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A-Giraffes at Work?
SPONSORING THE PRESS: In New Haven, Bass says it preserves journalism, on the web
By Paul Bass
Oct 12, 2007, 18:28

The Digital Difference:
A New Media Model for Reporting on Health

Paul Bass covered New Haven, Conn., for a variety of regional and national publications for 27 years. In that time he won dozens of awards for journalistic excellence. He is the co-author of Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer (Basic Books, 2006). In 2005, he started The New Haven Independent, a pioneering effort to support serious, web-based watchdog journalism with philanthropy and donor support.

"Thanks to a growing awareness of public health issues in Connecticut -- the growing ranks of the uninsured and underinsured and the racial disparities in the quality and delivery of care i- I was able to find the money to join the web express to discover if a middle-aged pen-pad-and-peck guy could make the shift to Community Journalism 2.0," says Bass. In this article, he recounts the experience so far. This article is reproduced by permission of the Center for Communication and Community (www.C3.ucla.edu) at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), which originally published it in the Summer/Fall 2007 edition of its outreach public booklet, "Context." (Issue No. 5) For a copy of the booklet email  mailto:infoc3@uclaccc.ucla.edu / (310) 206-2189

 By Paul Bass

Written for Context at UCLA

It'll come in the form of e-mails from activists. Or, it comes in the form of computer messages in which readers talk to me or to other readers  - digital reminders that the job I'm doing now is very different from the job I've been doing for more than 25 years.

 That job is working as a reporter and editor in the city of New Haven, Connecticut. For most of my career I have written for weekly and daily news- papers. I'm still writing and editing stories about New Haven - about its politics, its health care and criminal justice challenges, and its neighborhoods. But for the past year and a half I've done that purely online for the New Haven Independent (www.newhavenindependent.org), one of a new breed of not-for-profit "hyper-local" daily news websites.

 That has changed everything - including how I report the news and how the community interacts with and helps shape that news.

Take the remarks posted on stories we published last summer about a spike in youth violence in town. The Independent published a number of stories about two incidents in particular - the killing of two separate African-American 13-year-oolds cut down by stray bullets meant for someone else. As with all our stories, readers could type in comments to attach to the story. They wrote about the story; then they wrote to each other.

I wasn't surprised by the passion contained in the posts. I was surprised by the great variety of readers posting.

"If parents won't keep their teen kids inside at 11 p.m., perhaps it's time for a curfew in New Haven, " wrote one white reader who recently moved into New Haven from a wealthy suburb. The story (www.nnewhavenindependent.org/archives/22006/006/kkrystals_pplight.php ) was about the death of Jajuana Cole, who was standing on alter-the periphery of an outdoor party next door to the house of her best friend in a low-income, black neighborhood when she was killed. The next comment came from Quanisha Cole. It read simply: "I will miss my sister."" An alderwoman from a middle-class neighbor- hood followed.

"Regardless if kids are out at 10 p.m. 11 p.m., getting shot and killed is way too high a price to pay for being out late,"" she wrote. "Blaming parents does nothing but shut down innovative ways to get people to settle their differences peaceably. We live in a culture that accepts violence as a way to settle scores -- whether it's neighborhood turf wars, or land use a world away. Violence is used to show strength, flex muscle, and win wars. Until we come to grips with violence anywhere, we will experience violence everywhere . . . even in our own backyards. "

With that story, on subsequent stories about the same murder, on other stories about protest marches against violence and public hearings, different voices continued the conversation. People from the neighborhood wrote about their personal connections to the tragedies. Policymakers weighed on what the whole city could do. Suburbanites or residents of better-off parts of the city wrestled with what the victims' families and neighbors, as well as the rest of New Haven, could do to stop the violence. Looking back, it seems that some of those who wrote us understood that violence can be a public health issue.

By the time the next 13-year-old bystander - Justus Suggs - was killed, I wasn't surprised by the outpouring. I was moved, but not completely surprised, to see his mother's heartfelt plea to other city kids to put away the guns. (www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2006/08/justus.php )

I don't attribute the sizable community response we've received to good reporting - although I'm proud of the stories the Independent has covered. We break some of them. Others we write with a more community and policy focus than stream media. But that 's not what these reactions are about. The daily paper wrote good articles about these murders too.

Rather, the reactions told me something about the "new" news. It's about the medium -- the Internet -- and its possibilities for involving people in the issues and generating dialog among people who walk the same streets but had never previously conversed. From these messages, we 're learning that people -- especially people in disadvantaged communities -- want more access to information and more of a say in discussions about health care and other issues central to their lives.

Considering the level of community feedback, I'm undaunted by the "digital divide."" Yes, some technology comes later to poorer communities of color. But, like cable TV, the web is getting there.

And people know how to use it, especially people under 40. I had a hunch about this when I started publishing the Independent in September 2005. I had burned out on corporate newsrooms and corporate journal- ism.

Even the muckraking native weekly where I'd spent the previous 15 years had been purchased, downsized, homogenized, and lobotomized by a corporate giant, the Chicago-based Tribune Co.

I noticed that everyone I knew in conventional newsrooms was unhappy or unsettled about the recent profit-driven changes in their industry. With relentless budget cuts and mindless corporate dictates, reporters and editors felt they had to fight to do even a fraction of the journalism that lured them to the business in the first place. In contrast, on the web frontier, reporters who'd made the leap to online journalism were rated.

Assuming they could find an online job -- or the money to start an Internet news site -- they could not only return to their original mission of telling important stories; they could also involve the public in new ways.

Thanks to a growing awareness of public health issues in Connecticut -- the growing ranks of the uninsured and underinsured and the racial disparities in the quality and delivery of care - I was able to find the money to join the web express to discover if a middle-aged pen-pad-and-peck guy could make the shift to Community Journalism 2.0.

The result was my launch of the New Haven Independent, a five-day-a-week combo newspaper- radio-station-video site covering the city. The idea was to take some of the innovations of blogs - reader participation, real-time postings, heavy linking, multimedia capabilities - and inject professional fact-gathering, editing, accuracy, and general standards. The idea was to cover everything; not just events such as peace demonstrations and not just the conventional watchdog work of monitoring city hall. We would also cover a zoning meeting or a neighborhood health clinic - radical reportorial acts in an age of downsizing in corporate media.

 To create the Independent, I recruited some others interested in the future of grassroots journalism.  To finance it and to foster other alternative community journalism projects, I formed a not-for-profit called the Online Journalism Project.

 Among the core missions of the nonprofit are the following:

 • Publish the online Independent for New Haven

 • Publish an online statewide health care news site for Connecticut (www.nnewhavenindependent.org/HealthCare/iindex.html   )

 • Help other journalists who want to launch professional-quality local

online news sites

 • Advocate for a new breed of online news reporting that adheres to professional standards of fairness and accuracy

 The model we designed is similar to National Public Radio's. We seek grants from charitable foundations and other givers to support reporting in specific areas -- the environment, health care, arts, and urban neighborhoods. The givers don't review or participate in our articles; rather they have an interest in seeing those subjects covered. We don't publish ads; the sponsors have their logos displayed on the site with a link to their websites. Other donors pay for smaller two-year "sponsorships" for general support of the site. We hope also to build a base of individual donors who allow us to deduct $110 or $118 a month from their credit cards.

Unbeknownst to us, another site started on the same model, on a bigger scale, in San Diego http://voiceofsandiego.org  . Governing magazine, a monthly for public officials, recently reported on the Independent and the San Diego site: http://governing.com/articles/12paprt.htm  .)

 Our interest in health care reporting enabled us to obtain the funding to get started. Several Connecticut foundations dedicated to health have grown increasingly concerned about the rising numbers of uninsured people (about 400,000) in a wealthy state of just 3 million. The foundations have also been concerned about the health care disparities based on race and ethnicity, including the difficulties they face in reaching Latino citizens. To reach more Spanish-speaking readers, we've partnered with the weekly La Voz Hispana, providing them stories that are translated into their language.

 The need for more health-care reporting for minorities is great and it has been growing. For example, a 1999 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation study found that Latinos and African-Americans depend largely on mass media for their health care information. However, the study also concluded that the media misreports and underreports health care news affecting their communities.

Our first $550,000 seed grant came from the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut. In our second year, that foundation and the Connecticut Health Foundation provided two-thirds of the minimum $1,125,000 annual budget we needed to do our job. Five other institutional donors provided the rest.

We launched at a time of need. Cuts in corporate newsrooms affected health care just like any other news beat. The results: less reporting, more national news service copy, and almost no in-depth local reporting.

Bloggers filled much of the vacuum. Most of them were not professional journalists. Most had listservs or websites that connected specific groups of people - say, breast cancer survivors or seekers of a cure for Hodgkins Disease. But in some cases they carried out the journalists' job, or pointed the mass media to stories they had missed.

The most dramatic example came in March of 2005, six months before we launched our own site. It happened in West Virginia. A state legislator, worried about abandoned babies, introduced a law making it a crime not to report a dead fetus to the police within 12 hours. The legislator wasn't thinking about how the law would affect women who had miscarriages. Amid their grief, they would become instant criminals.

The media didn't notice, either. Maura Kearney noticed. She was the editor of a blog called Democracy for Virginia

(http://democracyforvirginia.typepad.com/democracy_for_virginia/ccurrent_affairs/index.html   ).

The legislator ignored her call to discuss the matter. But her item outraged women in the blogosphere infertility/miscarriage network. Her item was cross-linked on the nationally focused Daily Kos site. Within days Kearney appeared on ABC's "Nightline."" The legislator withdrew the bill.

The explosion of blogs appeared to us both exciting and lacking in professional standards and approaches that would reach a broader audience. After all, many blogs speak to the converted. We decided to harness the blogs' energy and interactivity and linking capabilities, and combine them with old-fashioned news reporting and standards. Blogs were making news. They were linking to news. However, with important exceptions such as Kearney's, they weren't producing their own news reports.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media was reporting less on the local level. The Independent would provide actual reporting and we would cover health care and other issues on a hyper-local level. Health care is just one of eight beats on our site. We believed that by incorporating dedicated health-care news coverage into a broader local news palette, we would lure new readers to the subject beyond the universe of people those foundations already reach through their membership lists. We set out to do better, in old-fashioned and new- fashioned ways. Simply by working the beat, we found stories that illustrate racial disparities in health care - stories that have been traditionally under the mainstream news radar.

For example, the mainstream media has covered legislative efforts to establish universal health care in the state. However, the corporate media rarely reports on the special access problems affecting Spanish-speaking immigrants, the fastest-growing population in our area. We were prepared when a research and advocacy group called Democracy Works issued its first report on the state of immigrant health care in Connecticut. We were able to combine older and newer techniques in covering it.

For example, we produced "Marta's Odyssey,"" the story of one undocumented worker who lost her job and faced special obstacles to regaining both her health and her livelihood (www.nnewhavenindependent.org/HealthCare/aarchives/22005/112/ppost_33.html   ) .  However, to provide more context, we embedded that story with a link to the Democracy Works report so readers could read the full text themselves.

 Online journalism also facilitates community conversations about reports -- allowing some to complement stories by offering relevant information or information resources. For example, one of the readers posting a comment on the "Marta 's Odyssey" story informed us and our readers of efforts by some advocacy groups to help people such as Marta.

Our nonprofit status also gives us the independence to focus on the public interest in health coverage. For example, universal health care figured prominently in the 2006 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate campaigns in Connecticut. With our focus on that issue, we helped push politicians to address the problem and helped readers determine where the politicians truly stood.

Again, some of it involved old-fashioned reporting. We caught up with the governor at a campaign stop and pushed her to state a position -- something she had avoided doing previously. Meanwhile, when her Democratic opponents introduced plans, we linked readers to the full versions of the legislation - comparing and contrasting. Also, when Massachusetts announced a universal plan, our news coverage linked to the following:

 • A news report on the plan

 • A copy of the plan

 • Previous coverage on where Connecticut political candidates stood on the general notion of universal health care

 • Previous stories on activist groups advocating universal health care

Identifying Local Problems and Solutions

We knew, before launching the site, about the difficulties poor people had receiving adequate care even when they were covered under a state Medicaid program. However, by covering the events of groups like Mothers for Justice - largely ignored by other media -- we discovered specifics.

For example, we learned that low reimbursement rates were forcing families to drive an hour and half to find a dentist who would see their kids. Again, we extended old-fashioned reporting by posing questions to decision-makers, by providing links to public documents, and by offering an archive of previous stories.

By searching for stories on local impact, we increasingly found ourselves at community health centers -- rather than hospitals -- for stories that involved racial disparities. These centers have become the frontline in the fight to keep a safety net patched together in the health-care system - a fragile safety net fraying under the burden of burgeoning demand and continual budget-cut threats.

Also, by looking for stories about possible solutions to health issues, we could provide news that people could use. For example, we've learned - and also spread the word - about the higher incidence of diabetes in communities of color. However, we also reported on the exercise and nutrition programs that are catching on in places like New Haven and Hartford.

In addition, when activist groups called attention to a pending cut in Medicaid, we were able to for- ward their e-mail alerts immediately to a broader universe of readers and urge them to e-mail law- makers. (That campaign was ultimately successful in averting cuts.))

Ultimately, poor health and poor access to health care results in shorter life spans. We weren't focused on how health problems cut short black lives in our community until we start- ed publishing free obituaries. (Our local daily, like many across the country, stopped offering free obits.) Readers of the obituary section began calling attention to the fact that so many black residents seemed to be dying young. I hope to pursue that story.

 Internet Advantages

The linking capabilities of the World Wide Web were particularly useful tools in our efforts to cover the unfolding battle between legal-aid lawyers and HMOs over whether records on how the HMOs administered the state's Medicaid program should be made public.

That battle progressed from the courts to the legislature and through the state Freedom of Information Commission. Each step required some complicated explanations. Those stories can be dry, or they can present an imposing block of text to readers who may be inclined to pass the stories by.

We wrote some longer pieces -- with a human focus -- that put the issue in context. With each ruling or new motion filed, we briefly touched on the back- linked people to previous articles, summarized key new information, and then linked people to complete court documents or public statements for more details.

We used the same web tools when a grassroots Latino health-care advocacy group started up and did so again when a series of other studies on racial disparities were issued.

By last fall, we were also incorporating additional technology into storytelling: video clips. For example, in a story about grassroots-level health care providers at a strategy session for a statewide campaign to pass a universal health-care law, we presented the story of a Chilean immigrant. The immigrant, a former journalist in his country of origin, had worked his way up from a bakery-restaurant worker to a position organizing small business people on health care issues in a pre-dominantly Latino neighborhood. However, we didn't tell his story. He did - on video. We simply posted it.

(www.nnewhavenindependent.org/HealthCare/archives/22006/112/aactivists_gear.hhtml

In addition, we frequently provide our readers access to a wider universe of information and perspectives by linking them to an archive of websites of groups working on health care social-justice issues. We call the section an "Activist's Toolbox."

We also know that people use our archives. We can see it in the comments that come our way, such as this e-mail from a local minister active in community campaigns against the city 's major medical center, Yale-New Haven Hospital. He and other ministers have criticized the hospital for foreclosing on the homes of low-income patients with bad debt from hospital bills. They have marched alongside blue-collar workers that include some union advocates - many of them black and Latino - some of them working two jobs in order to feed their families or afford health insurance.

"Hey Paul,"" he wrote. "A guy from the Wall Street Journal phoned me for a story he's doing on the hospital fracas. I referred to a lot of documents and he asked if he could see them. I told him they were all on your website. He said: 'Everybody else says the same thing.'"

I can't honestly report on how many people have been linked to information or organizations that they had not known previously. It 's hard to measure that. However, we do know that our readership has gradually grown from about 1,500 page views per day a year ago to about 4,000 page views per day.

Also, we have received over 3,000 reader comments through the end of 2006 and the submission rate is rapidly increasing.

In developing and touting the hyper-local news model, I by no means intend to downplay the other important web experiments going on. Blogs will continue to play an important role in all future civic dialogue on the news; so will citizen-journalism efforts like NewAssignment.net .

In some cases the distinction between "blog" and "news site" is becoming so blurry as to be meaningless. For example, news sites such Baristanet in New Jersey rely heavily on contributions from readers and there are citizen journalism blogs such as Massachusetts' H20Town. Both reader-driven news sites and citizen blog sites provide the kind of local information that mainstream media often fail to produce.

Also, mainstream newspaper dailies such as the Fresno Bee, the Washington Post, and the Bakersfield Californian have shown that some corporate media et "it." They 're reinventing themselves on the Internet with savvy multimedia and citizen-input features. There will be room for everyone in the expanding media landscape.

After years of pessimism in the corporate newsroom, I'm now optimistic about the prospects of better journalism and improving health coverage. I believe we journalists who made the leap from mainstream media to the web can applaud innovations by our former employers . . . .

Reprinted by permission, Center for Communications & Community at the University of California-Los Angeles.