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At Voters' Service

Shinhee Kang Ian Karbal Feven Merid

October 27, 2020 |

Columbia Journalism Review |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, Ohio

Ohio media outlets have provided practical voter information to combat confusion. WOSU, the local NPR affiliate, created an online guide for mail-in voting, with deadlines prominently bolded and videos explaining how to request and fill out absentee ballots. They also ran six call-in shows to give listeners practical information about voting and an opportunity to hear from election administrators and voting-rights experts. The Columbus Dispatch and the Akron Beacon Journal, among others, have run voting “how-to” articles and created informational guides with candidate profiles and ballot explainers.

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Cold Hard Cash for Your Greenhouse Gas

Sarah Gonzalez Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Alex Blumberg

October 22, 2020 |

Gimlet Media |

Podcast |

Over 15 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Illinois

Refrigerants being used in old air conditioners or grocery story cooling systems leak into the atmosphere contributing to global warming. Tradewater, a company in Illinois, picks up these containers, destroys the refrigerants, gives them cash, and then sells them as carbon offset credits. They collect up to 250,000 pounds of refrigerants per year, but there is still more out there. Supermarkets in the United States could switch to more natural refrigerants, but barely 1 percent are known to have done that. Getting rid of these refrigerants can be an important solution to combating climate change.

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'It's on the writers': How The Correspondent drives interaction between members and its journalists

Lucinda Southern

October 14, 2020 |

Digiday |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States

To entice paying subscribers to its ad-free news site, and to spark informed discourse in its comments section, The Correspondent promotes an unusual degree of interaction between its journalists and readers and actively seeds discussions with experts’ comments. Unlike often-toxic discussion forums on other news sites, The Correspondents' forums foster collaborations between writers and readers on prospective articles and in analyses after publication. While it's too soon to tell if the strategy will retain and expand subscriber rolls, the forums show an unusual level of quality and civility.

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With unemployment hotline overloaded and stimulus on hold, PA boosts chatbot 90x

Layla A. Jones

October 13, 2020 |

Billy Penn |

Text |

Under 800 Words

Response Location: United States, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Accessing information about unemployment compensation online just got easier for residents of Pennsylvania. The current chat box capacity is 500 but will be increased to 50,000 by the end of the year. The phone hotline currently receives about 20,000 daily calls and has been difficult to get through since the unemployment benefits began in the wake of the coronavirus shutdown. The website also features a virtual assistant, which answers hundreds of commonly asked questions.

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‘Smart Buses' roll WiFi to students without access

Lex Gray

October 12, 2020 |

WAVY-TV |

Broadcast TV News |

Under 3 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Virginia

In order to bridge the digital divide one school district in Virginia is putting Wi-Fi routers on its school buses. They call them Smart Buses. They buses drive out to neighborhoods where students don't have access to fast, reliable internet. “Four of the Smart Buses go out every day. Each can serve about 40 students, covering about three-quarters of the need in the district.”

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How one state is sending thousands of WiFi hotspots to keep students in school

Anne Maxwell

October 12, 2020 |

WSPA-TV |

Broadcast TV News |

3-5 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Travelers Rest, South Carolina

In South Carolina, 180,000 households don’t have access to Wifi, according to estimates. A problem for students who are trying to attend virtual classes. Using CARES funds, the state purchased hotspots. In one county, almost all of the students are connected. “The hotspots are working well, with just about all of the county’s 77,000 students logging on to learn.”

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How one Native American tribe in S.D. created its own wireless education network

Nick Lowrey

October 07, 2020 |

South Dakota News Watch |

Text |

1500-3000 Words

Response Location: Lower Brulé Indian Reservation, United States, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, South Dakota

An indigenous community has tapped into new technology to provide broadband internet access which is critical for virtual learning during the coronavirus shutdown of schools. Digital radio waves were used to broadcast a high-speed internet signal covering hundreds of miles of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe reservation. Using radio waves to access internet was only possible due to a ruling passed by the FCC in 2019 that allow radio waves to be leased. Tribal governments were given priority access to broadcast licensing.

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How schools are finding thousands of students they couldn't reach when the pandemic began

Jennifer Sanders

September 18, 2020 |

KXAN-TV |

Broadcast TV News |

3-5 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Leander, Texas

For one school district in Texas, using personal relationships established before the pandemic, proved the best way to reach bilingual students in rural parts of the district who weren't showing up to remote classes. One librarian and a parent “went door-to-door there to track down students and find out how they could help families transition to virtual learning. They also had parents fill out note cards showing how many children lived in the home to make sure no child was left behind.” Other Texas districts are similarly relying on home visits to check on students. Data shows those methods work.

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No WiFi at home? One Virginia school district has a creative solution for students

Lex Gray

September 18, 2020 |

WAVY-TV |

Broadcast TV News |

3-5 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Suffolk, Virginia

A school district in Virginia has implemented a two-prong solution to provide internet access to rural students during the pandemic. The indoor solution allows students to make appointments to be inside the school to access the internet. The outside solution, equipping three schools in the district with equipment to boost their Wi-Fi signals, allowing students who can’t make indoor appointments a way to access the Wi-Fi. “We just took advantage of something that was already happening in the district."

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The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare Want to Backstop the Web

Lily Hay Newman

September 17, 2020 |

Wired |

Text |

Under 800 Words

Response Location: United States

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

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