AL.com partnering with MIT-based non-profit

Alabama Media Group will partner with Cortico, a MIT-based nonprofit dedicated to fostering public conversation in communities and media, as part of a $2 million grant announced from The Knight Foundation.

The grant was announced as part of the The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's new $300 million, five-year commitment to the future of local news. This is the second grant to Cortico from the Knight Foundation, with the first announced in September 2017 for $900,000.

"We are grateful that we have this opportunity to dive deeper into our community to help lift voices, stories and viewpoints that we might not be able to hear otherwise," said Kelly Ann Scott, vice president of content for Alabama Media Group.

The grant will allow AL.com to hire a full-time reporter to work on bringing more diverse Birmingham stories into the local news report.

Working in cooperation with the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab, Cortico builds listening systems designed to surface a community's under-heard voices and channel their perspectives and stories into the public dialogue.

The AL.com partnership will begin in Birmingham this spring. It will focus on finding gaps on what matters most to residents in the metro area, and then reporting on those gaps.

"Understanding what matters most to our communities and engaging around those storylines is a huge part of the future of local news," Scott said. "We are committed to finding those voices and stories so we can reflect them in our reporting, and are eager to discover what we can learn from this partnership."

Through its first initiative, the Local Voices Network, Cortico is building a network of recorded in-person conversations that helps people in communities understand one another better.

"The Knight Foundation funding is helping Cortico build new local spaces for constructive public conversation that will help rebuild understanding among people and trust between the public and the media," said Deb Roy, co-founder of Cortico. "LVN will allow many more local voices to be heard and help journalists tell stories that people really care about."

Conversations from LVN take place around a "Digital Hearth," which records the discussion and enables hosts to play speech highlights from other groups in order to cross-pollinate voices and perspectives across community boundaries.

The conversations are analyzed with special tools – they're transcribed so artificial intelligence software can analyze – offering the community, journalists and leaders new windows into important local issues.

As part of the AL.com partnership, Cortico will combine conversations from its LVN with local Twitter and talk radio conversation to help find stories that reflect the conversations and lives in Birmingham and its suburban communities.

"We want to be able to better connect and report on the stories that matter to those who live in the Birmingham Metro area," Scott said. "We hope that this partnership will help us hear more voices in our community and use those voices to develop stories."

LVN will be deploying in select communities over the course of the next year, with the long-term goal of rolling out into every state. Roll outs also are underway in Madison, Wis., and in The Bronx, N.Y.

The recent funding brings Cortico to a total of $10 million raised from foundations and individuals who seek to bring technology and human power together to improve civic life. To date, in addition to the Knight Foundation, Cortico funding has come Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partner and founder of LinkedIn; Craig Newmark of Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and founder of Craigslist; and Ali Rowghani, a Y Combinator Managing Partner.

Cortico was founded by Chairman Deb Roy, director of the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM) at the MIT Media Lab, Cortico President Eugene Yi, and Russell Stevens, deployment lead at LSM. Cortico's development team brings experience in using machine learning to understand and map media, while its deployment team includes experts in data journalism, local news, and community organizing. Advisors and supporters include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito, Ali Rowghani, and Craig Newmark.

Alabama Media Group is a digitally-minded news and information company that combines the up-to-the-minute access of AL.com, Reckon and gulflive.com with the long revered, award-winning journalism of The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and Mobile's Press-Register and The Mississippi Press. Through award-winning lifestyle brands, including "It's a Southern Thing" and "This is Alabama," AMG crafts compelling digital programming to connect southern culture to the community. Alabama Media Group is part of Advance Local, one of the nation's leading media and marketing companies, reaching more than 50 million people throughout the U.S., across multiple platforms.