At WeMedia: Nonprofits and media; activism online and off; telling our own stories
I’m in unnaturally chilly Miami (its projected to get down to the 40s tonight) at the WeMedia Conference and am currently sitting in an afternoon session about “advocacy groups who once relied on journalists are now making the news themselves”. The session is being moderated by John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation and the discussion includes Jon Sawyer, Executive Director, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Ellen Miller, Executive Director, Sunlight Foundation (who in her introduction referred to herself as a serial entrepreneur).
The Sunlight Foundation uses technology to help bring transparency to the activity of our elected officials in the US. They get behind orgs like http://www.MinnPost.com – started by people laid off at Minneapolis Star Tribune; http://www.Congresspedia.com which, as it sounds, is a wikipedia-like site but where all articles are vetted before being uploaded- its a curated space; and the Center for Independent Media – setting up bureaus of ‘professionalized bloggers’ who are doing investigative stories and driving stories. For Ellen, one model of success of wemedia is John Marshall at Talking Points Memo.
At the Pulitzer Center they’re trying to fund good stories about issues that are not getting coverage in mainstream media. The discussion didn’t actually answer the question between risks and benefits of having nonprofits in the space of media creation- perhaps because its actually nothing really that new. … Then I let another fellow here borrow my computer because she was live blogging the session and her battery was dying on her. There are more notes from the discussion here.
Then it was off to my panel “Activist World: Social Networks for Social Good” – it was a great group of people (Joan Peckolick, Founder, Selfchec;James Carlson, CEO, Bucketworks; Deron Triff, Co-President and CEO, Changents - all projects worth spending time with), most of whom I’ll be going to dinner with tonight but the energy was low (we’ve all been going since 7am and been sitting in a LOT of panels by this point) and there wasn’t much time to talk but there were some good questions that circulated about how best to reach youth (most frequently referred to here as “millennials”) and also about how to keep the internet open, – the question poised to me was because we require a people to log into the Hub if they want to upload, comment, rate, interact. Hopefully the conversation will continue…
The last session was probably my favorite of the day – Indigenous voices discussion “Telling our own stories” ….


