The line is from Romeo and Juliet. The character Mercutio says it — three times — while he dies in a swordfight defending the honor of his friend (it’s in the middle of the play and helps set the action that sends the main characters –spoiler alert, if you’re still in junior high school — to their deaths).

It’s a pretty apt description for the state of things in the state Capitol this aft. High drama there, with the governor addressing the legislators, and so on. Read Capitol Fax for the latest–I think–it’s hard to understand. Not so hard to understand: elected officials have messed up and the folks hurting the worst are the ones with the least.

“Long-term chronic under-capacity”

Case in point: Fred Ludwig. Two weeks ago he called and we chatted briefly about how to build a story bank of individuals who would be affected by service cuts if (when, it now seems) the state’s “doomsday” budget is enacted. The agency put out a news release (PDF download) June 15 announcing 12 layoffs. Today, it was Fred’s turn.

When we checked back today, he told us he was in the middle of cleaning out his desk. Today was his last day, he’d just been laid off, after 18 months as communications staffer for the Thresholds social service agency on Chicago’s North Side. Read the rest of this entry »

Kara Carrell responds to a question at Making Media Connections (photo by Bob Black)

Last year, about half the folks who took our first-ever impact survey (an end-of-the-fiscal-year survey on what they did with what they learned from us) told us they did something different online as a result of what they learned.

Since this is the second year we’re doing it, we will be able to make some comparisons between now and this time last year–of course one of the things we hope to learn more about is how economic challenges of these days are affecting how we communicate for the better/for the worse.

Looking forward to hearing more about how you and others used lessons learned from The Workshop in the past 12 months! Take the survey yourself, it’s right here.

Oh, and when you’re done, give us your name and contact info so we can add you to a raffle to win an iPod Nano as a small thank-you for your feedback.

Thanks!

P.S. have you seen the gallery of photos from our most recent conference? Taken by Bob Black, Olga Lopez, and 1 or 2 other volunteers, they came out great!

One of the most popular custom workshops that organizations ask us to present to their staff is the Elevator Pitch, so we decided to see how our staff sees the Workshop itself.

We used a worksheet created by Sue O’Halloran, where you make your elevator pitch follow this format.

You know how… (problem)? Well what we do is… (feature). So that… (benefit). We’re kind of like the… (metaphor).

Here are the elevator pitches that the Community Media Workshop Staff came up with:

Thom Clark (President)

Hi, I’m Thom Clark of the Community Media Workshop at Columbia College.
You know how community groups complain about getting news coverage about their work?
Well, at the Community Media Workshop, we coach nonprofit communicators on how to get their story out, to the media, volunteers, donors and customers. Through three websites, an annual media guide and Newstips for reporters, we help journalists learn of these stories. We’re kinda like a little league coach, helping organizations get off the minor league bench and onto the front page of the New York Times.

Gordon Mayer (Vice-President)

Hi, my name is Gordon Mayer and I work at Community Media Workshop. You know how nonprofit volunteers and staff feel like if they could just tell more people about their work, it would help to make the world a better a place (and help them raise more money)? Well, what we do is provide communications coaching and training for nonprofit volunteer and staff communicators, and help journalists find sources in the nonprofit community. The benefit of our work is that nonprofit communicators can focus on the communications tasks they need to do, to leave time for and help support all the other stuff they have to get done as part of their jobs. We’re kind of like a voice coach, because even though we all know how to communicate, everyone can learn to really project so their voices can be heard more clearly by more people.

Demetrio Maguigad (New Media Manager)

You know how everyone is trying to make sense of “Social Media?” What we do is help nonprofits think more strategically about it to find out what it is they actually need - specific tools and how to use them, so they can focus on getting their message and story out! We’re kind of like a brita water filter - providing you with a more clear approach to your story telling.

Maggie Walker (Executive Assistant)

You know how nonprofits are doing all kinds of good work that know ones knows about?  Well we offer communications trainings and coaching to help them tell their stories in traditional and new media, so that they can spread the word about the work that they do.

Diana Pando (Senior Trainer)

You know how nonprofits have trouble telling their story to the media and other audiences? Well what we do is provide communication training and coaching to nonprofits. So that they can tell their story about the work their organization is doing to media, funders and supporters. We are kind of like a mega phone for nonprofits

Lovette Ajayi (Marketing Coordinator)

You know how nonprofits can have smaller resources and lack the know-how to market themselves effectively? Well, what we do is give nonprofit organizations communications coaching and training so that they can advance their missions and tell their stories better. We’re kind of like the people who teach nonprofits how to fish instead of having them pay for others to fish for them.

Jessica Rosenberg (Intern)

You know how it can be difficult getting your stories out to the media?  Well the Community Media Workshop offers communications trainings so that nonprofits can effectively communicate with journalists.  We’re like a bridge that links nonprofits to the news media.

dalila Renteria (Intern)

You know how everyone always has something to say, or at least think they do? Well, what we do is teach people how to get their voice to the public through any means of communication so that it stands apart from the herd and gets noticed. We’re kind of like a top notch communications education with out the student loans.

Naomi Kothbauer (Intern)

You know how nonprofits can easily struggle with communication in the ever-changing media landscape?  Well, what we do is enable nonprofits to share their stories by supplying them with a comprehensive, up-to-date media guide and trainings so that they can outreach a broader range of the public.  We’re sort of like a conveyor belt for nonprofits.

Eric Harvey (Intern)

You know how community is an abstract idea, so abstract that it can seem non-existent? Well, what we do is make community more tangible by providing news publications with the resources they need. By helping to foster a healthily diverse set of news publications throughout Chicago, we try to raise awareness of often-overlooked sub-communities. We’re kind of like a group of midwives for community.

Well there you have it, folks. Ever considered having your staff do an Elevator pitch about your organization?

Interesting program, cute video, cool combination of players involved! (Nice to see volunteers who do not take themselves too seriously). Seems to be a lot of moving parts to this program, and it might be worth checking out if you want a video but do not want to invest massive funds (buyer beware!).

Wouldn’t you love to see Mayor Daley squirm as John Callaway asked him about Olympic budget cost guarantees he never shared with the voters? Or what about a one-on-one with Oprah? Or an unscripted half-hour with our latest political celebrity Patti Blagojevich (”What advice did your dad, Ald. Dick Mell, give you on which defense attorney to hire?”)?

Photo by Karen Kring. John Callaway, Thom Clark & Geoff Dougherty at 2/22/09 “Future of Journalism” Town Hall Meeting

Master interviewer John Callaway died Tuesday evening of a heart attack at 72. I find myself already missing some of the interviews I wish he’d completed. The long-time host of WTTW Channel 11’s “Chicago Tonight,” Callaway gained a deserved reputation as one of the region’s premier interviewers. Like Workshop mentor Studs Terkel, Callaway could push his subjects beyond their prepared sound bites to probe a celebrity’s motives, question a politician’s manevuers, or help illuminate an author’s tome. Ironically, Callaway was the only nominee to ever turn down a Studs Terkel Community Media Award, believing a younger person should fill the slot.

John was always well-read and well-prepared for his interviews, but his intellectual prowess didn’t overwhelm or overtake his subjects. His wonderment and curiosity informed so much of his work, as displayed in a one-man show of his life produced for a week or two at Pegasus Theatre in 2001. My last encounter with him was sharing the panel at last February’s Town Hall Meeting on the future of journalism, a somewhat bleak afternoon for traditional journalism, where John was typically inciteful about a city without daily newspapers and bloggers who steal content.

Now I don’t how public television’s digital signal will pick this up, but I understand John’s next interview will be with St. Peter to explore who paid for the pearly gates.

Thom Clark

As friends at social service agencies are getting set to layoff staff in the coming weeks and organizing rallies in the hope that they can stop it, we get the sense of the limits of the power of effective communication.

The situation, which calls to mind the phrase “if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention” is that governor and Legislature are at a standstill in fixing problems a long time in the making. Governor Pat Quinn says the current budget “creates a $9.2 billion dollar funding gap and forces deep and distressing cuts to our vital social service agencies” on his home page. Rich Miller’s authoritative Capitol Fax (fair warning, if you haven’t been following along, you may have to spend 15 minutes or so reading to get a sense of what’s going on in springfield) documents that legislators feel Rod Blagojevich’s replacement has done a less than stellar job of convincing them to support his income-tax increase solution.That’s the simplistic (maybe overly so) sum-up of the situation.

The news coverage has been good, as a recent google news search shows. Some favorite columnists such as Mary Schmich and Phil Kadner, have both had nice stories on local rallies, for example. (Mary’s story ends with a great quote from a picket sign: “the state budget is a bigger mess than my room.”)

Read the rest of this entry »

Just picking up on the theme of new news, in the “truth is stranger than fiction” category:

Dan Pacheco is no slouch in the world of citizen journalism: his printcasting.com site promises to help you “start your own local magazine in minutes” (intrigued? I am) and has grant support from the Knight Foundation. But as he posted June 15, “Citizen Media Goes Fisher Price” (also at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab, where I first read it) his daughter scooped him and the rest of the news media with a tornado picture she snapped with a Fisher-Price camera in the suburbs of Denver earlier this week.

In a nutshell, there’d been some freaky weather in the Denver area for several days, so Dan was on the lookout already for tornados; his daughter walked into the home office to tell him she’d spotted a weird cloud, he went to grab his camera, tweeted it , and started taking pictures. The 6-year-old naturally grabbed her camera as well (who knew fisher price made a $64 digital camera?) And they all ended up on the local TV news. Anyway, read it there, at his blog, as Dan tells the story great, with video and pictures.

His takeaway is that “a confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we’re witnessing the birth of a completely new — and arguably better — breaking news system that involves everyone.”

Yes! but also, that new system is still going to incorporate some kind of Big Media that reaches out to wider audiences.(Like, in this story CBS 4, the local TV news guys). That role is still key to a better news ecosystem. Anyway, I get a kick out of imagining a 6-year-old on the weather–or any other–beat.

Lovette Ajayi of CMW responded to comments about the NEW News report during the Making Media Connections conference while holding down the registration table Wednesday and Thursday (photo by Jonathan Werve)

We’re getting emails, other folks are getting emails, phone calls… a lot of questions and comments on The NEW News: Journalism We Want and Need. Well, our goal was to start some more conversation, and we have. I only wish more of the reactions were online in one findable spot rather than in side conversations in email and such. (Note to skimmers: this post got long, skip to the end if you want to just catch the bottom line)

First, two points of news about the survey:

• It’s still open: Anyone who feels their site was missed (or misrepresented) can add to the list. Take it here.
• More detailed info is coming. Maybe we’ll even transfer all this information to a wiki, per Kiyoshi Martinez’s suggestion. In any event it’s always been our plan to build out communitymediaworkshop.org/newnews with detailed info from the study–our designer has created wireframes for the site and I’m just getting ready to send Demetrio the final tables. Of course we wanted it to be ready for the study release but we just ran out of time.

Next point: phew, journalists are tough! On each other. There have been some great comments, for example by Alexander Russo here and here. Very flattering to have him dig into the details and deserving of an explanation. He notes: Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting day at the office with the unveiling of our NEW News report on Chicago online news.

I wished I was interviewing Phil Rosenthal instead of the other way around this afternoon, since he came up with the best soundbite so far:”It’s about the value, not the cost of local news.” Wish he’d said that in his column! ah, well.

It was nice to get a call from Alexander Russo of the District 299 blog covering Chicago Public Schools. It’s now appearing at Chicago Now and includes a brief mention of the report (good move, Tribune!)

Just a quick wrap up of other reactions: Read the rest of this entry »

One reason there has not been much posted here over the past 10 weeks or so is that we’ve been busy pulling together a report on the state of local online news in Chicago, The NEW News: Journalism We Want and Need for The Chicago Community Trust. It’s not about how to pay for local news, but why we pay for it–and about who’s doing what online in Chicago.

It’s the first time anyone we know of has tried to assemble a report quite like it, that combines a directory of who’s doing what, some thoughts about where local print and online news is actually at in terms of coverage, and some thoughts on the kind of news we want. Some key thoughts:

• There’s less local news in the newspaper, these days, but no guarantee that online news publications will do any better.
• Online news publications will need to adopt some of the characteristics of local news—include news vetted by editors, copy editors, etc., select stories that both entertain and inform their audiences, and perhaps most importantly that they create a forum for one conversation, a universal feature that is hard to arrive at on the Internet, which drives us toward so many unique, small, even idiosyncratic news sources.
• Assembling such a report in such a short period of time (we surveyed producers of more than 80 online news publications, looked for trends in local news coverage in the Tribune and Sun-Times over 20 years—mostly, it’s declined, and conducted focus groups with nonprofit community leaders) was a job of work.

Our main goal was to add a different note to the conversation about how to save news… for audiences that are able to hear it. It will be too bad if the folks we respect and admire in metropolitan newsrooms are unable to take it in or get much benefit from the research.

One columnist’s take
Shame on me for not living up to my own spokesperson training rules: I spent two hours explaining all this to Phil Rosenthal, Tribune media columnist, explaining what we did and did not find about local online news in Chicago, to wind up reading a column this morning in which he says he thinks the whole project was waste of time. Now why am I surprised?

Obviously you can read his column here, and draw your own conclusions, but he seems to have wound up feeling that everything is fine in the news business so why don’t we just keep things the way they are. Hello? Shouldn’t have to explain to the media columnist, why the status quo is unworkable (our study does not focus on the news business’ money problems but they are obviously a sign that things need to change).

Find out for yourself… download your own copy here.