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Chatham site aims to be a real-life lab for local news needs and funding  


Reese News Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill is taking its innovation work from the classroom to the field to develop an online news service for the university's fast-growing neighbor to the south, Chatham County.

Ryan Thornburg, Reese News executive director, posted plans for OurChatham on the lab's blog. The new site hasn't begun posting news: so far, it offers a signup for the project's first offering, an email newsletter curating links to Chatham news and information. Thornburg says email, in-person gatherings and social media platforms all will be part of the research and development process.

Thornburg describes OurChatham both as a news site that has to become self-sufficient by 2020 and as a "demonstration garden" to help local news publishers and producers more broadly, in part by modeling best practices for building trust and quality along with revenue.

"I’d like OurChatham to be a kind of living bibliography of the best tools and best research being done by the broad and diverse approaches of people across the country looking for ways to sustain local journalism," Thornburg wrote. "At the very least, it will make us more credible when we say 'you should try this.' ”

First, he wrote, the OurChatham team aims to learn what people need and want from local news. Reese News will use the Hearken platform to gather questions that students from the UNC School of Media & Journalism will answer through reporting. 

UNC's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media and Reese News Lab are funding OurChatham's initial work, and Thornburg says findings, successes and other lessons will be shared through CISLM and in other ways. OurChatham content also will be available to publishers, following distribution models established by other nonprofit news sites.

Located between the Triangle and Triad urban areas, both of which have been growing steadily for decades, Chatham is a large county whose main towns are Siler City to the west and Pittsboro center-east. Both are growing, and farm and forestland is giving way to large new and planned suburbs. Chatham's growth rate ranked sixth in North Carolina from 2016-17, driven largely by residential development.

County residents get local coverage from a variety of area media, listed on the Chatham government site, but the county has no dedicated daily news outlet and is home to a wealth of issues, institutions and communities ripe for more coverage.

Staffed by a combination of faculty hours, students and other hires, OurChatham will face the same demands any news service must answer: Identifying, reaching and successfully serving both an audience and a market, and serving the public interest while developing solid financing. Being a startup makes some of those challenges easier and some more difficult, yet offers the chance to build toward needs and opportunities.

"For me, the two big questions are whether there really are unmet information needs among county residents that they will pay to have met, and whether we can serve the diverse information needs without a lot of duplication of effort," Thornburg told me via email.

Follow the OurChatham site and Reese News site for updates, and I'll post again as the service takes shape.

Storylines

Lumbee identity, Silent Sam and DMV's secret-not secret office

  • Two Charlotte-based freelance journalists, reporter and writer Lisa Rab and photographer Travis Dove, produced a rich and multilayered cover story for the Washington Post Magazine on issues of race and recognition for the Lumbee tribe in Robeson County and Eastern North Carolina. Rab started pursuing the story in 2017 and spent months developing sources and doing extensive research and field work to understand issues around the tribe's quest for federal recognition and individual efforts to gain acknowledgement of Lumbee ancestry. When I reached Rab, she took care to credit some of the people and references she drew on, voicing respect for their efforts over years or even decades. "I’ve written a lot about race in my career, (and) this struck me as a story unlike any I’d ever heard, just questioning the concept of race itself," Rab told me.
  • Equally striking were the accompanying photos of Lumbee people by Dove, a Wake Forest University graduate (featured recently in the Wake alumni magazine). He produced a mix of documentary images and more than 100 individual portraits. Seeking a unifying style for the latter, Dove bought a stretch canvas at Michael's, a couple of stools at the Habitat ReStore and a small wagon to cart all his gear to the Lumbee Homecoming parade. He took about 50 portraits after the parade and a few more at a local swimming hole, then went back to take about 50 more portraits after church that Sunday. The Post published more than 20 of them on its website with Rab's magazine story.

  • I asked Jane Stancill how she and News & Observer colleagues Andrew Carter and Julia Wall pulled off a long-form article and video, "The Unfinished Story of Silent Sam," while protests were still unfolding a couple of weeks ago around the pedestal of the toppled Confederate monument on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. She replied that they'd been thinking about a longer story for awhile, and after the statue fell decided to tell it in chapter form:
    • "Andrew, the history buff, took the first two chapters, the beginnings of the statue and the early/middle period, when the statue was part of lighthearted campus lore, though some were beginning to point out its problems. I took the last two chapters, which basically told the story of the increasing student unrest starting around 2010 and then the escalation in the past year. Photojournalist Julia Wall had covered many of the events of the last year or two, so she had a wealth of footage from protests and other events. She created a wonderful narrative video of the growing activism that led to what happened Aug. 20. The challenge was pulling it off in a matter of a couple of days, with all the daily breaking news demands. But we knew we needed to get it done while it was at the forefront of people's minds. The story was finished Friday night, and it was posted Saturday morning, as protesters were beginning to arrive on campus."

  • WBTV investigative reporter Nick Ochsner got a tip recently that state employees were signing up to get driver's licenses at DMV headquarters in Raleigh, bypassing the long lines at local offices that had themselves become headline news. Ochsner said the station revealed what his report called a "secret driver's license office" after sending a producer with a hidden camera "to see what happened when he went to DMV headquarters and asked about the office. The security guard at the front desk told him, explicitly, that the office was only for 'employees and their associates,' "  Other media picked up right away on the Aug. 27 story; and though DMV officials did interviews with several outlets denying the "secret" description, Ochsner said he wasn't granted a promised interview with DMV commissioner Torre Jessup. A day or so after Ochsner's story aired, Jessup sent staff a memo saying the practice of issuing licenses at headquarters would end, WBTV reported.

Use This

NAB's big innovation challenge open through mid-October

  • If you have an idea that can "change the face of local media," there's a great opportunity to advance it through the National Association of Broadcasters' PILOT Innovation Challenge, which is inviting proposals from all over. First prize is $30,000, second is $25,000 and third is $20,000, and three $15,000 innovator awards will be offered as well. All include access to industry experts and the chance to present at NAB events. The innovation challenge, in its third year, is led by John Clark, well-known to North Carolina through his roles at WRAL in Raleigh and UNC, including leadership of the Reese News Lab. Deadline for submissions is Oct. 19: more details can be found here, and PILOT staffers will offer virtual office hours and other support for interested applicants.

Ask and Offer

Asks:

Send shoutouts for people, stories or projects to highlight in NC Local. Send announcements, too. A new feature, "Local Voice," introduces people in. local news and information. Email me.

Offers:

I'll be at the Online News Association conference next week. I'll be looking for takeaways for North Carolina: let me know if you're going.
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Bulletin board

"Visual Trumpery," free speech at UNC and WFAE's music pod

  • Alberto Cairo's public lecture tour at Duke University tonight and elsewhere in North Carolina this week is called "Visual Trumpery," but it's not about a person. Instead, the presentation by Cairo, University of Miami Knight Chair in Visual Journalism, is described as a nonpartisan presentation that "focuses on the visual, examining misleading charts, graphs, and data maps designed by individuals and organizations from across the political spectrum." Cairo, former UNC professor of visual communication, was also scheduled to speak at N.C. State University last night, at UNC-Chapel Hill on Thursday and at Davidson College Friday evening.
  • There's still time to register for the Institute for Emerging Issues' statewide ReCONNECT to Community forum in Asheville on Sept. 17. One panel will focus on the media's role in civic engagement; others will highlight civic success stories from five North Carolina communities. The event, the first Emerging Issues forum held outside Raleigh, is open to the public; there's a registration fee, with scholarship help available. 
  • UNC-Chapel Hill is building plans for its 10th annual First Amendment Day, set for Sept. 25 to coincide with the national Banned Books Week. Events posted so far by UNC's Center for Media Law & Policy include a panel on the idea of "counterspeech" and a special edition of "The State of Things" on WUNC public radio. Free speech and First Amendment freedoms are always timely; given the national climate of debate and UNC's own tensions over the presence, removal and future of the "Silent Sam" Confederate memorial, the topic holds additional relevance both on campus and off. Follow on social media via #UNCFree.
  • Public radio's WFAE has a new podcast, Amplifier, featuring artists and music from the Charlotte area. "Amplifier" is hosted and produced by Joni Deutsch, also WFAE's on-demand and audience engagement producer, with producer Cole del Charco. More than 300 artists sent their songs and stories in response to a summer callout, and the podcast website includes a map of music venues, explainers for people new to listening to podcasts and a playlist for exploring music from Charlotte.
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The Local View: Asheville

Teen members of "the Squad" get practice in video production and interviewing recently during the Summer Learning Institute from Asheville Writers in the Schools and Community. This helps them prepare for their roles in leading and producing the bilingual online magazine Word on the Street/ La Voz de los Jóvenes during the fall and spring semesters. (Photo by Sekou Coleman) 
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