Rebeca Piccardo/BBC Managing Editor
Four professors joined forces in the hopes of innovating journalism and civic engagement to address the rising concern about sea level rise in South Florida, and they just received the funds to do so over the next academic year.
School of Journalism and Mass Communication professors Robert Gutsche, Susan Jacobson, Kate MacMillin and Juliet Pinto won a $35,000 grant from the Online News Association Challenge Fund to test their proposed project titled, “Sea level rise in South Florida: How are waters affecting you?”
The issue they want to address with this project builds upon the ideas from Pinto and MacMillin’s work that was featured in WPBT2, “Changing Seas.”
“It was important to stick with that issue,” Pinto said.
The ONA and its partners, the Knight Foundation, the Excellence and Ethics in Journalism Foundation, the Democracy Fund and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, launched the $1 million Challenge Fund last december to help universities fund projects that bring “innovation in journalism education,” according to their website.
This collaboration came about when Jacobson and Gutsche were working on a proposal to bring more application development into the SJMC curriculum while Pinto and MacMillin worked on their own proposal about the issue of rising seas, according to Jacobson.
When they found out they were working towards the similar goals, the four faculty combined their ideas and created a “super proposal,” Pinto said.
The winners receive up to $35,000 in “micro-grants” to support their local news experiments, and customize their curriculum to create a “teaching hospital model,” the ONA website said.
After the first year of implementation, each project is eligible to compete for a $100,000 award, which would extend their local project for a second year, according to Gutsche.
The purpose of the ONA Challenge Fund is to create a collaboration between faculty, students, news organizations and community members to raise awareness about a local issue.
With the grant money, the SJMC faculty members plan to develop a Web Geographic Information System course to get students involved in “innovative, investigative journalism and citizen science,” according to their submitted project proposal online.
One of the goals of the grant is to take publicly available data and combine it with information gathered through crowdsourcing to create apps that will let the public know how sea level rise projections will affect their area, Jacobson said.
The idea is that the public can type in their local address and get the projections of sea level rise over the next few years, said Jacobson. For this, students, journalists and members of the community must get involved in gathering information about elevation and other factors that will have an impact.
Jacobson said she would help teach this new course, “Mapping Sea Level Rise for Media,” for the upcoming academic year along with the University GIS department to help gather data.
Each project member is bringing their expertise to the table to make a difference in the reporting and community engagement about this local issue.
MacMillin, who could not be reached for a comment, would use her experience to manage all the content for this project, according to Jacobson.
Pinto’s knowledge of environmental issues will help guide the idea of “crowd hydrology,” which will help get members of the community to build on the public data feeds from the South Florida Water Management District, she said.
“Crowd hydrology,” or crowdsourcing is one of the ideas that made their project proposal stand out to ONA, Gutsche said.
His reporting and progressive pedagogy will help get students to learn about local issues and help members of the community to get involved with crowd hydrology and guide them in the journalistic process, Gutsche said.
“This is a progressive pedagogical project,” said Gutsche, who wants students to assess their work as journalists in terms of making a difference.
“[We need to ask ourselves] is the journalism that we’re doing effective?” he said.
The University’s partners in this project include Jennifer Fu, center head of the GIS department at FIU; Neal Hecker, chief content officer of WBPT2; Alexa Elliott, producer of “Changing Seas”; Caroline Lewis, founder and CEO of Climate Leadership Engagement Opportunities Institute; Jayantha Obeysekera, chief modeler of South Florida Water Management District; Ernie Hsiung, co-captain of Code for Miami and Rebekah Monson, lead organizer of Hacks/Hackers.
The the array of local partners involved in this project would “make the outcome even more powerful,” Gutsche said.
With the collaboration of Code for Miami, for instance, Jacobson said that she hopes to have future hackathons at the University to “brainstorm on the issue of sea level rise and discuss solutions.”
“we can invite members of the tech community to play with the data,” she said.
rebeca.piccardo@fiusm.com