Pilot sites
From Banyan Project
The Banyan Project weaves many elements into a structure that, when fully realized, will deliver a comprehensive report of quality journalism that the Banyan public will find relevant, respectful, and trustworthy no matter where they live.
But it will have to be launched in stages, with pilot projects for community-level news, service journalism, investigative reporting, and other elements of a comprehensive news report. Each pilot will evolve to be a prototype that will be replicable as Banyan scales toward full realization.
The pilot sites will be launched under the NewsCoop.org brand. Banyan is the name for the conceptualization effort but isn't likely to be the brand name once the Project matures.
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Measures of Success
To succeed, the pilots must be both practical and strategic, testing major elements of the overall Banyan structure while establishing the project as worthy of further funding. The sites must clearly demonstrate:
• The distinctive character of Banyan journalism, so that major funders can easily extrapolate from community-level news to imagine its national/foreign and other forms of coverage.
• Vitality as measured in page views and continuing reader engagement that is the sign of Banyan's distinctive relational approach to journalism.
• Serious civic networking potential that can lead to co-op memberships.
Community Pilots
The initial community pilot will provide:
Distinctive local news and service journalism that’s directly relevant to the lives of people in a carefully selected less-than-affluent geographical community, and
An online community where this public can come together as a civic network to learn from one another and to organize to achieve community needs.
Banyan’s 2.0 publishing software will also offer tools that make it easy for reader/users to 1) contribute many forms of information that enrich the Banyan report and 2) offer direct feedback to editors. The feedback, along with analytics and semantic Web tools, will help editors hold themselves accountable to the reader/users who buy an ownership share in the Publishing Co-op.
A detailed description of Banyan's overall approach to the news is here; details on community-level news are here.
The initial community pilot is to be developed in Boston, where Banyan’s president and several members of its advisory board live, followed by at least two other community pilots in communities in other cities with different laws, cultures and populations. The community pilots, wherever they are launched, will be refined into a model that will be replicable in communities across the U.S. as Banyan scales toward maturity.
Detailed planning
The first step will be to create a map of all census tracts in the pilot city that are dominated by households in the third to seventh deciles of the income distribution, identifying neighborhoods where the Banyan public lives. Then Banyan will:
1. Identify and evaluate all the community-based organizations and power centers in the third-to-seventh neighborhoods – medical clinics, credit counseling offices, major ethnic churches, schools (including community colleges and commuter colleges), etc.
2. Based on this evaluation, select a neighborhood or a manageable group of neighborhoods with strong and reliable community institutions as the area the pilot will serve.
3. Design newsgathering and production processes specific to chosen community.
4. Consistent with the need for journalistic independence, establish relationships with the pilot area’s community institutions not only as crucial sources of information for readers but also as allies in marketing Banyan in the community.
5. Meanwhile, build the software, taking care to minimize the need for rebuilding as Banyan scales; hire the staff, establish freelance relationships, and prepare for the launch.
6. Launch, and make refinements as relationships unfold.
Other Pilots
After the first local pilots are launched, upgraded and stabilized, Banyan plans to turn its energy to developing pilot investigative reporting and service journalism sites.
Pilot service features would help people navigate issues of life-and-death urgency: 1) health guidance for people without medical coverage, or who are underinsured, and 2) guidance for the financially vulnerable who live in daily terror of debt collectors and worse. These should attract a large number of engaged readers -- and their success should help Banyan attract more new sources of tailored journalism.
To seed each of these independent entities, Banyan would find the needed journalists and help arrange funding for them.
Banyan will learn its way forward as it scales, adding more local and service sites as the journalists and funding come together; then, at the right moment, it will add the major undertaking of national/Washington/international coverage and the comprehensive daily package will be launched.
