Last week, Ellen Hume spoke to the MIT Center for Future Civic Media about her latest project, NEWz, a site for New England ethnic news. The website offers a sampling of the best news stories published in a week in over 100 ethnic publications across New England. NEWz is the only portal offering a snapshot of the diverse ethnic media landscape in the Greater Boston area.
Hume’s real enthusiasm for the project stems from its threefold mandate. Beyond serving as an online platform for ethnic media, NEWz aims to be a forum for dialogue across ethnic boundaries, as well as a training resource for those who contribute to their migrant community’s press.
Hume’s project is ambitious; she wants NEWz to maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date ethnic media database that includes records of both hyperlocal newsletters as well as larger publications with circulation figures in the thousands. In its attempt to amplify voices that are otherwise not heard in the mainstream media, the project is relevant and timely. Still, Hume’s conversation with the faculty, staff and students of the center focused on the challenges of developing a product that effectively fosters participation and engagement while serving the needs of the communities it targets.
She openly discussed financial constraints, and problems posed by online publication software that is not user friendly, curbing contributors’ ability to upload multimedia content to the site. Although NEWz recently received a grant to enable the translation of online content, Hume is unsure whether to translate news stories, user comments or community blogposts and is uncomfortable about translating all content directly into English. She also wonders how to encourage participation from those who do not see themselves as community activists or journalists, and debated the pros and cons of editing podcasts, having her students at the University of Massachusetts-Boston Center on Media and Society conduct interviews with community members, and establishing information gathering kiosks in migrant neighborhoods. The question of maintaining a degree of editorial control was also raised as Hume floated, with many reservations, the suggestion of allowing readers to rate the stories they consume on the site.
Hume remains excited about the potential of NEWz to facilitate conversation across ethnicities and provide an alternate platform for highlighting news stories that are too community and location-specific for the mainstream media to publish. Here are some excerpts from an interview conducted with Hume after her talk at the center.
Q. Given that ethnic publishing is a largely print-based medium, who do you see as the online audience for NEWz?
A. We realize that not all the members of the communities that access ethnic media in print will be able to access our website online. But one of our goals is to expand the readership of these ethnic publications and boost their web presence. Our real mission is to present important stories from these communities to a new population comprising policy makers and influentials. We’d like to have bankers, people who read the Boston Globe, and the mayor reading our site. Moreover, we want to promote a dialogue across ethnic boundaries so we think it can be effective to get community activists and opinion leaders from different ethnic groups to read about each other and eventually meet face-to-face at meetings that we organize. We should also keep in mind that one in four adult Americans consult some form of ethnic media, so there is an audience out there.
Q. How do you contend with the fact that some articles in community-based ethnic publications do not conform to the standards of professional journalism?
A. The problem of standards does come up since we are trying to be a site that lets contributors set their own style. It is true that some ethnic media are not printing best practice journalism. Often, the journalism is sponsored and is in the interest of a group or restaurant owner, not in the public interest. But there are many examples of ethnic publications and writers working with us who aspire to civic practice. We have also indicated that contributors are responsible for providing high quality, factually appropriate content. Stories submitted to the site must fulfill our mission of being in the public service. Even opinion pieces should be based on fact. To help writers meet these criteria, we conduct workshops for media partners and introduce them to standards of fairness and objectivity. Of course, the challenge is that we want to aggregate professional and citizen journalists in one place so as to facilitate community conversations.
Q. In the context of NEWz’s pedagogical mandate, could you explain the thinking behind the Reporter’s Toolbox section of the site?
A. We’re trying to take resource journalism to a new level so that citizens can contribute to our conversation and add information themselves. We’ve added tips, a virtual phone directory, and useful links so that it can remain inclusive while aspiring to best practice journalism. We didn’t want people to think that they had to fulfill all criteria to participate. Moreover, a lot of ethnic media is advocacy oriented and we wanted to respect that and serve our contributors better by offering them resources to support their writing.
Q. In your opinion, how does NEWz foster civic engagement?
A. Our whole idea is to empower through information and connections. We want to be a door, not a window, and so we invite people to visit our portal and participate. We allow people to generate their own content and make their voices heard on the site. In addition, we host face-to-face meetings that help build community and set the site’s agenda in accordance with the needs identified by ethnic media representatives. We’re trying to build community both virtually and offline.
Q. What sorts of articles do you highlight on NEWz, especially in light of your community-building mandate?
A. We have multiple kinds of stories appear on the site. Some – for example, stories about medical rules and immigration – cut across different communities. But we also find that ethnic media are able to highlight what is unique about neighborhoods and cultures and we want stories that focus on those aspects to find a bigger audience as well.
Q. You discussed your frustrations with the content management software NEWz is using. Do you think that the software available for online publishing is prohibitive and impedes participation?
A. It may just be that the professors, students and community members involved with NEWz don’t have the expertise needed to manage the software that we use. But I do think that the internet is not as easy to maneuver as some would suggest. We’ve found different content management systems to be clunky and problematic, especially when we tried to create a news wire or add audio-visual content to the site. We’d like the site to be a playground we can use without having to run to the webmaster each time. We’re not sure which software best enables podcasting, moderated blogging, and vlogging, and are still looking for input regarding this aspect of the site. We are thinking of converting to Drupal and hope that will solve the problem.
Q. Why are you interested in having both college and high school students working on the site?
A. Our mission is to empower people and enable them to find commentary on different issues. We want educated consumers and are also interested in media literacy and transparency. We want students to engage in political commentary and learn how to detect information with a commercial or political agenda. Students can also learn the value of credibility, inclusiveness, respect, and discussions that amount to more than ranting and raving and hurling epithets. Once students learn about best practice journalism, they can become citizen journalists and use these resources in the future. Moreover, they might want to support the mainstream media in the future as well, because no one wants to pay for investigative journalism anymore. Beyond students, however, we also see the site as an educational opportunity for our ethnic media partners as they are able to attend face-to-face training workshops at the Center for Media and Society.
Q. How do you think the site will change once it is equipped to feature more community posts, user-generated podcasts, vlogs, and digital storytelling using mapping technologies?
A. I think this is where new media content becomes experimental. Mainstream media and news stories are not superior to citizen journalism, and vice versa. The two forms can be wonderfully complementary to each other and that is why we encourage people to contribute. That said, we don’t want to lose a high standard of reporting and writing. One way of doing that is to make clear what is a news story, an opinion piece, and community viewpoint. Different standards of citizen journalism will need different categories and labels to make the site work as it is envisioned in the immediate future.