The Many: A Conversation Across Divides is the next Big Thing from Spaceship Media. A national conversation of women across political lines, The Many was  featured last week in Nieman Journalism Lab. Us being us, we took the article’s headline as a challenge worth meeting: Can 5,000 strangers have a productive Facebook dialogue? Spaceship Media is about to try. Click here for the article.

 

As Spaceship Media’s first full year of operation comes to a close, we’re looking back—at the accomplishments, the partnerships, the progress. We started with a theory and a sketch of a plan, piloting our model with a grant-funded project that brought high school students of color together with police officers in Alameda, California. Thank you to Bill Schaff and Qiuming Hay for supporting that effort.

We launched in earnest the day after the 2016 general election, pitching Michelle Holmes from the Alabama Media Group a national, cross-political-lines conversation. That became Talking Politics. We owe Michelle, AL.com’s vice president of content, a deep debt of gratitude for betting on our untested idea, and for her guidance and support ever since.

We are thankful to the team at the JSK Journalism Fellowships at Stanford and the Jim Bettinger News Innovation Fund for sponsoring a project on immigration that we conducted in partnership with Univision and Digital First Media (Thanks, Tom Bray, for being a champion of that work.)

Linda Miller, director of network journalism and inclusion at Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, became another advocate and brought us on board that venerable radio station for a project about agriculture and the future of food. We returned to Alabama for a project about race and the achievement gap, and worked with The Seattle Times on a conversation about communication between educators and the families of students of color.

We’re looking forward to work in the new year that will take us to Georgia, Australia, Pennsylvania—and beyond :)