Photo quilt I design from individual photos on SAMPLER entries
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What's Giving Tuesday?
Black Friday,
Cyber Monday...
After two days of shopping, December 2nd is a day to give back. It's #GivingTuesday.
In 2012, 92Y joined with the United Nations Foundation (“UNF”) to create an annual global day of giving that helps raise funds and awareness for important causes everywhere.
How can you help SAMPLER?
You can donate on Razoo and/or help spread the word....
Here's a post on facebook
Here's the tweet...
Our projecthe audience for of this project will be regional and national consumers of legacy, online and social media. The users will be citizens in South Central Appalachia and journalists. Our challenge is that our region is covered only occasionally by the national media, often when there is a mining disaster or a release of poverty statistics. The authors of this coverage often lack a feet-on-the-ground understanding of the complexity of local issues. Regional papers that provide balanced coverage tend to cover one state, although the problems are endemic. Citizens often don’t understand the difference between public relations, spin and good journalism.
We believe our crowd source approach to good journalism will build skills needed for users to raise awareness of the issues facing our region and provide citizens citizens with the information they need to meaningfully evaluate those issues and participate in the civic arena.
Our partners
We are partnering with the Appalachian Community Fund (ACF) to build an alliance of journalists and citizens working to strengthen in-depth reporting on a sustainable transition from coal's mono-economy in Southern Central Appalachia (West Virginia and the areas affected by coal mining in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina.) We especially plan to cover the practice of mountaintop removal. Other topics include the proposed introduction to the region of other extractive carbon-based energy industries (fracking and natural gas pipelines) with an analysis of their their possible effects on climate, water, land and/or air quality. On November 1, we submitted an application to the Knight Foundation's Prototype Fund to help develop the project. OVEC serves fiscal sponsor and is accepting our crowd-sourced donations until we achieve own non-profit status.
Here's how I described the project to Knight:
SAMPLER will use a website, twitter, facebook and other social media to provide content to national media and teach citizens to critique our coverage and that of others.
We take our definition of reporting from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Our goal is to help citizens gain the skills to create and publish stories, photos and videos of their communities and to help journalists cover topics they could not address as meaningfully alone. Our users will gain knowledge that they need for meaningful civic engagement to improve quality of life through a transition from poverty and environmental degradation to environmental justice and sustainable development.
The assumptions we will test if we get the grant:
*Citizens can build skills needed for users to raise awareness of the issues facing our region
*Journalists will use our content to deepen their own content
We will know if the project has worked or not by metrics such as:
*number of participants
*participant evaluations
*consumer evaluations
*number of blog posts
*number of articles on other media
*number of comments websites of other media linking to our posts
*number and variety of supporting organizations
What we've done so far:
*we've use this blog as a prototype to publish photographs (Paul Corbit Brown, Vivian Stockman, Roger May, Antrim Caskey); journalism (Rachel Parsons, Sarah Verkasi, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Ted Boettner, Mary Anne Hitt, Jon Foley)
*Sue Sturgis and Chris Kromm of Institute Southern Studies provides advice, offer to syndicate through Facing South
*Margo Miller of the Appalachian Community Foundation has offered to syndicate content in its regional blog
*established relationships with MIT Center for Civic Media, Looking at Appalachia Project, Cir.ca, Carnival of Journalism
*Darryl Fears, Washington Post environmental reporter wants background information to cover mountaintop removal
*Blacksburg Glade Road Growing syndicates posts on sustainable agriculture, cooking with local ingredients
*New Organizing Institute and Energy Justice Network underwrote social media training
*Newstrust added coal as news archives category
*Alliance for Appalachia provided a travel grant for me to attend the 2012 Knight Media Learning Seminar
*Washington and Lee provided scholarship for its Poverty Journalism Workshop
*developed logo
* provided description to local and regional foundations
*set up google alerts on related news topics
*set up data base on scientific research on mountaintop removal
*Newstrust will share material on how to think like a journalist in evaluating quality of journalism
*started data base of environmental, poverty and political reporters; civic groups
