Here’s some background reading that helped inform my capstone proposal and that provides context on the people and projects involved:
This Twitter thread from Simon covers a lot of ground:
Last week I published this piece summarizing our first few years of work on info districts and mapping out how we're turning that vision into a new standard for access to local news, information, and civic engagement.https://t.co/MlDZzcVHk9
— Simon Galperin (@thensim0nsaid) January 24, 2022
Some of the links mentioned in the thread:
- Building a new model for community-centered local news (Simon Galperin, January 20, 2022)
- Towards a public choice for local news and information (Simon Galperin, June 2019)
- 5 Business Models for Local News to Watch in 2020 (Knight Foundation, January 2020)
- Could New Jersey be the home for a new solution to the local news crisis? (Nieman Lab, April 2020)
- Information Districts Are a Popular Way to Expand Funding for Public Media (Data for Progress, July 2020)
Here’s a bit more about the Bloomfield Information Project and the existing Zapier-powered workflow that they use for their news harvest.
Here’s the It’s All Journalism podcast interview where I first heard Simon and learned about these projects.
After listening to the conversation, without this capstone project even on the radar, I emailed Simon to express excitement and affirmation for his work, and to share a bit about my own projects and background.
One part of that background is that since 2011 I’ve been maintaining a web-based tool in my own community that aggregates and shares local news headlines and other information. I recently re-launched it at WayneCounty.info and continue to build on it today. My main goal with it is to increase community awareness about news, events and happenings in the area, increase civic engagement based on that information, and help people detangle their awareness and engagement from social media platforms that incentivize problematic behaviors and the spread of misinformation.
My approach has been very focused on software automation. Simon’s has been focused on human-led curation with software tools to scale that process. There’s a lot to explore at each end and in between.
Simon and I set up a call on August 4, 2021 to chat more, and found we had a lot of shared interests and goals in local news production models. We continued to exchange emails and geek out over tools and workflows for the following months, and the conversation continued from there. At the end of 2021 I proposed collaborating as a part of my capstone project, and here we are!
