- NewsLynx
- Introduction
- 1. Executive Summary
-
2.
Introduction
- 2.1. Definitions
- 2.2. Previous Research
- 2.3. From Monitoring and Evaluation to Media Impact
- 2.4. The Rise of Nonprofit Journalism
- 2.5. The Quantification of Content
- 2.6. Current Efforts
- 2.7. Qualitative Projects
- 2.8. Quantitative Projects
- 2.9. Internal Newsroom Tools
- 2.10. Where NewsLynx Fits: Incorporating Qualitative and Quantitative
- 3. Research Findings
-
4.
Platform Description
- 4.1. The Model
- 4.2. The Impact Framework, as Implemented
- 4.3. Model Concept: Impact Tags
- 4.4. Model Concept: Categories
- 4.5. Model Concept: Levels
- 4.6. The Combination of Tags, Categories, and Levels
- 4.7. Other Concepts for Possible Inclusion
- 4.8. Model Concept: Subject Tags
- 4.9. NewsLynx Interface
- 4.10. This Story’s Life
- 4.11. How People Are Reading and Finding It
- 4.12. Who Tweeted It?
- 5. Newsroom Use
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6.
Recommendations and Open Questions
- 6.1. Impact Work Practices: Recommendations
- 6.2. Commit Resources
- 6.3. Integrate with Editorial
- 6.4. Start Small
- 6.5. Publish Both for Humans and Machines By Using Standards
- 6.6. Impact Work Practices: Open Questions
- 6.7. Building Impact Tools: Recommendations
- 6.8. Building Impact Tools: Open Questions
- 7. Future Paths for NewsLynx
- 8. Conclusion
- 9. Appendix A
- 10. Appendix B
- 11. Footnotes
- 12. Citations
The Rise of Nonprofit Journalism
The last ten years have seen rapid growth in journalistic organizations built on these support sources. A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center identified 172 such nonprofit outlets in the United States.17these, over 70 percent were founded after 2008. While mostly nascent, nonprofit news organizations have achieved considerable impact in this short time. In 2010, ProPublica—founded only three years prior—became both the first nonprofit and exclusively digital news organization to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Since then, the Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News have also received the prestigious honor. The Philip Meyer Award, an annual prize for computer-assisted reporting, has awarded its last three top prizes to nonprofit outlets.
Whether because they are unbound from bureaucratic legacies or banner ads, nonprofit news organizations have become beacons of innovation in the industry, regularly exploring and experimenting with new revenue models, distribution channels, mediums, and methods of reporting. This innovative spirit has captured the attention of serious funders such as the Knight Foundation, which in 2013 awarded at least 20 grants to 13 such institutions totaling nearly four million dollars (authors calculations from Knight’s 990s),18not to mention numerous contributions to individuals and organizations to support the broader journalistic community (one of which has been the Tow Center itself). Some for-profit media outlets are also experimenting with foundation support. Since establishing its Strategic Media Partnerships program in 2011, the Gates Foundation has supported initiatives at The Seattle Times,19The Guardian,72and Univision.20 As foundations have entered the fray of journalism, they have brought with them the M&E philosophy inherited from their work with NGOs and the international development field. In turn, the livelihoods of nonprofit newsrooms have become increasingly linked to their ability to collect and report meaningful metrics of impact. Unsurprisingly, the Gates and Knight Foundations remain at the forefront of this movement. In 2011, Dan Green, the head of Gates’s aforementioned Strategic Media Partnerships program, convened journalists, editors, social scientists, and media grantees to share and strategize tools and methodologies for measuring impact. These sessions resulted in the publication of ``Deepening Engagement for Lasting Impact: A Framework for Measuring Media Performance & Results.”21The report offers a comprehensive guide for media makers facing the onus of impact, breaking the process of assessing it into four parts:
Closely following the framework of results-based management, the report
instructs media grantees to set goals, define a target community,
measure engagement, and ultimately, demonstrate impact. And yet, while
this four-step process for measuring impact may appear simple enough,
difficulty arises in its implementation. The report suggests the use of
custom surveys, interviews with stakeholders, and analysis of data from
disparate sources. These are tools that even the largest media
organizations struggle to utilize correctly, let alone small nonprofit
newsrooms. Many of the report’s proposed methodologies—like using Klout
for measuring influential audience members—now appear outdated, even
three years after publication. In sum, while comprehensive, the report
ultimately did more to confuse and overwhelm its audience than it did to
crystallize a direction forward.
Beyond these issues, the “Deepening Engagement for Lasting Impact” report had no response to the problem of scale. By this, we mean the challenge of creating tools and methodologies for measuring impact, which can be applied to more than a single project. Many of the organizations we interviewed for this study struggled with the time and energy required to properly measure their impact. This effort was made all the more frustrating when different foundations asked for different metrics or to report them in different formats. To address this issue, the Gates and Knight Foundations made a 3.25-million-dollar grant in 201322to the USC Annenberg School of Communication to found the Media Impact Project (MIP).23of its mission is the promise of “developing processes and tools needed to implement media impact measurement frameworks.” This promise is manifested primarily in the Media Impact Project Measurement System, which has similar goals to NewsLynx.24web and social media analytics, and qualitative data into a unified framework for application in a multitude of contexts (the authors of this study have consulted MIP on their work in this domain). While the system has yet to be released, if successful it could be a significant step forward in scaling media impact measurement. The Media Impact Project differs from NewsLynx in that it anticipates outsiders devoting resources to studying a news organization’s operations.