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Collaboration

How the Pomegranate Center Is Transforming Communities Through Collaboration

"I work with communities of place ... just people who happen to live together in the same neighborhood, same city, same town, who come from different cultures, ideologies, religions, tastes and values. In my philosophy, those differences are the greatest untapped asset we have in our society. In what conditions can those differences lead to something productive?" --Milenko Matanovic Milenko...

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Collaboration

Eye on Collaboration: IBM + Eameses; Newmark on Craigconnects

This is the first in an occasional series in which I'll round up interesting examples of collaboration from around the web. Think of me as your friendly neighborhood Collaboration Curator. This week: a 40-plus year collaboration between IBM and design giants Charles and Ray Eames culminates in an iPad app; Craig Newmark says getting non-profits to collaborate ain't easy; E.O....

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Collaboration

What Journalists Can Learn About Collaboration From Improv Comedy

Did you hear the one about the journalist who used improv skills to do her job better? It's no punchline: The art of improv offers many lessons for journalists, not least of which is how to collaborate more effectively. I've been performing improv since 2004, and in 2010 I started teaching workshops that apply lessons from the art of improv...

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Collaboration

At SXSW, Austin Alchemy, Creative Culture Lead to Collaboration

One of the highlights of SXSW for me this year was a session called "Everything is a Remix, So Steal Like an Artist," a conversation about remix culture and creativity between artists Austin Kleon and Kirby Ferguson. As the session title indicates, their philosophy is that all artists build upon the work of others -- nothing is 100% original....

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Collaboration

Lady Gaga and Harvard? Collaboration Makes Strange Bedfellows

Sometimes, the partners in a collaboration seem obvious: NPR and Frontline, for example. Kanye and Jay-Z. Peanut butter and jelly. (OK, so peanut butter and jelly don't really "collaborate," per se ... but they certainly work together. They're a team. I'm sticking by this point.) Other times, though, you see that two people or two organizations are in cahoots, and...

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Collaboration

Can Journalism Find Its Own 'Brooklyn Boheme' to Inspire Collaboration?

In 1980s Brooklyn, Spike Lee knocked on Branford Marsalis' door to introduce himself; Marsalis was soon playing saxophone for several Spike Lee joints. Elsewhere in the same neighborhood, Erykah Badu ran an idea for a rhyme by Carl Hancock Rux, which would later turn into her famous song, "Bag Lady." As the new documentary "Brooklyn Boheme" from directors Nelson...

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Guides

Your Guide to Crowdfunding Public Media Projects

Need $40,000 to produce a local documentary? Just ask your audience. That's what filmmaker Sam Mayfield did, for a film she's working on about last year's protests in Madison, Wis. In a blog post on January 13, she wrote: We are currently trying to raise $40,000 of our $200,000 budget through Kickstarter, the online fundraising platform that facilitates grassroots investment....

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Public MediaShift

Public Media: A Wish List for 2012

What's the No. 1 innovation that's needed in public media in 2012? I posed that question to the public media group on Facebook, as well as to some additional colleagues via email. The responses ranged from a focus on cultivating a culture of innovation, to calls for more innovative content approaches, to the need to grow public media's audience to...

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EducationShift

Collaboration Profile: A Look at WNYC and NYT's SchoolBook

SchoolBook is an ambitious new web offering from WNYC and the New York Times that provides news, data and conversation about New York City's
schools. The site, which launched just before the start of the school year, has been lauded by members of the education establishment, parents and journalists, and provides an interesting model for other public media stations to consider.

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Public MediaShift

WBUR Helps Listeners Find Better Health Care Options

Martha Bebinger, a longtime reporter for WBUR in Boston, had been reporting on efforts to control health care spending in Massachusetts for years, but over the past year and a half to two years, interest in the subject intensified among listeners, she said, and it was time to help them be part of a conversation. And so Bebinger and WBUR...

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Public MediaShift

Innovative Projects at Public Media Camp 2010

The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. Ira Glass. Gwen Ifill. Big Bird. These are some of the public faces of public media, but behind the scenes lies...

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Collaboration

KCET's 'Departures' Exemplifies Community Collaboration

I've written for MediaShift several times about journalistic collaboration between news organizations, such as the Climate Desk project, for example, or Public Media's EconomyStory. But there's another kind of collaboration that's critical to the future of journalism: Collaboration between a news organization and the community it serves. This kind of collaboration is critical for a few reasons. First, as anyone...

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Collaboration

The Climate Desk: Time-Intensive Collaboration Pays Off

When I first heard about The Climate Desk back in April, I was impressed by its ambitious mission: The Climate Desk is a journalistic collaboration dedicated to exploring the impact -- human, environmental, economic, political -- of a changing climate. The partners are The Atlantic, Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, and PBS's new public affairs show...

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Public MediaShift

Lessons on Collaboration from EconomyStory, Election Projects

"Online: Content is king. I don't disagree. But collaboration is queen. In chess the king is the most important, but the queen is the most powerful." 
- David Cohn We in public media produce a lot of content, but historically we haven't had a lot of collaboration. That's been changing recently, and I'm fortunate enough to have a front row...

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