Budget Hero

Budget Hero lets people decide how taxpayer dollars should be spent and focuses on the major issues in the 2008 election - such as the war in Iraq, the Bush tax cuts, expanding health care, and stimulating the economy. Players create their own federal budgets to match their stands on issues and their values. American Public Media reporters and researchers worked closely with the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office and many others to create an accurate portrayal of the federal budget and the main policy options in the budget debate.

Consumer Consequences

Consumer Conequences allows Americans to weigh the impact of their lifestyles on the Earth's resources.  Players describe their home, energy use, eating habits and more, and then find out how many Earths we would need if everyone on the planet lived the same way. Players can redesign their lifestyles and some government policies to see what it would take to live within our resources, or they can compare their impact with people of different income, gender, or age.

Select A Candidate

Media outlets nationwide now have the opportunity to share the Presidential Select a Candidate survey with their constituencies by using a free "widget," HTML code that automatically plugs in the survey on their Web sites. As the campaign season advances—as well as candidates' positions—the survey is updated regularly. Since its launch on October 18, 2007, the syndicated Select a Candidate has received more than half a million page views. by answering a series of questions about major issues, voters can quickly learn which candidates are most closely aligned with their views. We use Select a Candidate as a direct pipeline of listeners' contributions to development of coverage.

Idea Generator

APM's Idea Generators provide a collaborative space online for large numbers of people to research, argue and propose solutions to social problems. The aim is to generate fact-based discussion on important issues, like the racial gap in educational achievement, and surface new ideas, trends, or knowledge for our news coverage.

• American Public Media: Your Economy
• American Public Media: Preserving the American Dream
• Minneaota Public Radio: Education Achievement Gap
• Minneaota Public Radio: The Future of Small Towns

The Minnesota Budget Balancer

In Minnesota, we offer citizens the chance to create their own balanced budgets for the state and then share them with the governor, legislators or friends. The game offers the main options in the budget debate (with over a hundred choices) for raising or cutting spending and revenues.  And it provides the social impact of every choice. We analyze the choices people make and use that to guide our editorial coverage and even create questions for scientific polling.
Budget Balancer: do your values add up?

Medical Matchmaker

We created Medical Matchmaker as part of a Minnesota Public Radio series on health insurance reform. The games harnesses a marketing technique called "conjoint analysis," where players are confronted with pairs of health plans and asked to choose the best one. After 12 pairs, players learn which features of health insurance plans are most important to them and how that aligns with the 4 major types of health insurance, including the new consumer-driven health plans.

Michael Skoler

Executive Director, Center for Innovation in Journalism

Michael Skoler dropped into journalism 25 years ago after dropping out of the travel and wine business. After writing for magazines and producing for TV, he wound up first as a science correspondent and then a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio.

Michael's earlier experience includes writing a daily show for CBS Radio, television reporting for WGBH in Boston, and freelancing for magazines ranging from Glamour to American Health and Reader's Digest. He earned an M.B.A as a Frank Batten Media Fellow at the University of Virginia. He then worked as a management consultant on his own and for McKinsey and Company serving mainly media and e-commerce companies.

During his time in Africa, Michael realized that people who were living the news in places like Rwanda, South Africa, Liberia and Nigeria had more expertise than the analysts so often interviewed by foreign reporters. As managing news director for Minnesota Public Radio, he brought that idea to American Public Media in 2003 to create Public Insight Journalism and the Center for Innovation in Journalism.

Linda Fantin

Linda became a journalist in the small towns of Wyoming, where newspapers were pieced together with hot wax and border tape, and strengthened by a partnership with readers. “People read the paper to see if we knew what they knew,” she says. This relevance is largely absent from news coverage today, which is why Linda is so excited about Public Insight Journalism and its ability to reconnect newsrooms with the communities they serve.

After five years writing and editing weekly papers in Wyoming, she spent 12 years as a reporter and editor at The Salt Lake Tribune where her investigative and storytelling skills were frequently honored. She worked briefly for Newsweek before moving to Minnesota, and continues to write a monthly feature column for the Tribune. She has taught and lectured on journalism at the University of Wyoming, where she earned a B.A. in journalism in 1992.

Andrew Haeg

In 2003, senior producer and analyst Andrew Haeg left his job as a business and economics reporter for Minnesota Public radio to help pioneer the Public Insight Journalism model. Today he manages day-to-day operations for the Center's staff in St. Paul and Los Angeles.

Andrew signed on to Public Insight Journalism because he saw how technology was enabling people to share their knowledge and insights in surprising ways. No longer could journalists act as "an elite group of gatekeepers preaching to the masses."
From 1999 to 2006, Andrew moonlighted as the Midwest stringer for The Economist magazine. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn. He was co-winner of the 2000 Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business journalism and the 2003 and 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

Andrew has helped build the tools and processes of PIJ, expand the Public Insight Network to more than 40,000 public sources, integrated the public into news coverage across American Public Media shows and led the creation of numerous online interactive projects designed to engage and learn from the audience.

Michael Caputo

Michael Caputo joined the Center for Innovation in Journalism after years of searching for the next evolution of reporting. Before joining CIJ, Michael was news director for public TV station WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., where he hosted a weekly news show and also reported for WXXI radio.

Michael was a political reporter for the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle newspaper, where he worked on its "Voice of the Voter" project. He also hosted public forums as part of MacNeil/Lehrer's "By the People" project.
As a Public Insight Analyst for Minnesota Public Radio News, Michael connects the MPR newsroom with citizen knowledge, sources and story ideas. He has produced and moderated numerous Public Insight Forums, as well as created online and on-air stories.

Michael is currently a Policy Fellow at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Married with two young children, his pursuits include fiction writing and playing guitar.

Melody Ng

Melody Ng loves meeting new people, listening to what's going on in their lives, schools, workplaces and communities, and then translating heir experiences into news stories and programming.

Before joining the Center for Innovation in Journalism, Melody coordinated a Twin Cities visit by StoryCorps, the national project to instruct and inspire people to record one another's stories in sound. She also interned for the American RadioWorks documentary unit at APM, where she interviewed scientists and physicians about new Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder research and treatment.

As a graduate student of ecology, Melody mucked her way through shallow Minnesota lakes and nighttime Appalachian woods to study wild rice and salamander populations. Now she focuses her attention on human communities through PIJ. She taught English in the People's Republic of China for two years, and was a writing tutor for graduate students at the University of Minnesota.

Joellen Easton

Joellen (Jo) Easton joined the Center for Innovation in Journalism because she wanted to aggressively explore new modes of producing journalism. As a Public Insight Analyst, she divides her attention among supporting American Public Media's sustainability coverage and Marketplace's Entrepreneurship and Washington desks; tackling business technology needs and developing journalism games for CIJ; and training CIJ's partner stations in the use of Public Insight Journalism.

Jo came to Los Angeles from Boston, where she had worked in public radio since 1998, most recently as an associate producer at PRI's Global Resources Desk at The World and previously at WGBH Radio's Culture Desk and PRI's Sound & Spirit. She came to American Public Media in 2005 shortly after completing her master's in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she wrote her thesis on "High-Interactivity Radio: Using the Internet to Enhance Community Among Radio Listeners."

With a B.A. in anthropology from Tufts University, Jo has studied classical trumpet at New England Conservatory, West African drumming at the University of Ghana, and audio art in the woods of Quebec.

Brendan Newnam

Brendan Newnam believes that everyone has something worthwhile to share and that his job is to help them do it. He joined the Center for Innovation in Journalism because he knows of nowhere else where it is possible to explore new ways of reporting that are more relevant and more connected to the public without the pressures of advertising dollars.

He started his radio career as a researcher for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has written travel guides in Eastern Europe and worked as a freelance arts and culture reporter for various national magazines. While in law school, Brendan worked as an associate producer at WRTI in Philadelphia and upon graduation began contributing to American Public Media's Marketplace and Weekend America.

As a close follower of cultural trends in the United States, Brendan makes the following predictions for the upcoming year: peashoots become the new kale, George Harrison's solo records rise in prominence, and poetry replaces snark.

Sharon McNary,

Sharon has worked in TV news and documentaries, radio, wire service and newspapers in the diverse and challenging Southern California news market, developing award-winning investigative and computer-assisted reporting projects. Following a mid-career public service break with the Peace Corps in Bolivia, Sharon returned to print and multi-media reporting. She has covered disasters, government corruption, growth and immigration, often using databases, mapping and other technology tools to break news.

As a Public Insight Analyst in Los Angeles, Sharon works to link the newsrooms of American Public Media’s national programs Marketplace, Marketplace Money and Weekend America to sources. Indoors, Sharon is an avid cook, seamstress and knitter while her outdoor pursuits are competing in marathons and triathlons.

Molly Bloom

Public Insight Analyst, Elections

After working at the Center as an intern and Assistant Producer, Molly is currently putting her political science degree to work, working one-on-one with Minnesota Public Radio reporter Curtis Gilbert to produce innovative, voter-driven election coverage and using PIJ’s tools to engage voters and non-voters alike.

Molly got her start in radio at Brown Student Radio where she hosted a jazz show, produced a children’s literature show and also served the station in several roles including Jazz Director, Programming Board, Director of Operations.  She learned how to look at the news through the eyes of the community while a volunteer at KFAI - the Twin Cities’ community-run radio station.  Molly interned on Performance Today and American RadioWorks before starting with Public Insight Journalism in the MPR Newsroom. 

Jeff Horwich

Jeff Horwich is host and producer of the audience-inspired radio show In The Loop. He joined Minnesota Public Radio in 2001, and reported on Central Minnesota and the business and economics beats before joining the Center for Innovation in Journalism in 2006 to focus on In The Loop. As host of ITL, Jeff is working to build a new kind of program based upon collaboration with its audience. As a reporter, he used Public Insight Journalism for various daily and in-depth projects including "Whose Recovery Is It," an investigation into the layered meanings of 'economic recovery.'

Before coming to MPR, Jeff graduated from Duke University and reported from Tokyo for the Asahi Evening News. On ITL, and in his spare time, Jeff is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, saxophone, flute, harmonica and mandolin.

Sanden Totten

Whether talking live with In The Loop audiences or chatting with strangers on the bus, Sanden Totten has a passion for other people's stories. He got his start in radio working as director of both punk music and news for WOBC, Oberlin College's community station. He has since worked for Boston Public Radio's Here & Now, American Public Media's Marketplace and Weekend America, as well as Minnesota Public Radio's 89.3 The Current. Sanden joined the Center for Innovation in Journalism to help find new perspectives and gripping stories to share with others.

In his free time, Sanden enjoys listening to loud music, eating cereal and reading comic books. He has lived on four different continents, speaks five languages (most of them poorly, he admits) and once rode across the United States with his mother on a motorcycle.

Anna Weggel

Alana Ronningen

Alana Ronningen has worked for American Public Media since 2003 and for the Center for Innovation in Journalism since its inception. While her degree in business (and a minor in English) qualifies her for many things, she was attracted to the Center by the sheer volume of things that need to be organized to keep the Center team humming. She also serves as the financial analyst and grant manager for the Center.

In her spare time, Alana enjoys baking, making natural jams, and cross-stitching. She is currently stitching an ambitious and complicated sailing scene as a wedding gift for her friend.

Preston Wright

Preston Wright sees his role at the Center for Innovation in Journalism as an opportunity to redefine the rules of Web engagement. Serious games and online tools such as Select a Candidate, Idea Generator and Consumer Consequences exemplify what he envisions as a bright future for journalism innovation.

Before joining CIJ, Preston was Web producer for all of American Public Media's classical music programs, including the Peabody Award-winning American Mavericks, as well as for Minnesota Public Radio. In his free time, Preston composes music—he received McKnight Composer Fellowships in 2002 and 2007 and was named a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellow in 2003. Whenever possible, he escapes to his guesthouse and farm in Belize, Central America.