Folks, I stumbled across a great editorial this past weekend in a North Carolina newspaper, Sun Journal. The article connects the survey we just conducted with factchecking remarkably well:

First they report on survey finds, but then use them to rightfully brag on their own strict policies regarding the accuracy of their coverage.

They say,

We’re not popping any buttons over the survey results — a Gallup poll last fall reported 55 percent of Americans distrust the media generally — but we do take them as an endorsement of some standard practices at this newspaper, all of which are designed to ensure accuracy, even at the cost of not being first.

We do not report information that we cannot confirm through reliable sources — for instance, from a police department spokesman or an official document, if not from an eyewitness — and we attribute that information by name, not to an unnamed source, in virtually all cases. We do not usually report second-hand news — that is, news that originates with a media outlet not associated with the Sun Journal — and if we do, we identify the source, a practice not always followed by our cousins in the electronic media.

The zooming popularity of social media and its potential for newspapers as a distribution platform put pressure on those practices only if reporters and editors subordinate our primary goal of getting it right. That won’t happen here. We’re excited about possibilities offered by social media for getting and distributing the news and plan to use those tools fully to make our reporting more timely, more accessible and, yes, to beat the competition to the punch. But when speed conflicts with accuracy, we’re not afraid to apply the brakes.

I appreciate when people can use both social media and factchecking effectively. It's so important to verify your sources properly and it's a topic I continue to explore. Recently I spoke at the NextGen: Charity event to explore this topic further. Reliable factchecking will go a long way in restoring readers' trust in newspapers. With only 22% of respondents in our survey finding newspapers "very credible" I think improved factchecking is something newspapers and publishers should think about making a higher priority if they ever want to win back our wholehearted trust.

Folks, as you may know, I've been doing a lot of work with good orgs who are doing factchecking work, and voter protection. As the nation gears up for the general election in November, and news outlets increasingly cover campaign stops and primary results, my craigconnects team asked the polling firm Lincoln Park Strategies to survey likely voters to find out the real deal about what they look for in a news outlet, the trustworthiness of news outlets, and their opinion about the effect of social media on news quality. Check out the infographic to see the survey results.

The survey interviewed 1,001 likely voters nationwide. Interviews were given by land-line and cell phone from January 10 – 12, 2012.

We discovered that likely voters are looking for news they can trust, but are torn about where they can find it. I'm not in the news business and I won't tell anybody how to do their job, but I am a news consumer and I'd like to know I can trust the news I'm getting.

We asked people about, and explored six media types in the survey:
• Cable news stations
• Network news
• Newspapers
• Talk radio
• Internet new sites
• Blogs and social media

We broke the results down by sex, race, age, and party:
• The data set only focused on people who identified as White, Black, or Hispanic. The data we had for other demographics such as Asian and Native American were such a small sample size that all answers for these subgroups are not considered statistically significant.
• Age was broken up by 18-35, 36-44, 45-64, and 65+.
• Party was broken down by Democrat and Republican.

Some of our findings confirmed our earlier expectations:
• “Traditional” news outlets scored highest in terms of perceived credibility compared to newer and less traditional mediums.
• Democrats are more likely to give cable news and network news a higher rating.
• Republicans have more faith in Talk Radio then Democrats.

As for social media:
• Younger people give more credibility to social media vs. older adults, which confirms people’s initial thinking, BUT neither really giving high scores for social media usage to get their news.
• Non-traditional media such as Internet news sites, blogs and social media sites scored far down the list as being credible.
• College grads are slightly more cynical about social media then non-college grads.
• Democrats were a little more positive about social media, but not significantly.
• There were some differences in Hispanics vs. Whites and Blacks – Hispanic people tend to be less enamored with news sources, and are going to social media for it.

Most people aren't getting hard election news from social media. I think tech folks and early adopters are, but not most people, not yet.

And we discovered some cool new stuff:
• Cable news stations were the top source of news for 33 percent of respondents.
• Newspapers scored the highest in credibility with 22 percent.
• Less than one quarter of the population would describe any source of election news as very credible.
• Talk radio, often cited as influential on political news, scored only 13 percent as very credible.
• 13% of Republican women and 11% of Republican men think that newspapers are very credible, with twice that: 28% of both Democratic women and men think that newspapers are a very credible source for information about voting.
• Blacks give more trust to news sources and Whites fall in the middle.

Interest-based efforts hold great promise for helping ensure trustworthiness and boosting public confidence in news reporting. It's called factchecking, and there are a lot of good people working on it. They're looking at ways to help the news media hold candidates and other public figures accountable for what they tell the public. It's hard, and it's expensive, but it's really important.

Greetings Friends and Colleagues,

On Saturday, February 25th St. Anthony’s is hosting a “Fond Farewell” event in our original dining room. Please join us as we celebrate the space that has served San Franciscans for over 61 years and 38 million meals. This will be your last chance to pay homage and reflect on a miracle that began on October 4th, 1950.

When: Saturday, Feb. 25th
11am – 2pm: Open House
12noon: Entertainment and Speakers

Where: St. Anthony’s Original Dining Room
45 Jones Street; San Francisco, CA 94102

What: A public farewell to this sacred space.

•Paint:
Write a note or paint a picture on the walls about what this space means to you.

•Demolish:
Swing a hammer to help us demolish a wall in the Dining Room and take a small piece of St. Anthony’s with you.

•Reflect:
Contribute a message to our Time Capsule, which will be opened on our 100th Anniversary.

Please feel free to share this invitation with others, post in your organizations, post to your community calendar, etc.

We hope you to see you there as we say good-bye to the old and get ready to usher in the new St. Anthony’s Dining Room in 2014! Please contact St. Anthony’s Events Manager, Kathryn Murphy, at kmurphy@stanthonysf.org or (415)592-2768 with any questions.

See you on February 25th!

(Folks, I rarely quote press releases like this, but the folks at  FlackCheck.org, sister site of FactCheck.org, might have something  brilliant here.  They do have a great record of independent, nonpartisan factchecking. I'll personally request your help with this, once it gets going.)

For Immediate Release: February 21, 2012

Contact: Kathleen Hall Jamieson. 215 898 9400 or kjamieson@asc.upenn.edu Jamieson is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FlackCheck.org Launches “Stand by Your Ad” to Fight Deception in Super PAC and Other Third Party Political Advertising

TV and radio stations are required to air political ads by candidates for such federal offices as the presidency even if their content is blatantly deceptive. Not so the messages of outside groups. Instead, broadcasters have the right to bar so called “third party”’ ads or insist on the accuracy of those they decide to air. Ohio stations did just that when a group called “Building a Better Ohio” offered Ohio TV stations a deceptive ad last October (To see the ad they rejected, go to
the FlackCheck.org website.).*

In the hope that local broadcasters around the country will follow the lead of these Ohio stations, APPC’s FlackCheck.org, the sister-site of the award-winning FactCheck.org, is calling on them to insist on the accuracy of ads by super PACs, the political parties and all of the other outside groups that arrive at their doorsteps with cash in hand. In service of this goal, the project urges those in local markets to applaud responsible station action and decry business- as -usual.

To assist station managers and viewers, FlackCheck.org’s “Media Watch” page is both flagging deceptive presidential ads in primary and caucus states and identifying the stations airing them. To make it easier for viewers to send words of encouragement or dismay to station managers, the FlackCheck.org “Stand By Your Ads” initiative provides them with the names of station managers, the e-mail addresses of stations and a sample letter that can be amended and
sent directly from the viewer’s account.

“We urge broadcasters to insist on the accuracy of the third party ads, not just for the presidency, but across the board,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “We hope that stations will take the same care in screening out deceptions in the political ads of outside groups that they take in protecting their viewers from misleading product ads.”

To locate the FlackCheck.org “Stand By Your Ad” page click, http://www.flackcheck.org/stand-by-your-ad/ and then click on “Stations.”

Guest post by Nicholas Zevely, The Mission Continues

The Mission Continues challenges post-9/11 veterans to rebuild purpose through community service. Through a 26-week community service fellowship, each Mission Continues Fellow dedicates 20 hours/week to volunteering with the local nonprofit organization of their choice. To date, over 250 veterans have been awarded fellowships with organizations including Habitat for Humanity, American Red Cross, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

In a recent study conducted by the Center for Social Development at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, 71% of Mission Continues Fellows reported furthered education post-fellowship, 86% had successfully transferred their military skills to civilian employment, and 100% of Fellows polled would recommend the program to a friend or family member. The true impact of the fellowship program, however, is best understood after having met a current Fellow, an experience that never ceases to leave me humbled and inspired.

Four days after starting at The Mission Continues, I met Josh Eckhoff. Having made it through two tours in Iraq, and the suffering of a Traumatic Brain Injury that led to 13 months of intensive rehabilitation and two more years of recovery, Josh needed a new challenge.  He applied for and was awarded a Mission Continues Fellowship in 2011to volunteer at the St. Louis Science Center where he provided tours to young visitors.

This past fall, I met Kristen Parrinello at our Annual Summit in St. Louis. Following her time of service in the Navy, Kristen went on to receive her MBA and start her own social media consulting firm. Still compelled to serve her community, Kristen completed a Mission Continues Fellowship with Furnishing Hope, a non-profit organization committed to providing improved living environments to families in crisis.

Josh and Kristen typify the compassion, dedication and ethic of service present in our veteran community.

On a macro level, the cost of not engaging veterans in meaningful service or employment means the unique skill sets and leadership of the 5.5 million men and women who have served since 9/11 will go underutilized. Our veterans are assets. The failure to not only welcome them home, but ensure a successful pathway to civilian life is a guaranteed detriment to our economic and social wellbeing as a nation.

On a personal level, the failure to adequately engage veterans upon returning home risks a much graver cost. The majority of veterans return home without injury or disability and the greatest challenge in their transition may be finding a job. For some veterans, however, a decade of war has left scars too deep to heal. In the most damning statistic of the nation’s preparedness to welcome home our military men and women, the Department of Defense estimates that from 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of one every 36 hours. Mission Continues Fellow and U.S. Army veteran Andrew Berry told us, “Since I retired in September 2009, I’ve had seven friends – seven – who served with me in Iraq, who have committed suicide.” After being shot twice and surviving eight explosions, Andrew also suffered from PTSD and TBI. Today, he serves with Orlando Vet Center, counseling other veterans to overcome their injuries and become leaders in the community.

If we continue to challenge individuals like Josh, Kristen and Andrew to reenlist in their communities, then they will come to define not only this generation of veterans, but this generation of Americans.

The application deadline for The Mission Continues 2012 Fellowship Class Bravo is March 1. For more information about becoming a Fellow, visit our website or email fellowships@missioncontinues.org

Nicholas Zevely is an AmeriCorps VISTA and Communications Coordinator with The Mission Continues, a veterans service organization based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Hey, people in Veterans Affairs and elsewhere are working with folks in private industry to help vets get jobs. They're doing some genuinely innovative work.

Key to this is the Blue Button effort, which now allows vets to download their service record including skills codes. That record can be used in a number of innovative ways, to build better resumes and also to more effectively find jobs based on those skill codes.

For example, the following is a live visual portfolio for Ann Weeby, built using tools from rrripple.com, based on the skills codes in the Blue Button skills file.

(Hey, Ann's looking for her next opportunity.)

The skill codes can also be used to search the Veterans Job Bank at the National Resource Directory. For example, Ann has a skill code 42 Alpha or 42A.  She can manually enter that code into the job bank and she'll see a list of all of the jobs relevant to that skill code.

When she actually applies to a matching job she can send a link to her rrripple portfolio that will not only showcase a verified document of her skills but all of the other evidence of her skills and achievement during or after military service that make her the best candidate for the job.

This is just one more example of some really good work that you never hear about. Lots more's needed…

Hey, I've worked with Aneesh for a coupla years, and bear witness that he's the real deal, and has done a lot for the country, serving citizens well and providing a good return for the taxpayer dollar.

Here you see him, on the left, with Joaquin Alvarado from American Public Media, and myself, on January 25th at the White House. (Photo by Jay Rosen from NYU.) We were discussing how to use government data to help people, including improved customer service, along with some others smart regarding new tech.

People who've worked with Aneesh have nothing but praise for his effort, well deserved, for real. You might check out Seven Videos That Best Highlight Chopra’s Work.

President Obama said, “As the federal government’s first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra did groundbreaking work to bring our government into the 21st century.  Aneesh found countless ways to engage the American people using technology, from electronic health records for veterans, to expanding access to broadband for rural communities, to modernizing government records. His legacy of leadership and innovation will benefit Americans for years to come, and I thank him for his outstanding service.”

Here's a little of what he's accomplished .

1)      He championed policies to build 21st century infrastructure – from the President’s National Wireless Initiative, including the much-needed nationwide public safety broadband network, to the Policy Framework for a 21st Century Grid that led to the green button movement empowering 6+ million households to download energy usage data in human and computer-friendly form, that even caught the attention of famed venture capitalist, Fred Wilson. His recent TEDMED lecture framed how health IT will lead to a higher quality, lower-cost health system.

2)      He helped establish a set of Internet Policy Principles that have been endorsed by 34 countries and were visible in the Administration’s response on SOPA/PIPA including a call for voluntary measures reduce online piracy. More broadly, he embraced open Internet standards in areas like health IT through the DIRECT project, a simple, secure method to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients over the Internet.

3)      Most importantly, he has defined a new “Open Innovation” culture that builds upon the President’s National Action Plan for Open Government and Strategy for American Innovation. He has opened data for entrepreneurs, from the fast growing “blue button” to the recently launched Open Education Data Initiative; led as an “impatient convener” in an area of great importance to me – the “Apps for Heroes” showcase; launched prizes, challenges and competitions in healthcare, energy, and education; and established a new model of attracting entrepreneurs to join the government in solving problems, even invoking “lean startup” principles.

In sum, he’s helped connect entrepreneurs to our government in a spirit that makes you feel like we can invent our way out of our nation’s biggest challenges.

With the wars overseas winding down, the need to help vets and military families is increasing, as attention to their needs shrinks.

Vets need jobs, and that's high priority. So do their spouses, and they all need a hand dealing with everyday challenges that are magnified when troops are deployed or relocated.

A guy like me, I don't know what kind of real-life help they need, but here's what I read. They might need a little help in areas I wouldn't have figured:

• getting school credits transferred
• dealing with family stress resulting from deployment or relocation
• understanding military culture, like commonly used acronyms
• meeting people in new bases
• using social media, including issues like operational security
• good jobs that can move with a relocation

Really good help is provided by Blue Star Families and also the National Military Families Association, which focus on military families connecting and helping each other other out.

The National Resource Directory has a really good database of nonprofits and government agencies who can provide specialized help in specific geographies.

Sesame Workshop also provides help with difficult transitions.  (That's me at a Sesame event, with Cookie Monster; he's the one in blue.)

The Department of Veterans Affairs now has Facebook pages for each medical center.

DonorsChoose.org has programs to help the schools that serve military families.

Finally, don't forget national groups which provide broad assistance, like the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America and the Bob Woodruff Foundation.

I figure that we should support Americans who risk taking a bullet to protect us, and that means also looking after their families. Just seems right…

The new Open Government stuff gets results, normally with no media attention. It's just good, solid work, no drama, no way to sensationalize it. That's included a lot of progress in the last two years or so from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Turns out that a group of folks at the GSA, that's the General Services Administration, has been planning for years to figure out how to make Federal websites more effective, and they concluded a real successful national conversation at the end of last year:

http://web-reform-dialogue.ideascale.com/

A lot of people provided and refined a lot of good ideas, and here're my favorite three. Please note I'm biased, since I focus on customer service and getting to the point fast and simply.

1. Talk in plain language. People don't need fancy anything, much less Washington/Beltway language.

2. Simplify everything. My take on this is that people should be able, ultimately, to go to one place to figure stuff out, to get help, and not be bounced around from place to place, or to be totally lost. My model for this is the 311 style systems in places like NYC or SF, one stop shopping for government services.

3. Get welcome and mission statements off the homepage, or maybe just off the top of homepages. They get in the way, and add little.

Again, this is my take, filtered by my biases.

Okay, I've worked with Peter for a couple years, and just saw a very positive article which understates his performance and results for vets. For those years, I've seen remarkable work including real innovation, like employee and vendor innovation, and increasing use of social media.

I bear witness to this, including some worry that he's been working eighty hour weeks routinely.  (I couldn't do it.)

Anyway, he reports to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, to get it right.

Check out Feds@Work: VA's Peter Levin Pursues 'Art Of The Possible' In IT Innovation

"I'm a huge believer in a very high tolerance for errors and mistakes," he said. "I assume that most of the things I do are going to be wrong or somehow mistaken. So I rely on a highly iterative process, a highly collaborative process and a highly communicative process that allows me to say, 'What about? What if? Could we try? Let's engage each other constructively in a conversation not about why it won't work but how it will work.'"

Levin says his aim is to "encourage the culture" at VA to "recognize that it's much better to have tried something silly and know not what to do than to stay in the rut you're in, knowing that you're never going to succeed on the trajectory that you're on,."

"In government, frankly, there's a premium in saying 'no' because if you say 'no,' nobody can hold you accountable for having made a mistake. I'm trying to find the 'yeah sayers,' the ones who say 'I have no idea either but I know how to run an experiment.'"

Peter just blogged about new efforts to help vets, particularly regarding finding a job, check out Celebrating Our Veterans With “Apps for Heroes”.