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:

I think I figured out how CTDN came out ranked first in the Community Media Workshop’s puzzling new report on local online news sites (PDF):  the report’s reliance on rosy data reported by Chi-Town itself (plus perhaps the absence of self-reported site visitor data from WBEZ)

Right on target! As we note in the methodology, a number of survey respondents including WBEZ gave us data that they asked us to keep confidential; that’s why WBEZ does not show up on any of the three self-report tables. As to rosy Chi-Town data, Geoff discusses this in his own blog here and we’ll let him speak for himself.

A number of people took issue with Chi-Town Daily News topping the list. I guess it’s worth pointing out that we did not set out to recreate “Chicago’s Best Blogs” or Chicago magazine’s “best Websites in Chicago.”

Our goal was both more and less ambitious than either of those efforts: to foregound new and innovative online news publications in Chicago and that we prioritized community newspapers, blogs and other sites from the neighborhoods and original voices on arts and culture. (see the methodology section on page 20 of the report).

Also, wanted to point out a comment thread where the highs are high and the lows are low over at Windy Citizen and some interesting comments on Phil’s column.

One more conversation got started over at Columbia Journalism Review, where Megan Garber responded to a comment I left about “nonprofit executives” not being a good representative set of people with whom to do focus groups. She notes, in part, (I grabbed part of her extensive comment and broke it into 3 grafs to make it easier to read):

The focus-groups-of-executives approach bothered me in particular because it echoed a phenomenon all too common on the business side of journalism: the attempt to glean what audiences want–and what they need–from experts rather than from audiences themselves.

I definitely see the report’s point that nonprofit execs are people who are not only connected to their communities, but committed to them–and I see your point, too, that nonprofits will likely be playing greater roles, going forward, on the content-provider side of news. Still, though, it seems to me that if we’re going to talk about “what we want and need” when it comes to the news, then the “we” in question needs to be as inclusive as possible.

It needs to be informed not just by community leaders, but by community members more broadly. Nonprofit executives should definitely be part of the conversation; it doesn’t follow, however, that they should be allowed to dominate it.

Point taken that we could have chosen folks who do not, in a sense, follow the news for a living or try in their work lives to make news. However, just want to correct the implied thought here that we were somehow asking these individuals to “represent” the people they serve in our conversations. Leaders at nonprofits are an audience in and of themselves! And given that our local community foundation asked us to do the report, and our concern with how news can help to build community or not, I think they are a very appropriate audience to check in with.

In general this concept of audience challenges metro news organizations, since their mission almost by definition is to reach lots of different audiences every day, in my opinion. I do also think journalists need to get more sophisticated about the concept of audience generally. There is no such thing as the general public, but rather many different audiences… I know it sounds like the marketing department talking, right? If it makes you feel better, we at nonprofits think of this as outreach. And we know that now that 2-way conversation is a bit of a buzzword, audience is a more important concept to grasp than ever. At our conference yesterday someone uttered the neat phrase “there’s riches in the niches.”

Final thought:

Let’s celebrate that Chicago rocks local online news. We have hundreds of sites doing it, and depending on how you measure, almost everyone has some kind of bragging rights relative to everyone else–the Chicago Reader, for example, comes out way ahead on alexa.com (at number 36,645) compared to, say, Progress Illinois (a sleeper in the report, I’d say) and the Defender, according to Google, is more authoritative than Gaper’s Block (now who would have guessed that?)

The conversations are valuable. Other people will undertake similar efforts to grasp what’s really going on with local news online in other cities and in Chicago in the future. Whatever we can learn about how to do it better the next time will be valuable

OK, enough of this for today–the folks at the Chicago Media Future conference graciously have agreed to let us distribute the report at their event tomorrow and we’ll continue the conversation next week (plans are to recap the whole thing in a Huffington Post Chicago piece toward the middle of the week, so watch for that, too).