In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, editor and co-founder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

PLN operates in a unique media environment, where the very act of distributing a magazine to their customers might first require winning a lawsuit. You see, their primary audience is made up of prisoners themselves. Prison Legal News is the longest-running publication put together with the help of people who are incarcerated, and since its first issue in 1990, it has become a critical resource for discussing issues facing these populations. It's an independent, monthly magazine that reviews and analyzes prisoner rights, court rulings, and news about prison issues. PLN focuses on state and federal U.S. prisons, as well as some international coverage. Paul himself has become a distinguished advocate on behalf of the U.S. population. Asked whether we could blog his talk, Paul responded, "Secrecy is the antithesis of publishing."

From Newsletter to National Publication

Prison Legal News started as a newsletter, in 1990, covering only Washington state's prisons. It was 10 pages and hand-typed for 75 subscribers. It launched into the publishing world with a $50 budget. The organization was completely volunteer-run until 1996. The first run of six issues ended up becoming a 22-year, 224-issue run (and still going). Some of their earliest subscribers are still with them -- a great sign for the publication's longevity, but a less great reflection of these subscribers' sentences.

PLN's perseverance has paid off: In 1990, there were 30 or 40 prisoners' rights news publications, but many have since ceased publishing. Prison Legal News has expanded its coverage as its subscriber base expanded. At one point, they realized they had more subscribers in California than in Washington, and that they had graduated to a national publication. Yet Paul considers himself one of the few people in print publishing these days who welcomes competition. He wishes there were other publications and institutions engaged in this work.

Prison Legal News is not light reading -- there's no horoscope, no advice column, just hard news and information. But that's what their customers want. An annual reader survey draws a 30-40% reader survey response, and the feedback is consistently asking for more useful information rather than lighter fare. There was a publication in the 1990s called "Prison Life," which covered prison life and the prison experience, and they were somehow surprised when they were unsuccessful, because prisoners would rather not read about this in their leisure time.

An expansion into book titles has focused on self-help and non-fiction reference books for prisoners, especially titles that aren't viable for traditional book publishers. Paul mentions books including "How to File a Lawsuit and Win," and books on hepatitis C (a dangerous health threat within the incarcerated population). There's great interest in books on health, including "Our Bodies, Ourselves," which Paul notes has been banned in some prison systems. They also provide "radical critiques of the criminal justice system", including edited volumes titled "The Celling of America," "Prison Nation" and
"Prison Profiteers." Paul notes that the books reach a different audience than the magazine, that there are people who prefer reading the long form of arguments.

Who Reads Prison News?

Prison Legal News is a niche publication. It's not trying to reach the whole incarcerated population of the U.S. It's targeting activists and lifers interested in improving prisons. Paul said they want to reach the activists, the 1% of people who make change. Men are 95% of the U.S. prison population, and make up a higher percentage of PLN's readership compared with women. Paul attributed this to the fact that women generally receive shorter sentences, and their subscribers tend to have long sentences ahead of them. Paul has found that it's the people who are in prison for a long period of time that make things happen. These are the lifers, the ones filing the lawsuits and organizing other prisoners. These are people who have accepted that prison is their life now, and who are working to do something to improve it.

There are around 7,000 subscribers to the print publication, but the reach is much broader. Reader surveys suggest that copies reach more than 10 prisoners each -- Paul estimates a readership of 80,000-90,000 readers. Additionally, the website gets around 100,000 visitors per month. The subscriber base includes judges, court officers, lawyers, journalists and academics, including Noam Chomsky, who Paul told us proudly was one of the first subscribers. All the big investment banks subscribe, Paul told us, because they follow news on the private prison industry. "I was happy when Lehman Brothers went under, but we lost a subscriber," he said. Lehman Brothers had been one of the biggest bankrollers of the private prison industry, so it was a happy day when they went down.

Publication Litigation

A big focus these days is making sure the target audience in prisons can actually receive the magazine. This requires extensive litigation. Prison Legal News has obtained consent decrees in nine states, ordering state prisons to deliver the magazine. PLN is currently litigating in New York and Florida to enable subscribers to receive their publication, both the magazine and the books they publish.

Almost every state's prison system has censored and banned the magazine at one point or another, Paul told us. The organization has won nine lawsuits, receiving consent decrees that order state prison systems to deliver the publications. The bans are generally pretextual. They're bans based on postal rates used to deliver magazines, or whether prisoners are allowed to pay for the magazine from their trust accounts. Sometimes there are arbitrary blocks on sending publications to prisoners in certain types of custody. In Washington, PLN discovered they needed to become an "approved vendor" and had a very difficult time figuring out "who's brother-in-law we had to work with" to gain "approved vendor" status, Paul said.

It's not just PLN getting banned. In one case, in South Carolina, the American Civil Liberties Union had to sue when a prison banned all books except the Bible. These pretextual excuses can get pretty absurd -- Paul is currently facing an argument that the staples used to bind the magazine might be used as dangerous weapons. While we think it's funny, these are the issues PLN is forced to litigate (marshal the resources to sue the government, and win). "Think of every magazine held together by staples, delivered by mail. TIME, Newsweek. We're the only publisher in America who routinely challenges this censorship," he said.

Many of these rules are designed to prevent prisoners from having material to read, far beyond PLN's magazine. It would help if other American publishers would join in the fight to ensure publications are able to reach prison populations. When an Indiana judge upheld a ban on gay publications "Out" and "The Advocate," Paul asked the publishers to file suit, because it would stand up better in court than a suit from a prisoner. But publishers aren't seeking the prison population. "They tell us that they're not part of our targeted advertising demographic," he said. For PLN, the core audience is prisoners, and there's no point in publishing if the core audience can't get it. In recognition of this, they realized that funding staff attorney positions was a priority.

I noted that some critics of PLN have argued that it's as much a litigation platform as it is a publication. Paul countered that "our initial goal was always just to publish the magazine. But we got to to the point where we're just consuming ever greater amounts of organizational resources just getting the magazine into prisons." Paul estimated that he can spend as much as 40% of his time focusing on being able to distribute the publication, rather than producing and editing it. "The editor should be worried about being (an) editor, not worrying about why one prison system or another is censoring content," he said. For there to be any litigation, the government has to illegally censor the magazine, then PLN has to sue, and then they have to win. "If you don't like the consequences, don't break the law," Paul said.

Isolation from Society

Restrictions on what can be sent in and out of prison harm PLN in another way: It makes it very hard to hear from the incarcerated. In some prisons, prisoners can no longer send or receive information beyond what fits on a postcard. Other layers of draconian restriction include rules that postcard communication has to be in ink, can't use a label, etc. These mechanisms tend to be arbitrary and are designed, Paul argued, to prevent prisoners from having communication to and from the outside world. His organization has challenged a couple of these successfully, with a couple more pending. Paul told us that they are trying to nip this trend in the bud before it gets entrenched.

"Part of the goal is to get prisoners information. But conversely, we want to hear from them," he said. The bulk of the magazine's content is provided by contributing writers, who are mostly prisoners, some of whom have been working with PLN for over a decade. In the hopes of ensuring widespread distribution of the information, PLN doesn't demand exclusive publishing rights -- and people are free to copy and disseminate the information.

This is an area of close overlap with one of the Center for Civic Media's projects, "Between the Bars." BTB is a blogging platform for prisoners that gets around the lack of Internet access by scanning and publishing letters to a blog, and then mailing comments back to the authors on postcards. In addition to helping the incarcerated publish to the web, it helps the rest of the U.S. population by ensuring that we are able to hear from these voices, who comprise 1% of our entire populace.

Prison News Online

The Internet has greatly improved the visibility of Prison Legal News. Paul told us he conducts 3-4 interviews a week about the publication and the issues it raises. He's fluent in Spanish and noted that there's a great deal of interest in these issues from programs in Colombia and Venezuela. One of his associate gives interviews in Russian media, which seems to have an endless appetite for stories about the U.S. prison system. Some have observed that the U.S. prison system must be pretty bad when the Russians enjoy making fun of it.

The online presence of the magazine has allowed PLN to build a publication library online, with more than 6,000 documents available in its Brief Bank. "We've got the biggest, and I would say, the best, repository of prison documents online," Paul said. As a result, PLN generally shows up in Google's first page for prison-related queries, except sometimes when the "Prison Break" program is on TV.

Prisons can be a bit of a timeless place, said Paul, where the equipment you see is 50-60 years old. PLN's print publishing business still thrives here (advertising levels for the print magazine are actually going up), and web publishing is almost nonexistent. PLN hasn't figured out how to make money online, like other publishers. Its content performs poorly with online advertising. On the site, the news content is free, legal content is paid, and these fees cover basic staff time put into the site. Advertising and subscription income and book distribution bring in about the same amount. Payroll is the biggest expense. They get some foundation funding and donations, and when all of this revenue is cobbled together, it's enough to move forward.

Staying Human

The acts of reading and writing are core to helping prisoners maintain their humanity, especially when everything else in these punitive systems is working to degrade that humanity. A publication like PLN lets prisoners connect with others, when the rest of the system is designed to isolate and alienate.

Paul is wary of the dehumanization that takes place before genocides and in prisons. We lose sight of the people in prison. We need to keep in mind that they're someone's father, someone's son, regardless of what they've done. When someone's been murdered in a prison, it's almost always that person's mother who calls PLN.

Paul closed his presentation by noting that he's now 264 issues into this project, and that since 1990, "everything to do with the criminal justice system, by objective or subjective standard, has gotten worse."

Localore is a new $2 million national competition produced by the Boston-based Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), with $1 million in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to catalyze producer-led innovation teams at local stations. Here at Zeega, this is particularly exciting because we'll be teaming up with several of the winners as creative technology partners. (For more info about Zeega, an open-source platform for creating interactive projects and documentaries, see this and this.)

To be paired with producers, stations had to produce a video to describe what made them the perfect hub for innovation. In a pretty amazing showing, 61 stations across the nation -- from Native American reservations to statewide networks to major market radio and television outlets -- added their profile to the Localore Station Runway. More than 130 producers applied with their ideas for Localore projects. The winners will be announced on February 1.

For us, these projects will play a leading role in defining much of what Zeega becomes during this early stage. Our partnership with Localore matches the strategy we've envisaged for ourselves from the beginning -- we believe firmly that great storytelling and storytellers should drive the design and development process. As opposed to traditional software development that begins with generic specs, we're committed to building out Zeega's core features through real projects tied to real producers, communities and users. And importantly, as opposed to just ending up with a bespoke mix of technology experiments after Localore ends, these projects will make a lasting contribution to the tools for public media. There will be a set of content-driven features in Zeega that will be made available for other producers and a set of rigorously documented open-source code that can be further expanded.

The Localore initiative is an outgrowth of MQ2, the AIR-driven effort that first funded Mapping Main Street, thus planting the seeds for Zeega. The Localore teams are tasked with bringing their ingenuity to blend digital and broadcast technology, and invent new forms of journalism that will appeal beyond public broadcasting's traditional core audience.

To complement this technological innovation, the initiative is based in specific geographic communities in order to deeply enrich local reporting and community engagement. This push for localism comes at a time when commercial station owners in the U.S. continue to divest their investment in local talent and stations.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, "It is the artist's job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience." For us, it's about searching for means to create new possibilities with what currently exists, making it, and in the process, often subverting the intentions imagined by a technology's original creators.

We'll be back with more at the beginning of February when we can share the winners!

Recently, I was dismayed to see Grindr described in a Slate post as a "gay hookup app." I was dismayed not because it's a wholly inaccurate description, but because its an incomplete one. It is true that gay men, as a community, are connected in broadest terms by a shared sexuality, and make no mistake, Grindr beautifully addresses this undeniably predominant "gay hookup" use case. But as a gay man who's had this particular "gay hookup app" installed on his iPhone for the past year and a half, I can tell you that because of the idiosyncrasies of what it means to be a "member of the gay community," there is more going on here than gay men just connecting to have sex.

For those who are not gay, don't have a "gay hookup app" installed on their smartphone, or don't own a smartphone at all, there are are a few things I've noticed about Grindr that might inspire digital entrepreneurs and community builders -- especially those working with diverse, local communities.

Usability

No app presents a truly flawless user experience, and bugs plague even the most sought-after apps. Lately, Grindr seems less prone to crashing than similar apps on my phone, and its interface behaves how you would expect and makes the act of exchanging text and other media dead simple. The app's interface is also to the point. When you fire it up, there are no menus -- just men: square photos with screen names, laid out in a grid and as a default ordered by distance from your location. When someone sends you a message, his photo moves to the top of the grid. There are plenty of extras features to help you organize and keep track of your favorite users as well as to share photos and location, but Grindr knows they are exactly that -- extras. The Grindr experience is such that a user can comfortably spend time there and connect with the community for whatever purpose suits him.

The community drives what it does

Grindr's simplicity makes it easy for users to guide their own experience with the application. I can quickly flip through nearby users and start up a conversation with anyone, in just a few swipes of the finger.

I first installed Grindr on my phone out of curiosity when I lived in downtown Phoenix, around the same time construction was completed on a Sheraton a few blocks away. The first conversation was with a convention visitor in town with his partner: "Hi Cody, where is the best gay-friendly restaurant within walking distance?" Those first conversations were part chat, part concierge. Hardly the "gay hookup" use case. It was one member of the community helping out another. In spite of whatever reputation of gay men Grindr might have, the app doesn't force users to interact in some seedy, stereotypical way -- if offers an open format where users can chat, meet up, and everything in between.

Embrace overlapping communities

Wherever we are physically situated, we're part of a community -- people who live near one another, work together, go to school together. We are more connected to some communities than others, but for pretty much all of us, those communities overlap, and one reason Grindr is compelling is its ability to bring together the overlapping communities of sexuality, geography, interests, etc.

I'll confess to finding it highly fascinating to open up Grindr during my lunch break at work, where I can watch those communities overlap before my eyes as I see co-workers and baristas at my favorite coffee shop pop up on the screen. I can understand how people might flinch at the idea of opening up an app like Grindr near one's workplace during business hours, but there is something powerful about realizing someone has something in common with you, even if it is your boss or subordinate.

Unless your profile contains particularly scandalous information, what's the harm in using tools to discover and interact with people with whom you share multiple communities, whether the thing you have in common is your sexuality, the place you work, a fondness for bowling, or all three?

A quick scan of phrases in Grindr profile descriptions further demonstrates how tools like this are unique in fleshing out opportunities to connect: Gaymer. Gay professional. Come Occupy Seattle with me. Need gym buddy at downtown 24 Hour Fitness. These are expressions of self-identity, but they're also calls to connect with other communities that overlap in the gay community. Imagine if you were a gay person in Seattle who loved video games (gaymer!) -- here's an application that helps you connect with not just people nearby, and not just gay people nearby, but gay people nearby who are also gamers -- Grindr is a particularly compelling application that is worth your time.

It's that kind of slick, community-driven user experience that greatly contributes to Grindr's success. Grindr and apps like it can always strive to do an even better job of connecting members, and the challenge is finding ways to improve the ease of drilling down to these overlapping communities without sacrificing simplicity and ease-of-use.

So download the app and try to answer the question of how Grindr could accomplish that. Maybe your answer will help inspire the solution for your own wicked community-building challenge.

The Saturday morning plenary on Diversity was well-attended -- and as the moderator, I thank all who got up early to come out. The panel was knowledgeable about the role of minorities in the early days of digital media, innovators who are making waves now, and why diversity is important -- even if any one of us can go out and start the next Politico or Huffington Post. Get a recap here or on the National Association of Black Journalists Digital Task Force blog.

Of course, there were the usual questions about just how to find minority content producers or other employees for digital companies. For younger ones, the student newsroom at ONA was a good place to start. For more experienced and executive-level digital media types, all you have to do is tap into the digital pioneers from BET.com, AsianAvenue, LatinFlava, 360Hiphop.com, the Baltimore Afro American Online, Black Voices or dozens of other companies started by people of color over the past 15 years. We've been here all along, even if none of the attendees at the Diversity plenary -- save Benet Wilson from the NABJ Digital Task Force blog -- could correctly answer a pop quiz on diversity history in digital media.

Or just check the ever-growing list, maintained by Emma Carew, of expert digital media people who also happen to be people of color. Or check out the NewMe Accelerator for diverse companies for partnerships and advice.

Kudos go out to co-chairs Michelle Johnson, Teresa Hanafin and John Davidow for their attitudes toward inclusion.

Diversifying sessions

"We really pushed to make sure that ONA 11 was inclusive. From the keynote and a follow-up panel discussion on diversity issues, to the makeup of the sessions and speakers, we were on a serious mission to make sure that women and people of color were represented and felt welcome at the conference," Johnson said. "I have to credit Program Chair Teresa Hanafin of Boston.com for getting the track captains on board and seeking help in diversifying the sessions. They reached out to everyone, including me, for contacts and it showed.

"I have to admit that I stopped coming to ONA for a few years because I didn't feel particularly comfortable there. That's ancient history now. And I'm hopeful that this is just the beginning."

Hanafin said that diversifying the sessions was one of her goals as the programming chair. "I told each of my track captains that I wanted to severely limit the number of all-white sessions and emphasized that throughout the process of choosing participants," she said. "It was a goal fully supported by the ONA staff as well, who made a lot of good suggestions to me.

"In addition, early on [co-chair Johnson] circulated the spreadsheet of people of color in the digital space, which was very helpful. And she also invited her NABJ, NAHJ (National Association of Hispanic Journalists), AAJA (Asian American Journalists Association), and NLGJA (National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association) buddies to her academic meetup," she said.

The numbers speak for themselves: "Not counting the J-Camp sessions with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube (those companies decided who they wanted to send), there were 30 keynotes and panels on Friday and Saturday," Hanafin said. "Of those, 21 had at least one person of color or international speaker at the head table. I wanted it to be higher, but I have to admit I was thrilled to see the diversity and proud of what we were able to accomplish. "

reaching out to regulars

The UNITY journalism groups played their part in making sure they had representation as well. NABJ this summer did a great job of reaching out to ONA regulars to infuse its annual convention with digital sessions thanks to program chair Sybril Bennett, and the group returned the favor in Boston. A couple dozen NABJ members were there as attendees and speakers. There was a good turnout of NAHJ folks as well.

Sam Diaz, former board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists who was on the Diversity plenary panel, said it was his first ONA but won't be his last and he's looking forward to the group coming to his territory in San Francisco next year. I hope more members of the Native American Journalists Association can regularly come, because many native people are still cut off from Internet and wireless access and that should not stand.

While there is still work to do to make sure our digital media organizations are inclusive, and lots of work to make sure all Americans are represented on the pages of our media sites, as Dori Maynard pointed out at the session, this ONA was definitely a great start.

Now, if we can only get the ONA board to give Webbmedia's Amy Webb a larger (and cooler) room for her future presentations, life would be good indeed.

This approach couldn't be more evident than in the case of two recent Civic Media Sessions, videos of which you'll see below. Our sessions, spread throughout the semester, are conversations around civic media topics we're just now defining, including the coalescing of the field itself around information needs, geographic communities, and replicable, sustainable technical innovation.

"Design for Vulnerable Populations" was a session we held last month, and it addressed the fact that designers of new media -- web-based or otherwise -- seem to have in mind an idealized user, someone who's hungry for news, is digitally connected, and feels one technical solution shy of changing the world.

Sadly, that idealized user hardly exists outside of the New York Times' "Weekender" ad. In fact, civic media innovations, to be truly civic, have to work for the marginalized, poor, the ill -- even for the imprisoned. So "Design for Vulnerable Populations" was moderated by our center's own Charlie DeTar, creator of the prison blogging platform Between the Bars, and featured speakers critiquing how we bring environmental justice, health and sustainability into the design of cutting-edge media tools.

Design for Vulnerable Populations

And then earlier this month, Zuckerman moderated "Civic Disobedience," with Clay Shirky, Zeynep Tufekci and Sami ben Gharbia. Zuckerman addressed a key set of questions: What accounts for the rise of networked revolt in the Arab world and elsewhere, and how is it succeeding in some places while failing in others?

Civic Disobedience

We're awfully proud of the intelligence brought to bear on these often-overlooked but critical issues. So as this spring semester wraps up, be sure to sign up for our center's updates to hear what we're planning for the fall.

Long live journalism!

And so it goes as we continue on through the process of Schumpeter's gale of creative destruction. With pay walls that come and go and come again (or hacked with four lines of code) and linkbacks ever so briefly taking it on the chin, how is it that we continue to misunderstand the business of the news? We've got to get long past the "what, me tweet?" debate and must move on to a diversity of news-telling technologies that serve communities across the globe.

News needs new monetization models; to get there, we must broaden our nets to find the keen minds to shake things up. Yet literally half our population faces the closed-door treatment. According to a study from Kauffman Foundation, only 4% to 9% of venture capital has gone to women entrepreneurs. That's right. So if you're a woman who has been successful in this business, you have boot-strapped, dodged, darted, borrowed, begged and ultimately innovated past anyone's wildest imagination. But, sadly, what this really means is that some of the smartest among us are simply not being fully utilized because they lack meaningful backing.

Bringing Women to the Table

Contrast this to Aileen Kleiner's recent TechCrunch post, Why Women Rule The Internet. A rare female VC who works at Sand Hill firm Perkins Caufield & Byers, Kleiner's myriad of statistics show that it is simply foolhardy to ignore what women can bring to the entrepreneurial table.

I was personally surprised to learn this is the reality that I am facing. Until now, my experience has been very different, including watching several of my female college pals ending up as high-powered Hollywood executives. One went from sleeping on my couch and working as a temp secretary to ultimately becoming president of a major cable television network. Whatever the difficulties of that path, the fact that there were others around her on a similar journey had to make it feel less impossible.

Unfortunately, I haven't enjoyed a similar playing field. Our second place prize on our business plan was fantastic until you consider that of the 27 teams in the competition, I was the only woman. Often, developers or other potential interactive clients will send emails addressed solely to him, even after I have explained that I am an equal partner. In another setting, I was sent a survey intended to induce camaraderie by asking us to select which superhero would win a battle -- except the list did not include a single hero of my gender. The jokes which can make me uncomfortable sit easy with all the guys in the room. And that's really the truth of it -- it is nearly always all guys in the room.

Teaching, Funding, Encouraging Women

So how do we shift the current unfortunate paradigm facing women behind technology startups?

• The decision-makers need to be made aware of such an incredible disparity. It needs to be talked about loudly and frequently. I have had men and women I respect become astonished when they learn of the inequality. That knowledge might help create sensitivity in this important arena.

• We need to encourage the women behind journalism-oriented startups. This past month, the International Women's Media Foundation gave three $20,000 awards to women-run digital startups with significant sustainability models. Similarly, the McCormick Foundation's New Media Women Entrepreneurs organization is in its fourth year of awarding $12,000 to female-headed start ups. Girls in Tech is also trying to help support and organize women innovators in general, hoping to offer leads and support.

• We must encourage girls to start learning computer skills early. When our elementary school offered an after-school class for kindergarteners teaching simple creation of a computer game, only one girl was enrolled alongside nearly a dozen boys. That was a decision made by her parents and they were sadly unique in their foresight. Computers and gaming must stop being vilified (that is for another post), and we must break up the all-male computer engineering classroom so that girls are no longer the anomaly in tech.

• We must shift the numbers at business schools. Men still dominate the MBA landscape even as business schools are making a valiant effort.

• Finally, we must somehow teach women to ask for it, whatever it may be. In a disturbing blog post in the New York Times by Joanne Lipman, the former deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal and the founding editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine, she wrote, "First, we can begin by telling girls to have confidence in themselves, to not always feel the need to be the passive 'good girl.' In my time as an editor, many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion? I'll tell you. Exactly...zero."

So I'll start the ball rolling and head for Sand Hill Road. I hope to report back to you soon that the VCs I visited said "yes" to my request. I am confident Stroome is ready for that kind of growth.

Shelbyville project kicks off with a series of "Welcoming" videos

Chances are you haven't yet heard of Shelbyville, a small rural community in Tennessee. If not, then you're probably also unaware of the upcoming "Welcome to Shelbyville" documentary or the online project that is forging a pilot, or prototype, for communities to tell and share their own stories. So let me share my initial impressions of this remarkable, ambitious effort.

Last Monday I was lucky enough to be a part of a "digital brain trust" of 20 progressive media and non-profit representatives at the Bay Area Video Coalition headquarters. The event was convened by Active Voice, a San Francisco-based non-profit that uses film, television, and multimedia to spark social change. We spent two hours reviewing the Shelbyville Multimedia project and offering ideas about how to finish it out and what to do differently next time.

What is the Shelbyville Project?

Active Voice conceived the vision of building a story-driven web platform and brought together a team consisting of Free Range Studios, a creative services firm, and documentary filmmaker Kelly Whalen, who produced webisodes for the project. Over much of the past year, the parties combined efforts to create the ShelbyvilleMultimedia.org website and "Welcome to Shelbyville", a documentary directed and produced by Kim A. Snyder that will air on the PBS series "Independent Lens" on May 24.

The Shelbyville project is a series of stories about immigrant integration. One of Active Voice's objectives was to introduce people to Welcoming America, an umbrella organization that works to promote mutual respect and cooperation between foreign-born and U.S.-born residents. It is overseeing "welcoming" initiatives in 14 states, including Welcoming Tennessee.

"They opened doors for us in Shelbyville and introduced us to other affiliates, who hosted community 'sneak previews' in October," said Active Voice operations director Daniel Moretti.

Active Voice approached Irina Lee, the creator of First Person American, about working on a pilot based on the Welcoming Stories theme.

The idea, Moretti said, was "to combine FPA's aesthetic and authenticity with Active Voice's need to attract user-contributed stories. We're hoping to raise funds to keep going, to both send Irina to other cities, and to commission other artists to create new Welcoming Stories formats."

You can see the webisodes about the project -- produced by Active Voice in association with the BeCause Foundation -- on Shelbyville Multimedia's Vimeo channel. You can also see some of the Welcoming Stories on the Tumblr site created by Active Voice and Free Range.

Positive Stories

The tone of the two sites is positive and uplifting.

As Moretti told us: "We didn't want to build an advocacy site but a site to help people take the next step by providing options for different levels of engagement."

While the project took a lens to the issue of immigration in rural Shelbyville, Tenn., Moretti pointed out: "We're media strategists, not immigrant integration specialists. We had a feeling that what was going on in Shelbyville would resonate with people in small towns and large cities across the country, and we're eager to help them connect to these issues in a human and nuanced way. But Welcoming America is doing this important work for the long haul, and we hope the website will be a great vehicle for them."

The story-driven web platform that Active Voice and Free Range developed, then, is not just to showcase webisodes, parts of a documentary or even the story of Shelbyville. Active Voice sees it as an early pilot of how other communities can tell their stories in a deep, meaningful but easy and lightweight way, with the focus on individuals' stories rather than forcing users to wade through a complex backstory.

If you're an educator, activist, or community organization that wants to engage on a deeper level and embed some of the webisodes on your own site or blog and invite conversations about the stories, head to the webisode discussion questions page.

The initiative's promise as a prototype

In my opinion, this is a superb initiative. I think it will attract considerable interest across a number of sectors: educators looking for meaningful materials to incorporate into curricula, community activists and cause organization folks interested in a promising new social change platform, and others.

The producers were wise to tap into an outside brain trust for a reality check at a critical juncture in the project -- two months before the documentary airs on national television.

Here are some reactions and ideas I tossed out or have thought of since -- some of which others echoed or built on:

• I love the non-linear aspect of the site and the stories that are built through each resident. Every "character" gets his or her own page, containing a profile, his or her webisodes, a brief quote and short bio. Nice. John Bruce of ForwardMapworks called it "transmedia," allowing the user to enter the story at multiple points.

• Also I love the focus on character arcs and interesting personalities, rather than loading visitors down with too many facts.

• I suggested holding a live online town hall in Shelbyville on the evening of May 24 to coincide with the national broadcast -- and to web stream it with LiveStream (another participant suggested CoverItLive) to enable both viewing and comments.

• I also suggested offering the webisodes as an ongoing weekly series on a national site or in a local publication to gain added visibility and traction -- maybe in Nashvillest, my favorite hyper-local web publication.

• And I suggested creating a strong call to action on the front page of Shelbyville Multimedia and to create a Welcoming Toolkit that would offer tools and resources to community activists and reformers.

• I would toss out the Shelbyville Multimedia logo and create a new one with the state of Tennessee as the backdrop while incorporating a dot to designate where, exactly Shelbyville is located -- the very first question everyone asks when they come to the site. And use it across all online properties.

• I think the project took a slight wrong turn with its initial branding. "Shelbyville Multimedia" doesn't convey the idea of community residents sharing their personal stories. (I will also add that some good URLs, like ShelbyvilleVoices.com, are still available.)

• As a result, it's difficult to tie the disparate elements of the project together. The team used WordPress as its still-in-progress web platform and a separate Tumblr site, with completely different branding, as a way for people to contribute their own stories. In the end, the Tumblr site seems to detract from the main site.

• The team also decided not to allow comments or conversations on the main site, chiefly because of issues regarding limited resources for moderation. I wouldn't have gone that way: I think you need to build in those capabilities as a fundamental part of any site that calls itself a community platform. Certainly conversations should be encouraged to bloom across independent sites and blogs, but the lack of a central "conversation hub" seems to swim against the tide in this era of interactivity, even if many of the conversations are happening elsewhere.

• As it is, that shortcoming can be ameliorated by adding a series of conversation widgets -- pulling from Twitter or outside blogs -- on the main site.

• Similarly, the fact that supporters who want to embed Shelbyville webisodes on their own sites cannot do so without obtaining permission in advance seems like a business decision forced on the team by traditional filmmakers concerned about control over digital rights. Certainly, there are tradeoffs and difficult choices that face project leaders when choosing nationally acclaimed filmmakers over untested documentarians who lean toward openness. But I sense that, for the next project, there are plenty of talented filmmakers and digital storytellers who prize sharing and creativity and are adept at producing high-quality visual stories.

Those reservations aside, Shelbyville Mutlimedia deserves kudos for pulling together an accomplished site in just a few months. It's an inspiring, rare, and possibly groundbreaking project that's worth your attention -- and perhaps a welcoming initiative in your own community.

What are your impressions? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

I heard privately from a dozen or so white digital media leaders who confessed that they often wondered why new media seemed to be getting off on the wrong foot when it comes to diversifying staffs at operations and speakers at conferences. And I heard from conference organizers who reported that they were redoubling their efforts to reach out to a more inclusive group.

Tiffany Shackelford, who was putting on a conference for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, for example, invited me to do the kickoff session on mobile at their digital conference in San Francisco at the end of January and had a very inclusive group of speakers over the weekend talkfest. The Online News Association reached out for that list that some of us put together back in 2009 and I am sure that the ONA's Boston conference this year will reflect America.

It is great to know that once presented with the problem and a solution -- like here is a list -- that people will try to do the right thing. But, of course, there is still much more work to be done in two areas: hiring at digital operations and getting many, many more newsy people of color to get into the digital game and getting them comfortable with the idea that new media, with all its messy talk of economics, is here to stay.

A lot has been written about the refusal of many major digital operations to disclose their diversity numbers, so I'm not going to get into that much today only to say that history has a way of repeating itself. So if these operations refuse to be inclusive they should be prepared for the consequences.

Innovation Issue

The other issue is innovation within the ranks of journalists of color, which was part of the December post but didn't get as much attention but needs to as planning gets under way for this summer's NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA and NAJA conferences. While it is nice to have the President or Boris Kodjoe speak at our conferences, it is more important to hear again and again from people who are leading the change in our industry and can show members how to survive this transition.

In January, I read with dismay a pretty heated discussion on the NABJ listserv about Arianna Huffington's and BET co-founder Sheila Johnson's plan to launch a black channel on Huffington Post. Some members questioned whether there should be a separate black section (and, later, a Latino section) rather than seamlessly and regularly integrating black and brown news and commentary into the main HuffPost. But the debate quickly devolved into the business model of operations such as HuffPost of supplementing their original work by linking to content at other operations rather than hiring an army of reporters, editors, copy editors and photographers.

On one side were the people who don't want to hear anything other than the old business of big media hiring lots of people. On the other side, were people arguing that the model has changed and journalists of color need to not only embrace that reality but also become a part of it. "What I desire, and what burns me at times, is that we on this listserv are so close-minded to what is happening in our business, and then we complain about a lack of opportunities," wrote one participant. "We are choosing to exist in the world of media as hired hands, as opposed to hands that can hire."

While I am so sympathetic to journalists worried about being a casualty of the next round of layoffs, I have to agree that we need to reset our minds to being entrepreneurs -- even if we are still collecting a big media paycheck and especially if we've already been downsized out of those gigs. I say "reset" because as a student of history I know that it is in our DNA. We forget sometimes how pioneering journalists of color were over the years because movies aren't made about our social networks.

Black History Research

In researching black history for my J-Lab-funded Black History Augmented Reality app, I was reminded about a lot of pioneering African-American media entrepreneurs who got into the game sometimes on a wing and a prayer but made sure the black POV didn't get lost among the national debate. The Black History Augmented Reality app, by the way, is now available in Layar with content in Washington, D.C.; Richmond; Baltimore; Philadelphia; Boston; Charleston; and New Orleans. Just download Layar to your iPhone 3GS or higher or Droid phone and search for black history -- and save as a favorite. If you are in any of those cities, you will see snippets of black history pop up as you look through the camera lens.

So in honor of Black History Month and as a reminder of our entrepreneurial roots, I want to give a shout-out to a few of the pioneers who took a chance on doing their own thing:

• Mary Shad - Long before Huffington created her influential Post, a 30-something Mary Shad, a free woman by birth, in 1853 founded in the Provincial Freeman, the first ever newspaper to be published by a black woman in North America. The Provincial Freeman was a radical voice out of Canada for full integration into white society. In her paper, she skewered the separate black communities that had been established in Canada by black leaders such as Josiah "Uncle Tom" Henson, fugitive slaves and their well-meaning white financiers. Her columns foreshadowed the debate that still rages today (such as on the NABJ listserv) over integration versus self-imposed segregation, as Fergus M. Bordewich put it in "Bound for Canaan: the Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement."
• Walter White - We marvel at the brave journalists who wade into dangerous territories such as Liberation Square in Cairo risking death to get us the news. Walter White, who later became the first national secretary of the NAACP, went undercover in the early 20th Century to expose racist terrorist groups that preyed upon the black community. As a very light skinned, blond, blue-eyed black man, White slipped into southern communities to uncover who was behind lynchings and race riots, beatings and burnings, including the 1919 mass murder of 200 black sharecroppers in Elaine, Ala., by white mobs. White was discovered that time but was able to get out of town with the posse hot on his tail.
• Emmit McHenry - Before there was GoDaddy, there was Emmit McHenry who in 1995 founded Network Solutions, the very first registrar of dot-com domain names which helped build the online infrastructure that we enjoy (or curse) today. He sold it for millions of dollars just as the web was really taking off, so missed out on the billions enjoyed by later entrepreneurs.
• Pittsburgh Courier - Much is made of social media's ability to change the course of history such as getting young people engaged in President Obama's presidential campaign. The Pittsburgh Courier was created in 1907 by Edwin Harleston, a guard in the H.J. Heinz food-packing plant, and quickly became one of the most important voices in the country because of its reach and influence in the national black community. The newspaper often set the political tone for African-Americans. A case in point is the newspaper's 1930s campaign to get black Americans, then die-hard Republicans, to "turn Lincoln's picture to the wall" and vote the Democratic New Deal ticket, thus creating a political alliance that lasts to this day.

These pioneers didn't have to do what they did. Shad could have remained safe and secure as a school teacher, White an insurance salesman, Harleston a guard and McHenry an executive at IBM -- but America would have been worse off because of it. Instead, they became innovators and entrepreneurs who took chances because the times demanded it. Just as they do today.

At a time when government funding for public broadcasting is hotly debated, "Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive," a new policy paper by Barbara Cochran, offers five broad strategies and 21 specific recommendations to reform public media.

And The Survey Says....

Just over 60 percent of respondents were from major metropolitan areas. Another 17 percent were from large cities. Only a handful (12 percent) came from towns with a population of 50,000 or less. Our survey skewed toward major metropolitan areas and in total they were happier with public media than folks in more rural areas. This should be kept in the back of our minds when we dive into the remaining questions and answers.

• Fair -- There are occasional examples of diverse programming, but it's not the norm.
• Good -- While not perfect, there are obvious efforts to make programming more inclusive.

Because I live in a large city, news media -- including public media -- just don't cover 'neighborhood' issues. Frankly, I stopped expecting them to do otherwise until I spent time in smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller city (Portland for example) and noticed how public media seemed so much closer to and integrated into the local community. I think public media could do a better job of covering local issues by reconsidering what is newsworthy ... i.e., neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to the greater community.

From the public's mouth

I live in East LA / Boyle Heights. It's very rare that good positive stories are told about my community via TV news. LA Times covers some good stories, but it's not the norm. I would like to see my community being covered w/ national issues other than immigration. Like Latinos who serve in armed forces, or those who are making a difference in the classroom.

Engage the emerging local blogosphere -- providing them promotion/audience and, potentially, revenue via bundled sales using the bully pulpit of public media. In other words, why can't a local PBS or NPR station serve the same role as a TBD.com in Washington?

They could spice up the reporting. The no rant/no slant approach is appropriate, but the reporting is often simple, dry, and probably not engaging as broad an audience as possible as a result.

Right now, Los Angeles seems poised to lose its PBS station, which is going independent. This is a good news, bad news situation. Some of its best current projects are local and these will continue and grow. But we will also lose some of the programs from PBS which we have come to expect and they will be missed.

Deploy the resources of journalism majors and graduate students in the many universities and colleges located in and around the major metro areas. Collaborate with universities and colleges to cover more beats, produce more stories, create more outlets, uncover more potential advertisers and train better journalists.

My community, Newburyport, Mass., is an hour north of Boston, a half hour south of Portsmouth, N.H., and an hour and 10 minutes south of Portland, Maine. I listen to public radio from all three, and no one covers Newburyport or its surrounding area. In fact, we're in a fringe reception area for all the stations. What would be really cool would be to have a low-power, listener-supported station right here in Newburyport. There's a local AM station that plays old music but has no local news presence.

Perhaps where I live makes me an outlier, but I suspect that my situation is quite common -- most public radio stations are in big cities or on university campuses in smaller places. That said, most smaller communities, including mine, don't have colleges.

Public media is largely the only not-for-profit trusted local and regional source of info, and source of curated content. I'd like to see that trust "capital" realized -- my local station is in the process of retooling for the new media revolution -- it's not easy to change the battleship's direction. More and amplified info like that from the Knight Commission needs to be put out there. The public at large doesn't yet understand how vital public media SHOULD be in their lives as info consumers. Public media orgs all should adopt "Community Media Projects" in order to learn, listen and meet the information and democratic needs of the communities they serve... everything else is broken, untrustworthy or unsuitable.

Awareness that public media is frequently a partnership between national providers (NPR) and local stations. Those that don't understand this partnership can dismiss the programming as not locally relevant. Visibility. Police who are present and interacting with local residents can generate greater trust and participation in public safety. Similar thing could be true of public media. If they are visible -- if they are not "they" -- then we feel more connected to the stories, more possibility to reach out to them when new issues arrive, etc. Engagement. Partner with schools, libraries and service orgs to unearth essential local stories, create broadcasts about them, and follow up to track impact.

Be more aggressive about giving up old ways (and sometimes long-time staffers) to free up resources and time to explore new ways of sharing information. Note on the tax question: I'd support more taxation for public media, but I'm discouraged about the track record used to spend tax money recently and would need total transparency (and some influence) on how money is spent in order to support more taxation.

We have a very active NPR-supporting community here but the simple fact is that they are charged with providing service to a huge, mountainous geographic area and while we may, as a community, have an above average rate of contribution, we also have greater infrastructure expenses than many other areas. Considering what Boise State Public Radio does with their resources I think they are doing okay. One of the features of public broadcasting funding in Idaho is that up to a fairly generous limit our contributions are counted as a tax credit. Not a deduction. A credit. "Do I want to give Butch Otter my money or do I want to give Terry Gross my money? Hmmmm."

Experiment. Be willing to try and fail at new shows, new ways of delivering the news. Invest in reporting. Pay freelancers a fair wage so that journalists without financial support can enter and stay in the profession (not possible now).

Public media should pioneer efforts to build real-time citizen journalist networks. Using low cost distribution and collation tools, public media could become hubs for high-quality, low cost information sharing -- school test scores, water quality, traffic needs, etc.

Through reaching out to organizations and individuals representing under-served parts of the community, especially economic and ethnic minorities. The demographic makeup of my metro area is changing rapidly due to growing Hispanic, Marshallese, and Hmong populations; except for some Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations, few media outlets report on issues such as immigration, wage theft, bilingual education, etc. Public media could a) report more extensively on those topics -- not as "minority" issues but as issues affecting members of our community; this would require b) establishing a broader definition of what our community is; and c), public media could offer internships and fellowships to young and/or freelance journalists, especially because the local NPR station is run by the university's journalism department.

I like the Bay Citizen model, and the Public Press ... one for exposing local issues to a broader audience, the other for in-depth local news for locals. I don't know if that counts as public media? Overall, I don't pay much attention to TV news, even public channels...so I'm not sure about that. Public media seems generally underfunded; I'd like to see more funding for it, as well as movement towards a more public-serving private news media (though we know, of course, that's easier said than done).

Because I live in a large city, news media -- including public media -- just don't cover "neighborhood" issues. Frankly, I stopped expecting them to do otherwise until I spent time in smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller cities (Portland for example) and noticed how public media seemed so much closer to and integrated into the local community. I think Public Media could do a better job of covering local issues by reconsidering what is newsworthy ... i.e. neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to the greater community.

Find positive happenings to report in communities that are typically only covered when something negative happens there.

For lack of a better phrase, they need to grow some balls. My town in New Jersey is influenced by political boss George Norcross, the unions, and the mafia. And that's not even the corruption and hubris that goes on in the city itself. What our reporters really need is assertiveness training, media law training, and self-defense courses. But most of all, they need the courage to use all of that stuff.

Our public radio and public television are separate entities that don't work together. Although our public radio is beefing up it's news reporting it seems simple to bring that reporting over to television. But public media is NOT JUST NPR and PBS. We have struggling cable public access community (no funding or support from the city) here and a number of online only community journalism operations (including a Knight grantee) that are all doing their own thing without coordination. Big Public Media (NPR/PBS) should be a leader to bring all of these "under the tent" and provide a real media public service to the community.

Actually, local issues aren't my concern. I wish public media reinforced its international coverage and improved its drama, comedy ... content. I envy the BBC.

As someone who listens to public media daily, it is sad that I have to try hard to think about a local issue being covered. In that respect, almost anything would improve the coverage as it feels almost, but not quite, non-existent. When local issues are covered they seemingly come in only two forms: 1. A feel good issue that is barely an issue and will create nearly zero discourse in the community. For example, holiday-lights festivals. 2. Wimpy. The interviewer/broadcaster will do nothing while two sides of an issue actively lie to the community and directly contradict each other. Fixing #1 is easy -- nobody really terribly cares, so we don't need 10 minutes of coverage about a mayor flipping the switch and lighting a tree up. Fixing #2 is harder. The public media must stand up for itself better and call out the guilty parties. The public media must step up its role as a sort of police officer of society and arrest those who break the rules.

ALWAYS retain vigorous capacity for citizen reporters. Fund them with equipment and training. People are busy now and have to work independently, but with lifelines keeping them connected to their media outlets. Use McChesney and Nichol's idea of $200 in tax credit going to every citizen, so that the citizen can donate their credit to whatever organization they choose -- such as journalistic ones. Constantly produce and air/publish material about the importance of journalism -- keep hitting the public with that message!

Survey people in the neighborhood for their backgrounds, locations and topics of interest, get them interested in issues that affect everyone. Focus on things like air and water quality, advice on picking up litter and why it's important not to litter, community events, getting to know neighbors' talents/skills, healthy alternatives to fast food and big box grocery stores. Community based ways to prevent crime/hate acts should be talked about explored and tried.

In my community (Minneapolis/St Paul, MN), "public" radio and television are HUGE cash cows. They do a good job and are influential but the real inclusive and diverse media that truly serve the under-represented populations of our area are Community Radio Stations, in particular KFAI. MN Public Television/NPR/MPR/PBS could do a much better job but they are more concerned with maintaining (and increasing) corporate and government funding than with covering issues that don't always have universal appeal.

In its current state, public media is dangerous because it offers the illusion of complete objectivity and truth. Too many people listen to it uncritically because of this. I would like to see public media representatives ask much tougher questions of everybody and hire a much more diverse staff of journalists. The illusion will still be there, but it will match reality more closely.

My community now has a Patch website. It's too early to judge how successful it will be in reaching out to our diverse community, but so far it appears to be more successful than the established, corporate-owned media outlet in town (a poorly staffed small daily newspaper that generates little local content).

In my area, despite being close to a large university, not much of a public media movement exists. A more visible public media would go a long way towards creating a more progressive, diverse community.

They could provide better coverage for schools. They seem to report statistics and not real life goings-on in our schools to the community.

I don't have any television or newspaper service, so I am somewhat "self isolating" from our local media. I get most of my news from the Internet, so I think one area of improvement for local media would be to increase the content and improve the usability of their websites. That is more of an improvement in distribution than in "covering the issues," but distribution is a key component to the reporting of news.

Was it an oversight? A slap? Or was it a reflection of the lack of diversity in the country's online newsrooms? Maybe it is the echo chamber effect of the online news types whose definition of who is innovating is limited to the people they hang with.

Plenty of Candidates

It surely couldn't be that there are no persons of color innovating in media. A year before, prior to the ONA conference in San Francisco, I helped put together a list of about 20 African Americans, ranging from online executives to entrepreneurs to a CTO, who could be on panels. Sadly, none of them made the cut. And each year, when I organize a week-long intensive innovation session held by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, where three groups of five college students each have five days to come up with a new product for the newspaper industry, minorities and women are well represented on the speaker's list.

This year, more than half of the speakers were persons of color, including power hitters such as Chris Hendricks, VP of interactive media for McClatchy, who schooled the students about the reality of online advertising; Caesar Andrews of Gannett to talk about ethics and technology; Dr. Sybril Bennett of Belmont University who caught the students up on the latest technology innovations; and Brandon Harris of Gannett's innovation group, 11g, who guided them through the human-centered design approach to disruption.

It didn't take that much effort to put together the list of speakers, and I was pretty much restricted to NAA members so didn't reach out to people who are doing their own thing like Fern Shen, founder of Baltimore Brew, or Rick Hancock, who built a full multimedia studio in his basement where he runs a successful new media empire in Connecticut. And I didn't reach out to the likes of Denmark West, president of digital media for BET Networks; or Chuck Creekmur and Greg Watkins, the guys who successfully launched Allhiphop.com more than a decade ago when they were using two-way pagers to push the news out; or academics such as Kevin Clark, director of Digital Media and Innovation at George Mason University; or Michelle Ferrier, associate professor at Elon University and a J-Lab Women Entrepreneurs grant winner. These people are from a list off the top of my head, and there are many more out there.

I'm not going to put all of the blame, if you will, for the lack of diversity at these conferences on the organizers. Persons of color who are innovating or want to innovate need to get involved and raise their own profiles. The UNITY journalism groups have been way too slow in preparing members to make the transition from staff member to COO of their own ventures or training them to roll from legacy to new media. But that is changing. Thanks to the Ford Foundation, each of the minority journalism groups had funding this year to seed a startup, and a panel I was on that dealt with innovation was standing room-only at last summer's NABJ convention.

I also applaud those organizations that are consciously making sure that journalists of color are getting the training they need to be successful in new media. The Freedom Forum's New Media training at the Diversity Institute in Nashville and the Maynard Institute continues to make sure mid-level executives are steeped in new media and innovation. This summer, the Village Voice alt-weekly is launching a Minority Media Digital Fellowship, a 10-week training program for college students that will be held at the Cronkite School and facilitated by yours truly, because the publisher doesn't like the number of minorities doing the digital thing. The deadline for applying is Feb. 8.

New Year's Resolutions

I'm not one to see problems without thinking of solutions, so in light of a new year coming upon us, let's collectively make some resolutions when it comes to diversity in this new media that we are building:

• When planning conferences and panels, resolve to expand beyond your trusted go-to group of presenters to a more diverse set. If you don't know whom to invite, ask and I'll make sure I give you some names. Feel free to start with the people already mentioned.

• Go young: BET.com, MTV.com, Allhiphop.com to name a few are a wonderful source for millennials who have experience in interactive content and news. I am happy to see ONA launching a youth initiative as a tribute to one of its founding members, MJ Bear, who passed away in December. It was one of her last wishes.

• NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA and NAJA, let's make sure this summer's conventions are steeped in innovation and new media training for our members. It's nearly 2011 and media are evolving and we need to make sure we evolve with it.

• Site managers please look at your staffs. If they are all white, resolve to diversify whether by hiring experienced persons of color or growing your own. I had to build an entire staff of culturally aware content producers in 1999 when BET.com launched at a time when the number of African Americans in new media was woefully small. So I trained black and Latino hip-hop magazine writers, BET television producers and young people straight out of Howard and Hampton universities in new media. Many of them are now leaders at new media companies across the country.

I believe that if there is a will, there is a way. We can't build a strong new media if their content and staffs are not diverse. New media cannot afford to make the same mistakes as old media, especially in the face of a changing America. More journalists of color have to take chances and innovate, whether it is at your legacy media company or at a startup that you form at your kitchen table. Whether you are pushed or you leap, you will need new media skills to get ahead. There is still time and there is still room in the media landscape for a diversity of ideas and people.

Editor's Note: Due to the reaction we've had to this story at Idea Lab, we will be having a discussion about it and other issues of diversity in new media on Twitter at 2 pm Eastern Time on Dec. 29 at the #mediadiversity hashtag. Please join us!

Though we were the top winner in the inaugural Knight News Challenge back in 2007, MIT's Center for Future Civic Media took as our mandate something rather "un-news": Applying our tech expertise to information needs, broadly defined, rather than what we'd traditionally call news.

This focus has had a big impact on the kind of work we take on. It's pushed us to identify key needs left unmet by traditional news outlets, even ones otherwise adjusting well to the transition online.

We've worked on urban signage, open-source grassroots mapping, natural gas drilling databases, and much else with big, ground-level application.

So while others are touting -- rightly -- how new technology has changed, say, midterm election coverage, the Center for Future Civic Media this week is touting the launch of a new project that helps prisoners blog.

Between the Bars

Between the Bars is being developed by MIT master's student and Center researcher Charlie DeTar and Center fellow Benjamin Mako Hill. This project is a brilliant mix of high and low tech aimed at the 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons. Because prisoners have little or no access to the Internet, Between the Bars invites them to mail handwritten letters to a physical Between the Bars address. The letters are scanned, posted online, and transcribed by volunteers, and readers can leave comments, which are printed out and mailed back to the author.

The result is a public, searchable, "respondable" blog post, much like any other.

Charlie and the Center were drawn to this project because it meets an information need not addressed anywhere else, as he told WNYC's "The Takeaway" last week:

Prisoners have no access to broadcast media, and especially no access to the Internet. Phone service costs in prison can be extortionate -- often several dollars per minute. Our project aims to provide a gateway between the Internet and postal mail. This makes it available to nearly all prisoners.

This is essential, because we're good at incarcerating people but bad at reintegrating them once their sentence is served:

We want to help give prisoners a voice to speak and express themselves beyond the criminal identity forced on them by a criminal system that by, policy, refers to inmates as "offenders." We don't believe that prisoners' right to express themselves should end at the prison gate, and our projects aims to give them the tools to speak from inside. Second, we want to help humanize prisoners in the eyes of the public, who, due to the barriers created by imprisonment, often treat prisoners as outcasts and second-class citizens. Third, we want to help prisoners support "weak" social ties. Sociologists have shown that our networks of "acquaintances" provide critical help in tasks like finding jobs and form the basis of our social safety nets. While prisoners can use phone calls and letters to stay in contact with their closest friends and family members (strong ties), weak ties are often destroyed by incarceration. We hope that blogging can provide a means of maintaining these connections.

Charlie worked with MIT's legal advisers and varied prison-related organizations to ensure little risk would come of the process, but we're thrilled to say thus far participating bloggers are proving the Between the Bars system can work for them. If you happen to work with prisoners or advocacy organizations, get in touch with us at http://civic.mit.edu/contact and we'll show you how you can help.

Zuckerman said it's a big myth that the web is bringing us closer to other cultures or countries -- when we're on the web, we're basically in our own small islands of our social networks. Most of us who are building businesses/non-profits around non-traditional media content know this, but he has some great PowerPoint slides that add a lot of meat to the arguments. Give it a look:

Cultural DJs

In addition to providing some very telling facts -- did you know that "Madagascar" the movie is a bigger brand than Madagascar the country? -- he talks about translation. And not just the challenges of literal translation from one language to another, which is something Video Volunteers faces in our work all the time, especially now when we have community video correspondents working in nearly every state of India, a country with dozens of official languages. He talks about "cultural translation." He makes the point that we need more "DJs ... skilled human curators" who can speak the language of the West and of other cultures at the same time.

The incredible editors at Global Voices fit that bill, and so does the blog Afrigadget. Video Volunteers attempt to do this, too, in the articles that accompany the online videos made by our community correspondents in our new IndiaUnheard community news network.

This is really interesting to me because at Video Volunteers we talk a lot about the need for "unmediated" voices -- essentially, voices that are not culturally translated. This is one of the differences between community video, which to us means equipping traditionally "unheard" communities to tell their stories in their own words, and documentary film, where a professional uses his or her artistry and insight to translate community voices for outside audiences.

At VV, we believe, in fact, that so much is lost in translation that you want to keep "cultural translation" to a minimum. And so, with our newly launched IndiaUnheard community news network, we want to bring voices out voices in their raw form. As my partner Stalin K. often says, "if I say the words 'Masai warrior' you get an immediate visual in your head. You don't, in a similar fashion, hear their voices in your head."

We know from TV what the Masai look like. But we don't know what they sound like, because in traditional National Geographic-type media, we just see the Masai with a narration; their whole culture, never mind their language, is translated for an international audience.

There are real limits to the possibilities for translation. As I heard Zuckerman himself say at a Civic Media conference, it's hard enough to find cultural translators for English to other cultures. But what about all the learning that could happen between the readers of, say, Kurdish media in New York City and Haitian media in New York City? How is that translation going to happen? I don't know that we could ever have enough translators to solve that problem.

Two Videos to Watch

So how do we get people to watch -- rather, to want to watch -- videos like these two posted below, made by our IndiaUnheard correspondents? If the world had an ideal system for enabling the poor to represent themselves in the media, which I would say is something like one community journalist per village (or even per 20 villages), how would we interest people outside those villages to watch this content? Here are two recent videos to check out and see what you think:

Children Carry Trash, Not Books shows how children of poor families do not benefit from the current schemes on compulsory free education. The video is produced by Pratibha Rolta, a community correspondent from the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, who works as an activist on women's issues.

The second video, titled Children Denied Education, captures the plight of child labourers in Haryana's brick kilns who are deprived of several rights, including education. The correspondent here, Satyawan, was a Sarpanch (village head) for five long years before joining IndiaUnheard, and has in-depth knowledge of corruption within the local administration.

Besides our own website and within the communities where the producers work (where most of our work is shown) there are some forums for videos like this. I showed these two videos two weeks ago as a panelist at the IFP/UN-sponsored ENVISION 2010: Addressing Global Issues through Documentaries, an event organized by the IFP, UN Communications Department, and New York Times. This was a one day conference on education and documentary films and, happily, there was space for user-created content.

A few years ago there probably wouldn't have been. I was on a panel about the impact of user-generated media, along with with Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, John Kennedy of World Without Borders and Ryan Schlieff of Witness -- all good friends in the field of media and human rights. People in the world of documentary film, or in the UN sector with its huge budgets for traditional communications, were getting a taste of what's possible when you turn the camera over to communities. This is progress towards the acceptance of these voices.

More Global Than Ever

With our work, I take a long term perspective. (Wanting every village in the world to have someone skilled and motivated to represent his neighbors' concerns in the media kind of requires that!) I think that media preferences are not fixed in stone. What Americans liked on TV and in the movies in the fifties is different from what we liked in the seventies and today. Who knows where people's tastes will be twenty years from now?

I'm an optimist. I think we will only get more global and more curious, and more open to raw, unfiltered reality. I believe there are even studies that show that kids today who've grown up with mashups and social networks are much more open to gritty media that their parents wouldn't look at.

In the meantime, we keep telling our correspondents to tell their stories in their own words, with their own style, their own analysis -- no matter how challenging it may be for outsiders to understand without translation.

By contrast, when we started Video Volunteers in India, there were only two other groups in the country running permanent programs in community video. So the difference in Brazil, where we recently launched, was amazing and wonderful to see.

Below I've collected some of our observations about Brazil, and listed a few of the inspiring moments and facts regarding Brazil's community media that we learned during our month spent visiting the different groups. (I hope I've gotten all the facts correct, but please correct me if you see any mistakes in what I've written below; much of this information is from notes I took during fascinating discussions.)

Brazil's Commitment to Community Media

The Brazilian government is committed to supporting community arts and culture. There is a three percent tax break for corporations that support the arts, and this only applies to the arts! The government created a "points of culture" program around the country, where they have invested in 150 community arts projects to the tune of R$150,000 (around $75,000) per year, for three years. Many of the media NGOs we visited were funded in this way. The singer Gilberto Gil is currently the minister for culture and, given that he's one of the most revered celebrities in the country, this focuses citizens' attention on the importance of the arts.

It makes sense that this level of investment would be happening in Brazil and not in countries where poverty is more prevalent. One of the major societal challenges in Brazil is to keep young kids from favelas out of gangs and drugs and violence. Speaking to them in the languages they understand and love -- hip-hop, graffiti, video -- is possibly the best strategy for reaching disaffected youth.

Susan Worcman, director of the Brazil Foundation, said this is because "artistic talent in Brazil is generally very high. We have a lot of creative people." Driving around Sao Paulo seems to confirm this. The city is the graffiti capital of the world, and some artists from favelas have exhibited in major museums in Europe.

All over the city, as much in the hipster area of Villa Madelaina as in the favelas, you see incredible graffiti murals. It integrates the middle classes with the favelas in powerful ways. For instance, there was a community fresco program in Sao Paulo a few years ago, where kids from favelas worked with professional artists to create frescoes on the sides of buildings all over the city. All of the works included plaques reminding people that they were produced by slum kids.

The quality of community arts work is generally very high. Several NGO programs were started either by famous film directors (such as, Cinema Nosso which grew out of the film, City of God), TV producers (Instituto Criar in Sao Paulo, which was started by a Globo Executive) or musicians (such as Afro Reggae, which was started by a hip-hop artist).

As a result, community video work has been seen on TV, won awards, and one even resulted in a feature movie deal ("Cine Cufa," though the project may now be on hold). For us, we've put less emphasis on how artistic a community film is and focus more on how it will inspire action. But because of their quality, these Brazilian films are more marketable to the mainstream.

Photography Class at Observatorio de Favelas

The purpose of most of the community media groups we met is to empower youth to fight stereotypes about the favelas that dominate Brazilian media. One great organization we visited is the urban planning organization Observatorio de Favelas. Its very name implies changing the point of reference of who is watching whom. It is about the favelas observing the rest of the city, and this is a very different way of doing urban planning. Instead of talking about the "city center" and "periphery areas," they highlight areas of high and low public investment.

Portrayal of Favelas in the Media

It is clear after spending even a brief time in Brazil that the image presented of the favelas in the media is as sites of violence. They are never shown as the culturally and creatively rich areas they are. This creates real fear among the middle class population of Brazil.

The receptionist at our hotel begged us not to go to a certain area when we asked her for directions. Cab drivers refuse to take people to some places. The point of most of the community media we saw is to challenge the stereotypes and teach the kids to be critical of the media. (As a result, there is relatively little community media/journalism being done the way VV does it, where the purpose is to screen media back to communities.)

Arts and Culture vs. News and Information

Each country VV has worked in has a different outlook or way of using community media. In India, at least in terms of our work, media is a tool to empower people to take action; it is a tool to accelerate other social change efforts. In the U.S., the scene is much more about news and information, and how we can respond to the current crisis in journalism.

In other parts of South America, there is a very strong indigenous media scene that unites different tribes. In Brazil, the focus is definitely "community arts and culture." It's about community media as a right in itself, and as an educational tool. Most of the organizations we met were focused primarily on training, as opposed to the distribution of that content or its use.

Brazil Media Stats

We learned some interesting media and policy facts from our conversations with Flavio at Ashoka, Bia Barbosa at Intervoces, and John Prideaux, the Economist's correspondent in Brazil. Newspaper readership in Brazil is extremely low compared to other countries. TV is by far the dominant information source in the country, and nearly everyone watches only one channel, Globo.

We saw for ourselves how media-watching habits seem much more unified in Brazil. A recent and very popular "telenovela" was a drama set in India, and everyone mentioned it to us. People were coming up to my Indian partner Stalin in the subway, giving him a Namaste bow and repeating "arre baba." It's just one of the ways you see these two incredibly strong emerging markets coming together through globalization.

Ninety percent of the country is reached by terrestrial TV, thanks mainly to the efforts of Globo. Very few people have cable or satellite TV. We asked Barbosa at Intervoces if media activists and community media organizations had tried to jointly create a TV channel, given that there is such a huge amount of content produced by community media groups. She said an impediment to this is the fact that terrestrial TV is the only option.

All of Brazil media is controlled by six families/companies, and there are no limits on cross ownership of media, or on how much of the audience one company can reach. Barbosa is fighting for the introduction of these limits, because as it stands corporations are able to heavily influence public opinion. Other policy efforts undertaken by media activists include:

• The creation of independent public TV, a la BBC, which doesn't currently exist. The government recently created an education channel, which did create more space for socially relevant media -- but it is controlled by the government.
• The increasing of diversity on television. Barbosa said that with so many community media groups and productions, the government should make space for programming that truly reflects the diversity of the country.
• The liberalization of Internet laws. One upcoming fight will be to allow political parties to use the Internet to gain support. What Barack Obama's did with the Internet would currently be illegal in Brazil.

There is clearly much more to learn about the movements in Brazil to reform and democratize the media, and these are just our first impressions.

But perhaps the most successful experiment in bringing so-called marginalized communities to the attention of the mainstream came not with community radio or the Internet, but rather the cassette tape and the boombox. With roots in the traditions of griots in West Africa, work songs from the Mississippi Delta, and dancehalls from the Caribbean, the birth of Hip-Hop as we know it today is generally credited to the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) who organized parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York where he joined two turntables to mix rhythmic beats with funk music. Partygoers were invited to grab the microphone and rap on top of the music as a way to creatively express themselves and show off their verbal dexterity. Those early parties on Sedgwick Avenue helped form the sound and community that would influence what are now seen as the pioneers of hip-hop: Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and The Sugarhill Gang.

In the early 1990's hip-hop's center of gravity migrated from New York City to Los Angeles, where N.W.A., Ice T, and others popularized gangsta rap as a genre of hip-hop that focused on the violence, partying, and hustling on the rough streets of Compton, California. It was only with the release of "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" in 1993 that New York City was once again nationally recognized among hip-hop fans.

From Hong Kong to Staten Island to Liberia

Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman recently caught an interview on Tom Ashbrook's public radio program, On Point with Wu Tang Clan leader Robert Diggs, also known as "the RZA." During the interview we discover an unlikely intersection in the 1980's between the lives of Ashbrook, a Yale graduate and career journalist, and Diggs, a poor, aspiring rapper in Staten Island who sought shelter in a seedy movie theater that specialized in pornography and kung fu flicks. Ashbrook, it turns out, was a foreign correspondent at the time based in Hong Kong where he supplemented his income as a journalist by dubbing kung fu movies into English. It is entirely likely that one of the many kung fu films that influenced the Wu Tang Clan's unique style of hip-hop featured the voice of public radio's effusive Tom Ashbrook.

New York City's outer boroughs today are barely recognizable yuppie incarnations of their former selves. Gentrification has taken over Brooklyn and is increasingly creeping into the Bronx. In fact, a long and costly protest campaign has sought to protect 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the birthplace of hip-hop, from being converted into a new development. But Park Hill, the home community of the Wu Tang Clan, has changed far less than neighboring Brooklyn across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. While tourists often take the free Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan for its uninterrupted views of the Statue of Liberty, rarely do they spend anytime exploring Staten Island itself.

One of the most sudden changes to the island's demographics came in the late 1980's and early 1990's when civil war broke out in Liberia, a West African country that was founded by freed American slaves. Liberian refugees fled violence that was stirred up by the American-educated warlord, Charles Taylor, and arrived to Staten Island by the thousands. They now make up the largest community of Liberians living outside of Liberia and their troubles in assimilating to a New York state of mind have been featured in Mother Jones, The Village Voice, WNET, and twice in the New York Times.

Ruthie Ackerman is a freelance journalist who is currently writing a book about the social impact of the Liberian Civil War and the integration of Liberian refugees in the same Park Hill community that gave rise to the Wu Tang Clan so many years ago. But rather than merely speaking on behalf of Liberians Ackerman decided to launch Ceasefire Liberia, a citizen media project which teaches Liberians living in Monrovia and Park Hill how to use digital media to tell their own stories.

As the above video shows, Liberian refugees have had a difficult time assimilating to Park Hill's established community and culture. But music - especially hip-hop - has been an effective channel to help narrow the cultural divide. Genocide Records is a collective of Liberia-born rappers and MC's whose music is clearly influenced by New York's hip-hop legacy, but with lyrics that emphasize the struggle of West Africans living in the United States. They performed this past July at Park Hill Day:

From New York to Mongolia, Madagascar, Colombia, Bolivia, and the World

As noted above, those early hip-hop parties hosted by DJ Kool Herc at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue were most definitely influenced by his early years in Jamaica were DJs at dancehall parties would talk over the records they were playing. Hip-hop then evolved further in New York during the 1980's and it hasn't stopped evolving in its spread from New York to California to Mongolia and Madagascar. Zuckerman notes in his post that shortly after the release of Wu Tang Clan's "Enter The Wu Tang (36 Chambers)" he began seeing graffiti all over the world - including Mongolia - celebrating the hip-hop group.

Wu Tang graffiti in Ulaanbaatar.

Hip-hop's universal appeal has made itself apparent in countless blog posts across many of the Rising Voices citizen media projects. In Bolivia both Cristina Quisbert and La Mala Palabra of Voces Bolivianas honored the life of Aymara rapper and El Alto resident Abraham Bojorquez (the post has also been translated into Aymara).

In Madagascar Tahina, Joan, and Stéphane of Foko Madagascar have each highlighted some of the impressive Malagasy hip-hop acts, including Raboussa:

You can learn more about Malagasy hip-hop at the excellent blog HH Dago. Tahina also recommends "Zazavavin-drap" by Malagasy female rappers Nah and Bug:

The award-winning Colombian citizen media project HiperBarrio even has a rapper among its members. Last year Jorge Jurado used his rhyming skills to compose a song about citizen media and its link to his community's graffiti culture. Henry Barros from HiperBarrio also produced two short documentary videos about rappers in San Javier La Loma.

Finally, from the REPACTED project in Nakuru, Kenya blogger Eric Owanyama says that hip-hop is the "single biggest movement that allows youths to explore their creative minds independent of class rooms and allow them to learn from the society and speak philosophies that have proven to teach more than most educational systems and syllabus teach."

As awkward as it may be, even Vladimir Putin has recognized the importance of hip-hop as a medium of communication with young people around the world. Whether "hip-hop is dead" as some have argued of late remains to be seen, but its global domination over the past twenty years reveals just what can be accomplished when a culture of remix, creative expression, and technology collide.

Now, compare that to the map of San Javier La Loma created by HiperBarrio and freely available with nearly unrestricted use on Open Street Maps:

There is clearly an aspect of amateurism to the cartography, but anyone who has been to La Loma will tell you that the second map is a much more useful representation of the community. All of the roads are represented, as are the church, school, and the labyrinthine network of steep footpaths which carry constant pedestrian traffic.

A resident of La Loma carrying a washing machine down the road.

In fact, much of the world is still a blank void on Google Maps, especially slums and lower income communities. The majority of Rio de Janeiro is remarkably well-mapped, and even includes public transit information. But if you live in a favela like Santa Marta (where Michael Jackson shot the video to "They Don't Care About Us") there is no street information at all:

Access to geographic information is crucial to the development of any community. As Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street Maps, puts it: "Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents."

Last Saturday Fredy Rivera, a leading mapper of Open Street Maps based in Bogotá, organized a workshop at the small public library in La Loma to teach its young residents how to make a map of their own community.

Gabriel Vanegas, the librarian in La Loma whose dedication is responsible for much of HiperBarrio's success, explained the background that led to the workshop:

In March of this year, thanks to the free software community, I had the opportunity to meet Fredy Rivera, a master of Linux and cartography, who will be with us to help us better understand the collective creation of maps. It will be an excellent opportunity to continue recognizing the community from the public library and through exercises of citizen journalism, free culture, participative history, and citizenship.

The workshop was later covered and summarized on the website of Medellin's Network of Libraries, a recipient of the Gates Foundation's 2009 Access to Learning award. Fredy Rivera posted a very useful summary of the contents of the workshops (in Spanish) on his blog.

Mark Graham has mapped the total number of of geotagged Wikipedia articles per language, location, and population. He found a "highly uneven geography of information." An article in The Guardian notes:

Almost the entire continent of Africa is geographically poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the 53 countries in Africa (or perhaps more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

The article goes on to optimistically wonder if this imbalance of information presents a new opportunity for Wikipedia's declining number of active editors: to democratize not just access to information, but what kind of information is made freely available. At one point iCommons was involved in organizing Wikipedia Academies to encourage local experts to fill in Wikipedia's sizable information gaps. (Unfortunately iCommons now seems more interested in publishing research reviews.)

Like Wikipedia, Open Street Maps, has seen an almost unbelievable explosion of activity in the past few years. But unlike Wikipedia, contributions don't seem to be declining. There is a strong commitment from within the community to produce valuable information not just about North America and Western Europe, but all communities regardless of class or location. In fact, last month a group of Open Street Map activists headed to Kibera, Kenya, one of the world's largest slums, to produce a better map of the area. Already their information has been integrated into Ushahidi to provide a real-time interface to local news events:

A similar project in Rio de Janeiro led by Viva Favela is also trying to integrate local citizen media with community-produced maps of favelas (including Santa Marta).

It is too early to know whether this flurry of cartographic activism will lead to any sort of sustained social change, but Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities offers a clear example of how access to information can serve as a catalyst for improved livelihoods:

A few years ago, the Water and Sanitation Program, a nonprofit affiliated with the United Nations and the World Bank, became interested in the water supply question in Kibera. The group issued a report on Kibera's water kiosks. By reading the fine print, you can determine how much Kibera people -- and by extension, residents of all the mud hut communities of Nairobi -- are being ripped off by the kiosk system. At 3 shillings per jerry can, Kibera residents pay 10 times more for water than the average person in a wealthy neighborhood with municipally supplied, metered water service. And that's when water is plentiful. When there's a shortage, metered rates don't go up, but the prices in Kibera do. So at those times people in Kibera pay 30 or 40 times the official price of water.

The group published a brochure about the study. They presented it to local and national politicians. There was only one bunch of people who never saw the study: the residents of Kibera.

Japeth Mbuvi, Operations Analyst for the program, explained why. "Our audience for this was not the people of Kibera, but the political structure," he told me. Then he added, "Anyway, maybe it's better not to publicize this: there could be riots."

I applaud Mbuvi for his frankness. He is one of the few people I have met at any of the large nonprofit agencies who was willing to be candid about his agency's shortcomings as well as its achievements.

Still, there's something sad about his concern.

Perhaps it's true that people in Kibera could riot over water. After all, Kibera has been the scenes of riots in the past -- most of them involving landlord tenant issue -- and scores of people have been murdered in the melees. Still, Kibera's people deserve to know the facts about their lives. What's the point of studying the water kiosks of Kibera if, when the study is done, the information is not shared with the people who are most at stake?