SmartTalk Q&A: Jan Schaffer of J-Lab
February 23, 2009
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Even though journalist Jan Schaffer was only 28 when she reached what many would consider the pinnacle of her profession — winning a Pulitzer Prize — she was just getting warmed up.In 1994, after more than two decades as a reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, she left to work on pioneering journalism initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media ventures. Now Schaffer, one of the nation’s leading thinkers in the journalism reform movement, occupies what she considers “one of the best jobs in the world” — executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.
“We reward and foster innovations to help transform journalism for today and reinvent it for tomorrow,” explains Schaffer, whose many projects include one effort geared toward women media entrepreneurs. “Our work puts us on the cutting edge of how digital technologies are empowering ordinary people to be new media makers, and helping mainstream news organizations connect better with their audiences.”
At the helm of J-Lab, which is a center of American University’s School of Communication, Schaffer sees herself standing “at the crossroad of new technology and the future of journalism.”
Q. What are some of the highlights of your journalism career?
Schaffer: As a reporter in the late 1970s, I broke the Abscam story about a sting operation in which FBI agents posed as Arab sheiks and snared City Council members and U.S. congressmen in a corruption investigation. I was sentenced to six months in jail for refusing to reveal my sources in the case. But once it became clear that prosecutors had videotapes of the accused, the charges were dropped.
Also while covering federal court, I worked with our state court reporter to cover the story of a mentally challenged man who was accused of firebombing a house in which five people died. Our reporting eventually got his conviction overturned and got the real fire bombers in jail. Also important, our stories led to the convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives on civil rights violations for coercing confessions and incriminating statements from the original suspect and others. This series of stories won several national journalism awards, and in 1978 it was combined with other police misconduct stories and won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service.
Oh yes, I met my husband at The Inquirer. He was also an editor.
Q. Why did you leave daily journalism?
Schaffer: It’s humbling to win a Pulitzer at age 28, but by the mid-’90s my husband and I decided it was time to move on and stretch our skills in other areas. We targeted the Washington Post and decided he should apply first. The Post has a nepotism policy, so we could not both work there. My husband, an excellent word editor, got hired in six weeks.
That meant it was time for me to reinvent myself. I was quickly offered a position as deputy director of a newly organized project, The Pew Center for Civic Journalism.
It was daunting to leave a daily newsroom for the first time in my professional life, but the new job was an intriguing project led by a talented broadcast journalist. It turned out to be the best move of my career. For the first time, I was able to marry my journalistic skills with entrepreneurial opportunities and learn how to run what was really a small business.
Civic journalism sought to explore ways that news organizations could help citizens do their jobs better as citizens. The idea was to report stories in ways that treated citizens as active participants in public life instead of as passive spectators of a daily freak show of news.
We funded 120 newsroom experiments that allowed news readers and viewers to participate in framing stories, setting election agendas and deliberating solutions to public problems. We trained thousands of journalists and produced extremely popular training resources. This was long before the idea of “participatory journalism” entered the lexicon.
It was an exciting, $14 million initiative that groomed the leaders and paved the way for much of the language, tools and thinking behind today’s developments in interactive journalism, participatory journalism, crowd-sourcing and citizen journalism.
Again and again, I saw how often smart women editors were at the forefront of innovations and new thinking in newsrooms. Many of my observations led me to commission a survey of women editors in partnership with the American Press Institute. In 2002, we released our report, “The Great Divide: Female Leadership in U.S. Newsrooms.” It’s still available at www.pewcenter.org.
Q. What led you to start J-Lab?
Schaffer: By 2002, it was time for our 10 years of grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts to end, as planned. I decided I wanted to launch a new center that would move the thinking and tools of civic journalism into the Digital Age. So I launched J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.
J-Lab helps both journalists and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life with projects on innovations in journalism, citizen media, news games, interactive stories, entrepreneurship, research, training and publications.
J-Lab now spotlights new forms of digital storytelling on www.J-Lab.org. It rewards innovative practices through the annual $10,000 Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizen media start-ups through its New Voices project (www.J-NewVoices.org). It has also built Web tutorials on how to launch community news sites (www.J-Learning.org). And it publishes the Knight Citizen News Networks (www.kcnn.org), which teaches journalism values and skills to people who want to launch their own community news projects.
By 2010, we will have helped to fund nearly 60 citizen media start-ups. And you can see some of the journalism innovations we have honored here: www.j-lab.org/awards/.
Q. Why did you launch a project targeting women media entrepreneurs?
Schaffer: We launched one of our most exciting news initiatives last year with a grant from the McCormick Foundation. The McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs program seeks to tap into both the frustrations women have with their available media and their visions for creating new media start-ups that fill the niches and gaps they see. We invite them to apply for $10,000 awards to make those visions happen.
We got almost 200 proposals last year for the first three grants.
You can see how the grantees are doing on www.newmediawomen.org. Also here, you can apply for this year’s grants. See the guidelines and application at www.newmediawomen.org/site/proposal_guidelines.
This year’s deadline is March 31, 2009. Our first-round grantees are not only excited about their initiatives, but they also tell us that the process of launching their projects is teaching them a lot about how to run a business.
We’re now embarking on new research to investigate how women consume news, what makes them mad about the news they see and what entrepreneurial ideas they have for news and information projects.
In early summer, we’ll host a New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit, open to anyone who’d like to attend. If you’d like to learn more, sign up for our occasional e-mail newsletter here: www.j-lab.org.
Q. So, what is the future for journalism?
Schaffer: Many large news organizations are at serious risk of failing in coming years. But I believe local and regional news vacuums are going to be filled — and filled robustly. Why? Because J-Lab is already seeing the various ways that hyperlocal news start-ups are creating news Web sites for communities that have little or no available media. When communities are not being covered, people are starting to gather and report local news themselves.
J-Lab will soon introduce the people we call the “New Media Makers” in a major video toolkit. You’ll hear these people talk about why they are doing what they are doing. They’ll also discuss their ethical dilemmas, the civic impact of their efforts and the roles they fill in the new media ecosystem.
Some of these new media makers are amateur journalists; some are professionals. Some sell ads, others receive grants and others work as volunteer journalists.
For many of these new media makers, an opinion blog is not their aspiration. “We’re trying to produce what used to be a newspaper,” says Christine Yeres, managing editor of the J-Lab funded start-up NewCastleNOW.org in Chappaqua, N.Y. “I think we get the readership that we do because … it is professional. It’s been gone over very carefully.”
It is on this new terrain that old journalism values — accuracy, independence and objectivity — are combining with new journalism conventions. Where “Big J” journalists excel at covering communities from the outside-in, many of these New Media Makers are crafting the models for how to cover communities from the inside-out.
“Sometimes, we want to be The New York Times and sometimes we want to be the church bulletin,” says Susie Pender, Yeres’ co-editor.
J-Lab will be on the forefront of tracking and articulating what we are seeing.
