Which is what brings me to Battlestar Galactica. There’s a scene in the 2003 miniseries that led to the revival of the 1970s sci-fi show that I regularly go back to because it feels connected to the state of journalism.

Some setup: Sexy robots vs. Edward James Olmos in space. Humanity is on the run, and two characters are at a crucial moment deciding whether they need to fight or flee. And then, one says:

I’m going to be straight with you here: The human race is about to be wiped out. We have 50,000 people left, and that’s it. Now, if we are even going to survive as a species, then we need to get the hell out of here and we need to start having babies.

Extinction-level events have more or less become the new normal in the news business. Think back to Craigslist, moving up to the scourge of content farms, the aggregator threat. And let’s not forget paywalls, native advertising, brogrammers, and, now, ad blockers.

Which is why you’d think journalism should have been wiped out by now. And yet it’s surprisingly resilient — and, under the right circumstances, profitable. But in order to reach whatever the hell the future looks like in this business, it’ll be necessary to step back from the #contentwars and start, well, building new things. Or, starting having babies.

Every minute spent debating whether bloggers are journalists, if Vice is really in the news business, if journalists need to learn code, and if viral traffic is bullshit is time not spent making something that might have the potential to connect with an audience, or even motivate them to open their wallets.

Which, of course, is why I’d like to ride into the sunset by firing off some burning hot takes on the state of the news business. Aside from being a talking head with a mustache, I’ve played on a softball team for the Harvard Business Review, which pretty much makes me an MBA. Prepare yourself for this burrito bowl of incisive media analysis. Call your lawyer, a priest, and that guy you know who plays in a kickball league with someone at Andreessen Horowitz.

Cash up front

There’s suddenly a lot of Scarface: The World is Yours-sized piles of money between investments in places like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Vice, and Business Insider.

How worried should we be that all this money will collapse the budding online journalism economy? Is private investment only inflating media companies that are still scrambling to find a foothold in a quickly shifting advertising environment? Is it creating a system of have and have nots, where the only way to survive is to reach broad audiences across a variety of verticals that also position you for an over-the-top offering on the synergistic telecom company that is snuggling up for global strategic planning?

SHUT UP AND TAKE THE MONEY before Elon Musk triggers The Singularity.

The once and future Vine

Speaking of omnipresent corporations that control vast amounts of power and probably a doomsday machine or two, let’s talk about moving pictures on screens. You know what’s going to be huge very soon? Video.

At this point, I’m certain the people who keep saying video is the future are also responsible for selling us all on Dippin’ Dots as the ice cream of the future. Because dessert in pellet form is the ultimate in snackable content.

First it was raw video shot by newsrooms. Then it was video shot by your “one-man band” and his/her multimedia bug-out/burn-out bag. Actually, strike that. Hosted, newscast-style video segments shot inside your newsroom is actually the next big thing.

Everyone is trying to chase the (legal) high that is video ad dollars. Because when you’re counting digital dimes and pennies, nice fat prerolls from Ford or Taco Town are salvation.

Should you be staffing up your own Motion Pictures unit? Absolutely. Do you need to get on YouTube Gold Club Elite? Probably. Now that you’ve got cartoon bags of money lying around, spend it on green screens and craft services, and “the talent.” How else can you double-down and gain that sweet ad cash for your investigative travelogue series on animal husbandry? Frankie Muniz’s people are already onboard.

That may not stop those millennials you’re hunting from watching most of their content on Vine, Instagram, or Snapchat.

Even snake people read the news

Listen, I like snake people as much as the next guy. Some of my favorite former coworkers are millennials. And sure, once you get over the fact that your Diff’rent Strokes references hold no water and that they have questionable eating habits, they’re not entirely terrible human beings.

But do they really, really need entire swaths of the Internet dedicated to millennial-focused content initiatives? Have we learned nothing from the crimes of Kidz Bop?

Journalism’s unhealthy lust for the young rivals only Hollywood’s in its vigor and persistence. As someone who was a one-time “youth columnist” for a newspaper, I assure you stories on skate parks and Tamagotchi will not trick them into subscribing to anything.

Millennials, like most human beings, probably just want a delicious mix of information that crosses their interests, surprises them, and fits into their daily habits in comfortable ways. Much like a Tamagotchi.

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

How many more indicators does the media business need that it should be hiring more brown people, queer people, transgender people, young people, or women people? Here is a basic question: Does your operation in any way resemble the audience you are trying to reach? Oh, it looks like Roger Sterling’s garden party? Interesting.

Making newsrooms more inclusive isn’t about creating a representative democracy of personal identities. “Yes, you there, 24-year-old Jewish lesbian who grew up in Ames, Iowa? What do you people want from us?” Creating that newsroom is about increasing the variety of voices that will inform stories and create projects that could expand your audience. It’s also, about staying competitive with your peers. Those young, hungry staffers who scare you are looking for paths to the future in your company.

It reminds me of a passage from our holiest of scriptures in media, The New York Times innovation report:

We rarely hire outsiders directly into leadership positions. We have struggled to groom our digital journalists for leadership, in part because we don’t fully know how to use their skills. And we have a tendency to move traditional journalists into top digital roles.

Take the time. Take the risk on a candidate that doesn’t meet whatever idealized vision you had in your head for a position. If they don’t have all the qualifications, that just makes them more hungry. If they make you uncomfortable, even better. The only people who should obsess over “fit” are Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum.

Listen, since we’re all going to be working for Stacy-Marie Ishmael or Lydia Polgreen at some point anyway, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Well, actually

Not everything can be solved by the Times’ Innovation Report. Sorry.

For that matter, there’s not a lot that can be solved by imitating what the Times does. Or any other Major Media Brand. Welcome to my seminar on Media Nihilism and The Infinite Sadness.

When you write about media companies over an extended period of time, you see when trends take hold and suddenly everyone in school is now wearing Lululemon yoga pants and L.L. Bean duck boots. Or, in this case, developing sponsored content, events businesses, and membership programs.

The days of successfully running a media company by playing follow the leader are officially over. Realistically, how many media companies are going to come up with a strategy for messaging apps, or devote time to understanding them? How many have the ad staff necessary to program sponsorships for a newsletter or podcast over the next six months? If we’re honest, there are maybe five companies capable of operating remote drone bases for targeted news insertion strikes.

Does this mean you should stop reading Nieman Lab and change your out of office responder to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?
Of course not. Instead, pick and chose the things that seem like they could apply to your specific corner of the media universe. Think of it as a Choose Your Own Adventure, but with more wearables.

Now, with all of that settled, my heart can be at rest as I say a farewell to #content. Thanks again to Josh, Laura, Yossi, and Shan. And Fuego, I think I’ll miss you most of all.

If there’s another thing I come back to — other than quotes about fighting robots and making babies in space — it’s the things David Carr would say and write. In 2013, he told Ken Doctor: “I like that people pay attention to what I write, but I never get confused about the fact that if my last name were not New York Times, far fewer would care what I thought.”

Thanks for reading, and for putting up with me, for five years. I’m pretty sure this journalism thing is going to work itself out.

For almost a decade, Ed Silverman has gained a reputation for his encyclopedic knowledge of the world of drug manufacturers and his ability to keep Pharmalot, his one-man blog dedicated to that subject alive.

But it’s been a long journey. Pharmalot started life as an early example of newspaper blogging by the Newark Star-Ledger. “The editor was looking for ideas of some sort, to create new sites. I wasn’t sure if he was looking for a full website or something else. But I suggested something about the pharmaceutical industry,” Silverman told me. In 2007, Pharmalot officially launched; a year later, as newspapers reeled from the financial crisis, Silverman took a buyout.

The story could have ended there. But over the years, Silverman (and Pharmalot) have had many homes and sponsors — as an independent blog, then as part of UBM Canon, and under The Wall Street Journal until this summer. Now Silverman and Pharmalot are moving again, to Stat, the new health and life science site produced by The Boston Globe, set to launch this fall.

At each point in its life cycle, Silverman fought hard for Pharmalot, negotiating to keep the rights to the name readers recognized. “I happened to suggest Pharmalot at the right time, if only because there were a lot of shifts and opportunities to start something new,” Silverman says.

At a time when even longstanding blogs can be shut down in an instant, that Silverman has been able to keep Pharmalot alive and develop a loyal audience is remarkable. Silverman says he still hears from people who were readers back in the Star-Ledger days, eight years ago.

I recently spoke with Silverman about what it took to keep Pharmalot growing, how blogging has changed over the years, and what information readers expect on drug makers and the agencies that oversee them. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

In recent months, they’ve introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages, the recently launched Google News Lab, and team-ups with companies like The New York Times on virtual reality projects using Google Cardboard. (Not to mention the Google Journalism Fellows, one of whom is hosted here at Nieman Lab each summer.)

Now Google is officially launching a €150 million ($166 million) fund to invest in online journalism experiments from publishers across Europe. The fund is part of Google’s broader Digital News Initiative, launched in the spring as part of the company’s campaign to make friends out of enemies in Europe.

The fund will invest in projects for the next three years, covering three rounds of applications starting this fall. The deadline for companies looking to apply for the first round is December 4. The project is only open to European publishers, and according to Google, 120 companies have already signed up. Notably, Google does not plan to take any ownership stake in the projects it funds.

Google is funding media experiments at different levels as part of the program. According to the company’s blog post:

Prototype projects: open to organisations — and to individuals — that meet the eligibility criteria, and require up to €50k of funding. These projects should be very early stage, with ideas yet to be designed and assumptions yet to be tested. We will fast-track such projects and will fund 100% of the total cost.

Medium projects: open to organisations that meet the eligibility criteria and require up to €300k of funding. We will accept funding requests up to 70% of the total cost of the project.

Large projects: open to organisations that meet the eligibility criteria and require more than €300k of funding. We will accept funding requests up to 70% of the total cost of the project. Funding is capped at €1 million.

Google’s newfound diplomacy and philanthropy comes after years of battling with European publishers about the company’s influence over advertising, search, and visibility in Google News. In 2013, the company created a precursor to the Digital News Initiative with a €60 million fund to help spur innovation in French media companies.

The former head of that program, Ludovic Blecher, a former editor-in-chief of Liberation.fr and a Nieman Fellow in our class of 2013, now oversees the innovation fund at the Digital News Initiative.

“What is really important for the projects we’re looking for is we want specific projects and not the broad digital agenda or roadmap of publishers,” he told me.

The fund is designed to help publishers, ranging from newspapers or other legacy media to startups, build out projects they can’t complete on their own. That’s a fairly broad area media companies could fill with ideas, which is why Blecher says they want ideas that have a specific business plan, performance indicators, or other goals and benchmarks that can be measured. “It’s about the creation of new revenue streams and addressing the creation of original journalism,” he said.

A group comprised of Google employees and news executives from around Europe, include companies like Spiegel Online and Telegraph Media Group, is overseeing the application process for the fund. A small team will process applications and make selections of prototype and medium-sized projects. The larger body will make the final decision on who receives funding.

Ideally, the Digital News Initiative would jumpstart dozens of skunkworks projects in media companies around the European Union. Blecher said they want to encourage publishers to take risks on the type of storytelling or revenue-generating projects that have been developed by their counterparts in the U.S.

One lesson from his time leading Google’s media innovation fund in France was the need for specificity in the projects from media companies. The best way to effect change at an individual company, and create a chance for another company to duplicate that, is to focus on a project, not a broader goal or hiring for specific positions, he said.

But the other lesson, Blecher said, was that publishers would rather have Google working alongside them rather than at cross purposes. Given that the relationship previously included threats, lawsuits, and acrimony, collaboration could be a marked improvement.

“It’s not just a fund,” Blecher said. “It’s about having discussions with publishers.”

“When The New Yorker started, they didn’t nail it on week one,” editor David Remnick told me.

The magazine is now facing a similar situation as it tries to transition into a new format: audio. The New Yorker Radio Hour debuts tomorrow to terrestrial audiences in cities like New York and Boston and to the wider world as a podcast. But what does The New Yorker sound like? While he’s open to experimenting with the form, Remnick knows at least one thing the new show won’t be: “The most foolish or arrogant thing we could do is get on the air and read New Yorker pieces,” he said.

Instead, Remnick expects a process closer to cooking: “All the elements of the crazy recipe of The New Yorker should be in there. The basics: There should be depth of discussion, depth of reporting, accuracy, humor, and range,” Remnick said.

The New Yorker is not unfamiliar with podcasts; the magazine has a handful of shows dedicated to politics, culture, and fiction, among others. But The New Yorker Radio Hour will be a hybrid of sorts, coproduced by WNYC Studios and distributed to public radio stations around the country. In the first two weeks, the show will debut on 26 stations, from New England to Portland.

In collaborating, the magazine and the radio station are trying to combine elements that regular readers of The New Yorker will recognize with new offerings. Remnick will be hosting each week’s episode; in the premiere episode, he sits down for a discussion with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates. Cartoonists Matthew Diffee and Drew Dernavich will discuss the process of how they create their work each week.

The first episode also features the initial installment of a narrative piece from Jill Lepore about her search to find her best friend’s biological father.

In discovering what The New Yorker is as a radio show, the staff will be the connective thread between the two worlds. “We’re trying to learn the medium,” Remnick said. “The New Yorker is what we do and we’re learning how to do this thing together and merge these different skills.”

That’s where WNYC Studios, the station’s recently created podcast unit, comes into play. More than a home to new podcasts, WNYC Studios is meant to be a place to develop programming that fits on airwaves and in earbuds. Using the knowledge that comes from creating and, more recently, distributing shows like Radiolab and On the Media, WNYC wants to provide a launchpad for audio producers, said Dean Cappello, head of WNYC Studios.

“This is probably the most enthusiastic reception we’ve received to anything we’ve done. It’s a credit to the regard people have for The New Yorker,” said Cappello.

Breaking into the weekend schedule on public radio is not an easy thing to do. For many stations, shows like Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, This American Life, and The Best of Car Talk are still the foundation of Saturdays and Sundays.

Cappello said public radio listeners are looking for more great shows, either on radio or on demand. The New Yorker, which can alternate between serious and satirical in a single issue, has many of the elements necessary to create the type of show that people want to listen to on weekends, he said. Combine that with the magazine’s name recognition and audience (which, it’s fair to say, overlaps with NPR’s), and you have a good base for a show.

“There’s a natural affinity between what The New Yorker does and what public radio does,” Cappello said.

In developing the show, there were some practical considerations. Even though The New Yorker and WNYC’s offices are not that far from each other, shuttling back and forth to record episodes would have been annoying. Instead, engineers from WNYC set up an audio studio with broadcast-quality equipment at the magazine’s offices in Condé Nast’s new 1 World Trade Center headquarters.

Getting those details right was relatively easy, but finding the right tone for the show was more of a challenge, David Krasnow, executive producer of The New Yorker Radio Hour, told me. While the show may include stories connected to the news, it won’t exactly be a news program. Instead, Krasnow said, it’s about finding the small, audio-friendly window into what may be a 10,000-word magazine story. Think interviews and personal narratives more than than long-format audio stories.

What the magazine provides in editorial variety each week, the show will aim for in a mix of interviews, personalities, and voices. “We talked about it as being inspired from the magazine, rather than listening to the magazine,” he said.

Krasnow and the rest of the producing team are working with Remnick and other editors to identify stories in the editing pipeline, or from previous issues, that might be a good fit for radio. But they’re also on the lookout for pieces that were an odd fit for the magazine or the website. Lepore’s feature in the first episode grew out of a memo she sent to her editor about an idea she’d had that wasn’t quite right for the magazine.

The producers are also trying to bring the literal tone of the magazine into the podcast, by incorporating actual everyday sounds: side conversations, phone calls, the uneven drumming of typing. “We developed a soundscape that is built from recordings taken here in the office,” Krasnow said.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is WNYC Studio’s first test as it enters an increasingly competitive market for podcasts. The studio is not just going up against NPR, which has recently launched new shows like Invisibilia and Hidden Brain, but also companies and networks like Panoply, Acast, Radiotopia, and Earwolf.

That competition, as well as the growing appetite for on-demand listening, is why WNYC wanted to create a division that focused entirely on podcasts. But having a separate division also allows for more flexibility in setting the advertising around shows that will live on public radio and as podcasts. While there are clear guidelines that restrict the types of marketing done over public radio, there are no corresponding rules for public radio podcasts. That’s a challenge and an opportunity for shows that exist in both realms.

Advertisers that already have a relationship with The New Yorker may also be interested in radio, Cappello said. And as WNYC finds new ways to deliver ads on The New Yorker Radio Hour, those ideas could also end up being used in other shows from the studio.

“There’s no shame in trying to leverage the dollars available and plow them back into our productions,” he said. But, despite the experimentation, WNYC will remain mindful of how sponsorships align between the radio and digital versions of the show, and whether that presents any conflicts.

Similarly, for The New Yorker, the radio show is part of the magazine’s continuing experiments and reinvention. In the past few years, it’s relaunched its website and seen subscriber growth after introducing a paywall. It’s built out a successful events business and turned The New Yorker Festival into its own franchise. In February, Amazon gave a full series order to The New Yorker Presents, a documentary-style series based on the magazine.

All these efforts have a similar, straightforward goal, Remnick says: “To reach new people. To reach more people, and to reach the people who already read us in different ways.” And while all of these projects seem to be unfolding at the same time, Remnick is cautious, noting that it takes time to learn any new medium. It was the same when The New Yorker first went online, and when it first went into print.

“This used to be an institution that put out a print magazine once a week. And that was interesting and complicated enough,” Remnick said.

That sounds like good news. But there are plenty of caveats for publishers: In 2014, Google, Facebook, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo accounted for 61 percent of total digital ad revenue in the U.S., according to Pew’s annual State of the Media report.

And this year, publishers are confronted by new obstacles: The rise of ad blocking on mobile and the specter of fraud brought on by bot traffic. With the rise of automated ad sales, some media companies are trying to build their own custom ad tech.

Factor in platforms like Apple, Facebook, and Snapchat hosting news — and offering to sell ads, minus their own cut — and it can feel as if publishers are trying to thread an increasingly smaller needle.

I asked several publishers what’s working for them in digital advertising in this uncertain environment. What types of formats are performing well? How is that a change from recent history? Do they have any plans to counteract ad blockers?

Now that many companies are creating branded/sponsored/native offerings, the hunt for America’s Next Top Advertising Model has moved to formats like video, podcasts, and newsletters. For many, mobile remains an elusive goal — and, as Mary Meeker’s annual slide deck shows, a tantalizing opportunity.

I spoke with executives from Slate, The New York Times, Vox Media, The Atlantic, Mashable, The Seattle Times, Newsweek, and Wired. Their thoughts on digital advertising are below, slightly edited for length and clarity.

If you take a look at Slate podcasts, or Panoply podcasts, we’re seeing a lot more brands move into that space. The biggest players are the “DR,” direct response advertisers, because we don’t have tremendous metrics and data yet. That’s one of the reasons I think the brands have been a little slower to move in there, although, as I mentioned, we’re seeing more and more brands move into that space.

There’s several different things we do there. The host read is very valuable. That’s the midroll unit, and it will go 30 to 60 seconds, sometimes longer. The hosts are given talking points and make it feel like it’s part of the program.

Four years ago we launched “Slate Custom,” which is basically an in-house creative studio that helps our advertisers communicate with Slate readers.

It’s another area where we’re having some success. We use the natural editorial positions on the site to drive the user to that content. It is clearly demarcated that it is sponsored content; it’s actually a different color. But we still bring the reader to that content the same way we bring them to high-quality content in Slate.

Our goal is to make sure we’re not confusing the reader, obviously, and that advertising does not influence the content of Slate, and finally to produce the best quality content for our advertiser.

At Panoply, we’re working with several partners to create custom podcasts, or native podcasts, where we deliver helpful or entertaining information to a particular listener.

We’re doing a series right now with Umpqua Bank. We’ve done a series with HBO. And we’re also doing something even more unique with GE. If you look at the iTunes chart, you’ll see a podcast called “The Message,” which is a fictional podcast, basically a sci-fi cliffhanger. We co-produce that with General Electric.

It’s just gotten more competitive. We’re still winning a great deal of business that’s tied to custom. But an advertiser can only work with one, two, or three partners. They might be able to go a little deeper occasionally, but it just makes it more competitive to win those battles.

We’re talking about a lot of things as far as ad blocking is concerned. It’s a concern for us and a concern for the industry, but we have made no decisions on what we plan to do there.

If it’s not one thing, it’s anothe, especially for an industry where we’re not charging our customers to enjoy world-class content. We gotta pay for it some way. I beg and plead with people to not use ad blockers so we won’t have to charge you for content.

The New York Times

Michael Zimbalist, senior vice president of advertising products and research and development:

Our native advertising and branded content businesses continue to show robust growth. In just the past two weeks alone we’ve launched programs for Cocoavia, Delta, Philips and Nest.

Additionally, our new mobile creative package called Mobile Moments is striking a chord with pretty much every advertising sector, from fashion to automotive to tech. Mobile Moments uses a unique native in-stream unit we call the Flex Frame that fills three-quarters of the screen on any mobile device.

Advertisers want to reach our audience, who are among the most curious, intelligent and influential people in the world. Who knows better how to reach our audience than us? Our best ad products build on the same techniques and insights that help inform our news presentation. In the case of Mobile Moments, for example, we used the insight that our audience’s news needs change throughout the day, and using that insight, we designed an advertising program with dynamic creative that can be [scheduled by time of day] in harmony with the news presentation.

Five years ago, it was pretty much all standard units adjacent to content, with limited storytelling capabilities. Today, we offer advertisers the ability to tell stories with the same depth and breadth of our news report.

Right now, our plans for ad blocking are to be vigilant — closely monitor the situation to understand what impact, if any, it is having on our business — and to strategically focus our ad product development on innovations that are additive to the user experience. Mobile Moments is a prime example of that. It’s non-interruptive and respects the user experience. That’s super important to all we do.

Newsweek

Thomas Hammer, senior vice president of sales, IBT Media:

The Atlantic

Hayley Romer, vice president and publisher:

It’s a space designed for growth, with more room for the company as it considers new projects, but also coworking spaces, a “Moroccan room,” a theater, and, yes, a podcasting studio. All the luxuries of a young startup, but with amenities designed to help the next maker build a project of their own. “We felt in terms of being part of an independent arts scene and independent creative scene it would be important,” said Max Temkin, cofounder of Cards Against Humanity.

And that includes podcasts. The studio allowed Cards Against Humanity to record its own programs, but they clearly wouldn’t need the space every hour of the day. Temkin had an idea to reach out to local podcast producers: “The quality [of shows] is really good and we saw an opportunity with people making more niche shows with a small audience not in a position to connect with sponsors,” Temkin said. And the Chicago Podcast Cooperative was born.

That was this past winter; today the cooperative has 30 shows that it supports through a local sponsorship network. With the growing popularity of podcasts, there’s no shortage of the networks popping up to locate, promote, and distribute shows. But the cooperative is somewhat unique in its narrower focus on the 312 area code.

More than just a studio resource and connector of talent, the cooperative also sells advertising across its collection of shows, bringing together local podcasts and local businesses. The model is a simple one, as described on the cooperative’s website:

Cambridge works at a real estate brokerage for her day job, but said she’s wanted to see if she could host and produce her own podcast. “Growing up, I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. And life didn’t go that way,” Cambridge says with a laugh.

As an independent podcast producer, Cambridge says her instinct is to use Google to troubleshoot any problems she encounters. But as a part of the cooperative she says she looks forward to tapping others in the network for advice and expertise.

Arnie Niekamp works at a game company, but has done improv in Chicago for a number of years. While he’s dabbled in podcasts before, he wanted to create a show that would be fun showcase for him and other performers. “I just had an idea I wanted to do a slightly weird kind of show,” said Niekamp, creator of Hello from the Magic Tavern. “It seems like new shows need to do something weird or high concept to get any kind of attention.”

The show, as the name suggests, takes place at a tavern in a magical land — in this case called Foon, accessed through a dimensional portal in the parking lot of a Chicagoland Burger King — and features a number of guests, all played by local improv performers Niekamp knows. “My podcast purports to be in a magical land and everything is not real, so doing traditional sponsorships would be pretty tough,” he says.

Niekamp admits $50 an episode isn’t a lot of money, though it can help cover some of the costs of the show. But Niekamp said advertising is a kind of signifier in this case. “It was great for us to have a sponsor for that first episode,” he said. “It felt like it gave us an air of legitimacy to some extent. Especially when we didn’t know if anyone was going to be listening.”

The show has steadily grown an audience and has been featured in places like BuzzFeed and The AV Club. This year Niekamp and the cast also did a live show at the XOXO Festival.

As the show continues to grow, that could mean new opportunities for revenue to support the show. Niekamp said he hopes the cooperative will continue to expand and look for additional ways to support shows.

For now, Friedman said the plan is to keep the cooperative relatively small and locally focused as they figure out what the future looks like. While they’ve received requests from shows outside Illinois, the goal has been to help local business support local shows, she said. “We want to keep it just for the people in Chicago.”

Temkin said they see it as a way to support the creative scene in the city, especially comedians looking to improve their visibility. Podcasts can be a great showcase for someone working in improv and provide a lasting space for people to discover talent without having to make a show at a club like Second City.

“It’s tough to have a breakout hit and when you do, you may move away to New York or L.A.,” he said. “Small things like this we can do to make it easier to make a living as an artists in Chicago and stay here are important.”

Not surprisingly, there’s a sharp difference in how fast a site loads if the ads are blocked or not:

We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites — including ours — and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers.

Our neighbors across the Charles River at Boston.com performed the worst: 8.1 seconds to load editorial content and a whopping 30.8 seconds to load advertising. The Times estimates visiting the homepage of Boston.com once a day for a month would cost $9.50 in data usage on an average American cell plan. (Boston.com’s upscale sibling, BostonGlobe.com, took a more reasonable 1.8 seconds to load ads and 4.3 seconds for editorial.)

The Times’ tests are a good example of why many publishers are anxious about the long-term consequences of ad blocking on their business model.

Reactions to the analysis were mixed, with Boston.com taking its lumps for its poor performance, while others saw the tests as another wakeup call to media companies.

A http://t.co/Ku1QSbwUq0 subscription might be cheaper than the data cost of visiting http://t.co/ddR0KtJSw9…? http://t.co/x9PjNmyQJM

— Tyler Machado (@tylermachado) October 1, 2015

Guardian has lowest ad load time of 50 news sites. Huge validation of the work of @patrickhamann & (former) team. http://t.co/G9QATV67wx

— Peter Gasston (@stopsatgreen) October 1, 2015

Nice job comparing mobile load times EXCEPT nobody goes to homepages on their phones. http://t.co/YK2N4wfP5y

— Chris Barna (@ctbarna) October 1, 2015

Mobile websites load faster & are easier to use with ad blockers, NYT finds. (I can hear the "nooo" from ad industry) http://t.co/j5ykCrCgcH

— Jody Serrano (@jodyserrano) October 1, 2015

Pretty amazing that ads can cost you $0.32/page from your phone data provider just to load 1 page of content http://t.co/6s94kIqbqw

— chris nunneley (@CeoNunneley) October 1, 2015

The best thing about this interactive is it translates load times into $. Most people do not have unlimited data. https://t.co/mRAzbS3BaQ

— stacy-marie ishmael (@s_m_i) October 1, 2015

Meanwhile, my hometown newspaper, the Star Tribune, has introduced its own ad-blocking counter measure:

The @StarTribune is using a script titled “FuckAdBlock” to prevent users with ad blockers from seeing content. pic.twitter.com/vRSdugJ4jj

— Tony Webster (@webster) October 1, 2015

The Star Tribune joins other newspapers like The Washington Post in trying to find a way to keep ad blockers at bay by essentially denying readers entrance to the site. Others like The Atlantic and The Guardian give readers a gentle nudge to find other ways of supporting their journalism.

Needless to say, some readers of the Star Tribune were unhappy with the paper’s decision:

@ehrens @dbrauer I hopped right on over to the Pioneer Press trainwreck of a website when I got that popup. See ya @StarTribune.

— Nick Campion (@mightympls) October 1, 2015

Nope, sorry @StarTribune. And FWIW, the popup doesn't seem to trigger with adblock enabled in private mode. pic.twitter.com/sU7QK9rbZD

— Benjamin Fribley (@bfribley) October 1, 2015

The @StarTribune is now blocking ad blockers, using a script that changes its block message `id` every half-second. pic.twitter.com/woAGvIEj2u

— Tony Webster (@webster) October 1, 2015

@webster @StarTribune @jaredamay Are mad that they are running a business? Do you think bananas should be sold without peels?

— Jacob (@jacobnollette) October 1, 2015

@MayorTabke @ehrens @StarTribune sounds like it. Strib is selling an upscale audience that has already shown willingness to pay.

— David Brauer (@dbrauer) October 1, 2015

The new funding from Knight will allow ONA to expand the number Local groups beyond the current 50 ONA programs around the country and provide more training opportunities for journalists. The funding announcement came this morning at the 2015 Online News Association Conference in Los Angeles. (Where you can also find most of Nieman Lab this week. Make sure to say hi.)

ONA Local is designed to continue the learning and networking that takes place on ONA conferences and offer those resources to the journalists may not have been able to attend. ONA Boston, for instance, has held trainings on using Google tools in the newsroom and discussions on diversity in local media. And, of course, the occasional happy hour.

As part of the grant, ONA Local will expand to up to 20 new communities and support existing groups in creating partnerships with other local media, academic, or tech organizations. ONA will also be bringing on a new staffer to oversee the effort. From Knight’s news release:

In the fall, the Online News Association will use Knight funding to hire a community engagement manager, who will start new groups and offer strong support for ONA Local leaders, including training, networking and annual conference attendance. In addition, a data-driven assessment and evaluation will be completed to develop a better understanding of local news needs in individual communities and improve the ONA Local program.

But the newest job postings show that BuzzFeed wants to test the waters of local news coverage, at least in the United Kingdom. The company is hiring 14 new positions, four that will go to “regional beat reporters.” From the job description:

We’re looking for reporters based in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, who have experience working on hard-hitting news stories and features that pop. They should have ideas about what BuzzFeed UK’s regional coverage should look like and where we should be reporting from. She or he also needs to be interested in stories that aren’t just interesting — they want to produce stories that are powerful, troublemaking, and well-reported; exactly as short as they can possibly be; timely and accurate.

In the last six months, BuzzFeed U.K. has slowly added to its ranks investigative reporters and top editors, including former Guardian editor Janine Gibson, who became editor-in-chief of the operation in June. Now she’ll oversee a move that puts BuzzFeed not only in competition with national papers and websites, but also local publishers in the north.

We’re expanding. So for the next three months I will mainly be interviewing. Come see us.. http://t.co/yLnZjZ8zOT

— Janine Gibson (@janinegibson) September 23, 2015

Every company with some funding, ambition, and an atlas has looked abroad to expand in places like the U.K., India, Africa, and Australia. But the work of introducing an existing media company into a new country can prove tricky. The job isn’t necessarily replication of the original franchise, but adaptation.

As BuzzFeed has developed its strategy for the London office, the approach has focused on granular reporting on elections and politics as well as developing reusable tech

“We’re not overly focused on building fancy show-off infographics or interactives. We feel that’s not an area where we want to compete. Where we want to compete is getting on the road and getting small scoops, really,” BuzzFeed U.K. executive editor Luke Lewis told the Lab’s Joseph Lichterman in March.

Local reporting may be the latest extension of this strategy, putting BuzzFeed reporters on the ground for local council meetings or other community concerns. At the least it will be interesting to see how BuzzFeed adapts its style and tone to a beat that was traditionally owned by local newspapers.

Local news in the U.K. is contested territory right now. Earlier this month, the BBC announced an ambitious reorganization plan that would shift the broadcaster in the direction of local news. Under the proposed plan, the BBC would develop a centralized hub for stories and data for news outlets to share and hire 100 new reporters.

Combined with the BuzzFeed expansion it could mean more local reporting jobs available to journalists across England. So far, the incursion into local news by outsiders has been met with some resistance by U.K. newspaper industry groups.

That changed in the spring when Satija reported on Antonio Buehler, an Austin activist who films police activity as part of the Peaceful Streets Project. You could listen as Satija rode along with Buehler, filming police as they dealt with traffic infractions and other minor incidents. The audio puts you in the backseat, giving you a sense of Buehler’s work and building context through clips from his videos.

While Satija’s story appeared on the Tribune’s website, it aired as part of an episode of Reveal, the public radio show and podcast produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Public Radio Exchange.

“We do a lot of policy-heavy investigative work at the Tribune,” Satija told me. “I’m interested in making that work for radio.”

Satija is part of a growing number of reporters who are creating stories for Reveal through a partner network that connects CIR to newsrooms around the country. Altogether there are five organizations that partner CIR to produce stories. Some newsrooms, like the Center for Public Integrity and San Francisco’s KQED, work in conjunction with Reveal on stories for the program. But places like The Texas Tribune and The Houston Chronicle have dedicated Reveal reporters. In Austin, the Tribune and CIR share the cost. In Houston, Chronicle parent company Hearst is covering the cost.

Launched in summer 2014, Reveal has slowly built itself out as a public radio-style show focused on investigative reporting from CIR staff and partners. From a handful of early pilot episodes, the show worked up to a monthly schedule, airing as a podcast and on public radio stations around the country. According to managing director Christa Scharfenberg, the goal was to be on 300 stations by the end of 2015. Right now Reveal is airing on 308 stations and the podcast pulls in 320,000 downloads a month.

Working with partners has been part of CIR’s strategy over its almost 40 years in operation. That teamwork is integral to producing Reveal; the partnership provides a deeper pool of reporters and story possibilities for each episode. The show keeps partners apprised of themes for upcoming stories. At the same time, the partners pitch the show stories that might be a good match.

“NPR only has so much bandwidth to bring those stories to a national audience, and that’s a role we could play,” said Scharfenberg.

Partnerships will become more important as Reveal tries to make the leap from a monthly show to a weekly in January. It hopes to add more news organizations to its list of partners in the next few months.

For the Tribune, the Reveal partnership follows a handful of other collaborations designed to introduce the site’s reporting to national audiences. Corrie MacLaggan, a news editor for the Tribune, said working with Reveal was an opportunity to expand the site’s readership beyond the state of Texas.

“We’re all about experimenting at the Tribune,” she said. “How can we tell the most compelling stories about Texas government and politics, and what are the different ways we can tell those stories?”

The Tribune is no stranger to producing audio, with podcasts like Tribcast and The Ticket, a weekly show on the presidential election. But developing stories for Reveal is a different process, MacLaggan said.

The ideal story is one that springs from Tribune investigations and might appeal to wider audiences. In many ways, Satija is like any other reporter at the Tribune: she sits in the newsroom and goes to the same story meetings. But part of her job is to pick which stories will work best for Reveal.

The story of the “cop watchers” worked because it focused on the growing tension between police and citizens’ use of video to respond to police misconduct. Satija found other people in Texas who film police interactions, which provided compelling voices to help tell the story in the audio piece. “It worked out really well to report for both radio and online,” she said.

The Chronicle is just ramping up production on audio stories for Reveal after hiring Peter Haden, a former reporter from WJCT in Jacksonville, Florida, in June.

Haden will lend help to other Chronicle reporting projects, which informs the stories that might be translated into radio pieces for Reveal. But his main responsibility is coordinating with Reveal’s team for upcoming shows, which can sometimes be tricky. “It can present some challenges when an editor is in Washington, D.C., the production team is scattered around the country, and the audio engineer is in San Francisco,” he said.

Like Satija, Haden has to perform a kind of balancing act, remaining aware of the needs of both Reveal and the Chronicle, and how those might intersect. “They have different cultures, but they both share the mission of doing meaningful investigative journalism, holding people accountable, and doing that in a very creative and engaging way,” he said.

As chat apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, Line, and Mixt grow in popularity — especially outside the U.S. — publishers have been trying to find ways to crack the code that will bring in new readers. For western news organizations chat apps present an opportunity to report and deliver mobile-first news in places like India, Nigeria, and China. The Times recently tried out WhatsApp to report on Pope Francis’ visit to Latin America.

As the Times has marched past the 1 million digital subscriber milestone — with the overwhelming majority of those inside the U.S. — the paper is looking abroad to boost audience growth. The WeChat account is part of that larger strategy. From the company’s announcement:

The ​account, launched in collaboration with the digital and technology agency CuriosityChina, expands the potential reach of Times journalism to WeChat’s 1​00 million international monthly active users across more than 200 countries.

According to Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha, “this is an international account for WeChat. The account is not available within China, their domestic market. The target audience for this account is WeChat international users in Asia but outside of China.”

But looking through the paper’s first dispatches on WeChat, they clearly have Chinese readers in mind. Top stories include Chinese President Xi Jinping’s impending visit to the U.S. and meeting with President Obama, as well as a profile of Asian-American actress Constance Wu.

Reaching readers in China has been a constant challenge for the Times. In 2012, the company debuted a Chinese-language site that combined existing stories from nytimes.com with reporting from Times staff based in China.

Not long after that, the Times become the latest western news company to find its site blocked by Chinese censors. But the Times has been working to find ways around the censors, using a combination of social media, mirroring, and apps to reach readers.

Many news organizations have had comments sections for as long as they’ve been online. For just as long, many have agonized over the value of the conversations that rage in the space below a story. There’s plenty of debate over the issue, as newsrooms struggle with moderation, the value of anonymity among commenters, and, in some cases, the legal issues that arise from what’s said in the comments.

“If I was painting a picture of a site we were gonna have, and then at the end I said, ‘Oh, by the way, at the bottom of all our articles we’re going to prominently let any pseudonymous avatar do and say whatever they want with no moderation’ — if there was no convention of Internet commenting, if it wasn’t this thing that was accepted, you would think that was a crazy idea,” said Ben Frumin, editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com.

Social media has changed the equation for a number of publishers that already use Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr to distribute their stories to new audiences. As Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg wrote on Recode’s decision to end comments: “We believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years.”

The benefits to social are that people are already on those networks, already holding conversations and sharing stories, Swisher told me. “It’s not clear why comments are a particularly good part of the [website] experience,” she said.

I spoke to seven news organizations — Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today’s FTW — about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now. All but one of the sites say they won’t be going back; The Verge is selectively using comments on stories and plans to re-introduce them across the site in the near future, according to editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. Transcripts of our conversations, below, are edited slightly for clarity and length.

The posts that have the most comments on them are not necessarily the most popular posts. But often, what was happening was that the posts with the most negative comments on them were the most popular posts because they were the culture posts. That sort of disconnect between what one vocal minority of the audience was saying, and what the huge majority of the audience was reading, was causing some whiplash.

I don’t know that you can engineer around bad habits of a community. I just don’t think that’s gonna work. I think you actually need to establish norms of behavior that people will follow because they care about the space. We can roll out a million product tools to help us deal with bad actors, but what we actually need to do is build a community that doesn’t allow bad actors to flourish in the first place.

That comes down to, again, the relationship between the people who work at The Verge and the audience who reads it and cares about it. That’s hard. That’s a much harder solution than we’re gonna build in down-rank buttons and shadow bans.

Havlak: As we turned off the comments on the posts, we’ve seen more people go into the forums. Forum traffic has jumped about 36 percent. It’s at its highest point by far this year.

In certain posts, we chose to leave the comment thread on. We chose to have the writer go in and say, OK, this is the question I want to pose to the readers to start a valuable discussion. And that’s [also] what a forum post does: it keeps things on topic, it keeps things positive, and it’s less [just] reaction to a story.

The community that happens on the website is super important. But it’s just one community out of 12 different communities we maintain. Website comments are just one of all of these different places where people are responding to us.

Of course, harassment on Twitter have been a problem, but [in general], people who come on Twitter and have their real names and faces, and are actually tweeting back at the writers, tend to be more civil, more constructive. They want to find our writers where they are.

It’s fortuitous that Facebook’s author tags have been rolling out. We’ve been turning those on and letting people follow a lot of our specific writers.

Reuters

Dan Colarusso, executive editor of Reuters.com:

We want FTW to be part of the conversation around the subjects it covers, but we’re fine with those communities organizing off-site, which is what they’re going to do anyway, whether we have comments or not.

First, we try to cover the story, whatever it is, really, really well. Then we try to present that story to the audience via social and messaging platforms in the most engaging way possible. That could be through headlines, featured images, native video on Facebook, Vines — whatever accurately presents the story while increasing engagement.

Since we got rid of commenting on FTW, we’ve added WhatsApp and SMS share features, and our numbers show those are both popular ways for readers to make contact.

We also use SimpleReach, Chartbeat, and CrowdTangle, all of which are analytics tools that show us what’s being said about our content on social platforms and other sites. We can then choose to engage in those conversations where they’re happening, or not.

There wasn’t much feedback [on our decision to remove comments], other than from media people on Twitter expressing their joy about the changes. (Publishing on the Internet can sometimes subject writers to abuse from commenters, you know.)

As for audience behavior: When FTW removed comments in December 2013, it had 8 million monthly unique users. Last month, it had 17 million monthly uniques, and the time spent per visit hasn’t dropped a bit.

The Week

Ben Frumin, editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com:

Building a commenting system where people would have to comment as their real selves, or moderating a commenting system where people were allowed to continue commenting pseudonymously, was really a resource issue for us. We’re small. We like to think of ourselves as a scrappy maverick. We compete with people who are bigger than us; we like to think we punch above our weight class. But we’re not the sort of operation that can moderate tens of thousands of comments a month. We just don’t have the manpower.

A really big part of it, though, is the idea, as I wrote last year, that I just don’t think [comments are] a core function or service of news and opinion sites anymore.

When we were making this decision last year, we looked a lot at the data. The most comments we ever had in a single month was July of 2014, when we had some 68,000 comments. That sounds like a lot. But we also had 12 million unique visitors that month. When you start to look at it that way, even if every comment was created by an individual commenter — which is not the way it works; surely several of those commenters commented hundreds of times — 68,000 commenters would still be dramatically less than one percent of our total readership.

We’ve seen engagement skyrocket. Now, closing the comments section is not the only thing we’ve done. We’ve redesigned our whole site; there are a number of potentially confounding variables in the statistics. But I do think commenting is a part of it. We’ve seen our pages per visit nearly double since we closed the comments section. We’ve seen our bounce rate nearly cut in half since we closed the comments.

On our site, we’ve seen engagement go up. Off of our site, on some social platforms, we see really robust and thoughtful conversations: On our Facebook page, off of our Facebook page but being sparked by our content, and on Twitter.

[Social media] in its best form leads to really rich conversations. Obviously, in its worst form, it can lead to partisan name-calling by a small number of vitriol-spewing readers.

Mic

Slade Sohmer, director of editorial strategy for Mic:

Popular Science

Carl Franzen, online director for Popular Science:

Techmeme debuted in 2005 at a time of rising media hysteria over the power of aggregators. I remember conversations in my old newsroom over whether Memeorandum (Techmeme’s politics-focused predecessor) was a net good or evil, and what it might mean for local news.

Now the landscape is more than a little different, as the outright aggregators have been challenged by social media. But the impact on Techmeme has not been as severe as you might think, Rivera writes:

Like all media sites, Techmeme’s real competition comes from whatever is best at diverting attention that it might otherwise draw. So foremost among Techmeme’s ‘competitors’ are Twitter, Facebook, blogs that function as news aggregators, and, in fact, media of all forms (not to mention sunshine, children, and puppies). A person who is content to gather technology news through what friends share on Facebook, or by scanning thousands of tweets each day, may be less likely to rely on Techmeme.

On the other hand, because this competition exists, those that do rely on Techmeme happen to be the most demanding and informed readers, the ones who know they can’t stay current on actionable news by merely consuming social media feeds. So while competition may curtail Techmeme’s readership somewhat, it has the effect of making our average reader more valuable.

In recent years, Techmeme has decreased its reliance on algorithms and has hired news editors (who aren’t afraid to rewrite headlines). That’s interesting timing, considering that some publishers are finding more uses for automation in the newsroom.

But that combination of man and machine is also what has made Techmeme stand out. M.G. Siegler writes:

The recognition that the two sides, humans and algorithms, can work in concert is perhaps the key power driving Techmeme. The site has a ‘voice’ as a result. What’s left off is just as important as what’s added.

In reflecting on Techmeme’s 10 years, Rivera said one of the site’s original goals was to uncover new sources for news and original voices. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson thinks that’s one area where Techmeme could still improve:

I can get the “big breaking news” anywhere and don’t value Techmeme for that. But I understand that others do and frankly Techmeme can and should do whatever they think makes for the best site for the largest audience. But I do miss the time when solo bloggers made up most of the links. Those kind of voices are still out there and there really isn’t a great way to find them unless they are software engineers whose links show up on Hacker News.

Techmeme’s birthday brought no shortage of congratulations and well wishes, along with the requisite snark.

“Reflecting on Ten Years of Techmeme” (rewrote the headline for you @gaberivera) http://t.co/5YQZ9qR3eF

— megan quinn (@msquinn) September 11, 2015

Notorious #content thief @gaberivera celebrates 10 years of plunder with over on #linkedin http://t.co/YUy2MFysbQ

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) September 11, 2015

One of my heroes: Ten Years Later, This Is How Techmeme Has Avoided Click-Bait, Auto-Play Ads, And More https://t.co/lP9tIIx9Gg

— Rafat Ali (@rafat) September 12, 2015

Congrats @gaberivera on 10 years of Techmeme. May you rewrite headlines and F5 your way into our hearts for 10 more. https://t.co/DpNIWZZjFm

— Sean Percival (@Percival) September 12, 2015

Congrats to @gaberivera on ten years of building an indispensable site. Still think the Leaderboard is bullshit tho. https://t.co/kpaHGaWcYu

— Tom Krazit (@tomkrazit) September 11, 2015

“Being in Texas, we have a reporter who covers upcoming executions,” said Chronicle deputy investigations editor Lise Olsen. “It’s part of the criminal justice beat.”

But the Chronicle’s coverage is limited to local and regional cases, the immediate lead-up to an execution and any legal proceedings surrounding it. These cases are part of a broader story about how capital punishment is used in America, as some states reject the death penalty while others push for new drugs to be used in lethal injections.

Now the Chronicle is one of several news outlets partnering with The Marshall Project to track executions across several states in the U.S. The Next to Die is designed as a database to follow upcoming executions, complete with details about death row inmates, their case history, and more.

The launch partners for the project include The Tampa Bay Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tulsa Frontier, and AL.com. With the help of those organizations, The Next to Die will cover Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri, Alabama, Florida, Arizona, Virginia, and Ohio. The Marshall Project built and will maintain the database that combines data from the Death Penalty Information Center as well as reporting from the partner organizations. The information will live on The Marshall Project’s site, with widgets and tools that partners can use on their own sites and which are embeddable by anyone on the web.

Olsen, who will work on the project for the Chronicle, said the database can provide a broader scope on capital punishment cases for readers. “We think there’s value in it. We have an ongoing commitment to writing about these cases and providing information on executions carried out in the name of all citizens,” she said.

As a site dedicated to covering the criminal justice system in America, capital punishment looms large for The Marshall Project. The site has run stories on Missouri’s high rate of executions and what happened in states that have abolished capital punishment.

Managing editor Gabriel Dance said they’ve been wanting to dig deeper into death penalty cases across the country, but the scope of the project proved to be too large for the fledgling organization. One of the biggest complicating factors was finding reliable, timely information on executions, he said. While places like the Death Penalty Information Center maintain data on executions, that information is not always complete, often updated only after an inmate has already been put to death.

What they wanted to create was a comprehensive database that could not only track cases as they progress, but could also be used to look for patterns around the types of people sentenced to death, the crimes, or the prosecutors responsible for the cases, Dance told me. They expect as more information is collected they more story ideas and possibilities for analysis will present themselves. How many inmates get a stay of execution and are there any similar circumstances? What district attorneys have a high conviction rate for death penalty cases?

The database is also purposefully narrow in scope: The focus is on the more immediate cases where execution is scheduled, not every inmate sitting on death row in each media company’s coverage area.

‘We know, from being small, and working at a lot of places, that no journalism ship has a lot of bandwidth for extra projects right now,” Dance said. “We wanted to make sure the ask was reasonable.”

Tom Meagher, The Marshall Project’s deputy managing editor, said they wanted to take a similar approach to collecting information as sites like PolitiFact and Homicide Watch. Namely, they wanted to create a system that could add some structure to the types of information already available. “It’s really tailored towards what a reporter covering this beat would already be picking up,” he said.

Meagher said the database could grow over time as reporters suggest different information fields that could be useful. One of the big benefits of the partnership is having a consortium of reporters who’ve covered capital punishment who can share ideas for gathering information and better stories, Meagher said.

It’s been almost a year since The Marshall Project launched, and in that time collaboration has been key to the site’s growth and reporting ambitions. The site was deliberate in starting off The Next to Die with a small number of publishers in states with scheduled executions.

At The Tulsa Frontier, they’ll be tracking cases in Oklahoma and Missouri, said Ziva Branstetter, the site’s editor-in-chief. Though the Frontier is a relatively young news startup, Branstetter previously covered death penalty cases for The Tulsa World, including the execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014.

That same focus has carried over to the Frontier. Branstetter said they’re tracking three scheduled executions in Oklahoma at the moment, with another across the border in Missouri.

Branstetter said the database could prove valuable to other reporters as well as the public. While there are nonprofits and advocacy groups tracking executions, many come to the subject with an agenda. “I always wanted to have something like this, and getting to help create it is pretty cool,” she said.

Branstetter said The Next to Die has the potential to create persistent coverage of capital punishment, rather than a story where journalists parachute in on the eve of executions. “The state is sending someone to death — this is the most severe action they can take,” she said. “We should cover it all with the same attention, no matter the manpower.”

In announcing the new strategy, Hall said: “Our new, open BBC will be a true partner with other organisations. It will also strike a new relationship with audiences that will allow them to do so much more. Our new, open BBC will inform, educate, entertain — and enable.”

Tony Hall describes plan for 'BBC Ideas Service' to make 'Britain the greatest cultural force in the world'. The BBC as a digital curator

— Trushar Barot (@Trushar) September 7, 2015

The proposal would make collaboration and technology central to the mission of the BBC. The new local reporters would, “provide impartial reporting on councils and public services.” Ideally the legion of new journalists and resources working with community newspapers would boost the output and reach of local stories:

The BBC will also provide easily searchable and local news content with a “News Bank” of regional or local video and audio as well as a hub for data journalism set up in partnership with a university based outside London. The plan is to embed the content on newspaper websites as well as the BBC.

The BBC is already at work on some of those ideas as part of the BBC’s News Labs, where they’ve been focusing on creating tools for collaboration and networked reporting.

The proposal comes as the BBC’s size and mission have come under fire by public officials and the TV-license-fee funding model it relies on has been disrupted.

As a result, layoffs and cutbacks in some services are expected. One option put forward by the BBC is to switch from the license fee system to a model where all households would pay a levy.

#BBC as an open platform is long overdue, as is a decision about whether it is national or international in scope.Big switch in focus tho'

— emily bell (@emilybell) September 7, 2015

BBC plans "shared data journalism hub" to serve it + other UK news orgs. In plans today: http://t.co/3PRbM71Mqq #ddj pic.twitter.com/btDIRdQFgL

— Jonathan Hewett (@jonhew) September 7, 2015

But that expansion into local news may come at a cost. The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade writes:

When the BBC’s pool of reporters start sending in their reports and video clips from council meetings, coroners’ courts and so on, publishers will say thank you very much and seize on it as a justification to accelerate the reduction in their own journalistic staffs.

I agree with @GreensladeR There is a danger in this aspect of BBC plans to support local press https://t.co/WjVLzmga7H

— Charlie Beckett (@CharlieBeckett) September 7, 2015

@Chanders @GreensladeR @jonhew 1. You end up with no more (perhaps fewer) journalists 2. You reduce diversity & increase BBC dominance.

— Charlie Beckett (@CharlieBeckett) September 7, 2015

You can read the full report here and find Hall’s full speech on the future of the BBC here.

But do all publishers use article tags the same way we do? And do tags make any difference in attracting people to a website? A new report from analytics company Parse.ly found no statistical link between the use of tags and the amount of traffic a site received — but also saw publishers using tags in creative ways to help guide strategy. (Sites that use Parse.ly include The Atlantic, Slate, Mashable, Business Insider, The Globe and Mail, The New Republic, and Upworthy, among about 400 total.)

In that network, 70 percent reported using tags and 30 percent said they go without. On average, 450 tags were published in a month, with the actual number of tags per post averaging 5.2. Parse.ly found no correlation between the number of overall tags published and audience size, and the number of tags per story didn’t change much with story length. ” Essentially, if we increase the word count of an article from one word to 10,000 words, the average number of tags in the article only increases by around 0.36,” the report found.

(Here at Nieman Lab, we’re relatively aggressive taggers, with over 13,000 tags used on our roughly 5,000 articles published since 2008. But our tag pages account for only about 1 percent of our pageviews. Our 10 most common tags? The New York Times, Twitter, business models, Facebook, advertising, social media, Google, paywalls, the Knight Foundation, and mobile.)

Despite the fact that tags are usually user-facing, their most important uses may be internal to news organizations. “In the last couple of years, we’ve noticed that tags are being used in more interesting ways,” said Andrew Montalenti, chief technical officer at Parse.ly.

Parse.ly’s findings suggest that publishers are making advances in how they use structured data in content production and audience analysis. Companies are moving beyond simply using tags as a way to surface stories on Google or in an archive. Specifically, Parse.ly found that publishers are using tags to categorize article formats (stories vs. quizzes vs. videos), paywall status, and sponsored content.

That same organizational ability to find, filter, and sort stories is being used to route different processes in the newsroom, Montalenti said. A site that runs native ads could track and report on specific campaigns based on tags for native content and the accompanying brand. Or, in the case of a site like The Globe and Mail, tags could be used to indicate which stories are only available to subscribers and which are available to everyone.

Last year, Joshua Lasky, a marketing manager at Atlantic Media Strategies, wrote about new ways how media outlets could use tags:

There’s a certain amount of content optimization that can be done here. Think if you were to tag articles based on whether they included a video; you could then analyze whether having this element improved article performance. This would help you to decide whether it made sense to embed more videos in the future.

In July, The New York Times offered a glimpse of a new automated tagging tool under development in its Research and Development Lab. Alexis Lloyd, creative director of the Lab, said that such tools will let the Times mine its archive to create new products in the future.

One department at The New School, however, doesn’t have to worry about history too much: Its Journalism + Design program launched in 2014. “We got to say, ‘What does it mean to do journalism in 2014 and moving forward?’ That’s our baseline,” said Heather Chaplin, director of the now one-year-old program.

The new undergraduate degree program was created with the help of a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation (full disclosure: also a funder of Nieman Lab). Applying its startup funding approach to education, Knight’s aim was to encourage the New School to develop a new kind of journalism curriculum framed around the concept of design thinking. Students learn about data journalism and social media, among other areas, from instructors in The New School as well as guest faculty assembled from newsrooms around New York.

Chaplin said the goal is to use design thinking to prepare students for the future. “I’m not so much interested in specific skills as dispositions,” she told me. “Are we helping people be able to learn really fast, so when things do change they can move with it without completely freaking out?”

The program jumped from around 90 students in fall 2014 to 240 this semester. I spoke with Chaplin about the experience of building a j-school from scratch and how design thinking can change the way journalists do their jobs. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

The idea that journalism is a set of values, and has a specific role to play in a free society: What if we took those traditional practices and mapped on top of them some design practices and design principles to help people be more imaginative, more nimble, better problem solvers? We could do the kind of journalism that might actually have a chance to flourish.

Of course, that leads to the question of what “design” means. It’s a hard question. I’m writing a paper for the Tow Center right now about what we mean when we talk about design and why it’s even a thing.

Design can be thought of in a couple different ways for journalistic purposes. When people talk about design, they often talk about visuals, and visuals are obviously important. But we’re really talking about design beyond the visual.

You can think about design as audience engagement. Designers always start by asking who they are designing for and why. So when we think about audience engagement and wanting to know our audience, design as a discipline can really help us. I also think about design as new product development: Nobody knows how people will consume news as we move forward. What might it look like, and what are the newspapers of the future? Design processes can help us come up with that.

And I’ve started to think of design as civic journalism — the idea that the design thinking process starts with empathy or deep listening.

What would a journalistic process look like that starts with assumptions on hold, preconceptions on hold, and just listening? It’s a bottoms-up approach to journalism: You’re out in the community that you’re serving, saying, “Hey, what do you need to know about, what are your information needs, and what’s going on in your world that we can help you understand better?” It’s not people sitting in a newsroom saying, “These are the things people need to know.”

We did things like POV statements and other exercises to try to understand who it was we were reporting for and how we could include them in the process. We did research into their media habits. Then we spent almost the whole semester working on a project.

We predicted starting with 60 students last fall. We had, I think, 94 students our first semester and 165 our second semester. This fall, we have 240 students with a waitlist of 60. It’s just been extraordinary. I couldn’t meet the demand — the school wanted me to add a bunch more classes and a bunch more sections and I had to say I couldn’t, because of quality control.

Last semester, we had Andrew Losowsky, who’s now leading the Coral Project, teach something called “stealth journalism” — how journalism could exist in unexpected physical spaces. All semester, the students designed journalism to be in the Union Square subway stop.

This semester we have Benjamen Walker, one of the founders of Radiotopia, and the students are going to create a podcast series that we hope will be ongoing.

The other great thing the Knight grant allows us to do is offer popup classes — these one-off, two-credit classes where we try to be on the edge or take on an interesting problem.

With the two-credit format, I’m able to bring in really high-level, top-notch people, because it’s a smaller time commitment. And the students can try something they might be interested in without committing their entire semester to it.

We try to do a lot outside of the classroom. We do a bunch of workshops. Last semester, we had Hong Qu, the CTO at Fusion, do a two-part workshop on the future of mobile video. We had Adam Sternbergh, who was then culture editor at The New York Times Magazine and now is a writer at New York, do a writing-intensive. And we had Andrew Donohue, the senior editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting, do a one-day design sprint on reimagining local beat reporting.

We thought we would start small, but we got big so fast. In one year, we created 24 new classes and brought in 39 people to teach. Just getting off the ground was the most all-consuming thing I’ve ever done. Now we’ve got to start building some internship programs.

Because we’re an undergraduate program, the way I think about it is that there’s a certain group of students every year who are so talented and absolutely committed to becoming professional journalists. They’re going to go out and get jobs.

There are some students who just did this as an undergraduate experience. They may not necessarily become professional journalists. But the thing that makes me sleep well at night is that they will be good at whatever they do.

We’re helping our students be smart, creative, and able to work collaboratively. If we really believe that journalism is a collective activity, and that everybody is a journalist at different points in their life, then I feel good that these students, no matter what they do as a profession — when their moment comes to do an act of journalism, they’ll know how to do it.

In the past, researchers have used it to track how the story of Trayvon Martin’s death evolved, and what shaped the debate around SOPA and PIPA in 2012.

Earlier this year, Media Cloud announced a contest to find new creative research projects that could take advantage of the platform, giving users access to “a range of Media Cloud tools — including Dashboard, Controversy Mapper, and the Media Cloud API — as well as to our searchable archive of 280 million stories collected from U.S. and international online media over the past 7 years.”

This week, 10 teams came together to present some of their research. Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media, has a full writeup on the projects that is worth a read. Here are a few of the projects.

Julia Wejchert and Katherine Ida were interested in breaking down how stories connected to abortion are visualized in the media:

They downloaded thousands of stories about the abortion debate using the Media Cloud tool, then hand-coded the images that appeared in each story, discovering that news articles about abortion rarely show the people most likely to be having abortions. Instead, the visuals of these articles illustrate abortion as an issue about politics, not about patients.

Eric Enrique Borja and a team from the University of Texas used Media Cloud to examine coverage of protests in Ferguson and Baltimore connected to the Black Lives Matter movement. Following the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, they wanted to see if stories connected to the protests contained negative or positive framing:

In both waves of Ferguson protest, Borja sees comparable levels of positive and negative framing. Many stories invoke rioting and looting, but there is also discussion of activists, civil rights, uprisings, protests and demonstrations. By the second wave of Ferguson protests, the negative frame is increasing in power. In Baltimore, there’s a massive disparity between positive and negative frames: there is virtually no media coverage of the events after Freddie Gray’s death that refers to protest, and massive coverage of riots and violence.

Kate Mays and Karin Seth of the Emerging Media Studies program at Boston University retrieved 8,000 stories from Media Cloud, and tracked hashtags around the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision in June.

Mays and Seth find that two narratives ended up dominating the debate after the Supreme Court decision. Those who favored the decision saw it as a civil rights victory, while those who did not invoked the first amendment’s protections of religious freedom to assert a right not to recognize these marriages. They also found extensive evidence that the US decision was influential in an international context, invoked in discussions in Australia and other countries making judicial and legislative decisions around equal marriage.

If you’re interested in Media Cloud and would like to get access for your own research, you can find out more here.

The Knight Foundation wants that work to continue and is investing $2.2 million in ProPublica that will expand its efforts in collaboration and data-backed journalism. In announcing the funding today, Knight vice president for journalism Jennifer Preston said the support will help ProPublica continue to develop new tools for news and new methods of storytelling.

“ProPublica’s engagement and news apps teams have been leading the way in the use of data, social media and other powerful tools to engage members of the public in the newsgathering process,” Preston said in a statement. (Disclosure: Knight is also a funder of Nieman Lab.)

This is not the first time Knight has given financial support to ProPublica. Among other grants, in 2012 Knight gave $1.9 million to ProPublica to increase the capacity of the news apps team.

The new backing from Knight will also be used to increase the audience engagement work that helps reporters cultivate sources and build community on and offline. The funding will also help ProPublica launch a two-week summer training institute in 2016 to help journalists learn skills for handling data, interactive design, and more.

Scott Klein, ProPublica’s assistant managing editor, said over email the goal is to help working journalists and aspiring journalists use the same skills as the nonprofit, to “learn how to do our jobs — getting data, cleaning it, analyzing and asking good questions of it, and ultimately visualizing it.”

All of that contributes to the applications, visualizations, and other tools that ProPublica produces for its investigations. Things like databases that allow parents to compare school districts, a scoring system to rate surgeons and hospitals in your area, or a handy guide to health and safety info on cruise ships.

Those projects are all part of ProPublica’s strategy of extending the life of investigations, giving the information a kind of utility to readers. That same thinking applies to helping out other news organizations, Klein said. Almost all of ProPublica’s work is made available for reuse under Creative Commons.

But ProPublica is also developing ways to make the underlying data in those stories more accessible to other reporters. The organization produces “reporting recipes” that guide other journalists in how to apply datasets to their own community.

The new funding from Knight will help ProPublica make that information more readily available for other reporters, Klein said. “As a national organization headquartered in New York, it’s very hard for us to do local stories that can have local impact. Providing high-quality local data sets that come out of our national reporting lets our work be in many places at once and magnifies the chance for real-world impact,” he said.

Klein said they’re also planning to work with researchers to better measure the impact of their work, and whether the types of news apps ProPublica makes informs readers decisions in the real world.

In the last several years, ProPublica has tried to make sure that emphasis on real-world impacts is baked into the reporting process from the beginning. They’ve used social networks and other digital tools to cultivate sources and story ideas. The funding from Knight will help boost that work as well, said Amanda Zamora, ProPublica’s senior engagement editor.

Back in 2012, they created a Facebook group to develop a community of people to share their experiences of being harmed in a hospital. That project led to stories on patient safety, and the experience was one of the motivations for creating the Get Involved, a contributors network for ProPublica’s investigations.

Get Involved has been a successful way of developing sources across a range of stories and collecting tips for reporters, and Zamora said they want to expand that effort. “When we established Get Involved we wanted to experiment with the idea of participation as a way to measure contributions and activity in our audience that went beyond the normal metrics,” she said.

Users — who can range from journalists to experts or regular readers — sign up for the network and contribute to callouts or questions in the early stages of reporting. One of the benefits, Zamora said, is that you create an audience that has already signaled it is interested in the story and can share it through other networks as the reporting progresses.

The Knight grant will help Zamora expand her team and dedicate more resources to the outreach and managing community building. They’ll also invest in more technology to help streamline that process. In the beginning, they used Google Docs and Spreadsheets; now they use Screendoor to facilitate projects.

They also plan to find more ways to make that process available to other reporters. The idea, Zamora said, is to “catalyze more reporting on the local level” through providing the tools to do similar sourcing work in their community. The key, she said, is not just better technology, but putting those tools in the hands of journalists when they’re just getting started on a story.

“The reason it works is because our team is not this sort of magical engagement team that operates on one end of the newsroom and makes all this stuff happen in a vacuum,” Zamora said. “The reporters are an integral part of the process.”

“As first-time founders we thought of a lot of things, the one thing we didn’t think about was how to build a community,” Zakin said. She and Weisberg left their jobs at NBC News to form their own startup. “Thankfully the community came to us.”

The Skimm now counts 1.5 million subscribers to its daily email, which breezes through the day’s news in a conversational, direct tone. That success is thanks largely to the community that formed around the newsletter, Zakin told me. Loyal fans emailed the founders asking how they could help. The answer? Skimm’bassadors, the legions of readers who promote the email in their networks and encourage friends to sign up. According to Zakin, there are now 6,000 people in the program, up from just 200 last year.

Media companies have been rediscovering the power of email in recent months, building out newsletters to amplify their work and create new connections with readers in their inboxes. For The Skimm, though, the newsletter is the only product that matters. Specifically, Weisberg and Zakin wanted to reach an audience of younger women, people who are looking for news first thing in the morning. For that demographic, the first read isn’t the newspaper or Good Morning America.

“Email was always the direction we were going to go in,” Weisberg said. “It’s nice to see that it’s come back in favor. But we always really believed that was the way to reach this demo.”

They got that demo and much, more, as The Skimm now counts people like Michelle Obama, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Oprah among its readers. Last December the company raised $6.25 million, which it’s been using to expand and plan for new products beyond email.

I recently spoke with Weisberg and Zakin about their expansion plans, how they’ve cultivated an engaged audience, and what they learned by delivering the news from morning TV. Below is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

The BINJ shares a mission similar to other news nonprofits that have sprung up as reporters, sometimes victims of newsroom cutbacks or seeking entrepreneurial paths of their own, try to fill the gaps in local news. The mission of the BINJ, Faraone writes, is to “produces bold reporting on issues related to social justice and innovation, and cultivates writers and multimedia producers to assist in that role.”

BINJ is operating on a shoestring budget and will rely on freelancers to tell stories about Boston neighborhoods. That can mean finding creative solutions to problems like a lack of regular office space.

Faraone decided to use that to BINJ’s advantage. By setting up shop throughout the communities the outlet wants to cover, BINJ not only has places to work, but it also connects with readers on a personal level and hears stories that might ordinarily go unreported.

BINJ Mobile was the first test of a pop-up newsroom, camping out at an event in Dudley Square in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Faraone set up a desk, typewriters, and notepads to hear what community members had to say:

The comments and concerns go on, and on, and on, and our plan is to keep adding to the list and to use the info in developing and cultivating features. We also brought an old-fashioned Rolodex, and attached phone numbers to topics people know especially well. For example, a woman who lives close to an increasingly controversial complex soon to be under development is filed under the name of that construction project.

As for leads … among others, we look forward to speaking further with Allen Curry, who served as one of the first African-American firefighters in Boston following a 1973 court decree that forced minority hiring. The hostility he faced back then was brutal, and his resulting struggle with the city still endures today, more than 40 years later, as do comparable employment nightmares for countless younger people of color who have come after him. It’s hard to find that kind of community memory online; had BINJ not popped up in Dudley, and approached Curry in person, we may have never heard about his story.

It’s worth reading more of the responses Faraone collected from the community at the pop-up event to see how residents’ views of local news might differ from journalists’. If you’re interested in learning more about the BINJ — or supporting it — you can go here.

The idea, according to Digg design director Justin Van Slembrouck, is to do sprint-style development in the coming weeks to create the discussion platform, similar to the rapid process used when Betaworks relaunched Digg in the summer of 2012.

At this point there aren’t a lot of details, but at the Digg blog Van Slembrouck sketches out some of the features they’re planning:

• Conversations will be based around a story

Not just about anything or anyone

• The author(s) of the story are encouraged to participate

(Or “content creators” if you’re new-school)

• It’ll be open and high-quality

Our aim: conversations that are just as interesting as the stories themselves

• Clear community guidelines will be in place

We’ll define these in our next blog post

• We’ll be moderating

It’s definitely not our long-term goal to moderate every comment, but we’re going to err on the side of civility to start

• You can digg comments

We want help to surface the best of the community

This year could be a tipping point in how media companies employ reader comments and conversation. A number of publishers have either shut down or put their comments on indefinite hiatus. Other platforms, like Reddit, are imposing new rules to ban harassment or illegal activity. At the same time, companies like Parlio are invested in leveraging discussion tools in new ways. The Coral Project, a collaboration between The New York Times and The Washington Post backed by the Knight–Mozilla OpenNews project, is dedicated to creating new software to improve discussion and community engagement on news sites.

The first iteration of Digg’s new commenting platform is expected to debut this fall. You can sign up to follow the project — and be a beta tester — here.

Those are the big, foundational shifts. If you zoom in on the local level, how are public media stations trying to confront change? The Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network (CPBN) decided to attack those questions directly by overhauling its entire organization, from the shows it creates to the ways it funds the network. CPBN intends to spend more than $7 million over the next three years to reinvest in the organization. To do this, it worked with design firm IDEO to create a playbook.

“We set out to re-imagine what we could be and what we needed to do to invest in our future,” said Dean Orton, chief operating officer for CPBN, said.

On the surface, CPBN was already doing well. In 2014, it reached over 750,000 people a week through CPTV. Total revenues for the network, including membership and underwriting among others, were $17.8 million in 2014, up from $16.1 million in 2013.

Given the combination of statewide television and radio, along with a corresponding digital presence — and even a print magazine — few media companies that match up, said Stephanie Schenkel, grants manager for Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network.

But Schenkel said the network knew it needed a fresh look at how it operates, and needed to determine if it was meeting the needs of the audience. “How do we take all this valuable energy and talent we have and make decisions that are best for our community?”

CPBN worked on the playbook with design firm IDEO, which does projects for companies as diverse as IKEA, GE, The North Face, and JetBlue. Support from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and a $250,000 grant from Knight Foundation made the report possible.

IDEO is famous for its human-centered design approach to projects, which use empathy as a means of finding solutions.

“When they first came to us, it was a pretty open-ended challenge,” said Ashlea Powell, a location director with IDEO who worked on the project. “They’ve been around 50 years and want to make sure they were set up for success over the next 50 years, which is pretty broad.”

As part of the process, the firm spoke with staff at CPBN, as well as experts, but also went out into towns around Connecticut to talk to people. They set up kiosks in malls and at Yale University, and held small events in people’s home, listenin to people across the audience spectrum — “someone that could name 10 different shows they do on air, and one person who doesn’t even know there is a Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network,” Powell said.

IDEO had to decide whether the scope of the project would be deep, designing a new show or branding package for launch, or whether it would be more broad. Ultimately the firm went with a playbook, which felt as if it could have a lasting impact, Powell said. “It felt like it was a real ‘teach a man to fish’ situation,” she said.

The resulting 36-page playbook was a mix of principles for making decisions about the future of the network, along with suggestions for creating new types of programming and events, and new approaches for sustainable funding. The report has been disseminated throughout the network, on the business and editorial teams across TV, broadcast, and digital.

Some of the proposals will materialize quickly: The playbook suggests a name change from Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network to Connecticut Public Media, along with rebranding that will debut next year, said Orton.

On the business side, it offers up suggestions for individual donations — adding tiered levels of membership, creating project-based funding campaigns or Kickstarters — and exploring new kinds of corporate sponsorships.

Others proposals are somewhat intangible. The playbook recommends “[recommitting] to the audience” and finding ways for the staff to “innovate with a purpose.”

The ideas the playbook suggests aren’t short-term solutions or ideas with quick turnaround times. But Orton said the network is already making progress. For example, it’s formed an in-house innovation team to look at new business models “so that we can spin up and try new business models and opportunities that diversify our company.”

The network has also expanded its education programming through Learning Lab, a 20,000-square-foot facility at CPBN’s Hartford headquarters with studio space and audio and video equipment. The program has a formal partnership with the Hartford public schools, and a program that offers vocational training to help veterans transition into civilian life.

In February it opened a new multimedia newsroom for WNPR, the network’s NPR station.

“At the heart of public media has been this idea of viewers like you, listeners like you. It’s about the audience we’re there to serve,” Orton said. “It’s natural for us to think about audience first and customers first to look where we can anticipate meaningful services for them.”

But, he said, “One thing in public media we haven’t always been good at is the ability to adapt.”

Many media companies are trying to reorient themselves to changes in technology or audience habits. It’s the stuff of newsroom memos that try to explain the necessity of transformation and the hirings, layoffs, or other reorganizations that often come with it.

“We found in our work we were running so tight we didn’t have the money to invest in things,” Orton said. “It became a treadmill that was unsustainable. We’re trying to bust out of that treadmill.”

Orton said the station’s staff knew they needed to rethink how they use the web in connection with radio, finding new ways to deliver audio to people. They also, he says, had to decrease their dependence on on-air pledge drives (in 2013 they tallied 117 TV pledge drive days).

The playbook provides an “ecosystem” to develop new projects, focusing on three areas: Flagship programming that highlights life in Connecticut; the development of more physical community spaces for the audience to interact with the network; and an improved collection of data and other resources for people to use in everyday life.

Orton said the plan in the coming months is cycles of development, testing, and redevelopment across the editorial and business sides of the network. The immediate priorities are reorganizing staff and workflows in the news divisions on TV and radio, but also formalizing new methods of community outreach and events, he said.

The playbook allows CPBN to shrink some of the larger challenges in public media into a more manageable size by working on the local level. It provides new ways to think about roles for public media that Orton said “historically weren’t on our radar.”

“We’re kind of re-imagining the role we can play,” Orton said, “but the mission in many ways is not different from what was started in the early days of public broadcasting.”

ProPublica is collaborating with the recommendation app to help provide better health care information on medical facilities and other providers. The idea is that finding a good doctor, nursing home, or dialysis clinic in your neighborhood will now be as easy as finding a reliable taco joint.

The data is shaped in user-friendly ways, similar to other features on Yelp. Instead of noting whether a place has wifi and if it’s good for kids, the health care data notes a provider’s wait time, noise level in patient rooms, and how well a doctor communicates with patients.

This is pretty cool: we're partnering with Yelp to get data from our healthcare apps onto their review pages http://t.co/E4dtoP6Rd8

— Al Shaw (@A_L) August 5, 2015

The partnership fits well with many of ProPublica’s other data-related projects: taking information that is often available publicly and making it more accessible to people. It’a also another way, much like ProPublica’s Data Store, to give new life to information the newsroom has already cleaned up and analyzed.

Luther Lowe, Yelp’s vice president for policy, told Lena Sun in The Washington Post they’re “taking data that otherwise might live in some government PDF that’s hard to find and we’re putting it in a context where it makes sense for people who may be in the middle of making critical decisions.”

Where, exactly, does the underlying data come from?

ProPublica compiled the information from its own research and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The data is for 4,600 hospitals, 15,000 nursing homes, and 6,300 dialysis clinics in the United States, and it will be updated quarterly.

Much of the information about hospitals, for example, is available on Medicare’s Hospital Compare Web page. But Yelp executives say the information is sometimes difficult to find and hard to sift through.

In exchange for facilitating the health data, ProPublica will get access to users’ health care-related reviews from Yelp. The reviews, which could be used in research for future ProPublica stories, will be anonymized.

Knight is awarding a total of $770,000, with each individual project receiving $35,000 to help test early ideas and build, as the name suggests, a prototype. (Disclosure: Knight is a funder of Nieman Lab, but not through the Prototype Fund.)

Many of the projects are targeted at making data more accessible, either to journalists or the general public: “Scrubadub,” by Datascope Analytics, is designed to help people “easily and ethically analyze unstructured text through a tool that scrubs personally identifiable information from raw text.” A team at Emerson College’s Engagement Lab wants to create a suite of tools that encourage journalists to use more data in storytelling. Bocoup, a Boston-based technology company, wants to build out “Voyager,” a system that could automate data visualization and be more intuitive to a user’s needs.

The Sunlight Foundation is receiving prototype funding for a government transparency program that would examine how foreign interests influence politics by analyzing data through the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

Melody Kramer, fresh off her time here as a Visiting Nieman Fellow, is receiving a prototype grant for her Media Public project.

The grant will help Kramer continue to examine ideas around broadening the meaning of membership in the world of public media. Media Public will create new ways for public media outlets to collaborate with the audience formerly known as members, in the hopes of sustaining organizations financially and creating a more engaged community. As Kramer wrote in her report:

More active donor relationships, which lead to greater donor loyalty, can be cultivated through building trust with people, increasing the number of two-way interactions with potential donors, and by teaching people the importance of the organization itself.

If you’re interested in helping out or getting updates on the progress, Kramer has created an email newsletter:

Media Public: we are making a public intranet for public media First newsletter goes out tomorrow. http://t.co/3Ex0OWvwA1

— Melody Joy Kramer (@mkramer) August 3, 2015

Below is the full list of projects that are part of this round of the prototype fund. In July, Knight also announced 12 Prototype Fund projects connected to the media as part of the Knight News Challenge. Along with the funding, project organizers will go through a six-month training process to prepare for a demo day. The deadline for the next round of the Prototype Fund is Aug. 17.

Collective Development by Anchorage Public Library and Code for Anchorage (Project lead: Meg Backus) (Anchorage, Alaska.): Opening library programming up to patrons by creating a participatory platform that will allow people to propose projects, workshops, or events that the library will facilitate.

CrowdVoice.by by CrowdVoice (Project leads: Esraa Al Shafei and Melissa Tyas) (Philadelphia): Creating an open source tool for efficiently collecting and distributing crowdsourced news and data that news organizations can brand, embed, and customize.

DataBasic by Emerson Engagement Lab (Project leads: Catherine D’Ignazio and Rahul Bhargava) (Boston): Training journalists and others to easily apply data to their storytelling through a suite of tools that includes learning activities and video guides.

Data Privacy Project by Data and Society (Project lead: Bonnie Tijerina) (New York): Making it easier for libraries to set up secure digital services and for librarians to help patrons better understand online privacy issues through a technical support network, software and documentation toolkits, and more.

Federal Agency Dataset Adoption by API Evangelist (Project lead: Kin Lane) (Los Angeles): Making it easier to access federal data for wider use by the public through an effort focused on processing the more than 5,000 datasets available at 22 federal agencies; the project will be driven by the software hosting and collaboration platform, GitHub.

Media Public: Putting the People in Public Media (Project lead: Melody Kramer) (Washington, D.C.): Enabling public media organizations to collaborate with audiences and each other through an online platform that will allow them to recruit volunteers to help with various activities.

Network Geography 101 by Data & Society Research Institute (Project leads: Ingrid Burrington and Surya Mattu) (New York): Teaching people what the Internet is actually made of by creating educational tools that will help users connect what they see on screens to the systems and infrastructure that makes the Internet possible.

Ombuds by Soapbox Systems (Project lead: Alex Kuck) (Charlottesville, Va.): Helping to preserve and protect free speech online through software that lets activists, journalists, and others working in conflict zones record statements through a peer-to-peer microblogging platform that is backed by a public record.

OSM Lite by Digital Democracy (Project lead: Gregor MacLennan) (Oakland, Calif.): Developing an easy way for people to create their own geo-data using software from Open Street Map, the project that creates and distributes free geographic data for the world.

Placelet by MIT Media Lab (Project lead: Elizabeth Christoforetti) (Cambridge, Mass.): Developing sensors that will collect data on movement, audio. and air quality in urban places to encourage more sensitive urban planning and design processes that will better serve communities.

Project Facet (Project lead: Heather Bryant) (San Francisco): Helping newsrooms plan and coordinate coverage across publishing platforms through an editorial workflow management app that fosters collaboration across teams and with outside partners.

Public Access to Pricing Personalization by Northeastern University (Project lead: Jason Radford) (Boston): Allowing people to see how retailers personalize their user experience and apply price differentiation through a website that will show personalized and non-personalized versions of common retail sites.

Real-Time Foreign Lobbying Mashup by Sunlight Foundation (Project lead: Bob Lannon) (Washington, D.C.): Bringing more transparency to the influence that foreign countries have over U.S. politics and policies through a tool that will highlight data collected under the Foreign Agent Registration Act; the tool will identify connections between foreign clients and their U.S. agents.

Scrubadub by Datascope Analytics (Project lead: Dean Malmgren) (Chicago): Helping researchers, journalists and others more easily and ethically analyze unstructured text through a tool that scrubs personally identifiable information from raw text.

SpeakEZ by School of Information Studies, CCENT Lab, Syracuse University (Project lead: Murali Venkatesh) (Syracuse, N.Y.): Helping the Burmese Karen refugee population in Syracuse, N.Y., get access to a range of resources using their mobile phones through an information system that uses interactive voice response.

Terrapattern Mining Tool by Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University (Project lead: Golan Levin) (Pittsburgh, Penn.): Enabling journalists, citizen scientists, humanitarian workers and others to detect ‘patterns of interest’ in satellite imagery, through an open-source tool. For example, users could use the tool to identify destroyed buildings in conflict zones.

User-Friendly Application for Election Data by Johnson County Election Office (Project lead: Nathan Carter) (Olathe, Kan.): Making it easier for voters, journalists, candidates and others to access election-related information through an application that will compile this data and allow users to query and filter it according to their needs.

Vote Worker Data Project by Fair Elections Legal Network (Project leads: Bob Brandon and Jon Sherman) (Washington, D.C.): Making it easier to recruit election poll workers through a search tool that will allow citizens to look for opportunities to serve as poll workers, list their skills, and apply to positions.

Visualizing Thick Data by IIT Institute of Design (Project lead: Kim Erwin) (Chicago): Helping researchers and others visualize qualitative data through an easy-to-use, web-based application designed for fast, efficient data exploration.

Voyager by Bocoup (Project lead: Irene Ros) (Boston): Enabling people to explore and understand complex data sets quickly using visual tools that automate visualization processes and respond to user feedback; the project is a collaboration with the Interactive Data Lab at the University of Washington.

Your Next Representative by DataMade (Project lead: Derek Eder) (Chicago): Expanding YourNextMP.com, a website by UK-based Democracy Club, for collecting and presenting information on local and national political candidates, to the United States and around the world.

Virtual Reality for Journalists by University of Texas at Austin (Project lead: R.B. Brenner) (Austin, Texas): Helping journalists introduce virtual reality content into their storytelling through an open-source tool designed to make publishing simple, operating like a WordPress for virtual reality.