SHARING OUTCOMES OUT LOUD
AS JOURNALISM CONTINUES TO REINVENT ITSELF, TWO OF THE MOST VALUABLE steps that funders can take are to explicitly provide support for evaluation, and to work with journalism projects and researchers to publish what they learn.
Richard J. Tofel—president of online investigative newsroom ProPublica, and a former funder at the Rockefeller Foundation— laid out his own impact taxonomy. [Note: 19]
“Put most simply, different sorts of journalism have different objectives, and therefore will produce—seek to produce—quite different sorts of impact,” he writes. Hard news seeks to inform, feature writing seeks to entertain, and opinion seeks to persuade. However, according to Tofel, ProPublica’s goal is to produce two distinct types of high-impact journalism: “Explanatory journalism” which “seeks primarily to elucidate, while investigative journalism, even if sometimes only implicitly, seeks change. The impact that results is thus also different: the impact of explanatory journalism will be determined by measuring how much readers’ awareness or understanding has increased, while the impact of investigative journalism must be judged by how much things beyond the reader have changed.”
The report goes on to outline several of the complex questions related to journalism and advocacy, and to detail how ProPublica regularly charts impact through a document called the Tracking Report.
For each published story, this includes key partnerships, prominent coverage or reprints, official actions influenced by the story, opportunities for change such as related hearings or studies, and “ultimately, change that has resulted. These last entries are the crux of the effort. They are recorded only when ProPublica management believes, usually from the public record, that reasonable people would be satisfied that a clear causal link exists between ProPublica’s reporting and the opportunity for change or impact itself.” These tracking reports are rolled up periodically into an Impact Report.
However, Tofel writes, “the final and most important test of ProPublica’s claims of impact comes when public credit is taken. This occurs occasionally on ProPublica’s website (where a subsection of “About Us” is headed Impact), but most regularly with ProPublica’s annual report.” [Note: 20]
Despite all of these efforts, Tofel concludes, “true impact—in the real world change sense that we have been discussing it in this paper—is relatively rare.” Like many philanthropic investments, there is a level of difficulty and risk involved in funding journalism for social good. However, many less quantifiable outcomes may result.
Rigorously proving a causal relationship between reporting and social change is very difficult—“there is no one reliable measure of journalism’s impact, no single algorithm that can be devised, no magic formula to load into a spreadsheet or deploy in an app.” Rather, he observes, sometimes words alone can explain how the many different trajectories resulting from a single investigation contribute to a broader shift, sometimes over a very long period.
Tofel’s analysis demonstrates how it might take the very toolset of an investigative reporter to tell the story of a journalism project’s impact—an ability to crunch numbers combined with a skeptical eye for spurious data, the patience and skill to assemble varying accounts from many sources, and the tenacity to follow the twists and turns of a process to its apparent conclusion.
Richard J. Tofel—president of online investigative newsroom ProPublica, and a former funder at the Rockefeller Foundation— laid out his own impact taxonomy. [Note: 19]
“Put most simply, different sorts of journalism have different objectives, and therefore will produce—seek to produce—quite different sorts of impact,” he writes. Hard news seeks to inform, feature writing seeks to entertain, and opinion seeks to persuade. However, according to Tofel, ProPublica’s goal is to produce two distinct types of high-impact journalism: “Explanatory journalism” which “seeks primarily to elucidate, while investigative journalism, even if sometimes only implicitly, seeks change. The impact that results is thus also different: the impact of explanatory journalism will be determined by measuring how much readers’ awareness or understanding has increased, while the impact of investigative journalism must be judged by how much things beyond the reader have changed.”
The report goes on to outline several of the complex questions related to journalism and advocacy, and to detail how ProPublica regularly charts impact through a document called the Tracking Report.
For each published story, this includes key partnerships, prominent coverage or reprints, official actions influenced by the story, opportunities for change such as related hearings or studies, and “ultimately, change that has resulted. These last entries are the crux of the effort. They are recorded only when ProPublica management believes, usually from the public record, that reasonable people would be satisfied that a clear causal link exists between ProPublica’s reporting and the opportunity for change or impact itself.” These tracking reports are rolled up periodically into an Impact Report.
However, Tofel writes, “the final and most important test of ProPublica’s claims of impact comes when public credit is taken. This occurs occasionally on ProPublica’s website (where a subsection of “About Us” is headed Impact), but most regularly with ProPublica’s annual report.” [Note: 20]
Despite all of these efforts, Tofel concludes, “true impact—in the real world change sense that we have been discussing it in this paper—is relatively rare.” Like many philanthropic investments, there is a level of difficulty and risk involved in funding journalism for social good. However, many less quantifiable outcomes may result.
Rigorously proving a causal relationship between reporting and social change is very difficult—“there is no one reliable measure of journalism’s impact, no single algorithm that can be devised, no magic formula to load into a spreadsheet or deploy in an app.” Rather, he observes, sometimes words alone can explain how the many different trajectories resulting from a single investigation contribute to a broader shift, sometimes over a very long period.
Tofel’s analysis demonstrates how it might take the very toolset of an investigative reporter to tell the story of a journalism project’s impact—an ability to crunch numbers combined with a skeptical eye for spurious data, the patience and skill to assemble varying accounts from many sources, and the tenacity to follow the twists and turns of a process to its apparent conclusion.