J-Lab: Exploring a Networked Journalism Collaborative in Philadelphia [1]

Our friends at J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism [2] just released a report [3] analyzing the media landscape in Philadelphia. The William Penn Foundation commissioned J-Lab to conduct the study of Philadelphia's media landscape and the state of public affairs reporting and make recommendations for a possible media investment strategy. It is well worth a read.

Some of the key findings:

• The available news about Philadelphia public affairs issues has dramatically diminished over the last three years by many measures: news hole, air time, story count, key word measurements.
• People in Philadelphia want more public affairs news than they are now able to get.
• They don't think their daily newspapers are as good as the newspapers used to be.
• They want news that is more connected to their city.
• People from both the Old Philadelphia, anchored by the city's union and blue-collar workers, and the New Philadelphia, representing tech-savvy, up-and-coming neighborhoods, want to be involved in helping to generate that news.
• The city is awash in media and technological assets that can pioneer a new Golden Era of Journalism.
• There is strong, but guarded, interest in exploring a collaborative journalism venture.
• A significant number of Philadelphia's new media outlets have expressed interest in pursuing a collaborative media initiative.
• Any collaborative news effort must validate and support the fiercely independent mindsets of the city's new media makers.

The entire report is available here [3].