Whether you’re making your case to subscribers or donors or just wanting to know what’s working, now is a good time to start tracking the impact of your journalism. Knowing your page views and monthly uniques is important, but so is being able to show that your investigative work inspired a change in the law or got the shady pol ousted. I’m seeing more and more newsrooms getting into subscription sales and making the case that #journalismmatters and requires investment. They’re not wrong, but I’ll argue it’s stronger communities that really matter and journalism is one way — albeit a necessary way — of getting us there. So let’s track that change and see if we can understand more about what the triggers are. Here are a few tips for getting started:

1. Agree on what types of impact matter to your organization. Real change, social likes? Think of the audience here. What will matter to donors, subscribers, your community? We define impact as “real-world change that happens as a result of our journalism,” and here’s what we track:
​

• At The Hechinger Report, a donor- and member-funded organization covering education, they also track things such as benefits to sources; requests for staff expertise, including data; full reprints of their work and whenever new professional development strategies are initiated in schools. Their 28-item list came about after an hours-long staff brainstorming session, said Lillian Mongeau, the site’s membership manager. “Conversations with the staff helped set the stage and get everyone invested on the ground floor,” she said.
• Blair Hickman, who led the building of an impact tracker while she was at The Marshall Project and now works as the director of audience at Vox, advises defining impact with leadership first: “A good way to jumpstart this conversation in a newsroom that's been publishing for awhile is to A) ensure everyone is on the same page about the newsroom mission, B) gather examples of what people within the newsroom would classify as impact (this often varies!) to review as a group and C) review existing definitions from CIR and NewsLynx for inspiration."
• Jessie Shi, the audience engagement fellow at Barron’s and a graduate student in New York University’s Studio 20 program, tipped me to this list (page 78) of what Institute for Nonprofit News members track, which includes referral links and helps set the news agenda for others. 

​2. Set your bar and keep it there. Don’t fill up your list or database with small things that don’t matter. We don’t get caught up in Twitter retweets but do record when our journalism starts a valuable conversation on social media. Mongeau calls this “major social attention” and values when a key figure shares their work.

3. Talk to your staff about what you’re doing and why. Get buy in from key stakeholders. The investigative team is obvious, but others will see the benefit, too. Remember your editorial board, if you have one, because those folks actually advocate for change and need to know/show whether they’re effective. If Mongeau had just shared a finished list with staff and said “do this,” it wouldn’t have worked, she said. Without buy-in it becomes “just one more thing” we all have to do. Our selling point was that impact offers a balance to pure page view tracking and a more complete assessment of the i-team. If this work doesn’t make our communities better, what are we really doing here? I hear this at farewell parties for colleagues: Mission is what keeps journalists going despite worries about the industry’s future.

4. Get started however you can. The tool doesn’t matter as much as seeing progress, but a good tool makes it easier. We started with a Google Form that fed into a spreadsheet before deciding to invest in software dev; so did The Hechinger Report before switching to CIR’s open-source tracker. (We both knew forms wouldn’t work long-term because spreadsheets get unwieldy quickly, but they helped us refine our list of impacts to track.) Pedro Burgos’ Impacto project uses web scrapers to streamline the work (though that requires evidence of impact to be online, where it can be scraped).

5. Don’t let software stall your progress. Simple may be better for your developer, who probably has a bunch of other projects to get to, and it definitely is for the journalists using it.  

6. Share your results with your readers, subscribers, members. Let them know why this matters, how they’ve helped (this is key) and how they can help going forward. How they can help might mean giving money, but it also could mean sharing story tips or calling their government representative.  

7. Remember to share this information with marketing, sales and memberships, too. They’re trying to make an effective case for investing in the type of work that makes people’s lives better. At The Hechinger Report, Mongeau said she’s found impact effectively motivates both donors and members to give. Regardless of our business models, we all could use a bit more of that motivation.

Here's some stories from the trenches and their impact:

• A story about three women opening a community center for foster care families in Arizona inspired a reader to donate $1 million to cover the entire mortgage. The Arizona Republic’s coverage of child welfare, along with research, is supported by a three-year grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.
• David McKay Wilson's four-month investigation into the Irvington (N.Y.) schools led to the director of technology's resignation on Jan. 25. McKay Wilson, who found him billing the district for travel related to his second job, covers taxes for lohud.com and The Journal News.  
• After the Detroit Free Press detailed allegations that Centria Healthcare, Michigan’s largest autism therapy provider, had been running a Medicaid fraud scheme and that the Attorney General's Office had opened its own investigation, state officials rescinded an $8 million grant for Centria.

If you have an impact story to share, email afrdelgado@gmail.com. Anjanette Delgado is the senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press and freep.com, part of the USA Today Network. Twitter: @anjdelgado.

by
Connie Hassett-WalkerAssociate Professor of Criminal Justice, Kean University
Editors note: This article appeared in The Conversation, reposted here with permission and with our thanks for continued insightful research and commentary from the world of academia. At MIP we are interested in finding ways to to promote civil discourse. The breech between anti- and pro-gun proponents seems an excellent place to attempt understanding of "the other" side. Decades of research tells us that media viewing has an affect on our thoughts and perceptions. Perhaps we should all sit down and watch each other's media with open minds...

It was an ordinary day in 2011, when I found myself watching a YouTube video of a gun owner making a semi-automatic rifle discharge bullets rapidly, as if it were an automatic weapon. 
My husband, a gun owner, watched firearms videos like this one. But I had never seen one. Intrigued, I sat down on the couch to absorb the imagery.
Hooking his thumb through his pants belt loop, the YouTuber demonstrated how pushing the gun forward, rather than pulling the trigger, allowed the gun’s recoil to “keep the gun going.” 
In other words, he was bump firing his rifle.
I’m a criminal justice researcher. At the time, a flurry of thoughts popped into my mind. Aren’t citizens forbidden to own automatic weapons? Is it legal to make a video of a semi-automatic rifle performing like an automatic firearm? What about the 1930’s machine gun ban - is there a YouTube loophole of some sort? 
This was 2011, seven years before a gunman at a country music festival in Las Vegas used a bump stock to make his shooting spree more effective and deadly, killing 58 people and injuring 851. 
Watching that initial video led me to spend the next five years exploring online gun videos and gun owner communities. It also led to a moderation in my views on gun-related issues – something I believe resulted from the understanding and empathy I gleaned from those videos.
Video opens a window on worldMy exploration would become the book “Guns on the Internet: Online Gun Communities, First Amendment Protections, and the Search for Common Ground on Gun Control,” forthcoming in August 2018.
That first video, and the many videos I would subsequently view, showed me how gun owners could legally share content that, in the case of bump stocks, could effectively render a particular gun control law moot. 
A gun enthusiast on how to bump fire without a bump stock.This realization led to the question - is it worth it to pass a law, as Florida recently did, banning the sale of bump stock devices, when people can just make and upload a how-to video of bump firing without the device? 
I felt like I had accidentally stumbled onto a secret that was hiding in plain sight. 
I also realized that despite being married to a gun owner, I knew very little about gun subculture, either in real life or online. But I could learn. 
Guns, part of fabric of lifeFor all the noise around gun control versus gun rights, there was a story that was missed by non-gun owners like me: how much these guns mean to those who own them. 
Delving into gun subculture online – which in some, though not all, ways reflects real-life gun subculture – can provide a perspective that may be, for non-gun owners, very different from their own.
Americans live in a time of political polarization on a variety of social issues, gun rights among them. Both gun control and gun rights supporters would benefit from understanding how those with opposing political and social views see their identity and their culture.
Recent data from the Pew Research Center illuminate the extent of gun owner use of the internet and social media. Thirty-five percent of gun owners responding to the Pew survey indicated that they often or sometimes visit websites focused on hunting, shooting sports or guns. Ten percent participate in gun forums online. 
Culture and its smaller subcultures comprise the values and behaviors that define a group of people. A related idea is homophily, that is, the desire to connect with others with similar characteristics, experiences and interests. Gun owners engage in this both in real life – for example, by attending gun shows, joining shooting clubs – as well as online.
Gun owners join Facebook groups with words in the names like freedom, liberty, oath keepers and duck hunters. They also join Facebook groups devoted to survival skills, love of the outdoors and hunting and fishing. They post in the comment sections of gun-related blogs. These are just some of the ways that gun owner subculture flourishes online. 
Dissing politicians and shooting old computersI learned that gun owners share ideas, images of firearms and videos signaling to other gun owners and the greater online community the accepted norms, values and activities of gun subculture. They use hashtags like #freedom or #2A, for the Second Amendment, on a posting. They post key words and phrases such as “take our rights away,” “Patriot class,” and “lock ‘n load.” 
A gun owner shares tactical advice on what to do if you ever encounter zombies.Gun owners showcase their rapid-fire skills with semi-automatic guns; explain how to clean a firearm; complain about political parties and gun control organizations; and compare one type of gun versus another. See, for example, “Glock 17 vs. Ruger SR9.”
I’ve observed that gun-owning YouTubers have a lot of fun filming themselves and their friends shooting all kinds of things – targets, zombies and computers. 
I‘ve come to view firearms as part of the fabric of their owners’ lives, complementing other lifestyles such as rural living, hunting and camping. 
Previously, I had thought about guns mostly as something dangerous, unnecessary and likely to lead to a homicide or suicide in someone’s home. 
Not any more. 
I developed some favorite videos and YouTubers. Having peered into a slice of these gun owners’ worlds, I felt a sense of familiarity despite not knowing any of them in person. 
This gave me an idea. 
If I felt a connection to particular YouTubers and videos, would others experience something similar? 
How to bridge a divideRecent research suggests that individuals can form attachments to media personalities whom they do not know in real life. 
If feelings of connectedness could be deliberately cultivated among gun control advocates and gun owners, might it be possible to parlay that into better understanding of the perspectives of those on the other side of the gun controversy? Could this lead to a productive conversation about gun rights and gun control in the U.S.? 
Some research suggests that it is possible to shift people’s opinions, even strongly held ones, and enhance empathy for others who hold very different opinions. 
Other scholarship has connected familiarity with reduced prejudice. So while a total opinion change isn’t likely when trying to bring opposing viewpoints closer, small movement on a seemingly intractable issue might be possible. 
Through the process of watching hundreds of videos made by and for gun owners, I find that my views on guns have shifted away from unquestioning support for gun control toward a more neutral, even gun-friendly, perspective.
I’m also much more aware of what I don’t know, including the particulars of all things gun-related (parts, accessories). 
The deadlock between proponents of gun rights and gun control is frustrating. To that end, I conclude my book by proposing that both gun control and gun rights supporters watch 100 YouTube videos featuring content from the opposing camp. 

Watching their videos helped the author empathize with gun owners. ShutterstockViewers should approach their watching with an open mind. They will see a slice of the other’s life in the context of their world. Here’s a hint for a “starter” video (for gun control supporters) to get the process underway. And for gun rights supporters, this.
Would this video watching experience work? 
Take the challenge and find out.

A team of journalists learned the value of tracking the impact of their research on cashless tolls on New York thruways; their findings are shared in this second piece by guest blogger Anjanette Delgado. In the first blog, Delgado described a deep dive into the inner workings of the cashless toll system, where they gauged effort versus value to their readers. The team utilized crowdsourcing to collect “horror stories” of drivers charged with fees for trips they hadn’t made and even had their cars repossessed and organized a panel to help drivers facing steep bills.

By Anjanette Delgado
Guest Blogger for the Media Impact Project

We typically record impact in our media tracker after we’ve completed an investigation or project, but this time we wanted to track it in real time to see what we could learn from correlation, and whether we could prove cause. (This could be useful in further investigative work.) Impact appears to be tied most to these things: 

Don’t let up. Unlike a lot of our investigative work in which multiple stories publish on one day, here we’ve published relentlessly as we learn more and more about this incredibly secretive system. 

Offer solutions to those looking for a win. We wrote an editorial identifying three things the state could do to improve the system. The state implemented all three right away and credited us for the suggestion. 

Focus on the human drama. The horror stories are easily the most-read pieces in the investigation, most likely because they are compelling narrative dramas that make you feel something (outrage, sympathy). Those victims are part of a federal class-action lawsuit against the state Thruway Authority, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; Conduent; and debt collectors. 

Make sure the people, agencies and companies you’re investigating know you’re doing it. Digging into Conduent, the private company that handles the “back office” billing for the Thruway Authority and controls nearly half of the U.S. electronic-tolling market, continued alongside the human stories. When we asked state officials questions, especially questions that proved we knew a lot about the system already, they responded in commentary, a letter to Conduent and a visit there. When we invited state officials to our panel event with drivers, they started an amnesty program that eventually cleared 281,000 violations, for a total of over $1.4 million. Conduent still has not gone on the record but has been reading our coverage. In June, two U.S. senators — Bill Nelson of Florida and Gary Peters of Michigan — called for a Federal Trade Commission probe of Conduent. 

Identify the people who are most likely to champion the cause and have the power to make change. Early on in our reporting we identified two local politicians — state Sen. David Carlucci and Assemblyman Tom Abinanti — who had started making noise about the problem. We quoted them many times and checked in often to see what they’d learned about the system. They’re behind the Toll Payer Protection Act, which passed both houses in July and sits on Gov. Cuomo’s desk awaiting his signature. “As we were proving points, that this system is bad and has been bad for awhile … we definitely said this is fixable,” Esposito said. In July they called for New York to end its deal with Conduent. 

​When possible, connect people on both sides of the story in a safe space. The panel event brought together drivers drowning in bills with lawyers offering advice and with representatives from the Thruway Authority who could help. Those representatives, who originally said their billing company is “the best in the country,” traded phone numbers with drivers and offered one-on-one help. 

Still investigating
While the community has seen some positive change in the billing system for cashless tolls, we’re not done investigating. We still don’t know: 

The exact cause of the billing errors. Fully fleshed out networks and connections for the key players involved with cashless tolling. A complete accounting of the fines Conduent/Xerox paid for failing to meet performance standards. (The Thruway has charged Conduent $477,272 for failing to meet performance standards.) How much money changed hands through lobbyists and PAC's in relation to the bridge and cashless tolling. What role the federal government is playing in this, both legislative and executive. Whether it was a single part or a systemic problem that caused the errors.    Cuomo’s office also won’t go on the record.  And not every driver wronged by the system has found relief. 

Still, New York state continues building out its cashless tolls system. In June the Thruway announced five plazas in the Lower Hudson Valley would go cashless by the end of the year, as the entire system switches by 2020. 

Executives at Conduent — which operates in every state and specifically works in cashless tolling in New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, Florida, California and Texas — are earning millions. 

And the cashless tolling technology, especially the equipment that reads and tracks license plates, is part of a much larger system of public surveillance for private profit that’s spreading rapidly on promises of convenience and increased safety.

“This is one of those investigations with long legs, capable of stretching across not only all of New York but likely most of the U.S.,” Scandale said. “It will impact every motorist (not only) financially but also cyber security-wise. Surveillance on you will grow as cameras proliferate and your whereabouts are logged on databases.” 

Change, while beginning in New York and Florida, needs to spread to other states as well. "We may solve it here if Cuomo signs the legislation, but what about Texas?” Esposito said.

Anjanette Delgado is the senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press and freep.com, part of the USA Today Network. She worked at lohud.com during most of this investigation. Email: adelgado@gannett.com, Twitter: @anjdelgado.

By Anjanette Delgado
Guest Blogger for the Media Impact Project
 
Editor's note: What is the “worth” of investigative journalism to readers? In this new piece by guest blogger Anjanette Delgado, a New York team reports on how they measured potential interest in an investigative series on cashless highway tolls. First of a two-part series.

A deep investigation into cashless tolling on a new bridge in New York began by floating this trial balloon: "Tappan Zee, Mario drivers hit with thousands in fees”

At lohud.com, we had been hearing about local drivers getting bills, sometimes for thousands of dollars in fees, to cover their $5 trips across the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. The story included a callout asking more drivers to come forward. 

We used the impact and effort matrix to determine whether a full investigation would worth the time and resources we’d be investing because we choose to apply our resources where we can do the most good. That first low-effort story, done in less than two hours, tested both audience interest and opportunity for impact.  

A flood of responses followed, showing the opportunity to right a wrong for a significant number of people and make a real difference in our community. (A similar story borne of other complaints around the same time drew little response and ended up being a much smaller story for us. We just didn’t see proof that the issue represented a job our community wanted us to do.)

Now, nearly a year in, we include this impact statement with toll stories: 
Reporters at lohud and The Journal News have spent months investigating cashless tolls to find out why drivers are getting fees and escalating fines for tolls for which many say they were never billed, who's running the system and where the system is breaking down.

The reporting so far has prompted changes, including: an amnesty program forgiving $1.4 million in individual bills; a bill introduced in Albany to help toll payers; a new web page for the amnesty program instead of using the faulty Tolls By Mail site; more distinct envelopes so drivers know they've received a bill; new toll signs on the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge; more responsiveness from Thruway officials, two of whom attended a lohud forum on cashless tolling and personally helped drivers with their individual cases. legislation drafting a tollpayer’s bill of rights; and an apology from the lieutenant governor. 

“So many of the people we talk to felt helpless and that’s where we come in,” said Frank Scandale, the project’s editor and head of investigations at lohud.com. “We have been able to get to the bottom of some things, get help for our readers, and put some of these bureaucrats on the defensive.”

Parallel channels
This investigation is largely running on two parallel tracks: 
1). A deep dig into how the system works, who’s managing it, where the breakdown is happening and how this technology is being used for surveillance. Frank Esposito is investigating this, and he’s using a network mapping technique to connect seemingly unrelated individuals into networks with clearly defined goals.    

2). Crowdsourcing and horror stories. These are the drivers getting pulled over and left beside a road in the Bronx at night after their car is impounded for a suspended registration for unpaid tolls. These are the drivers taking taxis to work now because their cars have been repossessed after fees got out of hand. These are also the drivers helping us fact-check some of the statements coming from the players in the first track. Chris Eberhart has been working on this track. 

We also quickly assembled a panel event offering help to drivers struggling with steep bills (two lawyers, a state senator and a representative from AAA). We invited the state Thruway Authority, which is responsible for the toll system, to take part. 

Anjanette Delgado is the senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press and freep.com, part of the USA Today Network. She worked at lohud.com during most of this investigation. Email: adelgado@gannett.com, Twitter: @anjdelgado. Look for the second part in this series next Tuesday.


​

by John Fraser, PhD

Dr. Fraser is the President & CEO of New Knowledge Organization Ltd, and a Fellow of the Media Impact Project at USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. His series of guest blogs on social media use among millennials will appear each Monday for the next three weeks.

Op-ed pieces about the cost of social media to civil society tend to be reinforced by an age-old trope that young people (no matter what generation) are enamored with their new technologies but have increasingly lower attention spans never before seen in human history. Rock and roll was supposed to lead to the demise of society in the 1950s, almost the same way that fast cars and sexualized clothing of the 1920’s were assumed to be evidence of the end of western European civilization. It seems that social media is the new rock and roll.

As new social media emerged, academics perhaps not raised with these technologies invested in a rapid-fire process of pathologizing digital behaviors. They often characterized failure as an inability of users to succeed in traditional learning modalities. It was those modalities – single-task execution or concentration in a classroom – where academics were rewarded in their own careers. They studied game addiction, comparative loss of single-task attention skills, and how social media negatively impacts academic performance.

While some studies were hopeful about the value of digital tools in society, the negative public reports far outweighed the positive. In the face of that work, our national study of teen gamers, It’s not who I am, it’s what I do broke new ground. We found that most so-called high school-age “gamers” were not all-consumed by their media tools. In general, youth had set aside a reasonable amount of time and energy for digital experience as part of their identity development process. What was more revelatory in that study was that teens were choosing their digital gaming to reinforce their ability to achieve success. Those who were more successful in science-based academic pursuits were more likely to use their digital gaming in isolation to advance their mastery, while those youth who were less academically successful with science were more likely to collaborate as a way to be successful. It is only in the past few years that we’ve seen an abundance of affirmative studies that consider how social media is changing the way we think – not better, not worse, just different.

We’ve labored too long on the assumption contemporary youth have low attention spans, when it’s now becoming apparent that most youth are simply exercising good judgment on how to use their time effectively.

​
References
Electronic Media Use, Reading, and Academic Distractibility in College Youth, Laura E. Levine, Bradley M. Waite, and Laura L. Bowman. CyberPsychology & Behavior. August 2007, 10(4): 560-566.https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2007.9990

The Associations Between Social-Media Use and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate Students in Biology. Jonna M. Leyrer-Jackson, Ashley K. Wilson, Journal of Biological Education. Mar 2017, Vol. 25: 1-10

Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning Henry H. Wilmer, Lauren E. Sherman, Jason M. Chein Frontiers in Psychology. Apr 2017, Vol. 8Crossref

Sleeping with Technology: Cognitive, affective, and technology usage predictors of sleep problems among college students, Larry Rosen, Louis M. Carrier, Aimee Miller, Jeffrey Rokkum, Abraham Ruiz, Sleep Health. Mar 2016, Vol. 2, No. 1: 49-56

“All Over the Place”: A case study of classroom multitasking and attentional performance. Dan Hassoun, New Media & Society. Nov 2015, Vol. 17, No. 10: 1680-1695

It’s Not Who I Am, it’s What I Do: Youth gamer identity and science understanding Asbell-Clarke, J., Fraser, J., Gupta, R. & Rowe, E. (2013), Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 1

By 
Anjanette Delgado

MIP Editor’s Note: Journalism can and does spur real change. The following two stories by our MIP guest blogger outlines how two reporters spotlighted serious problems in government agencies and helped initiate improvements. The first is a heartbreaking story involving the overwrought Child Protective Services in Rochester, New York, and looks at coverage that persevered for almost two years. The second piece hails from the TCPalm in Stuart, Florida following Hurricane Irma. It looks at how one reporter’s coverage of inefficient bureaucracies inspired an overnight environmental clean-up. One long-term, one short, but both stories proving the power of local journalism to change lives.

Institutional Change in Rochester
Reporter Meaghan McDermott was covering the general assignment beat one day in November 2016 when she got a tip that police were looking into the death of a little girl at a local hospital.  McDermott is a watchdog reporter who typically covers taxes and property for the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., but like many reporters these days sometimes she fills in on breaking news.

For the next year and a half, McDermott stayed on the story as investigators declared 3-year-old Brook Stagles’ death a homicide, her little body bruised and broken inside and out; as Brooke’s grandfather pointed a finger at Child Protective Services; and then as the child’s father and his girlfriend, Erica Bell, were charged. She sat through Bell’s entire trial. She investigated CPS. Within days of Bell’s criminal conviction in October 2017 — almost a year after McDermott picked up that general assignment shift — Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo announced sweeping changes to the county's Child Protective Services agency.

Institutional impact such as this — a change in how an entire agency or organization operates  —  commonly takes longer to occur than individual action. It often means lengthy and costly reporting (staff time, public records fees, etc.), deliberation, agreement and adoption or legislation, all of which are more involved than single hirings, firings or resignations. Policy change, too, takes time. McDermott’s story and the one I’ll tell next sit on opposite ends of the timeline, yet both led to important change in their local communities.  McDermott credits the impact of this story to two primary factors: 

1. The perseverance of Brook’s grandfather.
2. The revelations from her own reporting.

“Brook’s grandfather blamed CPS early,” McDermott said. “He started putting up billboards, websites, trying to get candidate (Donald) Trump’s attention.” He spent nearly $100,000 on billboards in cities across the U.S. carrying messages such as "Don't let children die from child abuse … like Brook Stagles" and “Child abuse crisis: Help CPS save lives. How many have to suffer or die? Brook did both!” 

“His story from the beginning was much more focused on failings with CPS,” McDermott said. “My reporting later determined it probably didn’t have a direct impact on her death. Erica Bell (did). But it did make me interested in whether the system working as it should, and my reporting found it wasn’t.” McDermott collected data on CPS cases and deaths, including documents showing caseloads in Monroe County were some of the largest in New York. 
“Usually you’d want caseworkers to have 12-15 cases a month, but some workers here had in excess of 50 a month,” McDermott found. Monroe was 54th worst of 60 counties in overdue investigations, 40th worst in number of workers with more than 15 investigations. 

Yet as it does in the best investigative reporting, the human drama proved more powerful than numbers. For McDermott, that was her coverage of Bell’s trial. She was there reporting every day. The local TV station covered the trial, too, but it was McDermott who did the digging. (Immediately after the trial ended she published “Little Girl Lost: The questions left behind by Brook Stagles' death,” a look at the “litany of failures and missed opportunities” in Brook’s case.)  “I’d like to think that the coverage generated enough outrage that it moved the needle,” she said. “Over time, the horrific detail of this girl’s death and what happened was so shocking to the community that I think the county felt they had to do something.” 
In all, the county:

• Added funding for 30 additional caseworkers, and right now it’s working to fill those positions. This has meant a $1.6M increase in budget. 
• Announced that an in-house hotline/call center would be reinstated this year. Advocates have said it helps them zero in on the most serious cases. 
• Raised the pay of CPS workers to make the jobs competitive; neighboring counties paid more and had smaller caseloads. The contract settled, workers are already seeing more money. 
• Started another class to train more caseworkers; this is happening now. 
• Upgraded technology (smartphones and tablets) so caseworkers could file from the field, increasing efficiency. 
• Is reviewing all state laws that govern case work so it can advocate for additional funding. 
• Is working on a mentoring program for new caseworkers. 
• Hired a coordinator to run a caseworker recruitment campaign. 
• Added a third civil service caseworker test annually. 
• Added $1.7M in funding for child abuse prevention programming. Nurses, for example, are working with first-time moms to teach them parenting, safe sleeping habits and more.  

McDermott’s not finished reporting; she’s checking to make sure those in government deliver on their promises. “It’s up to us to make sure that they’re following through and hold them accountable,” she said. “The only way to make sure that government follows through is to keep asking them, keep demanding proof.”

A mess in Hurricane Irma’s wake 
About a month before Bell’s conviction up in Rochester, Hurricane Irma barreled through south Florida and rattled the windows in the TCPalm newsroom in Stuart, Fla. By Sept. 18 it was gone, and Miguel Gonzales Sr. was on the phone to report a bunch of dead fish in the canal behind his house. Tyler Treadway, a reporter on the newsroom’s Indian River Lagoon team, had been on the lookout for fish kills and other storm damage. He asked for proof, and Gonzales sent photographs. Treadway’s story explained what had happened after Irma — the science of it: 

“Rain from the storm flushes large amounts of nutrients into the water, causing bacteria to have a feeding frenzy that sucks oxygen out of the water. Low oxygen levels cause the fish to suffocate. Oxygen levels in the C-24 ‘took a nosedive following the hurricane,’ said Edith ‘Edie’ Widder, founder and lead scientist at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association in Fort Pierce. ‘I'm not at all surprised there was a fish die-off in the canal.’”

The smell was awful, but that was only part of the problem. As fish die they release nutrients into the water that can feed algae blooms. Photographer Leah Voss took pictures of the thousands of dead carp, bass and striped perch, a sea turtle and a six-foot alligator stinking and rotting in the sun on the banks of the canal.  The next day, Treadway started asking who would clean up the mess and a “reverse turf war,” as he calls it, broke out. Three different agencies — South Florida Water District, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the City of Port St. Lucie — denied responsibility. 

So he wrote about that next. Publishing the second story “kind of shamed them,” Treadway said. Impact was swift.  The next day, the Water District agreed to take the lead and all three agencies came together to get rid of the fish. Just two days after Gonzales called to complain, the fish were gone.

“What I love about this story is it’s not the biggest story we’ve ever run but it’s what we do,” said Treadway’s editor, Adam Neal. “We got a call from a reader, and then we took it a step further to ask who’s going to clean this up. If Tyler hadn’t made those phone calls, I can almost guarantee it never would’ve happened.” Eve Samples, TCPalm’s opinion editor, also credits Voss’ photographs — pictures of piles of rotting fish — with inspiring impact.  
“The photos were so horrifying they really helped tell this story,” Samples said. “I think because of those photos it was very widely shared on social (media) -- because of the yuck factor.”

Read more about the local impact TCPalm has had in its “12 Days of Christmas” campaign benefiting nonprofits who help the lagoon.  

Anjanette Delgado is the senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press and freep.com, part of the USA Today Network. The Democrat & Chronicle and TCPalm are also part of the USA Today Network. Email: adelgado@gannett.com, Twitter: @anjdelgado.

by Laurie Trotta Valenti

A year ago, MIP Senior Fellow Jessica Clark unveiled a hands-on tool for helping media makers and funders map outcomes of a project: the Media Engagement Strategy Deck.

The cards work along the lines of a tarot. Different suits help users puzzle through key concepts for engagement, such as the who, what, why and how of a project, represented by symbols and colors. Connector cards allow users to construct a layout almost like a math equation: “You can begin with the factors that you already know (either your desired outcome or your starting platform) and then build an impact story from left to right, or right to left,” Clark says. “The language around media impact planning can be intimidating,” she explains. “The cards are designed to be friendly and intuitive, a way to plan and evaluate an engagement campaign.”  

Clark designed the cards to help producers and funders conceptualize the trajectory of an engagement campaign, and then use the decks to talk to their teams about project goals, shared outlooks, and differences between the two that might exist. The cards are meant to be flexible and reflect the many different creative approaches that media makers are taking to draw communities into issues.

MIP checked in with Clark during this anniversary season to learn about the deck's reception among her colleagues in nonfiction storytelling, academia, funding and beyond. We wanted to learn about the different contexts in which the cards are being employed and whether they are proving useful.  

“We’ve had enthusiastic response from people in newsrooms and documentarians,” Clark reports. The cards are being used in different ways. One Sacramento journalist used the deck on a documentary project, A View From Here, which looks at a range of social issues over time, such as food insecurity, immigration and housing. The editor used the cards to help journalists embrace more community engagement inside the newsroom. “We were trying to move the journalists toward a mindshift,” Clark says. “We’ve been in dialogue about the theory of change for the organization, the line between advocacy and journalism, and the cards help illustrate the concepts.”

The range of places and organizations employing the Media Engagement Strategy Deck include: among media makers at AFI Docs and Double Exposure; at funder gatherings such as ComNet and Philanthropy Workshop; in classrooms around the globe, including Central European University, the University of North Texas and SUNY Purchase; by journalism outlets and conferences such as Capitol Public Radio and the Online Newsroom Association;  in media venues overseas, such as the Jakarta Global Forum for Media Development; with PhillyCam, a media literacy training  program,  and in one-on-one sessions with funders, researchers and media makers. The cards are also being adopted more rigorously by some groups: The Solutions Journalism Network has worked them into their training curriculum, and Greenpeace International’s digital trainers have ordered several decks.

Last summer, Clark issued an updated version of the deck that includes two new cards: trust and collaboration. The “trust” card is based on “the many conversations we’ve been having around the country on lack of trust in the media,” and falls into the “outcomes” category of the deck, Clark says. The collaboration card grew out of a need to add partnerships as an option in the connectors category, she adds. One of the more unusual suits reflects the growth of experiential media, such as virtual and mixed reality. “The cards are for the senses, the experience of the user; they chart the eventualities of an engagement campaign. They are a living expression of the world.”

Want to try the cards for yourself? Purchase decks here.