Not withstanding the digital divide issues that need to be addressed it could really transform things. You could also potentially have live polls during candidate forums, solicit audience questions etc etc.

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1. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:53 am
  
  I agree and I hope we can have some of those mobile tools ready for our next local election in 2013. At a minimum, a mobile version of our election guide that is geo aware. Great idea to facilitate use of mobile at an event like a live candidate forum. That said, we have enough of a challenge plowing through all the 3×5 index cards when selecting our questions!
  
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Brian Wheeler says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:32 am

On our voter guides… one reason we go to the expense of printing and mailing them is that it is a path straight to the voter’s OTHER inbox, their mailbox. We want them to have something in-depth they can leaf through at their leisure and that doesn’t get buried in the computer information stream.

Sample:
http://www.cvillepedia.org/mediawiki/images/2011-Albemarle-VoterGuide.pdf

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1. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:36 am
  
  How much does that cost?
  
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2. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:38 am
  
  In 2011, our media partner (The Daily Progress) made an in-kind gift of the layout and printing. Before our partnership, that cost me about $40,000 an election. We paid about $7,000 this year for the postage and mailing of around 30,000 copies of the guides.
  
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3. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:40 am
  
  What do you think you get out of that investment?
  
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4. Jeff Lennan says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:45 am
  
  Brian – love the idea of the publishers doing voter guides, and it is very interesting your choice to go to the mail box as well. There are major implications for political mail coming down the pipe with USPS figuring drastic ways to save their bottom line. There was a great article in Slate recently talking about the implications for things like voter guides (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2011/12/u_s_postal_service_changes_how_they_ll_affect_the_2012_campaign.html). BTW love the QR codes too. We are working on mobile versions of voter guides we already do online and in the mail that will take all of this even further.
  
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5. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:46 am
  
  The big goal is helping people to make informed choices for the future of the community. Before Charlottesville Tomorrow started producing local voter guides in 2005, in-depth information on our local candidates didn’t exist.
  
  We sit outside the polls on election day and receive a lot of positive feedback about the voter guides (and we sign up new subscribers as a result too).
  
  We also get the candidates on the record about important community issues. The text in the voter guides is referred to by other candidates, by the media, and by citizens. Sometimes long after the election.
  
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6. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:49 am
  
  I am helping prop up the USPS! We actually had to pay full-fare (no non-profit discount) because we had for-profit entities featured in the material (i.e. our partner the Daily Progress and corporate sponsors). Important to note that our publication (and organization) does not endorse anyone.
  
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7. Project Vote Smart says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:01 pm
  
  Our organization publishes what we call the “Voter’s Self-Defense Manual” which is basically snapshot of the information on our website, inside a pocket-sized booklet, specifically offering the U.S. House and Senate current members and their voting record (on key votes as determined by our researches), a summary of their campaign contributions, and their interest group ratings from 17 organizations.
  
  We are surprised that even with the heavy use of technology, the internet, mobile devices, etc., the public still requests these manuals on a regular basis. Recently a website boasting “free stuff” updates, recently suggested “Free copy of Voter’s Self Defense Manual from Vote Smart,” and we’ve receive a little under 500 requests since Dec. 1. We even made some calls to make sure we weren’t receiving spam requests, and yes they are real people intrigued by this manual idea.
  
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8. Jeff Lennan says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:06 pm
  
  Our voter guides do, of course, endorse, as we are working for organizations who are making recommendations. There is a mix of “guides” out there each cycle, including those from non-biased publications like yours, and those from organizations with a vested interest in specific election issues (and candidates)
  
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9. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:07 pm
  
  Would you tell us more about your widgets and tools publishers can embed, including VoteEasy?
  
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10. Project Vote Smart says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:42 pm
  
  Our widget allows your website visitors to enter their zip code and find out information about who their current candidates are as well as who represents them. This can easily be embedded on any website simply by copying and pasting the code found here: http://votesmart.org/share/widgets
  
  We also offer our content via an API, which allows you to create custom applications using some or all of our data: http://votesmart.org/share/api
  
  Our newest application, VoteEasy, was built off of our API for example, and by using the issue positions we’ve researched for candidates, it helps match voters to the candidates most like them. News sites can have this application link directly from their site by using one of our many banners found here: http://votesmart.org/share/link-to-us#voteeasy
  
  Finally, we offer RSS feeds of key legislative votes on both the state and federal level: http://votesmart.org/media/rss
  
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11. Joy Mayer says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 1:57 pm
  
  Emily, I love that you keep asking measurement questions! What was the impact? Journalists really need to be ruthless about analysis and allocation of resources.
  
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Anne Galloway says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:26 am

@Mary Truck. I love the idea of a forum and polls. In the past, we’ve had a separate section and we’ll try to do that again. We also write as many in-depth stories about the issues — and what all the rhetoric means in context as we possibly can.

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1. Jeff Lennan says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:32 am
  
  Placing all of this information in a central location on your site would be very useful. That works well for sharing, community interaction, others linking to this as a resource, etc – all of which is good for search engine optimization. Its a virtuous cycle 🙂
  
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2. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:36 am
  
  Because we’re on-line … we use tagging to create story streams. For example, any article related to the 4th Congressional District 2012 race gets that tag, and that builds a page of stories, displayed sequentially. Then we have a general election page that has links to all of the subsets. Thus, the general “Elections” page will have individual links to 2012 4th Congressional District, 2012 Minnesota Marriage Amendment, 2012 U.S. President, 2012 Minneapolis – MN legislative races, etc. Each of these will display a paragraph at the top, listing the candidates or questions, and then all of the stories about that race, with the most recent first.
  
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3. Jeff Lennan says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 2:17 pm
  
  Good stuff Mary
  
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Mary Turck says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:20 am

We plan to launch a number of forums / polls / interactive stories early in 2012, asking readers what issues they want to hear about in each elections – state legislative districts, all local questions and races, congressional races, and national.

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1. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:21 am
  
  These will be crowd-sourced discussion of what issues people would like to see us cover (e.g., our readers may be more interested in extensive coverage of MN marriage amendment and presidential candidate views on gay marriage than on analysis of candidate positions on wars – but that’s just a guess, and it could be the opposite)
  
  After we have identified an initial list of issues for the various races, we will enlist local experts/bloggers who would be willing to write about candidates’/parties’ positions on those issues and point people to in-depth coverage on other sites.
  
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2. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:23 am
  
  If you can manage / store the product of all that outreach, you can use it to do very targeted outreach throughout the election season. Targeted outreach = relevance, relevance = getting the attention of average folks, not just political junkies. That ability to target engagement is what PIN provides, but it’s certainly not the only way to do it.
  
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3. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:24 am
  
  Is it possible for local, non-profit sites like ours to access PIN’s database?
  
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4. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:26 am
  
  Absolutely. Many of our now close to 60 partners are non-profit newsrooms.
  
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5. Laura Frank says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:28 am
  
  I-News is one of PIN’s nonprofit newsrooms. It’s magnificent both as a resource and an engagement tool. And I’m excited about the addition of Spot.us to the mix.
  
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6. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:29 am
  
  Andrew, talk more about how PIN works. And how long you’d envision managing the product of all the election outreach.
  
  Also, I know a big PIN database requires a person to manage it. How can publishers use the concept efficiently vis a vis work and staff?
  
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7. Angi Carter says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:31 am
  
  We’re looking at those activities as well – and as a public service, providing a link for people to register to vote online and have forms at public events. Have any of you used other ways to encourage people to vote?
  
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8. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:36 am
  
  PIN is a set of tools, and a mindset. The tools allow newsrooms to create surveys (queries), find people to send those queries to based on demographics, past responses, interests, etc., and then gather, synthesize and store the product of those queries.
  
  Since this form of engagement takes time, and the Network requires care and feeding, the newsroom does need a person dedicated at least part of the time to reaching out and gathering what comes in.
  
  You can learn a bit more here: http://www.publicinsightnetwork.org
  
  My job is to make the tools easier to use, and to work with our tech team to envision new tools that will allow for greater engagement, more feedback to sources, etc.
  
  We’ve used PIN in a few election cycles, and have had great success developing a big, diverse pool of people interested in engaging around election-related issues. In the past, we’ve used queries like this one to build a base of engaged sources: http://bit.ly/w1aUNv
  
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9. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:40 am
  
  The magic starts to happen when you combine experiences that help people reveal their values and perspective to themselves (I think it’s true that politics is more about tribal affiliation than an honest reckoning with one’s own beliefs) with content that is highly relevant. If you have some resources, think about creating quizzes or games that give people a fun way to engage (see Select-a-Candidate: http://bit.ly/uyLpha), and that also help you gather info about them on the back-end — info you can use to serve up very targeted content.
  
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10. Aly Sneider says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:15 pm
  
  Angi, this makes me think of a book (and blog) called “Nudge”, which talks about choice architecture and how behavioral science plays into decision making, including voting. I remember an article talking about the Obama campaign’s use of a particular “Get Out the Vote” strategy based in behavioral science. Here is a bit on it from Time: “The key guideline was a simple message: “A Record Turnout Is Expected.” That’s because studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini and other group members had found that the most powerful motivator for hotel guests to reuse towels, national-park visitors to stay on marked trails and citizens to vote is the suggestion that everyone is doing it. “People want to do what they think others will do,” says Cialdini, author of the best seller Influence. “The Obama campaign really got that.”
  
  To read more of the article, check out: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1889153,00.html#ixzz1fsaau1F5
  
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11. Angi Carter says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:24 pm
  
  Hi Aly,
  
  This is fascinating, thank you very much. I think of few times in my life when I fell for that myself – ha!
  
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12. Jeff Lennan says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:45 pm
  
  I think a powerful role that publications can play in GOTV includes this idea of promoting a sense of “everyone is doing it”. For example, In Oregon, where elections are completely vote by mail, and voting goes on for 3 weeks, we are working on better ways to report out (in close to real time) how many people have voted, by region.
  
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Frank Muraca says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:19 am

I worked with Charlottesville Tomorrow (Brian’s organization) this past summer, and now I’m a student at George Mason in Fairfax, Va. The wiki model is a fantastic way to organize and bring local electoral information to a single location for voters to use. I created Fairfaxpedia (http://www.fairfaxpedia.com) which mirrors a lot of the things that C’villepedia does. This next election cycle it’s going to contain articles on local candidates, as well as their policy positions and funding sources.

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1. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:22 am
  
  Can you tell Angi more specifically how you set it up? And how you get people to pay attention to it?
  
  Here’s her question again:
  http://journalismaccelerator.com/questions/technology/what-kind-of-election-coverage-do-you-want-to-bring-to-your-community-in-2012/#comment-1042
  
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2. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:23 am
  
  How cool is it that our former interns: 1) tune in to this conversation on JA; and 2) take these tools to their next community! Awesome work Frank
  
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3. Denise Cheng says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:26 pm
  
  As a former community publisher, I can totally appreciate that. Frank’s comments and work are making me glow. 🙂
  
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Laura Frank says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:12 am

Hi, everyone!

Since I-News exists to help other publishers and broadcasters tackle complex stories, I’m eager to hear what folks think some of those issues are around the 2012 election.

We’re gearing up to delve into the money behind the politics. Is that of interest? What else?

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1. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:15 am
  
  Too often the mainstream media covers the horse race – who’s ahead in the Iowa polls, who’s ahead among registered Republicans in Iowa, did Obama’s numbers change in Kansas after his speech. We are committed to covering issues rather than the horse race. And we are committed to covering local races first, because we are a local news organization.
  
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2. Laura Frank says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:15 am
  
  As for I-News: In addition to looking at the money behind politics, we have analyzed voting patterns, and helped our media partners deliver election-night analysis.
  
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3. Laura Frank says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:21 am
  
  I think we’ve all seen the kind of coverage you’re talking about, Mary. There’s been much opining about how coverage too often falls into the horse race arena – many times because it’s easier/faster/cheaper/less complicated to do.
  
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4. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:24 am
  
  Michael Skoler and the folks at the State Integrity Investigation have taken a really broad view – Michael, you’ve talked about covering governance as a way to cover elections. Care to elaborate?
  
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5. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:25 am
  
  I think you’ve hit on it. We get the coverage we get because it’s the cheapest to produce & reliably drives audience. The challenge is to change that equation, either by making good stuff cheaper to produce (crowdsourcing can help) or by being creative about making the non horse-race content more enticing.
  
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6. Michael Skoler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:31 am
  
  One way to distinguish coverage is to ask whether candidates are committed to making state and local government honest and effective. I’m part of a project – the State Integrity Investigation – that is measuring and ranking every state on its risk of corruption. We’ll offer all the info so newsrooms can follow up on actual corruption and ask candidates about what they will do to ensure honest government.
  
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7. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:31 am
  
  I think there’s good coverage out there – but finding it amid all the dreck can be a challenge. That’s where I see our bloggers coming in, to sort through and identify some of the good, in-depth analysis and highlight it for readers. I hope they become the go-to sources for people who don’t have time to scour 17 – or 37 – news sources daily.
  
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8. Laura Frank says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:33 am
  
  You’re absolutely right, Andrew. And I think that while the journalism crisis means there are fewer journalists to dig deeper on stories, the other side of that coin is some journalism organizations are really thinking more carefully about how to best use their resources – and collaborate to leverage those resources. So they’re looking for ways to be more relevant and engaging than perhaps they’ve been inspired to do in the past.
  
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9. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:34 am
  
  Laura, what do you plan to do with the money story? And – I always wonder this – what have you seen that makes you believe this is information voters use? So many elections seem to turn on emotion rather than financial supporters.
  
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10. Michael Skoler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:37 am
  
  Great point, Andrew. There’s another option, too, which is reframing the issue – looking at what the candidates are not saying, looking into the records of incumbents, and looking into why government isn’t effective and how candidates plan to change that.
  
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11. Michelle Powers Godfrey says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:39 am
  
  I would add to Michael’s description of the State Integrity Investigation, the ability for newsrooms to engage their audiences with the corruption risk information, reports and data via ready-made embeddable widgets that we will provide. These widgets will be easy to use in support of local stories as they will be customized for corruption risk data in each state.
  
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12. Laura Frank says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:49 am
  
  Emily,
  
  I think the thing always to look for in money-in-politics stories is who is influencing what. And this is a story that goes beyond just the immediate election cycle. It’s a constant story.
  
  For everyone out there, I recommend getting to know the National Institute on Money and State Politics. They’re at http://www.followthemoney.org/
  A great resource.
  
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13. Cole Goins says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 1:45 pm
  
  I’ll second Laura’s recommendation to check out the National Institute on Money and State Politics. We (the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News) will be drawing on their data heavily for our new series, Consider the Source, aimed at tracking the money/messages behind advertising funded by outside groups leading up to the election.
  
  Emily, your question about making such information relevant to voters is key. One of our main goals is to help ‘de-wonkify’ the way our current campaign finance system works, revealing the special interests that are bankrolling candidates’ ‘shadow’ campaigns and and their respective agendas. We’re planning to have individual candidate pages on our website that aggregate our data and analyses, but are still in the process of sketching those out. What kinds of features/info do you all think would be helpful to effectively articulate these concepts to voters?
  
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Mary Turck says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:08 am

In 2008 and in 2010, we had a lot of national/congressional election coverage from a community media partner, the Minnesota Independent. The Daily Planet has covered local elections directly, as well as aggregating content on national elections from our media partners. As of a few weeks ago, the Minnesota Independent no longer exists. So we are looking at ways to ramp up election coverage for both local (legislative/municipal) and national (congressional/presidential) races.

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1. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:09 am
  
  The first thing we will do is to set up separate pages on the site for different races, so that readers can find all of the election coverage for the race they want to follow. For example, we’ll have a 5th Congressional District page, and a Marriage Amendment page, as well as a presidential election page.
  
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2. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:13 am
  
  Throwing a question out there to the group: What are the local information gaps in election year coverage that you hope your news org can fill? I think articulating the information need you hope to fill sets the baseline for your engagement efforts.
  
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3. Benjamin Berkowitz says:
  
  December 9, 2011 at 11:53 am
  
  I think there’s something interesting around voting booth failure and civic reporting on violations of voting regs at the poles. Our partners at JRC started playing around with this this past season.
  
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Angi Carter says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:06 am

Brian, I’d love to hear how you set up your community wiki and how you coordinate the forums?

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1. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:09 am
  
  We co-sponsor about 4 candidate forums each election cycle. This year we partnered with our daily newspaper, The Daily Progress. I served as moderator. We had moderator questions prepared in advance, took audience questions (at event and via Google Moderator), and let the candidates ask each other questions.
  
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2. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:11 am
  
  We have lots of forums sponsored by lots of local groups, so our strategy is to try for coverage of the forums for local candidates, rather than sponsoring.
  
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3. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:11 am
  
  Here are some links to our wiki resources to give you a sense of the material
  
  Resource page on our wiki
  
  Sample candidate bio on wiki
  
  Sample voter guide
  
  Sample candidate interview
  
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4. Emily Harris says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:15 am
  
  I am curious, Mary and Brian, if you’ve found any ways to connect with your communities in a way that brings audience members to forums who may not be usual political junkies?
  
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5. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:19 am
  
  Getting people to a live candidate forum is VERY HARD in our experience. Turnout is usually between 20-50 folks. That’s why we reached out via Google Moderator and through our social media to solicit audience questions. That way they could participate from afar. Then we share complete video. Honestly, a key product from the forums is the news story that runs the next day. We want people reading that and knowing they can come to our site for in-dpeth content as needed.
  
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6. Frank Muraca says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:36 am
  
  Hi Angi,
  
  C’villepedia and Fairfaxpedia are based on free server-based software called Mediawiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki). The software essentially sets up the a website format very similar to wikipedia (with a few personalizations).
  
  That’s the very basics of the technical part. The only different between community wikis and the original Wikipedia is that they focus solely on community topics. For example, Fairfaxpedia has articles about Fairfax schools, local non-profit organizations, and Fairfax elected officials (and much more). It wouldn’t necessarily contain information about the federal or state topics, only Fairfax subjects.
  
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7. Frank Muraca says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:42 am
  
  Another thing that I wanted to add – One of the most important aspect of the wiki is that anyone can contribute. The whole goal of the wiki model is to get as many people to collaborate in building an information system about the community. Of course, the role of a wiki administrator is to make sure people are posting verifiable/factual information. Just like Wikipedia, information can’t be biased nor misleading.
  
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8. Mary Turck says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:46 am
  
  So who moderates the wikis? And how much time does that take? We moderate all content posted to TC Daily Planet, so I know that takes time.
  
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9. Andrew Haeg says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:46 am
  
  Who, in your experience, tend to contribute to the community wiki? What motivates them? What do they get out of it?
  
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10. Angi Carter says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:50 am
  
  That’s exactly what I’m envisioning, this is great info…Thank you very much, Frank!
  
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11. Frank Muraca says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:52 am
  
  Right now, Fairfaxpedia is a one-man operation. (It’s only a couple months old – so it’s not nearly as developed as Brian’s C’villepedia.) And yes it certainly takes time. It’s important to make sure that people understand how to cite sources and organize information that makes it easy to find and verify. It’s all part of the education process though.
  
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12. Angi Carter says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:52 am
  
  do you link to it or does the site give you an embed code? I will check it out after this discussion, don’t wanna miss anything 🙂
  
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13. Frank Muraca says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:01 pm
  
  Well Fairfaxpedia is very new (only a couple months). I’ve had maybe three or four people make contributions, so I haven’t seen much a trend yet.
  
  I would argue that engaged contributors get a fair amount out of the process. Often times, local residents underestimate how much they know about their communities and how they can share that knowledge. Contributions are on a volunteer-basis, and they can interact with other contributors on “discussion pages” to continue to expand their knowledge.
  
  I first came across C’villepedia when Brian came to my high school to talk to my government class about what they were trying to do. Our teacher assigned us to create a detailed article on a local policy issue. The process ended up being an incredible opportunity to learn more about what was going on in Charlottesville.
  
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14. Frank Muraca says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 12:06 pm
  
  Well it’s a bit more complex than an embed code. You have to upload the files onto your server and go from there. The Mediawiki website does a much better job of explaining how to install it – http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation
  
  The technical process of setting it up took me about a month to figure out, but I don’t really come from a technical background to begin with.
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 7, 2011 at 11:06 am

You do a ton at Charlottesville Tomorrow! What do you think has been most effective at engaging the community – getting people invested in election coverage?

Laura and Mary – can you share your list of things you’ve done around elections?

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Brian Wheeler says:

December 7, 2011 at 10:57 am

Charlottesville Tomorrow has been covering our local elections as a major initiative since 2005. We just completed our 2011 election cycle, so I can offer up a few lessons related to printing/mailing voter guides, candidate interviews (and podcasts), sponsoring/moderating candidate forums, using Google Moderator to solicit audience questions, sharing the money data in politics, and posting in-depth info on our community wiki.

Essential to our approach has been to be non-partisan, to not make endorsements, and to be focused on a few races. We only cover city council and the board of supervisors in our two local governments.

Looking forward to this conversation and your questions and new ideas.

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1. Brian Wheeler says:
  
  December 7, 2011 at 11:06 am
  
  Election products produced by Charlottesville Tomorrow
  
  Post video and audio podcast of candidate announcement
  Cover local party caucus or primary nomination events (with video and audio)
  Conduct candidate interviews (with audio podcast and transcript)
  Publish election resource page on our website/wiki
  Co-sponsor and moderate our own candidate forums
  Cover other organizations’ candidate forums (with video and audio podcast)
  Produce a non-partisan voter guide mailed to each voting household
  Partner with newspaper to prepare “candidate grids” for publication in newspaper before election (simplified voter guides)
  Ensure candidate campaign finance filings are collected and tracked in Virginia Public Access Project online database
  And of course… write news stories throughout campaign
  
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Emily Harris says:

December 7, 2011 at 10:55 am

Welcome to the JA forum on maximizing your yield from 2012 election coverage. Today we focus on editorial issues. What can you share, or what do you want to know, about covering elections easier, better, deeper?

We asked a few folks to help us kick off the conversation – Mary Turck runs the Twin Cities Daily Planet and has been through a few election cycles at the helm of a hyperlocal. Andrew Haeg co-founded the Public Insight Network (PIN), which has had great success broadening community sources for public radio (and just acquired Spot.us). Laura Frank heads I-News, which, among other things, works to turn complex information into compelling journalism people can use in a democracy. And Brian Wheeler publishes Charlottesville Tomorrow, which covers local elections in depth, including creating a non-partisan voters guide.

Please join in anytime! Tell us what tool or resource you offer, or what you’re looking for. What election coverage do you want to bring your community in 2012?

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