Current (https://current.org/local-that-works/?tax_input%5Bproject-category%5D%5B%5D=7132)
139 results found.
Bay Area News Collective is a collaboration to assess the geographic diversity and density of Bay Area news through analysis of geolocated news coverage and personal experiences in the community.
The “Ogden Listening Tour” informs KUER on how to 1) Increase coverage of a geographic area, 2) Increase listenership, and 3) Connect with a diverse population
Minnehistories are bite-sized videos that share pieces of Minnesota history and allow the audience to reminisce or learn about an unfamiliar event, figure, or place in Minnesota history.
She Votes Utah is a collaborative initiative from KUER Radio and PBS Utah. The project provides information and resources targeting women voters in Utah to encourage voter participation.
A documentary short film project highlighting difference makers in each of the 21 counties in New Jersey
“Explore Milwaukee with 88Nine” is a county-wide scavenger hunt that gets people out of their homes and into the community, exploring new sites, discovering hidden gems and connecting with neighbors.
Jacksonville is one of the largest cities in the U.S., yet its media landscape is shrinking. The Jacksonville Today newsletter helps fill the gap with a must-read guide to civic life.
“A People’s History of Kansas City” is an award-winning narrative history podcast about the everyday heroes who shaped the region. It centers the stories that have too often been forgotten or ignored.
Conversation by and for the people of Jackson Hole with journalists from KHOL, WyoFile and the Jackson Hole News & Guide, sharing the stories behind their reporting and building trust in local media.
This limited-run podcast series sheds light on humans living close to nature. In five episodes, Facets explores the passions, tensions and healing that people find while living in a mountain town.
We hosted a Basketball Park Takeover which attracted over 200 Black youth ages 15-24, to establish trust and awareness of The Kansas City Defender. Numerous attendants are now regular readers.
Engaging rural communities throughout South Dakota through storytelling, outreach, and strategic partnerships, to create opportunities for local connection across multiple platforms.
Aspen Public Radio’s library of lectures and events, produced by local organizations, has made cultural conversations more accessible, thanks to this replicable initiative for small stations.
Colorado Postcards tell stories of people, places and things that make the state unique. In just 60 seconds, they feed listeners’ curiosity and foster a closer connection to the place we call home.
Black Music City is a collaborative effort that awards grants for new work to Black creatives working in a range of artistic mediums for projects inspired by Philadelphia’s Black music history.
In Troy NY, a neighborhood works to shift divisions and narratives through community-driven art. WMHT tells the story through digital and broadcast content and engagement events.
NorCal Community Voices is a multimedia initiative bringing the voices of our diverse community to the airwaves and digital platforms. NorCal features community voices every hour on TV and FM, 24/7.
The Beacon’s Community Engagement Bureau is a journalism lab reimagining local media. Our ultimate goal is to equip communities with the tools to eliminate information inequity.
WTVP’s acquisition of Peoria Magazine moves the community forward by engaging businesses and individuals outside of broadcast television, promoting collaboration and opening new revenue streams.
Louisville Public Media’s Podcast Incubator makes podcasting accessible to individuals who have great ideas and stories to tell but have historically been underrepresented in public media.
Traditionally, local newsrooms have used communication strategies apart from other news businesses in the same region, creating blind spots or redundancy in news coverage and accessibility. One news service may not serve a certain area or carry information important to its audience, causing readers to miss relevant stories; another news outlet may double up on a topic, putting scarce resources into a story already being covered well by an adjacent or competitive organization. This uncoordinated patchwork of coverage can lead to uneven or inaccurate local news perceptions.
Bloom Labs collaborated with seven organizations, including Bay City News, as part of the Bay Area News Collective to assess the geographic diversity and density of news in the San Francisco Bay Area. The others were Mercury News, East Bay Times, Marin Independent Journal, San Jose Spotlight and KQED. The project’s goal was to identify and respond to patterns of local news representation, or lack thereof, through the perspective of personal experiences in the communities and current geolocated news coverage.
Newsrooms used the Bloom for Publishers geotagging plugin in their CMS, and used Google’s Natural Language API to automatically tag subject area categories. Over 8,200 stories were geotagged that represented news items from 486 neighborhoods. A dashboard allowed for filtering by location, timeframe, category and sentiment.
Qualitative interviews complemented the quantitative data from geotagging to provide a holistic view. The goal was to understand how people feel represented and/or underrepresented in local news, what makes them feel that way, and how their trust and behaviors change across different local sources, information and contexts. Interviewees were selected to match the Bay Area population diversity, including factors like race, religion, economic status, etc.
The project’s collaborative approach enabled us to leverage patterns that are more inclusive of news coverage as we brought together insights from multiple newsrooms and regions in the Bay Area into one space simultaneously. Data analysis helped streamline resources across newsrooms and identify priority areas for future focus.
The outcomes of the project, including “representation indicators” and collective maps, showed what places and topics were — and were not — being covered. These markers were valuable for both newsrooms and residents, guiding the way for more useful, diverse and equitable news experiences.
When the project grant ended, newsrooms including the Mercury News and Bay City News continued on with Bloom. These two newsrooms noticed there were more insights to gain by continuing to geotag news. Both newsrooms have Bloom maps automatically appear below all news articles on their websites. Mercury News readers have given positive feedback about this feature, and are signing up for a “News Near Me” newsletter using the mapping technology.
For Bay City News, seeing the work aggregated and having a filter for time, topic or geography helped reinforce or challenge assumptions about what we were covering. It also helped to identify staffing opportunities where news coverage was lacking - for example, hiring a reporter in Vallejo because of a lack of consistent coverage in the North Bay. With every story geotagged, we provide extra context for readers who can see where a story happens on a map.
Spatial analytics is an understudied area, and this project is an important advancement in the field. Newsrooms can benefit from having a different understanding of their news coverage and the communities they interact with when they have the opportunity to analyze geographic data along with other layers of information in a spatial analytics framework. We hope that the project inspires continued experimentation in this area, and provides actionable takeaways for other newsrooms interested in better understanding their coverage through geospatial approaches.
The project was initially funded by the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge. Revenue growth was indirect for Bay City News as casual readers became more loyal readers using this tool, and eventually moved up the ladder of engagement to become small to medium-sized donors. Bloom has captured some ongoing revenue based on the continued use of its geotagging plugin.