the reality tunnel

I use a lot of technology and end up having a lot of unused or broken electronics and I have to figure out what to do with them.  The 44th Ward is having a electronics recycling pickup day on September 11, 2010.  This is what the alderman had to say about it in an e-mail blast:

On Saturday, September 11, our office, in conjunction with PC Rebuilders and Recyclers, will be conducting an electronic recycling pickup day. Anytime before 8am, residents can place electronic equipment in front of their homes to be picked up and taken to a recycling facility. Items to be collected include computers and computer equipment, TVs, DVD Players, VCRs, MP3 players, video equipment, and mobile phones. Additionally, residents can drop off electronic recyclables on this date between the hours of 8am and noon at the 44th Ward Streets and Sanitation office (1501 W. School St.).

I go to school at Northwestern University who also has an e-waste recycling program for students.  The city also has a drop-off facility at 1150 N. North Branch Street.  But, if you have functioning computers, I think the best place to donate them would be FreeGeek Chicago, a “not-for-profit community organization that recycles used computers and parts to provide functional computers, education, internet access and job skills training to those who want them.”

While it’s probably better to recycle computers than to send them to the landfill, I just saw a photo essay in the New York Times Magazine that showed the reality of what happens to e-waste at one site in Ghana.

Additional information

• More information about the 44th Ward Electronics Collection Day
• iCal file for the event

Photo by Mosman Council via Flickr using a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Me this week

Last week, I talked with Rhonda Jones-Gillespie, news editor at the Chicago Defender and I feel like I need to follow up with her.  It wasn’t until after our conversation that I realized why there seemed to be a disconnect around some of my questions.  While the Defender does report about African-American communities in Chicago, a big part of what they do, and what I didn’t really get, is ground city and national news stories in the African American experience in Chicago.  While I’ve been most interested in looking at how a story local to one community might connect with a broader audience, I’ve overlooked the opposite, but equally important, trajectory.  It’s one that journalists have been doing for a long time (though perhaps less so as news organizations become more resource bound) – taking a story and picking out the most important aspects for a local audience or looking at a broader policy’s impact on a particular community.

This week, I  was finally able to sit down with Icoi Johnson and Samuel Vega, the recipients of WBEZ’s Prizker Fellowship, which I had written about previously.  I found the fellows’ backgrounds and  outlooks to be pretty different, which was interesting and probably a good thing for WBEZ.  Vega, who is from Humboldt Park and seemed pretty involved in the community offered some interesting insight into WBEZ’s bureau in the neighborhood.  Vega said he  had noticed the storefront bureau, but had never been inside it until he toured it as part of his training for the fellowship.  He said it often appeared closed and that he was more familiar with the reporter who runs the bureau because of his coverage of events in Humboldt Park.  Vega’s anecdote indicates that connecting with different news  communities may be a little more complicated than simply setting up shop.

Coffee shop newsrooms – a cool idea but you have to pick the right shop

Setting up "bureaus" in coffee shops could help reporters connect with communities. But they have to pick the right one. GOOGLE STREET VIEW

Perhaps a better approach might be the coffee shop newsroom experiments that Poynter wrote about extensively at the beginning of this month.  Placing a reporter in an already trafficked space like a coffee shop may make reporters more accessible to the general public than a space exclusive to the news organization.  Some of the benefits of putting reporters or “newsrooms” in coffee shops seem pretty cool: more transparency/accountability, more audience understanding of the reporting process, developing new sources, getting new framings for stories or new dimensions for stories of which the reporter is already aware and recruiting citizen journalists.

This week I had my own experience with reporting and coffee shops.  I often work in coffee shops because I find them more convenient, and often less distracting than heading down to the Medill Newsroom.  While I use them primarily for convenience, they can still be a good way to connect with sources.  However, you have to go to the right coffee shop.  In reporting a story about LGBTQA youth of color in Boystown and a parking policy proposed by some residents designed to deter the youth, I did a lot of writing in Lakeview coffee shops.  I usually went to one close to my house a little east of Boystown or one close to Boystown but seemingly catering to a more particular customer demographic.  I liked the coffee shops I chose because they were locally owned and independent, there was interesting art on the wall and employees sometimes seemed like they were hanging out with friends or family as much as they were serving customers, creating a casual, comfortable atmosphere.

But, because they were somewhat more expensive and closed around 10 p.m., they didn’t really attract customers who were young people of color coming to hang out in the neighborhood.  The night I spent writing at the Starbucks at the corner of Belmont Avenue and Clark Street, a wide range of customers came in, including folks who could have been sources for my story.  While I could have gone out on the streets searching for people who could tell me their experience of coming to the neighborhood, a common thread in what youth I had interviewed told me is that they often feel profiled by police and neighborhood residents.  Both residents and youth described sidewalk confrontations that escalated and didn’t lead to a productive dialog.  As a reporter, I didn’t want to contribute to these dynamics. Spaces like coffee shops are important for reporting across dynamics like the ones in Boystown because they’re more neutral.  People from a variety of backgrounds can be on equal footing in the coffee shop as patrons and engaged in the same activities, like working on a laptop.  Had I spent the entire quarter working at that Starbucks, I might have been able to meet some sources with a good insight into the dynamic in a way that developed out of a more organic conversation, over music or helping someone reach a power outlet) rather than cornering people on the street.  Also, the public nature of the coffee shop could have attracted other people into the conversation, adding multiple perspectives to the reporting and perhaps even bridging the resident/visitor divide.

My experience with diversity and neighborhood coffee shops may be more universal.  Kim Feller, author of “Wrestling With Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino“, wrote about diversity and coffee shop clientèle on the Colorlines website:

While there are still funky independents eking out a living on the retail margins, most coffeehouses and designer roasters are niche markets, like purveyors of artisan cheeses, hand-painted T-shirts and limited-edition sneakers. They appeal to those on the trendy, cutting edge and survive by exclusivity—by pleasing a small, loyal and financially privileged. Starbucks, on the other hand, has been able to risk expansion from urban business cores and upscale suburbs into more modest settings, where it often provides the only meeting place that is neither a noisy fast-food restaurant nor a bar and that is often surprisingly multiracial.

Mosques and SEO

In terms of stories that sit across a cultural divide, nothing’s been bigger, or representative of journalism’s struggles to bridge those gaps, than reporting about the controversy over plans for a Muslim community center near the site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.  One idea that’s likely inflamed the debate is the use of the phrase “ground zero mosque” in the media, which suggests, incorrectly, that the community center is being constructed at the site of the former towers.  Mark Coddington at Nieman Labs has a good rundown of what a number of media critics have been saying about the use of this term.  While some blame cable news, others point to SEO.  As a term gains traction with the public, online news websites have to choose between using an incorrect term or making their content more difficult to find.  Coddington wrote:

Poynter ethicist Kelly McBride zeroed in on that idea of search-engine optimization, noting that the AP is being punished for their stand against the term “ground zero mosque” by not appearing very highly on the all-important news searches for that phrase. In order to stay relevant to search engines, news organizations have to continue using an inaccurate term once it’s taken hold, she concluded. In response, McBride suggested pre-emptively using factchecking resources to nip misconceptions in the bud. “Now that Google makes it impossible to move beyond our distortions — even when we know better — we should be prepared,” she said.

Coddington also pointed out that Online Journalism Review’s Brian McDermott pinpointed our news consumption patterns as the culprit for the proliferation of incorrect terms for things.  As we move more quickly from media to media, terms like “ground zero mosque” have more sticking power than Park51 or the Cordoba Center.

The tough choice of deciding between content discovery and accuracy is the same one I wrote about regarding the phrase “sissy bounce” and New Orleans artists’ distaste for the term.  In a pretty interesting, but unrelated thread, Anthony Neal, a scholar who studies Black popular culture, posted some tracks from New Orleans in the 1960s that refer to a dance called “The Sophisticated Cissy.”  Still, even if the term “sissy” may have some interesting connections to New Orleans musical history, it’s important to remember that contemporary artists don’t use the term to identify their work.

In the first of a two-part report about Chicago Public Radio’s Pritzker Fellowship, President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia describes the limitations of niche broadcasting, the journalism challenges that motivated the fellowships and his hopes for how the fellows will change WBEZ’s newsroom. In the second part, I plan to explore the perspectives of nominating community organizations and the fellows on reporting across boundaries.

Pritzker Fellows Icoi Johnson (left) and Samuel Vega (right) with Chicago Public Radio President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia. DONTE DEMONE TATUM

Reporting public affairs stories across a city as large and diverse as Chicago is no easy task, but new initiatives at Chicago Public Radio aim to meet this challenge.

President and Chief Executive Officer Torey Malatia said the station has established neighborhood bureaus and is providing journalism training to citizen journalists to both expand the station’s news coverage and audience and change the way its journalists report.

As a broadcaster, the station has always been tasked with serving its coverage area, Malatia said, but given the size and broad interests of this population, the station has chosen to target listeners who are active in their communities, grounded in the region and seeking information about what is happening around them. Even with this focus, the station’s potential audience spans a wide spatial and social geography, though its measured audience doesn’t necessarily reflect this.

“If you look at the makeup of our audience, it leans just dramatically towards white,” around 83 percent, Malatia said, “which the city does not reflect.”

While the information needs for other groups in the city could be served by media targeting ethnic or geographic audiences, Malatia said super-serving such niche audiences has drawbacks. “They tend to reinforce the particular views of the audience that they’re attracting,” Malatia said of specialized media coverage or politics and public affairs issues. While specialized media often provides complex, nuanced coverage of issues within a community, he said, coverage of issues crossing communities, or placing them in conflict, becomes over-simplified.

“People then perceive issues as confrontational, us versus them or difficulties that can’t be bridged,

Malatia said. “You have to somehow find a way to be a broadcaster that is offering a much more inclusive discourse.”

While the station has recognized this need and seeks diversity in its board of directors, management, staff and story selection, inclusive reporting hasn’t always been successful. Trying to understand its audience, the station hired a research firm to talk to people who fit the station’s profile of grounded and community-engaged, but didn’t listen. A frequent response, Malatia said, was that non-listeners found the station’s coverage to be problematic.

“They hit the heart of it right away by just saying we really didn’t know what we were talking about,” Malatia said, explaining that some non-listeners said even award-winning reporting only scratched the surface or didn’t reflect a community’s understanding of an issue.

“There’s nothing worse you can hear from an audience member than you’re just hitting kind of like the Cliff Notes of a story,” Malatia said, “You don’t want that.”

Malatia said this problem stems from a combination of human nature and the parameters of reporting.

“We’re coming from the assumption that, as human beings, we tend to know what is familiar,” Malatia said. “As professionals who are in journalism – which has a kind of rhythm and a kind of process to writing and delivering stories, deadlines, things like that – we tend to also lean towards those techniques that have yielded success in the past.”

As an example of this tendency, Malatia explained that a reporter covering a new story on a topic that the station has covered extensively in the past, such as public housing, may be inclined to contact the same official and expert sources that have been used for past stories.

“If you actually are thinking about it, there’s probably a hundred different ways to cover that story that you’re not going to think about when you’re under pressure to get something done,” Malatia said.

One strategy to break out of reporting patterns is storefront neighborhood bureaus in Englewood, Humboldt Park, West Ridge and Northwest Indiana. Malatia said by starting and ending their days at the neighborhood bureaus, reporters can more easily build relationships with the communities they’re covering.

Just as the station has moved to create a more accessible presence for its reporters in Chicago’s neighborhoods, it is also trying to bring community members into its newsroom. Starting at the beginning of July, Icoi Johnson and Samuel Vega began an intensive mentorship with an experienced reporter. Johnson and Vega are the first recipients of the Pritzker Fellowship, which is offered to those interested in reporting but who have no formal journalism training or experience. The recipients of the fellowship were selected from a pool of people nominated by Chicago-area nonprofit organizations. “Everybody was very excited about the pool of candidates,” Malatia said. Chicago Public Media plans to begin accepting nominations for the next group of fellows in March 2011.

Working toward producing a long-form, in-depth report, the Pritzker Fellows report stories and work with editors in a similar manner to interns from journalism schools, but at a faster pace, Malatia said. While one goal of the fellowship is to offer journalism training to future reporters, he said, he also hopes the fellows will change practices in the newsroom.

“We’ll not only be building journalists who have a very different perspective of how to handle a story, approach a story and what is worthy to be a story. We will also learn from them and expand our horizons about that too,” Malatia said. Journalists from diverse backgrounds, Malatia said, may know of key sources in their communities that a reporter from outside the community would overlook.

Malatia acknowledges that these efforts are an experiment. “We don’t know if it’s going to make a difference, but we just felt we needed to try,” he said. The station will evaluate the impact of the fellowship program by looking for audience demographic changes and polling non-listeners to see if their perceptions of the station have changed.

But evaluating the impact of journalism on communities is difficult, Malatia said. “Can you prove that journalism, even well-done, really makes a more informed citizenry that’s making better decisions? Only history can tell you whether the decisions are good or not. But I believe that and I think a lot of people do.”

Related links:

• Chicago Public Media’s press release about the Pritzker Fellows
• Information about applying for the fellowships

I’ve always wanted to know how to project “stencils” on walls or sidewalks, as a lot of clubs or businesses have started to do.  After a lot of knowledge from the Chicago New Media list, I found out that these projectors are called gobo projectors.  I also found out that IKEA sold an inexpensive version of such a projector called Isbrytare.  Jim Dennewill has a good rundown of the projector.

My impression is that IKEA no longer makes this product.  I’m wondering if there are any other ~$40 projectors that are currently in production.

Photo by Jim via Flickr.