Don't Forget About May 1

A friendly reminder to all our current, former and potentially new grantees: Don't forget to send in your letter of inquiry for requests of support greater than $50,000 by May 1. We need all requests in by that time to begin planning for our annual Journalism board meeting in September.

For more details on applying for McCormick Foundation Journalism Program grants, visit: http://www.mccormicktribune.org/journalism/journalismguidelines.aspx.

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Taking It Right to the People

President Barack Obama has chosen the path less traveled to get out his message: bypassing the traditional guard of the often-jaded White House Press Corps to reach out directly to his desired (mostly liberal) media, including bloggers and radio hosts.

For starters, he introduced the massive stimulus spending plan by connecting White House budget director Peter Orsazg on a conference call to mostly left-leaning writers . Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel followed suit and perhaps heralded the increased importance of ethnic media in Obama’s communication plan by a direct briefing with black and Hispanic media.

Jonathan Martin of Politico reports that as revolutionary as this plan seems, it’s the fulfillment of every President’s dream to bypass the inner sanctum of seasoned beltway writers in order to present their unfiltered messages to very friendly audiences. But Martin points out that it’s not quite so easy to completely dodge the scrutiny of the White House Press Corps.

Read Martin’s article here.

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Presumed Open Until You Hear Otherwise

Attorney General Eric Holder brightened up Sunshine Week with his announcement yesterday that "government agency records should be presumed public," according to MF grantee Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP). This guidance stands in stark contrast to the Bush Administration's previous policy that favored withholding information it considered senstive or classified.

The highlights of Holder's memo - as stated by RCFP - include:

• FOIA denials will only be defended if an agency "reasonably foresees that the disclosure would harm an interest" protected by one of the exemptions to release or if it is prohibited by law;
• Agencies must be "fully accountable" for administering FOIA. He said each agency's Chief FOIA Officer must ensure compliance with the law and "recommend adjustments to agency practices, personnel, and funding" as needed;
• Agencies should "readily and systematically post information online in advance of any public request"; and
• FOIA professionals within the agencies are "equally important" to any other component of application and accountability to FOIA and should have "full support" from their agencies as well as "the tools they need to respond promptly and efficiently to FOIA requests."

For more on the memo, visit RCFP's site at: http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=10050.

To see Holder's memo, check out: http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/docs/20090319_153628_foia_memo.pdf.

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More Bad News for Traditional Media

Don't expect much sunshine or rays of hope in the State of the News Media 2009, the Project for Excellence in Journalism's sixth annual review on the "health and status of American journalism." The study - which examined nine sectors in the news media - asserts, among other findings:

- Most news media audiences continue to shrink

- Economic challenges accelerated in the news business

- Aggregators are monetizing online news faster than news media companies

For the full nuanced report (there are a few nuggets of hope, certain online ad segments are growing explosively), visit: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/index.htm

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Newspapers and the Unthinkable

Check out a fascinating piece by Clay Shirky (a media consultant and adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program) on newspapers and the Internet at http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/.

Coming out a week after the infamous "10 Major Papers That May Fold or Go Digital Next" piece on Wall St. 24/7, this thoughtful item harkens back to the mid-‘90s warnings of New Directions for News head Jean Gaddy Wilson and provides some much-needed context on what’s happened since. It manages to connect the enormous societal transformation that took place with the advent of printing (“we’re collectively living through 1500”) to the approaches that newspapers took to the Internet throughout the 1990s (“they were, at base, all the same plan: ‘Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!’”). It concludes:

“For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

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Ethnic Media Initiative Underway in Chicago

Community Media Workshop, with support from McCormick, has boosted its media directory contacts for the area’s burgeoning ethnic media sector (see the directory at http://www.newstips.org/cart/index.php). Next up is a two-year grant from the Foundation for a CMW initiative aimed at boosting editorial content and online presence of the sector. For starters, check out Steve Franklin's newly created blog that covers the local ethnic media scene at:
http://chicagoistheworld.org/?cat=11

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Plant a Liberty Tree

At a time when only 3 percent of Americans can name the five freedoms of the First Amendment and a surprising number support government limits on freedom of expression, a new initiative is being launched to help raise awareness of these fundamental freedoms on America’s college campuses and you are invited to participate.

The Liberty Tree Campus Initiative, funded by a grant from the McCormick Foundation, will award colleges $5,000 to develop thought-provoking First Amendment programs .

“The Liberty Tree Initiative is a remarkable partnership that taps into the energy of the First Amendment and the insights of experts, academic leaders, artists, musicians and journalists,” according to Ken Paulson, former editor of USA Today and now president of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Paulson is a driving force behind the initiative, designed to continue the tradition of constructive and collegial conversations about freedom started by America’s earliest patriots under an elm tree near the Boston Commons.

For the full guidelines and instructions on how to apply for the grant, contact Sandi Chance (schance@jou.ufl.edu) or Jon Bougher (jbougher@ufl.edu).

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Ethnic Media Environmental Justice Fellowships Now Available

The University of Southern California’s Institute for Justice and Journalism (IJJ) is taking applications for its 2009 MF-funded Fellowship in Environmental Justice. Aimed at increasing the depth, clarity and context of coverage of urban environmental issues, the program will include sessions in Los Angeles and Chicago and will feature field reporting trips, professional training workshops and interviews with experts. The Los Angeles session will last one week and begin April 30, 2009, and the Chicago session will take place in July, exact dates TBD. The program will select 10 experienced print, television, radio and online journalists from across the U.S. who are employed by ethnic media news organizations or independent journalists who regularly cover ethnic communities or racial justice issues. The editors or news directors of the Fellows will also take part in at least three days of the sessions in Los Angeles.

For more information, click here:
http://www.justicejournalism.org/fellowships/index.html

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We Media Hits Miami

The same day that staffers at the Rocky Mountain News learned that their paper was to be shuttered last week, a conference was taking place in Miami celebrating bright new innovations in the online media world.

We Media, which occurred February 24-26, brought together some 200 digital media executives, experts and entrepreneurs for panels, speeches, awards and networking. Highlights included a talk by expert pollster John Zogby; an interview of Rev. Lennox Yearwood, President and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucusl; and University of Miami President Donna Shalala by U of Miami School of Communications Dean Sam Grogg and a talk on the future of media by Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen.

Awards included the Pitch It awards - where new media innovators 'pitched' their concepts to a panel of judges to vie for start-up funding and the MF-sponsored Game Changes awards to innovators whose work inspires involvement and action through media.

For a roundup of coverage on the We Media conference, click here:
http://wemedia.com/2009/02/27/roundup-of-we-media-coverage

To see a Poynter item on Alberto Ibarguen's comments on the future of news as well as broader messages from We Media, click here:
http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=131&aid=159170

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