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May 12, 2006
Bill Buzenberg Talks Public Insight Journalism
Bill Buzenberg of Minnesota Public Radio, talking about Public Insight Journalism. Notes are summaries, not direct quotes. - andy
MPR has been obsessed with user developed content. We have 900k listeners in Minnesota, around 15 million national, four million newsletters... One of the new things we've started is a mini wiki- a free news and music culture encyclopedia for our local community. We use Gather.com for generating local news stories with the general public.
Now we're focusing on Public Insight Journalism - "On any given story, someone in the audience will always know more than we do," says MPR president Bill Kling. We've created a database of listeners willing to give us info - around 18,000 people now. We take our database and write to them on different issues, contacting health care workers on health care stories, etc. We get back hundreds of emails and give them to the reporters to help them create a good story. The reporters used to be skeptical - now they're not.
We write to our database and ask them to tell us their personal economic story - are you getting crunched? Hundreds of people write back, giving our reporters a map of what's going on across our economy. We can even take the data to economists to get their take on the situation. It's giving the newsroom story ideas of things they'd never thought about before.
We did a story on the education achievement gap. We asked people to share their thoughts, and hundreds of people replied. We get to use their stories while the public can rate the stories. All of this led to a townhall meeting. Same thing with the future of small towns - our listeners have lots of ideas, lots of expertise on the subject, so we're able to capture the public's collective wisdom. We also created a budget simulator, where users could go through the state budget and make choices, then show whether you balanced the budget or not, and what programs you ended up eliminating. Around 11,000 people used it, even though it takes about 20 minutes to go through and do it. They can then email their results to policymakers, who are amazed at how better informed their constituents are than they realized.
We're now expanding it nationally. We've generated over 130 stories that have been informed by public insight journalism. If we can get the foundation support, we want to see other broadcasters using these tools.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at May 12, 2006 10:18 AM
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