Working Together to Define Why Our Media Matters

Hidden Colors by spettacolopuro

On March 18, NAMAC hosted a lively "Media Impact Summit" that drew together leading public and independent media makers, funders and researchers to share and hone assessment strategies.

This was one in a series of summits that I have been partnering with Tracy Van Slyke of The Media Consortium to organize since February. So far we've held them in five cities: Chicago (hosted by the MacArthur Foundation), New York (hosted by the Center for Media, Culture and History), Miami (as part of the We Media conference), Los Angeles (hosted by the Norman Lear Center) and San Francisco (hosted by NAMAC). We have two more summits scheduled by mid-April: Washington DC (hosted by the New America Foundation) and Boston (hosted by the Association of Independents in Radio).

The goal of these structured discussions is to gather relevant approaches to evaluating public interest media in order to share information and build tools with stakeholders in the field. The research is also designed to inform broader discussions among funders, outlets and policymakers about how best to support public interest media in the networked age. Attendees have so far included representatives of national and regional media funders, producers, and executives from local public stations and nationally recognized independent outlets such as Mother Jones and The Nation. We are asking them to identify tools and approaches to measuring impact in five areas: reach, relevance, inclusion, engagement and influence. We're also asking them to tell us what else they're measuring, what they wish they could measure, and what tools they think the field needs.

Through this process, we are gathering best-of-class examples. However, we haven't found much innovation when it comes to assessment— the emphasis in most cases seems to be on quantitative metrics. Instead, we're finding a real need in the field for tools that not only crunch raw numbers, but combine them with responses that suggest how media projects are creating contexts for publics to engage with content, debate issues, learn new ideas, and act as informed citizens.

That's where networks like NAMAC come in—as support systems to organize scattered media makers around crucial, field-shaping issues. Impact assessment matters for many reasons: to help funders make reasoned decisions, to help media makers communicate with users about what they're accomplishing, and to help them revisit their strategic plans and tweak them so that they'll work better. By coming together around shared impact tools and categories, we'll strengthen the whole field.

But even working together, media makers can't get the job done. Instead, we need to be prepared to reach out to other fields of practice—including business, nonprofit management and open source programming—to learn how they've developed complementary standards and iterative development processes.

The task is a big one, but it's also crucial to the future of our field. We'll be reporting on our findings at the upcoming Making Your Media Matter conference on May 12 in Washington, DC. We hope to hear from members of NAMAC about how they've assessed their own media projects, and to continue the conversation in the coming months.

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Jessica Clark is the research director at American University's Center for Social Media, and is a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation. She is the co-author, with Tracy Van Slyke, of Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media.