I’m in Los Angeles attending the Beyond Broadcast 2009 conference at USC Annenberg School of Communication. I had a chance to learn more about the school yesterday and see how the broadcast and multimedia programs work at the school. Today I’m looking forward to learning more about how others use new media to reach the public.
The highlight so far was enjoying the opening keynote speech from Henry Jenkins. He spoke about his definition of “civic media” and the changing media landscape. I enjoyed hearing what he had to say about the changing directions of citizen journalism and public media. I took away many thoughts and ideas I’ve had but may not have fully verbalized. I look forward to even more great conversations and ideas to develop across the next two days!
Okay — I am searching for the best ways I can help my students find journalism jobs in this challenging economy. And one of my former students, Ted Arthur, is still looking and has put together one of the more creative ways to show off his portfolio. I highly recommend watching this… But it works even better if you watch it on his website.
SUPER creative. I’m so proud of Ted and I would hate to watch him leave the industry before he gets to jump in and use his talents to the fullest!! Please share his link! Contact him if you’re interested. Contact me if you want to know more. Do you know of a journalist looking for a job? How are they trying to get the word out creatively? Let’s all work together and help these folks find a great opportunity!
With the end of my fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute, I’m transitioning back into a full time role in my newsroom, KOMU-TV and KOMU.com. As part of this transition, I’m taking on new roles as a morning editor in charge of our morning assignments and online initiatives. In many ways, I’m putting my money where my mouth is… I’m working on finding ways to get my day turn reporters to think beyond the original broadcast goal of reporting for the morning, noon, 5, 6 or 10 newscasts. That’s not how things work anymore. My general assignment reporters will be expected to tweet, send cellphone photos, email information directly to the newsroom. It requires a new mindset. It doesn’t require many different rules of video or still image editing or even the tenets of being a journalist. It just requires a wider scope of focus when you are collecting information.
I will try as hard as I can to chronicle this process. But I also realize that my returning focus to daily work in the newsroom will make it pretty hard to blog more often. But I will do my very best! And if you’ve seen success in using twitter and other mobile tools on a daily basis in your newsroom, please share it with me!!
I just wrapped up a pretty great conversation with Poynter online where we talked about the future of journalism. what’s going on with it and ways we might be able to change the way students and professors learn. I’d love your input — leave comments in the chat or on this blog!!
After working on a number of projects in the past year and trying to grapple with the lessons I’ve learned… I’ve learned about the importance of teaching and developing a knowledge of growing and fostering communities. So I have this need to bring the lessons I’ve learned into the classroom and find ways to extend it — teach journalists how to cultivate and grow communities, use the tools to deliver information and listen to people.
I’d love a range of people to participate — a few people responded to my blog post, others left messages on my facebook page, some send me thoughts over Twitter. This may be a great spot to bring all of those thoughts together in one place. So please feel free to join in tomorrow, May 14 at 1pm ET.
I was asked to present my experience at the Reynolds Journalism Institute as a member of the first class of fellows. As a faculty fellow, I was able to spend a lot of time working, thinking and trying to institute my lessons learned with my students and my newsroom at KOMU.
Five minutes.
I wish I could really summarize this experience in five minutes. But since I have five minutes, I’m going to focus on how I grew and changed my goals. I first focused on how newsrooms can collaborate. It’s still important… But I learned during this time that even if I find the most amazing way to bring multiple newsrooms together with the help of technology, it isn’t worth the effort if people don’t use the information. That’s why I moved to the most important word for my life as a journalist and as a journalism professor:
Community.
We need to find ways to teach our journalism students and our industry how to respect the process and work it takes to build community. This is crucial as more people turn to journalists for their personal skills and abilities – it’s very possible they aren’t going to them because of their newsroom. We need to be open, honest and connected. Hopefully I can search for ways to share this knowledge so we can all use the great skills of the journalism profession in this new socially connected world.
I have always trusted that higher ed will be a leader in how journalism will look in the future. There are so few environments where you can experiment and push ideas forward like a higher ed environment. The problem: Higher ed runs in committees. Agile changes are rare.
So the Missouri School of Journalism is spending a lot of time talking about how we can be more agile. Should it be focused on a change in curriculum? Should it be a change in focus for the faculty? Should we move forward with more partnerships with the journalism industry? Should the journalism school work on more interdisciplinary partnerships?
So I’m trying to take some time to envision the future and what kind of faculty structure would change the way we teach. What would you do if you had a blank slate and the chance to teach journalism?
I’m about to speak to a group of people attending the regional SPJ conference about making a good impression online. Here’s the slides… I’d love your thoughts about how you present yourself – or how you look at possible employees when you are searching online.
I love to follow trends and as I dig deeper into the many ways to use social media in the news business, the more interesting it is to watch trends in this quickly changing world. The big talk I’m seeing right now is the difference between mindcasting and lifecasting.
Mindcasting is when you broadcast what’s on your mind. This blog post is a mindcast. I’m typing out my thoughts on these two different styles of social communication. A lot of journalism professionals who are looking at the future of the industry tend to mindcast. They share links and tips and ideas about what is happing to the profession of journalism. Lifecasting is broadcasting what you’re doing in your life. If you are at the gas station, you mention how you’re filling up the tank. If you’re in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, you might mention how you’re not looking forward to stepping onto the scale when the nurse calls you into the examination room. A person who lifecasts talks about the day to day activities in their life. Usually you’ll see these two styles in many different forms on Twitter.
That made me think about how I tweet. I thought about it a lot especially after I got blasted by a person who has been in the broadcast profession for a very long time. He complained about how I tweet. He complained about how I tweet about going to the grocery store (which I actually do on a very rare occasion). I told him he could stop following me and not need to worry about my tweets. But he just kept complaining. What I couldn’t get him to understand was the fact that what I write on Twitter is something he can choose to read or not read. That’s the great thing about the microblog experience. You can choose to read and you can choose to not read. It’s much easier than deciding to unfriend a person on Facebook. A Twitter stream is just a Twitter stream. You don’t loose any other connection with that person. If you follow them on Facebook, you also lose all of that person’s contact information. If you unfollow on Twitter, you just don’t “listen” to that person’s little comments – mundane or non-mundane.
The interaction with this person made me realize that I use Twitter with a combination of mindcasting and lifecasting. I have a bunch of followers who seem to be okay with that style… And I had to think about what is appropriate for a journalist. If I was working in a more traditional newsroom, would I tweet differently? I doubt it. I think the items I tweet about show the many facets of my life: journalism, newsroom management, higher education, technology, parenting, parenting a child with physical challenges, owning a dog, running and exercise, marriage, and you know – sometimes it’s about grocery shopping. It makes me real. It shows the reality of being a journalist who is more than just a journalist. We’re all like that… Or at least, we all try to expand our life beyond work.
I’d be curious to hear what you think – in a mindcasting or lifecasting way.
As I get closer to the end of this year’s RTNDA conference (soon to become RTDNA – Radio Television Digital News Association), I am leaving with a lot of topics that I would like to think about more.
First, I was confronted by a long time journalist who basically yelled at me for my Twitter presence. I was told that he had no interest in when I go to the grocery store and that I should get out of his face with all of my updates.
I told him that he can stop following me and he’ll never know another special moment in my life. But that didn’t seem to calm him. I got him pretty bothered and it made me wonder if more of the older journalism leaders have this kind of attitude even though I’ve offered to explain how this tool actually works or attempts to work with journalists. So I shook it off and moved on. There is a super simple solution if he wanted: Just don’t follow me and he’ll never worry about a single thing.
Another issue: Tools. I love to talk about the tools I use to get great work done to connect with my community or to enhance the tools I’m already using (like Facebook and Twitter). I need to write a full post with video and explainers on the most popular tools out there.
Also, it would be great to get a better idea what news directors and other hiring managers want from job hunting journalists. Do they want to see a DVD of work? Will a website suffice? (Probably not since there are still newsrooms where the internet connection isn’t fast enough) I’d like to interview more managers out there and get a better idea of what’s really going on.
Another random thought – RTNDA is the first conference I’ve attended this entire year where I felt like I was working with people who have a common goal: Help our industry. There are people who actually feel the way I do without feeling that need for constant self-promoting. There are people who want to help the broadcast industry continue to grow, learn and succeed. I’m relieved. I was starting to think I was the only naive person out there who just cared a lot and wanted to help find solutions and change for our industry!
