Lee Smithey:	Welcome everybody. Let me welcome you on behalf of the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. My name is Lee Smithey. I'm a sociologist in peace and conflict studies. Joy Charlton wishes that she could be here to do this introduction, but she was called away out of town and so she reluctantly handed the task over to me. I was really pleased to get the job because I've really enjoyed working with Jim over the past several years while he's been at Swarthmore, so I'll take any chance to introduce him that I can get. Jim is quite an exceptional and Pulitzer Prize winning visionary journalist, and an expert on digital media as well.
	Jim first came to Swarthmore's attention several years ago when he wrote a letter to War News Radio saying that he was a listener and that he was a fan, and that he was quite impressed with what Swarthmore's students were doing with regard to their weekly news program covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those comments coming from a journalist with Jim's kind of experience was pretty heady and high praise. Jim thankfully subsequently joined War News Radio in 2010 as its journalist-in-residence, a position in which he has provided professional guidance to War News Radio students.
	As I mentioned, Jim has quite a lot of experience in journalism. For 17 years, Jim was the senior photographer at the Philadelphia Daily News. In 2004 and 2005, he took a leave from the Daily News and spent a year in Iraq embedded in US military operations, where he was part of the Associated Press team that was honored with the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Just before coming to Swarthmore, Jim held a faculty position in convergence journalism at the University of Missouri Columbia, which has a journalism program that's thought by many to be among the finest in the country. He's also taught at New York University and Temple University, where he now serves as the assistant director of their new Center for Public Interest Journalism. I'm happy to say that Jim also taught a course here at Swarthmore on peace and conflict journalism, which is a new and emerging field in my field.
	While traditional journalism is in the midst of an industry-wide transition and nobody really quite knows where it's going, Jim has been quite visionary. He's become an expert on social media and its information-sharing potential, and in fact GunCrisis.org is an outgrowth of that. It's now conceived as an independent solutions-oriented nonprofit news organization based in Philadelphia, but it also I might note has a national presence as well tracking gun violence news across the country. GunCrisis.org joins together the power of the Internet with the power of journalism to make a positive difference. In fact, this semester Jim is partnering with students in a class here at Swarthmore in peace and conflict studies called Peace Studies in Action, and I see some familiar faces from that class around the room at the moment. We're partnering with Jim to try and think about the field of gun violence prevention locally here in Philadelphia, and also what the evolution of Gun Crisis and it's unique model of public journalism, what that might look like going forward.
	Jim's work with this class is I think just another indicator of his generosity and his talent, his creativity and his expertise, and I think you're going to be able to gather that from his presentation today. Welcome back, Jim. Thanks so much for all your contributions here, and join me in welcoming Jim MacMillan.
Jim MacMillan:	Thanks very much, Lee, for that incredibly generous introduction. For the benefit of those of you who I haven't met and those of whom might not know everybody else in the room, I'm mostly looking at a sea of very friendly and familiar faces, which is wonderful. I'm looking forward to what we can all, the progress we can make together in a conversation today. I just want to say something first. It feels awkward to stand here in such a formal situation, but we'll take it from here, because I also need to very formally thank everybody who made all of this possible.
	The last few years, what I've done, what I've taken away from my time at Swarthmore has very directly contributed to the Gun Crisis Project and all that we're getting done, from the opportunity to lead War News Radio to my experiences with the students in War News Radio to my colleagues at the Lang Center and their support this year, and to Lee in particular for giving me the opportunity to teach a course in peace journalism for which I had the luxury of studying for a year in advance. All of these are staples, legs of the stool, of the table that kind of hold Gun Crisis together. I'm really grateful, and I hope you all really know that. I wouldn't have done this without all of you.
	For anyone who's suffered my class, suffered my teaching, I generally vastly over prepare and talk really fast and try to do more than is possible, and I'm going to really try to do the opposite today. We've got 45 minutes now, according to that clock anyway, and maybe a little more. Yeah. Wow, time flies. But I'd like to spend most of the time in conversation. For those of you who want to converse immediately or later, I just wanted to share some of our social media connections. We tweet @GunCrisisNews for local news, advance the Gun Crisis hashtag. Of course, there's the site and the email address. This is just a glance at our page from this morning. We've had over 1,000 posts in the first year. I think I just exaggerated. We've had nearly 1,000 posts in the first year, and we just passed our first year recently.
	Outlining what I'm hoping to do today is to quickly define the epidemic of gunfire in the US, the impact in Philadelphia and similar cities, why we launched the Gun Crisis Project, how we operate, what we've learned, some of the pitfalls, what's next, and how you, any of you, especially those of you interested in journalism can apply what we've learned to use at the intersection of journalism, communications and social entrepreneurship to bring about change, to solve a problem, because I think we're onto something.
	It's always a good practice when discussing trauma and traumatic events and showing graphic images, which you're going to see a little bit of today, to warn everybody that they can be disturbing. I'm not going to show anything worse than you might see on television or in a newspaper, but sometimes we can be surprised by our own reactions. If anything makes you uncomfortable, feel free to look away, feel free to walk away, and feel free to come back of course. The only thing I ask is if anybody becomes clearly upset, if a friend could follow along and make sure they're okay. Generally, just leaving the room does the trick. I know this from experience. There's no shame in it if you don't like what you see. It should be upsetting.
	In the big picture, in two days, April 4th will be 45 years since the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Since then, at least a million people have been killed with guns in the United States. By some estimates, up to 1.3 million. Sometimes I feel like just walking away at this point and leaving the presentation there. In recent years, it's about 30,000 per year. Well, here's a quick video introduction into Philadelphia, some of our coverage and just one of the videos we produced last summer. There's some graphic imagery. Nothing terrible, but I wanted you to hear the narrative.
	In the four weeks since the Colorado movie theater shooting made national headlines, the Gun Crisis Reporting Project has tracked 115 shooting victims in Philadelphia. Based on original reports and by monitoring media organizations and other sources, we found that the number of people shot in Philadelphia during this period exceeded the combined total of victims from the Colorado incident, the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, this week's incident in College Station, Texas, and the assault rifle attack that wounded 17 people in Alabama last month. In Philadelphia, we counted 16 homicides during this period, and 18 more victims who were initially reported in critical condition, often with head and chest wounds. There were 10 double shootings, two triple shootings, two quadruple shootings, and one incident in which five people were shot in the Strawberry Mansion section of the city on July 22nd. Two days later, two teenage brothers were shot to death in their home in Overbrook Park.
	All of the photos seen in this report were provided by Gun Crisis contributors Joe Kaczmarek and Tom Kelly, and were captured at Philadelphia shooting scenes during this period. The oldest victim we found was a 63-year-old man shot to death in a home on Lehigh Avenue just a few days ago. The youngest was an 11-year-old boy who suffered a graze wound last month, and the average age of the victims reported was 28. Four women were shot, but most of the victims were men. Our count includes those killed and wounded in five police-involved shootings, and one report of a resident who shot an intruder in his home. Check GunCrisis.org for a map of-
	That's one month last summer. Worse than usual, but not exceptionally so. One person was shot and wounded, is in critical condition after a shooting today, after a shooting this afternoon in Philadelphia. Yesterday, four people were shot. Let's see, some numbers. Roughly, over the last 25 years, about 10,000 people, nearly 10,000 people over the last have been shot to death in Philadelphia. That's roughly one or 1.1 per day, and more wounded. Typically four or five people are wounded for every one who is shot and killed. That doesn't also account of course for those psychological casualties. In 2012, 331 people were murdered in Philadelphia. 85% of them were shot to death.
	By comparison, more people were shot to death in Philadelphia during the duration of the war in Iraq than the total number of US troops killed by enemy forces in Iraq. More people have been shot to death in Philadelphia since September 11th than the number of people killed by terrorists on September 11th, but compare the response. In response to September 11th, the US launched a new cabinet department, invaded and occupied two nations, and is still in the midst of the longest war in US history. Where is the response for this sort of violence?
	The economic aspect of the problem is very important for Philadelphia as well. Aaron Moser, who worked with us last summer, looked at several studies and Philadelphia police statistics and resolved that the cost of violence to Philadelphia amounts to about $3 billion per year in direct and indirect cost. Mostly indirect cost: lost business investment, lost property value, the value of lives cost. Direct costs, of course: medical, emergency response, and criminal justice and so on. By comparison, I don't have hard numbers but Philadelphia just closed about 20 schools and had a 20-something million shortfall that forced that. Imagine $3 billion. Imagine if we can reduce that cost by 10% next year. I've also got to say on that point, when one of my colleagues pointed out when we were invited to present to Philadelphia City Council last year, Aaron talked about the economic impact and had politicians on the edge of their seat. We discovered how to get their attention and communicate in terms that they could respond to.
	Of course want to talk about the economic cost. That as well relates to human cost, and all the social services a city should be providing, schools and so on. Oops, I'm sorry. Maybe I meant to go to that slide sooner. Well, if you're not already convinced, here's one more look at the problem. Sorry. This is a map of casualties in Philadelphia in 2011.
	Only one homicide was reported in Philadelphia's historic old city in 2011. 33-year-old Scoey Potter was shot to death in March, but there were 318 people murdered across the city altogether. If you look back five, 10, or more than 20 years it becomes difficult to deny the scope of the crisis. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently mapped 8,991 homicides across the city over the last 23 years, and has shared that data at Philly.com/homicidemap. You can click to learn how each person was killed, and in three-quarters of the cases they were killed with firearms. These victims were shot in North Philadelphia, but West Philadelphia looks pretty similar and South Philly not much better. Center City is both more affluent and less densely populated, but even in the shadow of City Hall, the gray square seen in this view, you can see where people have been killed with guns. GunCrisis.org plans to examine this epidemic, seek solutions, and turn back the clocks. Learn more at GunCrisis.O-R-G.
	Now, our staff brings a lot of experience, about 50 years worth of Philadelphia reporting experience, and a lot of different source of experiences. I bring the background in peace journalism now, and journalism in psychological trauma, as well as our time in the field. Some social media journalism, but the catalyst for this project was a conference led by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which is based in Columbia. They held this conference in Philadelphia at WHYY in the fall of 2011.
	I'm a former fellow with the Dart Center and one of our other partners, Tara Murtha at the Philadelphia Weekly, just went through the Dart Fellowship, and I think it's safe to say that everybody in the organization is mindful of the special challenges and responsibilities of covering traumatic events. Our responsibility is to the people we cover, to the people we cover face-to-face, to the way we portray them in our narratives, to the way we treat our audiences, our audiences of news consumers and the risk of exposing them to trauma. Finally, our responsibilities to ourselves and each other and our loved ones to stay healthy and be the best journalist we can be.
	It was at this conference that I learned about some responses ... It was incredible after so many years at newspapers that I knew so little about what was being done, but I learned about innovations that were leading to double-digit improvements in rates of gun violence in city after city, or least parts of cities. Innovations in public health intervention, innovations in criminology, innovations in other technologies. I'll get back to the first two, but for example I read recently about a technology, a chip essentially, that could be manufactured in guns to make guns that wouldn't fire in what we all agree are gun-free zones, schools and malls and movie theaters. With 200 to 300 million guns already in private hands in the US, it's going to take a generation or two for anything like that to make an impact.
	Anyway, but these innovations are showing us is that double-digit improvements year to year. The most notable would be a program called Cure Violence. It's based in Chicago. It was formerly called Chicago Ceasefire. I want to step aside for a moment and explain that the ceasefire branding is very confusing, and that might be why they changed their name. Ceasefire Chicago and now Cure Violence and Philadelphia Ceasefire are public health intervention programs. Ceasefire Boston was the project launched by Swarthmore alum David Kennedy, famed criminologist who led to double-digit reductions through ... I'll get back to that. Through innovations in criminology, and Ceasefire PA is more involved in legislative interventions, gun control so to speak or controlling access to guns. In any case, in the public health model, the goal is to change minds and behaviors. Think about all the previous examples in my lifetime. Public health has changed behaviors around smoking, drunk driving, safe sex, wearing seatbelts. It's just a matter of education and intervention.
	In the public health model, they look at violence as a disease. Not a metaphor for disease, but as a disease imposed on a community under that can emerge under given socioeconomic conditions. The lack of good schools, jobs, opportunity, and prevalence of an abundance of guns and illegal drugs. Then understand that it emerges like any other epidemic, like smallpox or cholera where the violent acts are the germ of the disease. What do public health intervention workers do? But they go into the conflict zone so to speak and try to impede and disrupt the transmission of the disease, and so in this case it's a matter of disrupting retaliatory killing by responding to neighborhoods where there have been shootings and a matter of disrupting the generational learned behaviors of violence. There's evidence of this working in Philadelphia in its first year in a police sector of the 22nd district, which had the most shootings in Philadelphia the previous year. They showed a 47% reduction. I honestly don't remember if it was gun violence, shootings, or fatal shootings, but a dramatic reduction of gun violence year to year.
	The keys are credible intervention workers. Typically this means guys. It's mostly a male problem. Often times who have been arrested on gun charges, might be facing trials, might have done some time and come out and want to make a difference. Their goal is to go in and to help people in the middle of conflict understand that they have alternatives. Throughout human history people have often acted out violently when they've believed that they didn't have alternatives, and while alternatives might be limited for a young man in a poor neighborhood, a cooling off period can reveal more, and also to help people understand the ramifications of their actions, that opening fire on their adversary doesn't just do harm to their adversary but to their whole family and to their own family and to their whole community in so many different ways with the risk of further retaliation, legal costs, incarceration, and so on.
	I want to go off in so many tangents, but I want to run ahead so I'm going to keep moving. Why did we do this? Why did we think we needed to launch a project addressing gun violence? Because obviously we thought there was room for improvement in the media coverage of violence. Basically, if you're a news consumer in Philadelphia, it generally goes like this: It's a regurgitation of the police report. Every night on television you'll hear that whatever ... Say, for example, an 18-year-old man was shot at the corner of York Street and 9th Street so many times, rushed to whatever hospital in some condition, and there's no word. No word they're fond of saying on a cause, suspects or motive, and there's never a followup. Why that happened, why that practice evolved is a whole other long presentation, but we think there's room for improvement.
	When they do, and that's often through remote reporting without ever going to the scene. When they go to the scene, local broadcast news traditions, students are taught to ask people how they feel and what they heard and what they witnessed, so they say, "What did you hear? How do you feel?" What do you get in response? "I heard bang, bang, bang, pop, pop, pop. Everybody was running. I was scared to death." That's really the end of the report in most cases. There are exceptions. There is good reporting, but not so much. We thought there was a lot of room for improvement. We wanted to talk from the peace journalism model. We wanted to talk about the root causes of the violence. We wanted to seek solutions. We want to figure out how we got here and where we're going to go, but I need to keep moving along now.
	Hey, Tara. Just as one of my partners walks in. I just want to show you a quick video from the beginning of the project. We've had a lot of publicity, but Tara Murtha from the Philadelphia Weekly covered us before she joined the project. She saw what we were doing, inquired about reporting. We went out for one night. I took her out with one of my other partners, Joe Kaczmarek, and we drove around for a couple of hours and nothing happened, and then we came upon this. This was kind of a pivotal moment. It's nothing terribly graphic. Of course, it wasn't the next slide. I'll carry on. I'll come back to that.
	Anyway. I'm going to go back to Cure Violence. Oh, that's what I left out. There's also an important documentary called The Interrupters that focuses on the public health intervention model. If you want to understand how to disrupt killing, you really need to watch The Interrupters. It recently won the Columbia-duPont award for documentary and might be a better use of your time than listening to me. The Kennedy model, so David Kennedy [inaudible 00:22:49]. He was here. He presented last year. Basically, is the leading, was groundbreaking work in innovation and criminology, and he was presenting coincidentally at Temple University today, but I had somewhere to be. Among the changes in his approach are to focus on the most violent offenders, to bring everybody to the table, and to understand that most of the people that we blame for the violence want the violence to end as much as anyone. Most of the guys on the corner in the game are as fearful and despise the most violent offenders as much as anyone, and that was an important revelation.
	By targeting the most violent offenders, you move away from a culture of mass incarceration and you lock up fewer people, you bring less prison culture back onto the street. There are some downsides, too. There are some controversies, but for the most part most of the other innovations in criminology going on in other cities I think have evolved from the Boston Ceasefire or Boston Gun Project in the 1990s. The book is an essential read. That was a ridiculous oversimplification.
	One of the following outcomes was in 2005 the Homicide Review Commission in Milwaukee applied a combination of innovations from public health and criminology led to off the top of my head in memory now about a 50% reduction in gun violence year to year in 2005 to 2006. The Prevention Institute in Oakland works to solve all sorts of risks to health and safety, and have worked out a framework for intervention and the things that are needed. I can tell you right away that I think what Philadelphia might be missing is high-level leadership and specifically a strategic plan, a comprehensive strategic plan. There are lots of great small initiatives under way, but for the most part everyone says, "It's all hands on deck, we need everybody in the game, we need everybody to work on this," but there's nothing to grab onto. For our part, the communications in the second section is where we think we can help out and make a difference.
	This is the video:
	Yeah, it shouldn't be this easy to find a shooting scene, but on the average at least one person has been murdered in Philadelphia every day over the last 25 years, and more than three-quarters of them have been killed with a gun. Last week, local photojournalist Joe Kaczmarek took us to this scene just after a man had been shot multiple times, but there has been no other reporting on any of the crime scenes he showed us that night. GunCrisis.org is a new open-sourced journalism project intended to fill in the gaps. We'll strive to avoid polarizing debates. We contend that there is an epidemic of homicide by gunfire in Philadelphia. We'll study the landscape and the roots of the crisis, seek the individuals and organizations working to disrupt and intervene, and expand the community of citizens who refuse to rest until we make a difference. Join us at GunCrisis.O-R-G.
	Okay, so literally drive by photography. Not our most intimate work, but it was an important moment for the project because Tara had come along with us. We had been out for a few hours. She was going to write a column about these two guys. It was just two of us at the time who were working trying to launch this project, and then it takes about a couple hours, a few hours to find somebody who's been shot full of holes. At that point, she walked away and said, "You know, I'm going to pitch this for a front page, and I'm going to talk about real impact later," but this led to a cascade of media and publicity. Attention is currency in digital media. That's part of the formula. It's an important step, so this was a pivotal moment for us.
	Back to why we do this, disrupting common media narratives and filling in the blanks. How do we operate? Again, shorthand, we're taking from all of the hottest trends in journalism in the last few years and trying to make them work for us. We're hyper-local, independent, nonprofit, and solutions oriented, and believe me, we're a nonprofit. I would say that the contributed labor at this point probably runs into the tens of thousands. The direct costs are not insignificant for the people in the field in terms of filling their gas tanks and wear-and-tear in their cars, and I'll get back to sustainability later.
	The staff background. There are, like I said, four of us, 50 years experience. I'm not going to embarrass anybody with details, but incredible resumes. Lots of awards, top awards in the state and more. More importantly, they're the kind of people that are there when it matters. The strategy basically has been to illuminate the problem, quantify the problem, report accurately, and then seek solutions. Well, I'll get back to pitfalls, but if you just report on the danger without giving people an opportunity to respond, that's how you breed fear in the news consumer, so we strive to engage audiences and we do. We illuminate the organizations and the people that are making a difference, that are showing some impact in the city already.
	The pitfalls I was starting to say: Perpetuating prejudice and perpetuating fear. We don't get a lot of blowback on this like I have in other newsrooms, and I think the difference is that the audiences that come to our site have generally come there following search terms. If you load a full coverage news organization with a lot of crime, that can be a little more disturbing, but if people come looking for more information, they're finding what they're looking for. We disrupt fear by empowering people, and also disrupt the prejudice, very importantly, by causing coming back on the way that the epidemic emerges, the way that the epidemic is imposed, the way the conditions are imposed and the epidemic emerges, so we're not blaming the communities that are suffering.
	Among the services, I wonder what other slides I have. Among the services we provide are we're sort of a half a million or so page views, and what's interesting is we can see the search terms that bring people to us. We see that they're searching the addresses of crimes and the names of victims before any of these have been released by police or media, so we know that people are coming looking for more information, but we try to do much more. We do a lot of face-to-face engagement. We've been invited to present at City Council, at the Pennsylvania House by scholars, by students, to community groups. We support other groups. We've done some pro bono media support and social media strategy and social media mining and communication strategy for other grassroots violence reduction groups, and much more. The organization isn't just the website. The media isn't just the website. We're very active across social media, and the organization isn't just the media. We're working face-to-face as well whenever we can.
	But what about real impact? Right? Why do we do this? We're trying to stop the killing, and you're not going to catch us celebrating until we see some real evidence. In the short term, the good news is that this year is going very well so far. Year to date homicides in Philadelphia are down 40%. I'm not taking any credit for it. I'm not optimistic that that's going to sustain itself. I think it probably has more to do with weather than anything else, or what the Philadelphia DA calls "the ecology of criminology." I'm worried. The change in season is always a violent time, so I don't know if the people saved will stay that way, but time will tell. Let's hope I'm mistaken. Let's hope it stays this way.
	There's so much more I could talk about, but I want to save time for conversation. I'm going to fast forward and see if I have anymore slides, and if I don't have slides that I meant to show you I'm going to go into a slideshow. I haven't really said this. Obviously, most of our reporting is still photography, and the goal is to take you there, and so I'm going to show excerpts from the year-end portfolios of our two primary photographic contributors, Tom Kelly, who's here, and Joe Kaczmarek. Some of it's kind of graphic. Feel free to look or to look away, and maybe that's also a good time for us to ... Okay.
	I've presented it so many times and I never know what to do. I don't know whether to narrate it with the nuts and bolts of the events. I don't know whether to hit you with stats while you're looking at pictures, but I'm going to try something different today. I'm thinking maybe a minute or two of silence would be a good thing, so I'm just going to play the, look at the photos. Hope it makes you think about the victims and the whole spectrum of victims, and we'll see if it's the next slide. Of course, it's not. I'm going to step out now though, and I'll come back to the social media question.
	Here's about 20 photos. The first, oh my, and the application was running so this gives me a minute. The color photos, which are more than half of them, were shot by Joe Kaczmarek. The black-and-white photos by Tom Kelly. They're good representations of the work they did last year. It's not the most graphic work, but some of it might be a little bit hard to look at, but you can take a glance at the whole spectrum of people that might be affected. This takes about two minutes I think.
	We got a lot of work to do. That's what my email looks like every morning. Tired of it. What I didn't talk about are the sort of the what's next of the organization. Maybe that's something for conversation, but what I'd really like to do, especially with so many friends here and so much brainpower in the room, is rather than just do the traditional Q&A and harp on the same things you've all heard from me before, I'd rather take this to sort of an un-conference session. By that what I mean is that I'd like to invite, of course, if you have questions for me I'll do my best, but to respond to each other's questions and comments as well. The only rule in that scenario is one conversation at a time. I'll kind of moderate, but I want to know how you think what we can do to stop this. I want to know what you think of what we're doing, what might be right, what might be wrong, room for improvement.
	A good way to start this, a lot of you know each other, of course, but I just want to point out that two of my primary partners are in the room, Tara Murtha and Tom Kelly over here, embarrassed that I'm pointing at them. Lee Smithey teaches the course I'm collaborating with. There is somebody who's talking about volunteering this summer who I don't know if she wants to be called out or not, but people can probably see me looking at her. Amy [Depearo 00:34:08] might be working with us a little bit. Aaron Moser right here worked with us last summer, and there is some students from the class that we're working with, and lots of other smart people in the room. What do you think?
Lee Smithey:	Thanks so much for coming.
Jim MacMillan:	No, come on over. Thanks everybody.