Economy Story serves as hub for public media economy collaboration

Katie Donnelly

Both the proliferation of new platforms and the shrinking pool of funding for media outlets has driven a boom in collaborative journalism projects, which combine the strengths, skills, and resources of the partners in order to increase the depth of coverage and reach new audiences. Last year, public media organizations successfully collaborated in covering the election. This year, they've turned their attention to the economy.

A CPB-funded coalition of public media organizations is working towards providing comprehensive, wide-ranging coverage of the economy from local, national, and global perspectives. Project partners include: NPR, The NewsHour, PBS, PRX, PRI's The World, American Public Media's Marketplace, Nightly Business Report, Youth Radio/Youth Media International, Capitol News Connection, Public Interactive, WNYC, and KQED. This project moves beyond last year's election project by adding new partners (such as Youth Radio), and by focusing heavily on the broadcast component in addition to online widgets.

According to Pat Harrison, President and CEO of CPB: "We are pleased to build on the success of last year's election collaboration. Public service media has a long and distinguished record as a trusted source of information and reliable service to communities throughout our nation, and now we are working together in new ways to have even more impact."

One PRX-created site, EconomyStory.org, serves as a central hub for showcasing the tools and resources developed by partner organizations. (Internally, the partners are sharing information via a site called the Knowledge Network.) I recently spoke with Laura Hertzfeld, Managing Editor of EconomyStory.org, who described the project. She notes that the site's functions are multifold: it serves as a central spot to showcase and explain the work of the collaborators, it examines how current events relate to the collaboration, and it addresses the gap between local and national coverage on the economic crisis. "Public media does two things really well," explains Hertzfeld. "First, it's good at looking at data and analyzing data and second, it's good at telling great personal, human-interest stories. Economy Story is working to connect those two things."

In connecting the data with personal stories, Economy Story provides a concise, yet comprehensive overview of news items and the work of partner organizations. For example, recent blog posts include coverage of the economics of the California wildfires, the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and a new local currency in Brooklyn. Another post consists of an interview with The Online NewsHour's Patchwork Nation project director, Dante Chinni, about the recent growth of weapons sales in some parts of the country.

Economy Story effectively bolsters the work of partner organizations, especially NPR and The NewsHour, who are leading the collaboration. NPR is training groups of fellows in economy "bootcamps" through their year long News Economic Training Project. Selected station reporters attend one of three week long training sessions at NPR West with Supervising Editor Jason DeRose, where they work on producing high quality, economy-related broadcasts. Once the fellows return to their member stations, they participate in several months of online and phone-based training.

For more information on this project, see this video interview with DeRose from Economy Story:

The Online NewsHour is working on different kind of reporting project with their mapping project on the Patchwork Nation site. Created by the Christian Science Monitor during the lead-up to the presidential election, Patchwork Nation has teamed up with The Online NewsHour and local public broadcasting stations in order to expand the range of communities and topics covered. According to the project's website, "Patchwork Nation is a reporting project that aims to explore what is happening in the United States by examining different kinds of communities over time. The effort divides America's 3,141 counties into 12 community types based on certain demographic characteristics, such as income level, racial composition, employment and religion." The project relies on input from citizen bloggers in each community, and users are encouraged to write articles, upload videos, and submit photos to the Patchwork Nation Flickr group.

For more information about Patchwork Nation, see this video interview with Lee Banville, Editor-in-Chief of The Online NewsHour, from Economy Story:

In addition to Economy Story's ongoing coverage, there is still plenty to watch for from partner organizations in the coming months. For example, PBS will be launching an economy-related video widget this fall, and NPR has two more groups of fellows to train: one in October and one in January. The grant that supports these projects is scheduled to run through May 2010, but it is likely that some of the projects will continue after that point. According to Hertzfeld, "While the focus is on the economic crisis, the need to tell the story of the economy is not going to go away. Even if we're in a great place with the economy, there is still going to be room for covering these kinds of issues."

Will there be more large-scale public media collaborations in the future? It appears that this may be a new model for public media, as online tools are making joint production across geographical boundaries easier and easier. Curated sites like Economy Story are crucial components in such projects, as they highlight and expand upon the work of partner organizations, moving beyond simple aggregation and revealing deeper connections, among public media outlets and the varied communities they serve.

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