FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The project was made possible with support from Google GNI Innovation Challenge.
SF BAY AREA, CA — One year ago, Bloom Labs began Bay Area News Collective, its first cross-newsroom collaboration to assess the geographic representation of local news with seven newsrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area. Throughout the project’s year, our team and newsroom partners identified and responded to patterns of local news representation, or lack thereof, through the perspective of personal experiences in the communities and current geolocated news coverage. In conclusion, a 76-page report documenting the project has been released today and is publicly available.
The report covers the entire year-long project, representing analysis and lessons from technology and research activities. During the first half, newsroom partners began geolocating and categorizing their local news stories collectively, which helped gather over 8,200 stories and produced detailed local analytics reports. In parallel, Bloom Labs interviewed 19 residents and organizations in the local communities to discuss their personal experiences with local news. While synthesizing the collected data, the report outlines how the team identified specific representation indicators, which people use to measure their sense of representation for local news or other information about their community. During the second half of the project, the team used the insights to design and implement experiments with newsroom partners. The experiments addressed the current news representation challenges and opportunities in the Bay Area.
The project’s collaborative approach has enabled Bloom Labs to leverage patterns that are more inclusive of news coverage as our team brought together insights from multiple newsrooms and regions in the Bay Area into one space simultaneously. The resulting outcomes of the project were actionable and valuable for newsrooms and residents alike, guiding the way for more diverse and equitable news experiences.
The report aims to share these findings and set a path for how Bloom Labs and other industry organizations and individuals can conduct a project focused on location technology, data, and content to learn about representation in their locale. Bay Area News Collective was the first project at Bloom Labs that focused on local news representation and had a collective newsroom approach. Thanks to Google’s GNI Innovation Challenge and the newsroom partners for their dedication and trust to support our proposal and work alongside our team as they navigated through critical developing areas for the journalism industry.
The project ran for one year between December 2020 to November 2021. The report can be viewed at: assets.bloom.li/documents/banc/BANC_ProjectReport.pdf. For more information about the project, visit bloom.li/BayAreaNewsCollective and on Twitter at @bloomfornews.
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