A Report on the First Year
By Jan Schaffer
Read the Report > >
This report tracks the progress of an experiment J-Lab designed to see if there were ways to incentivize media collaborations and amplify, beyond narrow silos, the journalism being created by emerging news sites in the nation’s sixth largest city.
Philadelphia has a vibrant media landscape consisting of niche reporting sites, legacy newspapers and an active community of creative technologists. In 2009, the William Penn Foundation commissioned J-Lab to explore the city’s media ecosystem with a focus on the state of public affairs reporting. You can read that April 2010 report here.
One of the recommendations was to incentivize with $5,000 enterprise reporting awards several discrete, in-depth journalism projects that required news creators to collaborate. J-Lab issued a competitive request for proposals and announced the winners in October 2010.
This report details the outcome of that experiment. By any measure, they were a home run and they offer a replicable model others can employ to jumpstart good public affairs coverage.