To challenge the companies that own the media in your community, you need to find out who owns your local media and if they are doing a good job. These tools can help you find out how the local media are doing and what kinds of changes are needed.
- Who owns the media where you live? Find out with the Media Tracker from the Center for Public Integrity — a great tool to use in workshops, to make handouts and other educational materials.
- Grade your local news. Monitor your local news to see if they are really covering issues that matter. You can use the results in letters to the station, protests, license challenges, press releases and other activist efforts to demand better journalism. The model "scorecard" and "guide to socially responsible journalism" from the San Francisco-area "Grade the News" project can help.
- Our citizen rights: what to expect from the press. The Project for Excellence in Journalism lays out what citizens and journalists agree should be the job of real news media.
- What media companies promise: The Project for Excellence in Journalism collected news organizations' values, mission statements and pledges. Monitor the media to see if they are living up to their promises and make some noise if they are not. This is great material for activist and press campaigns.
- What do your neighbors think? Create a community research project: This community assessment toolkit from the University of Kansas can help you conduct a survey of people in your community or contact local experts to find out about the state of media in your town.
(For information and tools to use news monitoring to challenge a station's license, see the Campaign Models section of this guide)
