Digging into Knight’s tech priorities for 2023
AI, visuals and data journalism head the list; plus, Knight Chairs, Carnegie-Knight Deans meet in Miami
Living in Boston in the early 2000s, the Big Dig was my loud, rude neighbor. It was a beast of an infrastructure project, but it wasn’t just about replacing an elevated highway with a tunnel. In parallel, it was also about ensuring good use of the strip of downtown land the project freed up.
For months now, Knight has been working with a few dozen practitioners to define a core infrastructure for local news. This “Big Dig” of sorts will help propel standard solutions for common needs and direct the investment necessary for re-engineering at scale.
We will have more to say on that front soon. Today, I’m talking more about our parallel role of pursuing products and technology that will live on top of that core infrastructure. As we enter 2023, here are three areas I’m focused on to help publishers produce journalism that’s accessible, relevant and trustworthy for their audiences. No backhoes required.
Finding tangible and safe use cases for adopting generative artificial intelligence (AI).
ChatGPT. DALL-E. Midjourney. These tools and others — capable of turning natural language prompts into elaborate text and imagery — have been driving alternating cycles of whimsy and dread for the past several months.
Like any newly available, powerful and rapidly evolving technology, adoption isn’t a blanket “Yes or no?” question, but more of “When and where?” Should you ask GPT models to write entire articles? Not right now! Can you ask it to faithfully summarize your article into a Twitter thread? Probably! What about creating lede art with DALL-E? Worth debating! Are your freelancers using ChatGPT to generate pitches? Yep!
For 2023, I’m looking for the right places to explore specific use cases: What can be implemented today, what requires more consideration and guardrails and what will likely remain in the realm of science fiction?
Making local news more visual.
Visuals — photos, videos and graphics — help readers understand, remember and share stories. They also help publishers and broadcasters compete for attention in a world increasingly driven by video, much of it vertical due to usage on smartphones.
For 2023, I’m looking for tools and techniques that ease end-to-end production for small newsrooms. For instance: which applications streamline things such as social video clips, data visualizations and automated closed captions? There’s an increasing amount of good visual enterprise storytelling, but we also need simple, practical approaches for daily news stories.
Getting more data-driven journalism in front of local news audiences.
Democratizing access to community-level data helps journalists uncover stories and bolsters their reporting. Proper inclusion of data in stories also helps readers trust the reporting and anecdotes that bring the data to life.
A new generation of tools is helping companies of all types manage their own data and facilitate more informed decision-making. For 2023, I’m looking for tools and collaboration models that help journalists at small organizations take advantage of data. Part of it is proper handling of civic sources, part of it is leveraging tools that allow non-technical folks to “interview” the data, part of it is finding ways to share knowledge and tips between publishers to best coordinate resources and drive impact.
If you have ideas or reactions or think we’re missing out on something, I’d love to hear from you at lavallee@kf.org.
Engaging universities to fill local news gaps
By Duc Luu
Knight Foundation's annual meetings of our Knight Chairs in Journalism and Carnegie-Knight Deans felt anything but academic. The energy was palpable as both groups reconvened in-person after a three-year pandemic hiatus. In addition, the Carnegie-Knight Deans welcomed two new deans to the group: Hub Brown from University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications and Gracie Lawson-Borders from the Cathy Hughes School of Communications at Howard University.
With so many new faces at both meetings––which took place on January 13 and 14 at Knight’s offices in Miami––much of the time was spent sharing individual accomplishments of 2022 and the most pressing priorities for 2023. There were faculty-led presentations on:
Partnerships with search engines to enable real-time fact-checking.
The power of play, games, and interactive tools to change minds and correct factual misperceptions.
Successful efforts to rescue journalists from dangerous hot spots in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Central America.
Best practices that journalism schools are employing to counteract the politicization of their institutions.
In addition, Knight reviewed its funding strategy with each group and presented Gallup/Knight research on the public's perception of the news industry as a business and as a public good.
For the first time in a decade, the Knight Chairs in Journalism and Carnegie-Knight Deans will meet together right before February’s Knight Media Forum. The goal is to discuss the anchoring role that universities can play in local news ecosystems. Thanks to the combination of research, student and faculty talent, community trust, and financial resources, universities can be powerful partners in filling local news gaps. We’re excited to engage both groups on that topic.
Register now for the virtual Knight Media Forum!
Virtual registration is open for the Knight Media Forum, which will take place February 21–23. It’s the premier annual event for leaders in philanthropy, journalism and technology. Together, we’ll learn from leading thinkers and practitioners, and foster efforts to strengthen, scale and sustain informed and engaged communities. We’ve also published an agenda, though there are still some sessions coming together. We look forward to meeting some of you in person in Miami, and seeing others online!
Other news around the horn…
Awards
🌴 South Florida journalists get day in the sun. Any journalist or team of journalists in South Florida can now be nominated for the fourth annual Esserman-Knight Journalism Awards. The Awards highlight investigative and public service journalism in the area, with a focus on holding the powerful to account, finding an underreported community issue or breaking new ground on a story. And it’s not just award hardware: The first-prize winner gets $10,000, second prize is $5,000 and honorable mentions get $1,000. Nominations are due by January 31, so be sure to nominate great work today!
Funding
🤑 AJP announces latest newsroom grantees. As we all know, the American Journalism Project (AJP) is in the habit of handing out million-dollar bills (is that a thing? not really) to nonprofit newsrooms. The latest big winners of its largesse are Enlace Latino NC, Fort Worth Report and the Nebraska Journalism Trust. Note that the Nebraska Journalism Trust will help expand from the Flatwater Free Press to include new publications in small towns and neighborhoods. “Each of these organizations is working to close news and information gaps, in order to bolster their community and in turn help democracy thrive,” said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the AJP.
💰 Word In Black scores $1 million in funding. The groundbreaking collaboration with 10 top Black publishers around the country, Word In Black, received a $1 million grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to hire a climate justice reporter and an engagement manager, and to support operations. “Our journalism team will grow from six to nine employees and we’ll be able to cover climate change through a racial inequity lens, recognizing that Black communities have been disproportionately impacted,” said Andrew Ramsammy, chief content and collaboration officer for Local Media Foundation and Word In Black.
💸 Creative approaches to fundraising during NewsMatch. Last year’s NewsMatch campaign included $5.7 million in matching funds for nonprofit news outlets. It also included some interesting approaches to fundraising, as INN’s Sharene Azimi reported. For instance, three Spanish-language outlets worked together on collective fundraising. Enlace Latino NC, Documented and El Tímpano sent out common messaging on Giving Tuesday and continued collaborating afterward. Plus, Shasta Scout was transparent about its budget, helping it reach a more conservative audience. And Tone Madison kicked off its fundraising at a cocktail reception, while also releasing a compilation of Madison local music.
Diversity
✊🏽 Top media companies making progress with diversity. After the racial reckoning in 2020, many media companies promised to do a better job with staff and management diversity. So how are they doing? Digiday took a look at self-reported data from top media companies and found that they are slowly making some progress. For instance, the share of white employees is down 8% at BuzzFeed, 4% at Conde Nast and 3% at the New York Times. The share of white managers also was down at Gannett, NPR and the Washington Post. While progress is being made, there are still concerns that a recession could slow diversity efforts.
✨ICT partners with Lee papers for better indigenous coverage. Legacy newspapers have fallen short in covering Native American issues, and ICT (formerly Indian Country Today) would like to have more Native reporters covering those issues around the country. So it’s a win-win for ICT in partnering with Lee Enterprises newspapers to hire shared reporters at the Rapid City Journal in South Dakota and Tulsa World in Oklahoma. Not only will the partnership lead to more and better coverage of Native communities, but it will also open up a career path for Native journalists.
Impact
🎙️Sahan Journal serves Somali audience with audio via SMS. The Sahan Journal serves immigrant communities in Minnesota but had a problem: how to send newsletters to its large Somali audience with a variety of dialects and grammar differences. The solution was to send out audio clips via text messaging through GroundSource. As Hanaa Tameez reports in Nieman Lab, Somalis living in Minnesota told Sahan Journal they preferred to get news in audio or video, so the news outlet created the audio-clip newsletter that they distributed in YouTube videos as well. The result is 211 subscribers and 400 texts from the community to editor Aala Abdullahi. “We want to keep it bare bones,” Abdullahi told Nieman Lab. “We want to focus on a model that people could replicate.”
Jobs
🔍 ProPublica is hiring an editor for the Northwest region. ProPublica is seeking an experienced editor to lead its new investigative unit in the Northwest. The editor will hire and supervise three reporters who will be based in Washington, Oregon, Alaska or Idaho, as well as edit three Local Reporting Network partners based at newsrooms in the region. Learn more here.
🗞️ National Trust for Local News is hiring a Chief Portfolio Officer. The CPO would oversee the community news titles and news conservancies created by the Trust. They would also collaborate on the Trust’s strategy with other executives and the board. For more information about this job, go here.
📈 Pew is hiring a Research Director, News and Information. Pew Research Center is looking for an innovative and accomplished director to lead the News and Information research unit in the Washington, DC, office. The director oversees a research team seeking to understand the changing ways Americans learn about the major trends and events shaping society in the face of a rapidly changing media and information landscape. Learn more here.
Upcoming Events 📅
Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit
Online
January 31–February 1
Miami and online
February 21–23
Nashville
March 2–5
Austin
March 10–12
International Symposium for Online Journalism
Austin
April 14–15
International Journalism Festival
Perugia, Italy
April 19–23
Online
April 26-28
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News @ Knight Credits
Written by Marc Lavallee and Duc Luu, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Jim Brady, Jessica Clark and Kara Pickman
A Knight + Dot Connector Joint