It takes a community to build a newsshed

By David Poulson

Last week the Healing Our Waters coalition recognized Echo for excellence in reporting on the Great Lakes.

We’ve been recognized by others for pioneering some unusual forms of journalism. But I like to think that this Great Laker award recognizes our success with a traditional function of news: Defining, creating, organizing and fostering community.

Journalists most often define news communities as towns, cities, provinces, states and even nations.  The Echo experiment defines a news community in relationship to a natural resource.

The concept is that a watershed is more than a hydrologic feature. It can be a social construct.  Our goal is to turn the Great Lakes watershed into a newsshed.

Newsshed is a word invented (OK, I invented it.) to evoke imagery of diverse streams of news contributing to a critical mass of understanding of complex environmental issues.

Echo’s coverage of last week’s Great Lakes Week is a good example of how such a community works. Consider the challenge of an organization with scant resources having to cover four international groups meeting at the same time and in the same place over several days.

Here’s how we did it:

As important as such meetings may be, they often don’t offer the opportunity for journalists to fully explore the issues they raise. We started laying the groundwork with early research. And a week before the meetings we began publishing a story a day about something on one of the agendas. We continued that pattern through the actual event.

Great Lakes Echo reporters produced four of those stories.  Students at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism produced four more as part of their coursework.  We hired a Toronto-based professional freelancer to produce a ninth story.

We also provided those stories to Detroit Public Television which was covering the week’s events extensively for public television affiliates and for its Great Lakes Now website. As part of that collaboration we hosted the television station’s video streaming of conference events and analysis.

That gave us a live daily presence on the Echo website. Better yet, Detroit Public Television invited  Gary Wilson, Echo’s Chicago View columnist, to provide analysis of each day’s events. I got a kick out of seeing “Great Lakes Echo commentator” appear in the lower third of the screen each time Gary gave his take on events.  And he gave a nice shout out to Echo about halfway through this clip.

(My only concern is that the bright lights of television not lure Gary from Chicago View. Detroit Public Television anchor Christy McDonald joked that after his successful stint on television that Gary might start referring to himself as “talent.”)

It would be impossible for any news organization to cover the dozens of meetings, many at the same time and occurring in disparate venues. But participants helped.

We noticed that leading up to Great Lakes Week that many Twitter users were associating news of the conference with a #GreatLakesWeek hashtag.  We gave a heads up to Echo’s Twitter followers — we’ve got more than 1,000 – that this appeared to be a developing consensus. Other Twitter users retweeted the observation or made it independently. Soon the use of the hashtag was ubiquitous.

We put a Twitter reader onto the Echo website to capture those tweets. That provided not only participant comments, but a running list of links to yet more substantive observations of what was going on.

The tweet stream became a significant part of the newsshed.

And that’s a pretty cool thing.