Over the past two months, on the Center for Social Media's Public Media 2.0 Showcase, we profiled a series of such initiatives, examining in particular how project leaders evaluate their impact.

While there has been some controversy over semantics, for the purposes of this series, we used the term "digital and media literacy," which encompasses the foundations of traditional media literacy while emphasizing the importance of access to and informed use of digital tools. These types of programs help people to create their own media messages, participate in cross-platform civic dialogue, recognize and evaluate the messages implicit in media, assess the credibility of news and information sources, and understand the risks and responsibilities associated with social media and media production.

Strong, national support for digital and media literacy initiatives is currently lacking -- both in the public broadcasting and educational sectors. However, innovative programs are popping up across the country, sometimes in unexpected locations.

Snapshots from the Field

Our series examined initiatives from diverse sources, including public broadcasting stations, non-profit organizations, museums, schools and federal agencies, all designed to help users become fully engaged media consumers and producers. Each of the initiatives had a different focus (building students' journalism skills, recognizing hidden advertisements, bringing public media to underserved communities, etc.) They took place in person and online, in school and community-based settings, and in both kid- and adult-focused arenas. Five of the most interesting projects included:

• The PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs: This program, which recently completed a successful pilot year, pairs high schools with public media professionals in order to create investigative video reports. The program combines digital and media literacy, media production, news and current events and journalism education and includes a flexible curriculum developed by Temple University's Media Education Lab.

• Admongo: Last year, the Federal Trade Commission launched Admongo, an online gaming initiative aimed at helping 8- to 12-year-olds "become more discerning consumers of information." The centerpiece of the Admongo campaign is a single-player online game in which users navigate everyday settings, searching for hidden advertisements. The project includes an accompanying curriculum, developed by Scholastic. While Admongo provides a fun new way to look at advertising in the classroom, it is lacking in meaningful engagement, as it doesn't encourage students to critique or analyze advertisements so much as recognize them.
  

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum launched an initiative designed to help teachers use its State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda exhibit to teach digital and media literacy skills. During January and February of this year, more than 300 English teachers from across the country participated in a digital and media literacy online workshop that introduced the exhibit and key media literacy concepts through a combination of webinars, lesson plans and online discussions.

• Common Sense Media: Common Sense Media recently released a new K-12 curriculum focused on digital citizenship. According to the Common Sense Media website, this curriculum aims to "teach students to be responsible, respectful, and safe digital citizens." The curriculum focuses primarily on digital ethics and responsibilities, using engaging classroom activities to tackle issues like privacy, cyber-bullying, online identities, and copyright/fair use.

• City Voices, City Visions: City Voices, City Visions, a program from the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, provides summer professional development institutes for middle and high school teachers. These sessions educate teachers on how to incorporate digital video into their classrooms in both interdisciplinary and subject-specific settings. Teachers use handheld digital videocameras and basic editing software to turn academic concepts into familiar video formats and work with the City Voices, City Visions team to create appropriate classroom assignments, evaluation rubrics, and sample videos.

At the Center for Social Media, we are using our examinations of how these projects are assessing themselves to inform the evaluation of a project the Center has been incubating: the Public Media Corps (PMC), a public media and community engagement initiative from the National Black Programming Consortium. A service corps model, the PMC aims to increase both broadband adoption and public media creation/use in underserved communities. Last year, 15 fellows worked with Washington, DC, community organizations and public media stations to create a series of engagement models, which combined media production, media access and civic engagement. CSM will be releasing a report on the results in May.

Evaluating Media Literacy Projects

As with public media engagement projects, digital and media literacy initiatives face a challenge when it comes to evaluating success. There are currently no standard tools for assessing baseline digital and media literacy skills -- although in her white paper, Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, Dr. Renee Hobbs strongly advocates for their development. She notes that "there are so many dimensions of media and digital literacy that it will take many years to develop truly comprehensive measures that support the needs of students, educators, policymakers and other stakeholders."

Because the initiatives we looked at varied so much in scope and size, each took a slightly different approach toward evaluating programmatic success. Not every organization we profiled implemented a comprehensive evaluation plan. However, many of them did, and some key themes emerged:

1. Set clear and ambitious goals, and assess against them: It is important that digital and media literacy initiatives move beyond "raising awareness" and move instead toward
empowering users to make their own meaningful choices, critiques and content. For example, Admongo does not go far enough in allowing users to evaluate and analyze the game's advertisements, nor does it offer users much in the way of content creation. Successful digital and media literacy initiatives must set goals beyond awareness-raising, and evaluate their success based upon clearly-defined criteria.

2. Evaluate both media literacy and media production quality: One of the major tensions in evaluating youth and community media production initiatives is the extent to which media production values should be considered. Leah Clapman, director of the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs, noted that, as the program progressed, program leaders moved away from evaluating the production values of student projects and towards measuring what students have learned in the process. City Voices, City Visions is able to negotiate this tension with a multi-pronged evaluation strategy. Students are judged in class primarily by how well they convey academic concepts through video, but an annual film festival showcases high quality student productions, as determined by external judges.

3. Evaluate both teachers and students: Staffers from almost every initiative we talked to expressed that feedback from both teachers and students is necessary in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding of how well a given project worked. Both Common Sense Media and City Visions, City Voices, for example, combined student assessments, teacher interviews and case studies. Dr. Suzanne Miller, director of City Voices, City Visions, stressed that evaluating teachers beyond the confines of teacher training institutes is key, as "not enough research follows teachers out of professional development institutes and into the classroom."

4. Examine a variety of data: While most of the data collected in these projects was qualitative (a potential problem for some funders), it took many forms, including case studies, teacher and student interviews, and student pre- and post-assessments. Some of the data was collected through less traditional methods: the teachers involved in the PBS Student Reporting Labs spent a day in Washington, DC to discuss and debate the program and analyze strengths and weaknesses with external evaluators. Most of the programs hired external evaluators at least for part of the analysis, which helped to ensure depth of analysis as well as objectivity.

5. Share evaluation data with the field: Many of the programs are planning on publishing evaluation data in order to inform best practices. Common Sense Media plans on sharing video case studies on its blog. The Public Media Corps published a toolkit outlining the lessons learned from the program's pilot year. This toolkit is designed for use by public media stations looking to implement similar programs but can also be employed as a general guide for community-based media programs. The Center for Social Media will also be working with PMC leaders to release a more comprehensive evaluation next month.

It is this last point -- sharing information -- that may be the most crucial for measuring the success of digital and media literacy initiatives. Developing shared best (and worst!) practices and lessons learned through smaller-scale media literacy programs will help to ensure the development of the field and the success of future programs.

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media.

Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here.

How can public media spur multi-platform engagement through a national TV channel? That's the challenge that was posed to the team developing WorldCompass.org, the companion website for the World TV channel, a news and documentary channel now available in parts of 32 states.

The World channel, originally called PBS World, was piloted in 2007 in the northeast U.S. It featured PBS programs -- mostly documentaries -- that were still in rights on a 24-hour channel. The channel went national in 2007. Two years later, Boston PBS affiliate WGBH instigated an effort to turn the channel into a multimedia project that invited new voices to public media. (To date, the World channel has not conducted national ratings, although a plan to obtain national numbers is in the works.)

Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the World channel is the result of a collaborative partnership. The channel is produced and distributed by WGBH, WNET New York and American Public Television in association with PBS and the National Educational Telecommunications Association, which is more commonly known as NETA.

The website has a slightly different makeup of partners. WorldCompass.org is managed by WGBH, with American Public Television overseeing marketing and managing relationships with stations. The site has also pulled together a team of informal advisors from across the system to offer feedback on a multi-platform strategy.

New Media Mission

Part of World's mission is "to create a new model of content creation and delivery for public media 2.0, one that exemplifies diversity, digital media and dialogue." WorldCompass.org builds upon the broadcast offerings by offering its own curated content, blogs, and social media features.

Despite facing many of the common public broadcasting challenges -- most importantly, a small staff and a wanting budget -- WorldCompass.org has made clear strides since the beta launch and the staff is optimistic for the future. A revamped version of the site just launched in response to lessons learned through the initial beta site, which had been in operation since July 1, 2010. Expanded features include more integrated social media tools and organized menu items that help to reinforce the relationship between broadcast and online platforms.

The updated site hopes to take advantage of new tools to engage with "hip" 30- to 45-year-olds and capture the elusive 18- to 34-year-old demographic.

"Currently, a majority of our viewers are your usual PBS demo of 50- to 60-year-olds," said Matey Odonkor, WorldCompass.org's manager of online communications. "Not that this is a bad thing."

Still, World TV has a different mission and audience in mind. "We want to offer age-relevant programming to young adults who grew up watching PBS programs with their parents but stopped watching," said Odonokor.

Cross-Platform Integration

Like the World channel, WorldCompass.org aggregates content around monthly themes (The Skin You're In, Diaspora, etc.), including audio documentaries, feature length films, video blogs, television episodes, and other media. The monthly themes highlight connections among a wide range of stories -- both big and small, and objective and subjective.

This month's theme is Land, and content includes a selection of audio (like this State of the Re:Union broadcast on Greenburg, Kansas) and video features (like this American Experience episode featuring the Civilian Conservation Corps), plus a request for users' own stories about their experiences with land. There are currently no responses for this request, although it's still early in the month. However, February's request for users' own childhood stories only garnered one user response during that month.

"The fun part," said managing editor Kavita Pillay, "has been connecting with emerging voices in public media -- people like Glynn Washington, Hari Kondabolu and Zadi Diaz."

Hari Kondabolu is an up-and-coming comic, who recently starred in a "Comedy Central Presents" special. His videoblogging for WorldCompass is more intimate and personal than his stand-up but no less funny. Here's a contribution he made to the Diaspora series:

'Thematic Evolution'

"The hope is to give the user/viewer an 'I never thought of it that way' moment as they go through a theme," Pillay said.

Currently, the topics are chosen by WorldCompass.org's staff and advisors. But, said Pillay, "at some point, we're considering a 'thematic evolution,' meaning that we'll retain the creative approach to themes but maybe present them in a different way or on a different calendar. And we'd love to start taking theme suggestions from users!"

Integration between the website and the channel has increased with the relaunch. Streamlined menu options include TV schedules and "Where to Watch" options. The site also now includes video previews and written summaries for films and programs airing on the World channel. WorldCompass.org producers are looking to increase this type of cross-platform promotion by highlighting broadcast content through more live chats, excerpts, deleted scenes and online exclusives.

On the broadcast side, the World channel runs regular interstitials sending viewers to the website for engagement activities and online extras.

And, added Odonkor, "The presence of World's crop of talented and funny videobloggers on TV and the website helps to tie the two platforms together."

Increasing Engagement

WorldCompass.org pairs content pieces with crowdsourcing activities. Such "Call-to-action items" include polls, quizzes, trivia, weekend assignments, and live votes. These often link users to WorldCompass's Facebook page or a partner website. For example, this Faces of America video includes a poll item about Henry Louis Gates' lineage. To find the correct answer, users are directed to an ABC News story.

In addition to its Facebook fan page, which currently has 285 fans, WorldCompass has integrated social media with a Twitter account (96 followers), and a YouTube channel (44 subscribers). While these numbers are small, the staff is experimenting with ways to increase them.

"When we can, we try to be creative with our use of social media -- for example, we organize Facebook live chats [with] viewers and producers," Odonkor said. "For what we do online, curating shorts, it's important we provide extras to engage users and invariably increase time spent on the site or the Facebook page."

WorldCompass.org also employs social media to promote partners' work. For example, the organization teamed up with the National Black Programming Consortium to promote Season 3 of the AfroPop Series that is airing on World TV.

Looking Ahead

So far WorldCompass.org's focus has been on introducing more appealing content -- and engaging users with it -- rather than convening citizens around particular issues or problems. The tone mirrors other productions and channels aimed at this smart, mobile, multi-ethnic demographic, such as Current TV or IFC. It may be too early to tell how well this approach is working, or whether the site has succeeded in attracting viewers who don't already watch the channel. PBS has long been attempting to court a younger, hipper demographic with less than stellar results.

Stay tuned for additional videobloggers joining the team over the next few months. In addition, WorldCompass.org is about to increase its original content in the near future, using a combination of licensing, commissioning, and crowdsourcing.

"The site and the channel are works in progress," said Pillay. "We know that there's a wonderful opportunity for us to find new ways to bring together content from users and emerging producers as well as from established folks."

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media.

Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here.

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.

This article was co-authored by Jessica Clark, with research support from Christopher Ali and Erin Roberts.

After a slew of reports, conferences, and hearings, the calls for public media to step into the journalism breach have been met with action. Over the past year, there has been a wave of experimentation in local news projects in public media, a trend that is increasing rapidly, especially at radio stations. As Ken Doctor sums up in this Newsonomics post:

We've seen 12 topical sites prominently launched in major cities, under the rubric of Project Argo. We've seen National Public Radio building out a state-of-the-art internal wire (the NPR API), facilitating the sharing of national, global and local stories among public radio stations. We've seen the Corporation for Public Broadcasting fund various new initiatives, including the Local Journalism Centers, aimed at improving regional issues reporting. We've seen Boston's WBUR, the Bay Area's KQED, the Twin Cities's MPRNews.org and L.A.'s KPCC all launch standalone news sites over the last year, moving beyond the programming brochure look that has long characterized public radio on the web.

These projects are just the start. They are matched by ambitious proposals to ramp up stations' reporting capacity, such as Bill Kling's push to add over 300 new reporters to local public radio newsrooms, and NPR's new Impact of Government initiative, which will add reporters to cover state governments in all 50 states.

Eight Strategies

How often and how well are rising public media news projects actually engaging members of the public? Researchers at the Center for Social Media (CSM) have been examining the rise of multiplatform local news projects in our Public Media Showcase, profiling the efforts of stations including KQED, KETC (now the Nine Network of Public Media), WHYY; nationally funded projects including the Local Journalism Centers the Public Insight Network; and individual programs like the PBS NewsHour. Through this research, we've observed some trends, some challenges, and some hopeful indicators for the future of public media. (View highlights from our journalism and public media coverage here.)

A year ago here on MediaShift, we outlined eight strategies for effective public media 2.0 experiments: Involve, go deeper, reach new and nontraditional publics, repurpose/remix/recycle, collaborate, enable media literacy, play with form and promote political discussion. Our research since has focused in particular on the first strategy, examining diverse efforts to involve users in news creation, curation and conversation. But along the way we've found evidence that the other strategies are also gaining traction.

Several prominent projects have emphasized "going deeper" in their news coverage -- see, for example, Argo and the Local Journalism Centers, which depend on particular content verticals to draw users. Many station sites now include social media features that repurpose, remix and recycle content, and we're seeing more and more projects that experiment with form -- using maps, databases, widgets and visualizations to present information.

Some stations are moving beyond distributing content and incorporating digital literacy efforts as well -- one gateway for reaching new and nontraditional publics, where there's still a lot of work to be done. This year's election also provided the chance for both national and local news projects to build upon the electoral experiments launched in the last two cycles. We cover several of these trends in more depth below.

A Continuum of Engagement

Stations, makers and programs are adopting a range of engagement strategies to involve users, from closed to open. In our past year's research, we've explored numerous multiplatform and participatory reporting models, from the hyperlocal to the global. Figuring out how well public media projects are working requires a more nuanced sense of how members of the public are expected to interact with them. Informed by interviews conducted by CSM research fellow Erin Roberts, we've developed the following scale to help assess the openness of a given news project, and the corresponding roles expected of users. (See the main image to the right.)

• Editor-driven approaches follow the traditional journalistic model, with editors controlling the production of news from start to finish, engaging users only once content is broadcast or posted.
• Interactive approaches provide users with narrowly focused options to interact with content, usually through features such as clickable maps, blog commenting, moderated discussion forums, Twitter and Facebook accounts, etc.
• User-informed approaches actually position users as sources, relying on them for information, perspectives, and crowdsourced research, which are then filtered through an editorial process.
• Community-centered approaches invite users to participate in the production process, with a small amount of guidance.
• Finally, on the most "open" end of the scale, user-driven approaches embrace users as full collaborators in news production.

Not surprisingly, we discovered that most public broadcasting news initiatives are still clustered on the closed end of the spectrum. While many have begun to embrace interactive features, few are actually inviting users to become full creative collaborators. In fact, the potential of users as collaborators is only beginning to be realized, with just a few public media organizations inviting users to create and repurpose content. Examples on the open end of the public media scale tend to be outside of traditional public broadcasting -- community media projects, and hyperlocal citizen journalism sites -- which offer the virtues of inclusion and active engagement for users, but don't share the same level of trust as big brands like PBS and NPR.

On the whole, both stations and national public media news projects are centrally concerned with retaining editorial control in order to remain authoritative and balanced sources of news and analysis. Conversation with users on sites like PBS NewsHour is lively but highly moderated, with editors directing specific questions to anchors, or calling for participation sharply limited by topic. Interactive projects like public media games, widgets, maps, etc. retain this same centralized feel, but give users focused options for engagement and content creation.

The aim, says Dave Gustafson, the NewsHour's online news and forward planning editor, is to foster "high minded discussions of important topics" -- closer to the authoritative vibe of a magazine like the Economist than the staccato, 24/7 pace of a site like Yahoo! News.

"We want to be as open and engaging as possible while still protecting ourselves from the free-for-all," Gustafson said.

Like many outlets, public broadcasters are struggling to ward off online trolls who discourage civil exchanges with name-calling and flame wars; NPR recently contracted with professional moderators to help field thousands of comments per day. Projects such as the Public Insight Network are now figuring out sophisticated ways to open the doors to deeper consultation with users. Some of the more daring station-based news experiments have also begun to adopt some of the methods and values of community media makers, such as the Nine Network of Public Media and WHYY, with projects described below.

The most promising projects combine elements from across the continuum, providing users with a core of trusted information, along with robust interactive multimedia packages, opportunities to comment on and suggest coverage, and spaces for inclusion, debate and content creation. Learning how to mix and match these approaches coherently and intelligently will be an ongoing challenge--one that promises to turbocharge the relevance and depth of public media.

Collaboration is Key

This year, we've seen increased cross-platform collaboration among public media outlets, perhaps most notably with the CPB-Funded Local Journalism Centers, which consist of regional partnerships working to address broad topics, such as health, agribusiness and regional economies. These projects are progressing at varying rates, with differing approaches toward online and in-person community engagement. Kathy Merritt, CPB's senior director of program investments, said, "CPB is really trying to drive the ongoing conversation around collaboration. We think it's really important. And, frankly, it hasn't really been the practice up till now."

Although stations are collaborating more with one another, there has been both tension and promise when it comes to partnerships with outlets outside of the public broadcasting system. James Rainey's recent article in the L.A. Times describes the competition between public radio news, local newspapers, and new online outlets:

Don't count on any clarity in the local news space any time soon as newspapers tenaciously cling to their incumbent advantages -- including staffs still larger than most of the upstarts -- and upstarts continue to crowd the space.

I'm doubtful of the few who have been suggesting that public radio stations and their websites will become the primary sources of local news. I expect we're looking at a more cacophonous future -- with the radio news sources just one of many voices in the room.

The Nine Network of Public Media/KETC has circumvented this tension by actively embracing a partnership with local newspaper, the St. Louis Beacon. KETC and the Beacon collaborated on both Facing the Mortgage Crisis and Homeland, which Amy Shaw, the network's vice president of education and community engagement, said has been "to the benefit of both organizations."

Nationally, collaborations are starting to bubble up in order to fill gaps in investigative reporting left by receding print coverage. The Public Insight Network recently announced an ongoing partnership with ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting and The Center for Public Integrity. ProPublica, Frontline and the Times-Picayune also teamed up on a multi-media investigation of the New Orleans police department earlier this year. And last month, Frontline and ProPublica partnered on The Spill, an hour-long documentary on the BP oil spill. These strategic partnerships have successfully employed the strengths of each organization, and it's likely we will be seeing more of them in the future.

Increased cross-platform collaboration is likely to be of great benefit to public television stations, which simply have not been able to capitalize on local news the same way that public radio stations have. In February, Center for Social Media researcher Christopher Ali conducted a descriptive content analysis of the news and information programming of all PBS stations with available websites.

Ali found that 70 stations produced no local newscast at all; 86 stations produced a weekly newsmagazine; six stations produced a newscast that aired one to three times per week; and just 13 stations produced a nightly local newscast (four times per week or more).

There are several reasons for the dearth of regular local newscasts -- the most obvious is the cost of production. However, we have observed some successful cross-platform news experiments like KQED News. Additionally, we've seen some improvements in national public television news programs, like the NewsHour, which launched a rebranding effort last year to attract more digitally savvy young adults, and has been gaining both audience and redistribution of content through its coverage of the BP oil spill and the recent elections.

Diversifying the Public Media Audience

One of the blatant gaps that public media makers are still struggling to fully address is reaching new and non-traditional publics. In a recent study of PBS's major public affairs shows, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting found guest lists that were "strongly dominated by white, male and elite sources, who are far more likely to represent corporations and war makers than environmentalists or peace advocates." (PBS's ombudsman, Michael Getler responded that "counting heads on a news program is meaningless unless one also analyzes what they are saying.")

Most pubcasters would agree that widening representation is a good thing, and that it is only a first step towards reaching new users. Currently in a beta phase, the WORLDCompass.org site represents a step forward, serving as "an all-inclusive platform for anyone with something interesting and thought-provoking to share," aggregated around monthly themes that include topics like Diaspora and The Skin You're In.

Another gap that still persists is the very real struggle with differences in digital literacy -- some users clamoring for mobile, others still learning how to use email. Researcher Christopher Ali documented this gap in his coverage of WHYY's new NewsWorks initiative: "This digital divide was illustrated by one of WHYY's community forums held at a community digital media center. Here, one room featured WHYY proselytizing the value of NewsWorks, while in another room, community members were attending a regularly-scheduled class on how to use e-mail."

Some public media initiatives, Ali noted, could find themselves in a Catch-22 trying to reach everyone and end up "both too early for digital neophytes and too late for early adaptors."

However, some stations are doing an admirable job of addressing this particular issue. WHYY itself offers a host of community media options, with the Dorrance H. Hamilton Public Media Commons offering training courses for adults, after school programs for youth and professional development for educators. This type of training serves multiple purposes: It builds community engagement and brand loyalty, and provides locally produced content from a community perspective. The Nine Network of Public Media combines media training and distribution with their NineAcademy, a free community media program that trains locals in shooting, editing, and storytelling. The academy is in turn an intrinsic part of the station's Homeland project, which covers immigration issues.

The Public Media Corps project, which the Center for Social Media is helping to incubate, is also experimenting with community-driven models for digital literacy training and engagement with local news. Check back on MediaShift early next year for best practices gleaned from this beta test.

Persistent Challenges

Many of the challenges facing local public news initiatives are immediately apparent: Funding, staffing, training, and the hotly debated tensions between local versus national coverage and broad versus vertical approaches. Having a digital expert on staff can make a huge difference, as can a relatively small amount of funding to devote to digital resources.

During this time of great experimentation, we have found that innovative approaches may not always immediately attract users. In cases like these that rigorous impact measurement is crucial for strategic, iterative project development.

Public broadcasters face the difficult task of finding new ways to characterize success in an open environment, as CSM's Erin Roberts points out in her coverage of NewsHour: "Until recently, public broadcasters have focused almost exclusively on how many people encountered their content, not who those people are or how they interacted with the content."

Digital civic engagement may never scale up to the level estimated broadcast audience, but as the continuum above suggests, more participatory approaches position publics for deeper involvement, which in turn can open up new opportunities for both local relevance and fundraising.

The National Center for Media Engagement's recently revamped guide for producers lays it on the line:

The best engagement projects reflect thoughtful consideration of issues, audiences, alliances and, most importantly, outcomes ... While it's simpler and possibly more appealing to imagine a family gathered in front of a glowing TV set, eating popcorn and enjoying every minute of your program, the reality is more complex. If you want to affect the way people think, believe and act, you must engage them across platforms, in different settings and over time.

Given the ever-shifting ground for public media news projects, stations and producers need better tools and opportunities to share best practices with one another in a clear and systematic way. Establishing formal and informal hubs for networking, learning and information sharing among these projects -- like Idea Lab here on MediaShift, or Harvard's Nieman Lab -- could help to catalyze the creation of new and better projects around the country.

As we move towards 2011, there are even more shifts on the horizon. For now, however, public broadcasters still lag well behind local newspapers in their range and volume of coverage -- as a set of recent local news ecologies conducted by the New America Foundation suggest, they're a key but incomplete solution to the problem of diminishing accountability journalism in U.S. communities. More is needed on all fronts -- funding, sharing of best practices, and systematic assessment -- to transform this moment of experimentation into a vital public news service that not only informs citizens, but gives them the civic agency to actively participate in our democracy.

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media.

Jessica Clark directs the Center for Social Media's Future of Public Media Project, and is a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation.

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.

Homeland aims to "apply public media sensibilities, expertise and capacity to address a complicated and polarizing issue," said Amy Shaw, KETC's vice president of education and community engagement. The project includes a website that will feature original content created by community members and KETC staff, a series of facilitated community meetings in the St. Louis area and across Missouri, and a four-hour nationally broadcast television series. This combination, said Shaw, is designed to "push the boundaries of what public media can do."

According to the site:

The Homeland initiative is the embodiment of what public media can do well -- we generate awareness around the important and complex issues that need to be addressed in our communities, and then we create impact by mobilizing people to address these issues. In the process of talking to people throughout our region, we want to show, analyze and present what we learn. We're not going to tell people what we think about immigration or what is right or wrong, good or bad. We intend to help people embrace and understand the complexity of important issues to help communities address them in a more authentic, rational way.

NineAcademy Trains Community Members

Shaw said the project is "rooted in needs of the community," and it is clear that KETC takes community engagement seriously. Homeland is teaming up with KETC's NineAcademy, a free community media program that trains locals in shooting, editing, and storytelling. The best productions will be featured on the Homeland site and on KETC.

Although NineAcademy has already trained community members ranging from middle schoolers to senior citizens, KETC is intent on "meeting people where they are." Aware that some community members lack internet access, KETC staff has made sure that phone, face-to-face and snail-mailed correspondence is valued as much as online interaction. For example, KETC is experimenting with the idea of "conversations in a box" -- mobile storytelling kits, including inexpensive digital video recorders, that are mailed to community members. When they have finished recording their stories, they send the kits back to KETC for redistribution.

So far, according to Shaw, promotion for the project has been minimal, as the project website is still developing.

Five Sections of Site

At present, the site includes five sections that demonstrate the participatory and collaborative nature of Public Media 2.0, in varying degrees.

360 Degree Perspectives is a blog that explores multiple perspectives on immigration issues, based on KETC's meetings with community members from all spots on the political spectrum, including Tea Party members, far-left groups, and the very wide swath of Americans who don't currently identify with a particular political point of view.

Fact vs. Myth takes a nuanced look at some of the common information and misinformation surrounding the immigration debate. Check out this Fact vs. Myth video created by a NineAcademy graduate DeAnna Tipton:

Your Voice is a discussion forum for community members. Right now, the conversation is heavily populated by KETC staff, but Shaw is confident that the balance will shift over time to allow for more user-directed conversation.

Homeland Series is a behind-the-scene look at the making of the four-hour series that will air in 2011. The broadcast element of this project is, as Shaw explained, "a piece of puzzle," not the be-all end-all culmination of the project. In fact, no pieces related to the project have aired yet, although there has been much activity both online and face-to-face. Community meetings have shaped the entire direction of the project, including the decision to create the four-hour broadcast piece.

Finally, From the Beacon showcases related work from KETC's newspaper partner, the St. Louis Beacon. The Beacon was a partner in the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project as well, providing cross-platform news coverage to the benefit of both organizations.

Challenges

Although the project is developing smoothly, Shaw said that, "We were a bit naive in considering how challenging it would be to take on one of the most difficult and challenging issues of our time." As polarizing as this issue may be, the tone on Homeland remains congenial with only minimal moderation, indicating perhaps that people are tired of the sensationalized, black-and-white coverage of the issue that is often provided by traditional media.

In addition to the polarizing nature of the subject matter, KETC is also dealing with the fact that the station has not traditionally been a news organization. Now, as they experiment with community-based public affairs coverage, the team must constantly evaluate what works and what doesn't or, as Shaw put it, "go through a daily recalibration." The lessons that KETC's staff learn through this project could very well inform a powerful community engagement model for other stations around the country.

In the coming months, the Homeland team will continue to tweak the design and engagement aspects of the project in order to make the site more community-oriented. KETC is also working on some major internal shifting, and a rebranding effort to highlight the station's overall push toward public engagement. In the future, KETC will be taking on more than one in-depth community engagement project at a time. The subject matter for these future projects will come from -- where else? -- the community.

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.

The changes at KQED reflect a system-wide emphasis on experimentation and news expansion by public media outlets. Since the release of the Knight Commission's report, Informing Communities - Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, last October, station-based news projects have grown substantially. Large, cross-platform projects are becoming more prevalent, especially among public media organizations with the resources to produce them. See, for example, some of the innovative work being done by outlets like WYNC and WBUR.

Cross-Platform Coverage + Collaboration

KQED's news site combines coverage from KQED Public Radio, KQED Public Television, and KQEDnews.org. In addition to cross-platform news coverage within KQED, the site aims to provide seamless integration of local, national, and international coverage (thanks to extensive integration of NPR's API); in-depth news and commentary (including investigative reporting); and real-time weather and traffic updates. Eventually, the site will incorporate additional interactive features to make news stories more dynamic and relevant to Northern California residents.

According to Tim Olson, KQED's vice president of digital media and education, the expanded site is part of an overall increased push in news coverage. This shift is not the result of a new dedicated source of funding. Rather, said Olson, "It was something [KQED president and CEO] John Boland wanted to do for a long time. We restructured the budget to accommodate these changes."

The new site builds on KQED's history of successful collaborative initiatives. For example, KQED Quest is a "multimedia series exploring Northern California science, environment and nature." Quest integrates radio, television, and online coverage in a site that features maps, a community blog, and hands-on explorations.

KQED News also already has a wealth of in-depth news reports that integrate social media and Web 2.0 technologies. Take, for example, Climate Watch, which provides continuous coverage of climate-related news and incorporates mapping projects such as Reservoir Watch, which tracks the state's water reservoir levels. There's also California's Water Bond - Where Would the Money Go?, which explores the distribution of funds in recent California water-related legislation.

Another special feature, Governing California, invites users to learn about California government. This feature includes a California Budget Challenge game that allows users to submit their thoughts on spending decisions, and an interactive timeline of reform history in the state.

Additionally, "Health Dialogues," an exploration of health and health care in the state, includes an interactive map of health issues in rural California and Healthy Ideas, an eight-week special project that invited health care professionals to share their ideas on health care reform.

KQED News also incorporates maps, Twitter feeds, blogs, podcasts, video and user commenting on its news stories. KQED radio dedicates a portion of airtime to listener feedback, and the integrated site includes Perspectives, a section that provides two-minute audio commentaries from listeners each day.

Listen to this recent Perspective audio report from a KQED listener:

Traffic Increase & Challenges

Since the launch of the expanded site, KQED News has seen a 10-fold increase in the number of users, an impressive feat considering that, according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Measured by audience size and budget, KQED is the largest public station in the country with TV and radio under one roof." KQED is growing in terms of partnerships as well: The organization currently has ongoing partnerships with upwards of 25 other news outlets, including organizations like the Center for Investigative Reporting, Youth Radio, and ProPublica, and this number is growing.

The expansion is not without its challenges, however. KQED's clear strength is in radio news, but, as Olson noted, "text and images are required for a robust online news presence." Improving the text on the site is a major priority, and as the site continues to expand, this emphasis will grow as well. Olson noted that NPR has gone through a similar transition over the past few years, which was addressed by gradually training reporting staff, and adding photo editors and copy editors.

Another challenge is balancing the "one-stop shopping mall" all-news aggregator approach with the "hyper-targeted topic verticals" approach. It's sometimes difficult for sites to combine both of these elements, and KQED is currently testing both approaches, in addition to some of the more targeted projects listed above.

Olson said the expanded site is "very much just the first step" in overall growth. In addition to a news blog, "News Fix," launching shortly, a mobile version of the site is currently in production, and will be released in the fall. "We're in it for the long haul," said Olson. "We're just getting started."

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.

In an age when it's increasingly easy for amateur filmmakers, citizen journalists, and the general public to distribute videos online, is there any point in having a public-access cable channel? Some argue that public-access television has outlived its usefulness for this reason: Podcasting and online video have effectively eliminated the need to reserve television slots for public comment. In recent years, telecom companies have used this argument with great success to get out of having to contribute public-access funding. Lack of funding and public interest have caused many of these stations around the country to close up shop.

Since then, the fight for relevance has heated up considerably. But while many public access stations are struggling, others have been able to flourish by effectively leveraging Web 2.0 tools to their advantage. For example, Deproduction/The Open Media Foundation is spearheading the Open Media Project, a collaboration among public access stations based on open-access tools.

Another successful public access station is Cambridge Community Television. It serves the city of Cambridge, Mass., through three television channels (watch a live-stream here), an extensive website, and a host of training programs. According to its website, "CCTV provides training and access to telecommunications technology so that all may become active participants in electronic media. CCTV strives to involve the diverse population of Cambridge as producers and viewers, and to strengthen its efforts through collaborations with a wide variety of community institutions."

Colin Rhinesmith, CCTV's community media and technology manager, said that much of CCTV's success can be attributed to the organization's "willingness to embrace new technology and provide easy ways for residents to use the tools."

Rhinesmith directs CCTV's NeighborMedia Cambridge, a hyper-local citizen journalism project. The participants include professional journalists, retired journalists who want to keep their craft going, and people with no journalism background at all. They are all deeply involved in the community. Check out the comprehensive Mediamap here, which includes stories by locals describing the resonance of various neighborhood points of interest, issues to be addressed, useful community services, and more. The interface is user-friendly and extends the public access mission efficiently for the online environment.

Unlike many other citizen journalism experiments that have petered out over time, NeighborMedia Cambridge remains sustainable. This is largely due to its funding structure (they received a New Voices grant from J-Lab in 2007). NeighborMedia has also enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with local professional journalism outlets. Its stories have been picked up by outlets like Bostonist, Universal Hub and Boston.com. If you'd like to learn more about the success of NeighborMedia and similar projects, Rhinesmith is currently organizing the "Citizen Journalism and Social Media" track for the Alliance for Community Media Conference on July 7-10 in Pittsburgh. He's looking to connect PEG Access and hyper-local projects across the country.

Measuring Impact, Justifying Investments

How do you measure impact in a public access setting? Rhinesmith said that simple surveys have helped CCTV suss out whether their content is culturally relevant, and if it engages users in meaningful ways. They conduct pre-surveys to figure out how to target their trainings, and post-surveys to improve their process.

In a response to a previous MediaShift article on impact assessment, he said, "We provide the tools, they create the media. Surveys provide us with a way to measure how we, and our community, are doing in creating more informed and engaged local communication spaces."

CCTV's surveys combine a mix of open-ended and scale-based questions presented via multiple on- and offline delivery platforms, including Survey Monkey, physical printouts and telephone conversations. Phone conversations in particular have been extremely helpful in terms of driving membership. As Rhinesmith told me, "Nobody likes to be trapped inside a survey." Picking up the phone allows for a more natural flow of conversation and more nuanced answers to questions like "What do you think?" "What do you need?" and "What do you want?"

Rhinesmith acknowledged the difficulty in trying to measure impact both among individual participants and general audience members. He noted that with the physical training center, it is easier to measure individual experiences. What CCTV -- along with most other public access stations around the country -- is lacking are consistent, reliable tools to measure impact across broad audiences.

This is a familiar refrain: Platforms like Nielsen are simply too expensive for most public broadcasters. Perhaps this shared challenge could serve as a rallying point for similar stations around the nation who are seeking to successfully expand online.

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.

The international human rights group Witness, which provides training, support and visibility for local groups producing documentaries about human rights issues, has created a Performance Dashboard that tracks more than just the number of viewers. Using "at a glance" metrics, descriptive analysis and direct feedback from participants, the Performance Dashboard provides a concise overview of impact.

It combines traditional metrics -- such as sales and licensing numbers, email subscriptions, blog statistics -- with more nuanced data, including a timeline indicating progress of core partnerships. These reports are published twice per year on the Witness website, and they are made available to other organizations under a Creative Commons license.

Videos With a Purpose

Witness is able to efficiently track progress in large part because they begin each media project with clear advocacy goals. According to Sam Gregory, Witness's program director, all work "springs out of an advocacy strategy." He said Witness is focused on "making videos for a purpose as opposed to making videos about an issue."

Each video project starts with the completion of a Video Action Plan, which encourages partners to think purposefully about intended impact, avenues for action, and measures of success.

Some of these measures of success are particularly striking. For example, Witness worked with the Centre for Minority Rights Development (CEMIRIDE), a human rights organization, to create a film about the displaced Endorois community in Kenya. The film ended up being presented as evidence in a landmark case in which the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights ruled in favor of the Endorois community. Last month, the African Union, the highest legal authority in Africa, ruled in favor of the earlier decision and ordered the Kenyan government to provide the Endorois with compensation and reinstate their land.

While a direct causal link can be difficult to prove, clearly this film did its job. In a case such as this, the element of impact that is most important is influence, not reach. Gregory explained that even if only a few people saw the film, the film achieved its desired impact because they were the people with the power to decide the case.

New Focus: User-Generated Video

Witness hopes to broaden its impact with a new strategic vision that addresses the exponential growth in user-generated video. The organization is focusing on how user-generated video can be used by human rights advocates. (MediaShift reported on the organization's earlier experiments with viral video in 2006.) Witness currently trains about 500 people in human rights filmmaking across the globe per year, and recognizes the need to shift to a more scalable training approach. One of the ways that Witness will make this shift is by developing shared virtual spaces for fostering discussion on what works and what doesn't.

Yvette J. Alberdingk Thijm, Witness's executive director, explained the strategy in a blog post:

Right now and right here Witness, with your help, can exponentially expand its impact. But the demand for our services is far greater than our capacity. Witness's New Strategic Vision is designed to scale our impact. So beginning in 2010, in addition to continuing to train and support individual grassroots organizations, Witness will forge relationships among organizations and networks, creating a broader, more interconnected global human rights community. By doing this, we'll play a seminal role in forging coalitions that seek shared goals, with video emerging as the common language across all types of borders. In addition, we will scale our work by creating video toolkits and other web tools that facilitate knowledge sharing.

With the new focus on networked campaigns, in some ways, impact will become more difficult for Witness to track. What is the most effective way to measure impact when the media in question spans across so many different modes, timeframes, countries and (sometimes overlapping) networks?

In the future, Witness will likely spend more energy tracking the connections that form within and among networks. The Witness team is currently working through the process of adding new categories to the current Performance Dashboard.

The dashboard offers a great model for other media projects. But it's also clear that projects without similar, specific advocacy goals will likely have a harder time making use of the tool. Outlets and creators with more neutral goals of spurring discussion or raising awareness may have to turn to some of the existing impact assessment toolkits -- or perhaps even develop their own.

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.

As Perez's quote suggests, there is often tremendous overlap between youth media and Public Media 2.0 projects. While we describe public media's core function as "generating publics around problems," youth media projects often accomplish the same goal by addressing issues such as social justice, civic engagement, and media reform. But, too often, these sectors are not linked. Is this a missed opportunity?

There are over 100 youth media organizations in the United States, and they have a diverse range of priorities. According to the State of the Youth Media Field, a report written by Ingrid Hu Dahl, editor-in-chief of Youth Media Reporter and program officer of youth media at the Academy for Educational Development:

Youth media neighbors other fields -- including youth development, media arts, and public interest journalism -- and has looser ties with civic engagement, youth organizing/activism, and service-learning. But youth media is distinct in that it uses media as a tool and strategy for young people to examine themselves, their communities, and the world at large. One of the greatest qualities of youth media is its potential to reach large audiences while offering young people a thoughtful, mediated process.

Powerful Youth Media Examples

Below are just a few of the many powerful youth media projects that span different platforms with varied goals and approaches, including journalism, career training, and social justice activism. They are participatory, grassroots efforts that take full advantage of Public Media 2.0 tools in order to generate the kind of engagement that spurs community development and social change.

Global Action Project
Since 1991, Global Action Project has provided media training for underserved youth in New York City and beyond. Global Action Project runs several programs, including Urban Voices, which combines social issue media production, college prep, leadership and critical thinking skills; and Media in Action, which provides support for community campaigns with "targeted, cross-generational trainings in capacity-building through creative youth engagement, media production, and strategizing."

Additionally, their Global Voices program links youth producers with regional organizations in order to produce and screen videos all around the world. With the help of partner organizations, Global Action Project's productions are screened for over 250,000 people per year. Films are for sale on their website, and many are also available on Global Action Project's YouTube Channel. Below is "What's Justice?" a video about how the Youth Leadership Project of CAAAV (also known as also known as Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) is organizing for justice and community healing in the Bronx:

The Lower East Side Girls Club
It connects media production training, hyper-local journalism, intercultural understanding and community activism for girls aged eight to 18. The organization's website includes podcasts (check out this one about two young women who refused to serve in the Israeli Army), blogs, girl-produced videos, and girl-produced citizen journalism, including an extensive multimedia hyper-local journalism project. In addition to media training, the Lower East Side Girls Club runs a diverse array of programs, ranging from health to the environment to international field trips. For more information on the Lower East Side Girls Club, see the video below:

Youth Radio/Youth Media International
Founded in 1990, Youth Radio provides underserved youth with free media training. Each year, Youth Radio trains 1,300 young people in broadcast journalism, multimedia skills training and career preparation. Youth Radio has achieved tremendous success in terms of distribution -- over 300 Youth Radio reports are broadcast annually, on outlets including NPR, CNN.com and iTunes. According to Youth Radio's website, "an estimated 27 million people hear and read the often overlooked perspectives of young people through Youth Radio's work each year." Read Youth Radio blogs here, listen to programs live here, or explore the archives here. Also, be sure to check out this youth-produced journalism collaboration with KQED.

Challenges Facing the Youth Media Field

While youth are often at an advantage in terms of social media fluency and knowledge of contemporary culture, the youth media field faces major challenges in supporting training, production and distribution, especially for resource-intensive broadcast platforms. Perhaps the most pressing issue is funding. According to the State of the Youth Media Field report:

Veteran funders are making fewer and smaller grants, and new funders are not inclining toward the kind of small, youth development-oriented organizations that populate the youth media field. Despite this funding landscape, youth media organizations and their funding partners acknowledge that the field has great potential to address large issues like poverty, education, war/conflict resolution, and HIV/AIDs. Funders in these areas tend to make long-term investments with short-term deliverables -- a combination that would seem perfect for youth media, which routinely produces short, powerful, convincing, provocative, and extremely innovative pieces that have the potential to change society.

Along with difficulties in securing funding, practitioners in the youth media field sometimes struggle to uphold production values that match professionally produced media. While a particular youth media production may tell a great story that has the potential to ignite social change, many people will disregard it based on production values alone. Additionally, youth producers are not always taken seriously, or seen as even remotely authoritative. And in some school-based youth media programs, students can find their freedom of speech restricted.

According to Christine Newkirk of Youth Media Reporter, as a culture we are especially uninterested in the opinions and concerns of socially marginalized young people: "We see young people as consumers. We want their engagement in terms of buying things from us, but not in terms of listening to what they have to say."

Another issue facing the youth media field is visibility. There are hundreds of youth media organizations in the United States and abroad, but individual projects are often grassroots and local, and lack access to widespread distribution. The field is in need of a centralized distribution hub in order to create the kind of awareness that makes adults sit up and listen. For example, Youth Radio has had great success in broadcasting youth-produced pieces on national media outlets. The potential for public engagement and social change increases exponentially when the audience is widened. Newkirk noted that exposure to youth productions can lead adults to develop "a newfound respect for youth citizenship and participation."

As Dahl pointed out, youth media has too much potential to be ignored. And, much like public media, "youth media has the potential to create lasting, sustainable, major shifts in the culture we know today."

The youth media field must continue to generate engagement while expanding its reach into new audiences -- including adult communities. And stakeholders in both fields must continue to nurture the areas in which youth media and public media overlap.

Katie Donnelly is a research fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.

Launched July 1, 2008, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the project connects financially struggling residents with appropriate resources. St. Louis was hit hard by the mortgage crisis, and this, along with KETC's proven track record of community engagement, led CPB to select KETC as the project's producer.

Facing the Mortgage Crisis combines traditional news reporting, mortgage crisis-related video segments, and social media resources, including a blog, Twitter account, YouTube Channel, Facebook page, and a map of community resources.

The project embraces a strong community engagement approach, bolstered by KETC's partnerships with local online news publication the St. Louis Beacon and 26 community organizations. KETC also hired consultant Robert Paterson, who provides another layer of insight on the project on several blogs.

According to the project's site:

Public media is in a unique position to have a profound impact on critical issues such as the mortgage crisis. By raising public awareness, mobilizing networks of trusted community partners, and by aggregating community resources, public media organizations can make a significant difference in the communities they serve. Collectively, the impact will be felt across America.

This video also provides an overview of KETC's accomplishments with Facing the Mortgage Crisis:

Expanding into Other Markets

In light of KETC's success with this project, CPB provided additional funding for public broadcasting stations around the country to replicate KETC's model. The new projects are targeted to reach 32 markets identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as being severely affected by the mortgage crisis. KETC is managing the wider initiative. (Participating stations are mapped here.)

The participating stations' project websites show varying levels of sophistication in the content they're creating. As a result, it may seem as though stations have different levels of commitment to the project. Amy Shaw, KETC's vice president of education and community engagement, said the websites are not always reflective of their success with community engagement. While leveraging social media is a part of the project, she said an even larger part involves "facilitating grassroots dialogue" and "forming networks of trusted community partners."

In many locations, the project's success relies on collaboration among public broadcasters, in addition to community partners. For example, in hard-hit Detroit, Michigan Radio and Detroit Public TV created a comprehensive site with a frequently updated blog. Cleveland's ideastream also includes comprehensive television and radio resources, and has had great success with community outreach.

Some stations also teamed up with commercial outlets. South Florida's WUSF and Bay News 9 worked together to put a human face on the mortgage crisis. Their site emphasizes independently produced videos of local importance to South Florida residents. Dayton's public television station also partnered with a local commercial station and actually won their local ratings the night their mortgage crisis special aired. This is an incredible achievement, although Shaw was quick to point out that ratings aren't always the most accurate measure of success in a public media project.

Facing the Mortgage Crisis also partnered with United Way's 2-1-1 service, a call-in number that connects people with the resources they need, including emergency services, financial assistance, and health-related information. Many of the local station sites feature a prominent link to regional 2-1-1 centers. (For example, KETC's site links to United Way of Missouri.)

In a blog post, Paterson explained some of the metrics KETC used to measure the project's success. Notably, 2-1-1 calls increased 400 percent after KETC began the mortgage crisis initiative. Shaw also noted that an extremely effective campaign in Cleveland resulted in a "2-1-1 deluge."

New Model of Participatory Public Media

Developing appropriate metrics for this kind of engagement projects is a challenge. The national project is currently being analyzed, both internally and by two outside assessment firms. The results of these reports won't be released until February, but Shaw was able to provide some interim takeaways.

Most notably, the project has found that in order for public media to thrive, "stations need time to build internal capacity." Stations that are used to being "the voice out" to the people need to adjust to a new model of participatory public media. Stations also need to work on building internal competencies, placing an intentional focus on outcomes, and allowing relationships to drive work in the future.

Here's what KETC President and CEO Jack Galmiche wrote in a letter to CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison:

Stations are making the breakthrough in understanding that they can leverage Web 2.0. The costs of going here are not financial, they are cultural. Through Facing the Mortgage Crisis, there is a core group of stations who are discovering how to use the online space to amplify the value of our traditional content and to use it to offer a voice to the American people.

Stations are learning by experience how to connect social media and digital content in all that they do -- making it possible for the public to have a much deeper relationship and an identity connection with the station, while at the same time having a "safe and trusted place" to ask questions, have conversations, and build connections. The stations that are making this possible are also learning how to use their online space to converge national, local and public content on the web and are beginning to understand how to use the web to listen to every whisper in their communities and to reflect back what they have heard.

The project officially ended last month, but some stations have made a significant commitment to press on and transition to the next level of the project. Ideally, Shaw said, Facing the Mortgage Crisis will serve as a "gateway to a broader conversation."

"This is a concerted, national public media effort," she said. "It's not just about the mortgage crisis, it's about how to make the public see public media as significant, relevant and worth supporting."

In many ways, said Shaw, the project has spearheaded participating stations to "make the transition from public broadcasting to public media."

Katie Donnelly is a research fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.

Fortunately, there are dozens of initiatives that mine and share the data that influence policy and policy-makers. Many are funded by The Sunlight Foundation, which aims to use "the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens."

Below are 10 innovative government transparency projects that employ powerful online databases to make political data accessible (and, in many cases, fun as well). They serve as examples of Public Media 2.0 by providing much-needed intelligence about the relationships between officials, corporations, and policy-makers.

10 Watchdog Projects to Watch

1. Watchdog
Billed as "The Good Government Site with Teeth," Watchdog is a non-profit, foundation-funded project that uses open source software to aggregate government data -- including census information, campaign disclosures, and voting records -- in a single location. In addition to allowing users to search for data by location or officials' names, Watchdog also encourages people to take direct action by contacting their government representatives, and signing and creating online petitions.

2. SourceWatch
A project from the Center for Media and Democracy, SourceWatch is a wiki-style "directory of the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda," including public relations firms, think tanks, activist groups, industry-backed "experts," and government agencies. According to the website, "the goal of SourceWatch is to create the largest and most up-to-date guide in history, both in terms of breadth and depth." As of October 24, the site had 47,321 articles. Interestingly, SourceWatch does not adhere to a "neutral point of view" policy (like Wikipedia), although it does provide guidelines for contributors, and a paid staff of editors oversees the content.

3. Follow the Money
Follow the Money, an initiative from the National Institute on Money in State Politics, is an excellent resource for political funding information at the state level. The site includes comprehensive data, maps, charts, and graphs about lobbyists and government spending. Some of their creative tools include data visualizations such as Pulse, which demonstrates the "correlative relationship between money, incumbency, and winning"; c50, which compares the competitiveness of elections in all 50 states; and Contributions Timeline, which explores campaign contributions over specific periods of time. The site includes plenty of other innovative tools, as well as APIs and widgets.

4. Little Sis
Public Accountability Initiative's Little Sis is the antidote to Big Brother. It's an "involuntary Facebook" for government officials. This user-edited, social networking database profiles close to 30,000 current and former government officials, lobbyists and major corporate executives. It also includes close to 12,000 organizations, including lobbying firms and Fortune 1000 companies. The site provides data about these individuals and organizations, but its primary focus is on exposing the relationships between them (13,8871 relationships are currently highlighted). Little Sis has developed some interesting data visualizations, including this one (see a portion of that above). They are currently working on APIs and becoming an open-source project.

5. OpenCongress
An initiative from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, OpenCongress uses open source tools to track bills, representatives, funding, and votes. There are plenty of interactive and social networking features on the site. Users are encouraged to discuss, evaluate and vote on bills, as well as provide approval ratings for members of Congress. Registered users can create their own "My OpenCongress" customized portal to track their personal Congressional interests. OpenCongress also features a host of innovative tools, including state and district portals, a head-to-head voting comparison tool, various widgets, and Battle Royale, an aggregated list of the most popular happenings in My OpenCongress.

6. OpenSecrets
OpenSecrets is a large-scale database project from the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that has analyzed money in American politics for over 25 years. The site includes national, state and local political funding information, and provides news and analysis in the form of reports and blogs. The My OpenSecrets tool allows regular users to keep track of their watchdogging. OpenSecrets also offers resources for developers, and widgets that track campaign spending and industry contributions.

7. GovTrack.us
GovTrack.us is an open source database tool created by Civic Impulse, LLC. It tracks members of Congress, bills, voting records and Congressional committees. Users can employ "trackers" -- such as bill trackers, people trackers, subject trackers, and committee trackers -- to follow specific happenings, as well as create personalized "tracked events" pages. It offers widgets and APIs. GovTrack.us was launched in 2004, two years before the Sunlight Foundation formed. It was a source of inspiration for the current government transparency database movement.

8. MAPLight
MAPLight is a database project that "illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways." Users can search for legislators, interest groups, and bills across the United States. (Comprehensive state and local information is available for California and Los Angeles.) Money-related widgets are available, as is a Bill Positions API, which relies on combined data from OpenSecrets, Follow the Money, GovTrack.us and OpenCongress.

9. GovernmentDocs.org
GovernmentDocs.org is a collaborative project from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, the Sunlight Foundation, American Rights at Work and the ALCU. The site is a vast database of government documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Registered users are invited to review and comment on the documents. GovernmentDocs.org is information-heavy (some of the government files are hundreds of pages long) and its multimedia elements are weak (the blog on the site hasn't been updated in a very long time). But it offers an invaluable resource by publishing, indexing, and offering public review of formerly secret government data.

10. The Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker
Moving beyond the United States, the Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker from ProPublica and the Sunlight Foundation monitors foreign interests seeking to influence U.S. government policies. Using information from the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the project has digitized and organized foreign lobbyist information by legislator, country, lobbying firm, client and issue. The site is mostly data at this point in that it lacks some of the more fun and engaging user features that many other government transparency projects employ. But it is full of valuable information that's impossible to find anywhere else.

The above list is by no means exhaustive. For example, Project Vote Smart, is a comprehensive resource that deserves an entire post of its own. The open government movement is growing stronger with each passing election, and that means more of these valuable watchdog initiatives are being launched all the time.

Katie Donnelly is a research fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.