Her research examined the evolving media ecosystem and the role of journalism innovations such as hyperlocal online news sites in filling community news and information needs. Ferrier presented as part of the panel, “Cities Without News: Fighting Information Inequality in America’s News Deserts,” at NCMR. She shared the results of an analysis of North Carolina newspapers using geographic information systems and how such data visualizations help tell the story of the erosion of fresh news and information in the United States.

At BEA, Ferrier discussed the ownership of hyperlocal online news sites in “Is Everyone Showing Up Online?” While these news sites are filling in the gaps left behind by a receding legacy media, their founders are predominantly Caucasian in makeup, Ferrier found. Ferrier is conducting additional research using her media deserts model, to determine if the online sites are cannibalizing existing media markets or forging new ones.

The NCMR presentation can be found online at:

Michelle Ferrier co-facilitated an unconference gathering called “Journalism is Dead, Long Live Journalism” with Journalism That Matters colleagues Stephen Silha and Peggy Holman in Denver on April 3-4. Attendees created the agenda, which included topics on the sustainability of journalism, media deserts and the creation of a national media corps.

Ferrier is vice president of Journalism That Matters (JTM). More than 70 journalists, technologists, librarians and activists joined JTM at the Estlow Center at the University of Denver to discuss the new news ecology and the practices that must evolve to sustain journalism through this digital transition.

Ferrier interviewed Laura Frank, executive director of I-News, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network, and the evolution of her idea in the aftermath of the demise of several local papers. Frank discussed how her organization’s recent merger with Rocky Mountain PBS expanded the reach of I-News stories to a broader audience.

Ferrier also hosted two conference sessions, one on the Media Deserts Project, a research effort to map the media ecosystem using geographic information systems and the development of a media corps of new and skilled journalists and community members to help fill in the gaps where legacy newspapers have died.

During the closing session, Ferrier facilitated a conversation regarding new journalism principles and practices that if enacted, would transform the practices of journalism. They include:

• Nourishing community engagement is journalism’s bedrock purpose.
• We are committed to putting engagement at the center of our work.
• We choose to produce diverse, healthy, fresh news that nurtures community to conversation or action.

The work continues to evolve at:

Using online, broadcast, print, social media and interactive media practices, Ferrier explored how mapping technologies and analytical tools changed the text of political storytelling and how the data

Her evening talk addressed the changing nature of political discourse through data visualization that leverages new technologies and interactive media practices. Through examples from CNN to the New York Times and voter mobile apps, Ferrier showed how data helped to explain the complex stories of the paths to the White House through the Electoral Co

“The numerati are those that are adept at taking large data sets and learning more about us than we know about ourselves,” said Ferrier. “From the 2008 election to now, journalism has adopted some of these practices and used interactive storytelling to poll opinion and sentiment on the fly and educate voters more deeply on the issues.”

Ferrier moved beyond the rhetoric about “red and blue states” to examine how maps, charts and interactive flow charts told the story of American politics and voters. Dubbed the “Nate Silver Talk,” Ferrier discussed the pundit’s predictions on the blog FiveThirtyEight and how media responded to the challenges to traditional data interpretation.

From the New York

“I’m just fascinated about the ways in which digital technologies and data mashups help us extend the tool sets we have as journalists to educate and inform our readers,” Ferrier said.

Ferrier spoke separately during a question-and-answer session with doctoral students about successfully completing a Ph.D. in Texts & Technology. As an alumna of the UCF doctoral program, she discussed juggling a career as a newspaper columnist, her academic life and her family life to the attendees.

World leaders in agribusiness, biotechnology, nutrition, distribution, nongovernmental organizations, government and higher education gathered to figure out how to feed 9 billion people by 2050.

The two are students in the School of Communications and were accompanied by their professor, Associate Professor Michelle Ferrier. At the event, the three were part of the press corps for the event providing liveblogging, social media and reporting for the food-related sessions.

The team reported at sessions with Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer-prize winning columnist at the New York Times and author of The World is Flat and That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

The inaugural Global South Summit, hosted by the , brought together nearly 300 world leaders from the world’s largest food companies and global foundations, policy experts and scientists to lay consensus on how to feed the world’s population. The Global Food Summit track, hosted by the Sustainable Food Project, is the inaugural conversation around sustainable, nutritious and abundant food supply. They are the presenter of the Sustainable Food Pavilion at the upcoming food-focused Expo Milano 2015.

Researchers estimate that food production will need to increase by 70 percent to meet the world’s burgeoning population by 2050. Experts from industry and academe, supply chain management and plant genetics gathered to exchange solutions for meeting the challenge.

As part of their media writing class, Coats and Delaney learned how to provide the continuous liveblogging coverage. They posted status updates and photos to Facebook. Then the team synthesized notes into stories that were edited and published within hours of each session. Their work can be found on multiple platforms: 

Twitter Hashtag: #globalsouthsummit
Facebook: Global South Summit page
Global South Summit Blog: http://globalsouthsummit.com/blog/

“I liked the intensity of the day,” said Delaney. “We had to practice everything we learned in this fast-paced environment. I liked it.”

Coats agreed. “Everything happened so fast. You would report on a session, take pictures, tweet – then have to write the story before your next session.”

The team produced 11 reports that will be circulated to world leaders in a special edition of the Diplomatic Courier, the official media partner of the event.

Elon parent Cheryl Harrison, director of development and partnerships for the Sustainable Food Project of Expo Milano 2015, contacted Elon to bring a group of fellows to the event. Ferrier was asked because of her online community that focuses on local food and food policy. Her students in her media writing class had reported on the Fall Environmental Forum at Elon that was focused on local food this year.

“The summit was a great opportunity for our young communications students to validate the skills they’ve practiced all semester,” said Ferrier. “And to participate in such a high-level conversation about such a critical issue was an honor and a great way to be of service to finding a solution.”

Michelle Ferrier, associate professor of communications, presented on two panels regarding media entrepreneurship curriculum development at the Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communications conference in Chicago from Aug. 9-11, 2012.

Ferrier was awarded $1,000 in the first annual Council on Affiliates Industry Research Forum blind paper competition. She presented her paper “Media Entrepreneurship: Curriculum Development and Faculty Perceptions of What Students Should Know and Do” on August 11 which is published on the AEJMC website and will be distributed to industry affiliates such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists.

For the research, Ferrier interviewed a cohort of international professors who are teaching courses such as “entrepreneurial journalism” and “media entrepreneurship” and discovered the challenges and barriers to the development and implementation of such courses. Professors also shared the objectives of these courses and how they’ve integrated them into existing curricula.

“The media ecosystem is shifting and changing,” Ferrier said. “The intent of these courses isn’t to have every student pursue an entrepreneurial path, but to teach them the art of the hustle. They need to learn how to reinvent themselves and create products and services both within and outside of legacy media organizations.”

In an earlier panel on Aug. 9, Ferrier presented with three professors who have implemented media entrepreneurship concepts into courses. The panelists, including Ferrier, had been part of the inaugural Arizona State University Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute. The presenters discussed the institute experience and how they implemented what they learned in the classroom.

In his keynote speech to the AEJMC educators, Richard Gingras, head of Google News, urged communication educators to teach students the entrepreneurial mindset so that graduates can innovate and create whether they are inside existing media organizations or developing media startups.

“The media landscape is in the process of being completely reformed. We are not in a transformation from one state to another,” he said. “The process of change is not over and in fact will never be over.”
 

“Universities are offering media entrepreneurship courses, but there’s a credibility gap because many professors have never experienced the startup culture. We need relationships within the entrepreneurial community to make it real,” Ferrier said.

Kelly Hoey, co-founder and managing director at Women Innovate Mobile (WIM) Accelerator and others weren’t sure if entrepreneurship can be taught.

“How do you teach people that you’re going to have incredible highs and incredible lows, be as miserable and poor as you’ve ever been in your life, but you’re going to get up every day and that’s what you’re going to keep doing?” Hoey asked. “You can’t teach that.”

Roundtable participants included:

• Kelly Hoey, Women Innovate Mobile Accelerator
• Harry Lin, IdeaLab
• William Crowder, Comcast DreamIt Ventures
• Raji Bedi, DoingTonight
• Kaizar Campwala, former editor of NewsTrust
• Latoya Peterson, Racialicious
• Kevin Hailstock of Insightful-Art.com

The collaboration of researchers, called the Communication Policy Research Network, is headed by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The CPRN submitted a literature review and report to the FCC on July 16, 2012. The FCC is expected to release additional requests for research based on the report’s findings.

Ferrier became part of the team based on her research into media entrepreneurship and her media deserts project – a GIS-based visualization of the contractions in media industry reach. The media deserts research is designed to identify communities without access to fresh news and information and to direct attention and resources to these communities.

“The FCC has a critical role to play in the allocation of public resources and in ensuring a media infrastructure that serves all communities,” Ferrier said. “My hope is that through policy interventions at the federal level and entrepreneurship interventions at the local level, we can address the inequities in the media system.”
 

Associate Professor Michelle Ferrier of the School of Communications was a guest at the invitation-only Spark Camp held at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University from July 20-22.

The event, cast as a “dinner party” among friends, brought together digiterati from various media outlets, venture and angel investors and higher education to discuss the elephant in the room: money.

Participants included people like Richard Gingras of Google News, Esther Dyson of EDVenture Holdings, Latoya Peterson of Racialicious, Cyndi Stivers of Columbia Journalism Review, Matt Thompson of NPR, author Jenny 8 Lee and nearly 40 others interested in legacy and emerging media who wanted to learn and share regarding current and emerging models for financing news and information.

Kelly Virella, a media entrepreneur of national site Dominion of New York, valued the relationships she built during the weekend.

“At Spark Camp conversations about media aren’t pessimistic or pie-in-the sky,” Virella said. “They are visionary and grounded in practice. It’s one of the few places in America – possibly the only place – where you can go sit with dozens of smart media entrepreneurs and executives and think about how to prepare for your company’s future.”

The camp uses an unconference-style approach to surface burning topics. Ferrier pitched and moderated a session on funding news and information in underserved communities where there is no perceived marketplace value for the audience.

“Legacy media has a history of marginalizing the content and reach to low-income and minority populations because of the perceived value of these communities as an audience to advertisers. With the erosion of advertising as a primary revenue stream, however, even communities with discretionary income are finding themselves without fresh news and information,” she said.

Ferrier said the session was designed to surface ideas for funding a basic level of news and information for communities that deal with safety, health, transportation and community services. This model of news and information may take the form of a utility, Ferrier said, that is supported by device or state/municipal taxes as is the case in the UK and other countries.

“We’re developing an age of information haves and have-nots,” she said. “It’s access – part of the digital divide question, it’s content – providing news about communities that reflect those communities, and it’s about funding – that if we use a market-model where we think of audience as consumer, we lose a part of our ability to perform our democratic functions as a press…to create an informed citizenry.”

Ernest Sotomayor, dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School, said that he feels there’s a role for colleges and universities in filling that need.

“In rural areas in particular, we can consider the role that colleges should play in reporting events, news and features around their communities,” he said. “Columbia uses New York City as a laboratory for our students. There is a lot that gets written by journalism students like in Michigan and Chicago. if there is a way to expand the scope of what they are doing,…it expands the student experience and serves community needs.”

Ferrier is using GIS and media circulation and reach data to identify “media deserts” – communities that lack access to fresh news and information. The end goal is to inform policy and direct resources to communities that need it the most.

“I think it’s critical that we strip away the illusion that we are serving everyone with our current media and devices and help communities create specific interventions,” Ferrier said.

Moderator Jan Schaffer of J-Lab sought to bring together a panel of success stories to inspire and educate the audience. Nearly 50 attendees from educators to media practitioners and students with their own blogs listened to the growth and development strategies of the three startups.

Ferrier explained the intricacies of the media entrepreneurship ecosystem, describing how content startups differ from tech startups and how each type of startup takes different paths in seeking financing. She shared how pattern matching – the practice of financiers seeking to invest in people that look like them – derails the efforts of many entrepreneurs of color.

“The research demonstrates there are deep structural barriers that deny opportunities to entrepreneurs of color especially in the media fields and Internet startups,” Ferrier said. “And these barriers show up starkly when you examine the paths to capital and access to the networks of money that fuel startups at various stages.”

Ferrier also described how people of color can sabotage their own efforts when they perceive a “stereotype threat” as defined by Claude Steele in his book Whistling Vivaldi.

“When people stretch into new arenas where stereotypes exist about them, whether gender or ethnicity based or other stereotypes, they tend to spend mental energy fighting to disprove that stereotype,” Ferrier said. “They’ll redouble their efforts, working twice as hard to make sure they are seen as the exception and not the rule.”

However, this solitary “nose to the grindstone” approach leads to a downward spiral in self-doubt, isolation and potential failure.

“Minority media founders tend to be single-person startups who hold their ideas close to the chest,” Ferrier said. “These founders need to do the opposite and talk about their ideas, create strong teams that can further the ideas, or join groups that can help them realize that their struggles are not of their own making.”

Ferrier is also the chief instigator of the Journalism That Matters Create or Die series of startup events for people of color. She started the events to meet other entrepreneurs of color in the media space and encourage idea generation and team building. She is also surveying media entrepreneurs to determine the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in the media space.

Rick Hancock, digital platform manager of CT1 Media, a Tribune Publishing Company, said the session was invaluable in helping him think about media entrepreneurship.

“This is exactly the kind of information that we need to hear more of,” Hancock said. “No one is talking about access to capital and media entrepreneurship like this.”

The session, “How can media sustain a community? How can community sustain media?” brought together panelists Sarah Van Gelder, executive editor of Yes! Magazine, Josh Stearns, media manager of FreePress.net, and Jon Greenberg, former director of the New Hampshire Public Radio Public Insight Network.

Ferrier is also the publisher of LocallyGrownNews.com, an online community and news site focused on local food and local economies. She shared how her passion for food and gardening led her to look at the metaphor of news as food.

“If we begin to think of news as food, we see direct parallels to the news and food systems,” Ferrier said. “Citizens need access to fresh, local news and information. And some of our current media products can be seen as ‘junk food’ that affects the well being of individuals and communities.”

Ferrier also uses the news as food connection in her research on media deserts – defined as communities and places without access to fresh, local news and information. Using GIS mapping, the visualization will help journalists and activists identify locations for interventions and invention.

“When we look at the changes happening in media, we see the development of hyperlocal online news operators that are providing that fresh, local news and information,” she said.

The growth in local foodways mirrors the changes happening to the media system and perhaps points to ways of organizing how news is to be gathered, produced and distributed in the future,” Ferrier said.