Entries Tagged 'Brain dump' ↓

In my ongoing quest to help find ways to assist local newsrooms in saving money and continuing good journalism, I’m trying to take full advantage of my time as a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow. So far I was able to complete a major collaborative effort between four newsrooms on election night and three newsrooms leading up to the election. I was able to help put together a massive webcast and community party to help bring a closer connection between the institute and Columbia, MO. I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to expand and enhance the connection between RJI and the Missouri School of Journalism faculty and students. I’ve also worked on trying to build new connections between the two university entities and businesses that can really help our industry. I have students who are wrapping up a project with CBS Mobile and CBS interactive (which is currently going through a merger with CNET). I’m always looking for new ways to connect with Adobe and Apple. I’m playing with a number of open source CMS to find a solution for my journalistic needs.

But that isn’t enough. I learned a lot in our previous Smart Decision 08 project. I don’t want to lose momentum… So I’m working on creating a way to bubble up great journalism in the thick of the failing economy. I’d like to launch a collaborative effort based on the economy and try to become a central hub of information and collaboration in a time of uncertainty and need. Here are my initial thoughts that have come through many meetings and late noodling before I fall asleep at night:

1) This site needs to launch soon - I’m thinking about building a blog system (possibly WordPress?) at first and then consider building something more extensive in Drupal as our needs grow.
2) I’d like to launch it by asking as many people in the mid-Missouri area to tell us (the journalists) what is important to them. I want them to lead us towards the stories we need to tell.
3) This could be a great opportunity to team up with some of the journalism students who are in the earlier classes. They could help gather simple evergreen information that can help make the site really helpful for our community
4) I need to play with my own server space until the university is willing to open up a server space outside of our firewall that allows us to play with open source platforms. I’ve said this for at least two years. I haven’t won this battle yet.

While I try to noodle on these ideas, I’m packing for a big family trip to Florida so I can see my parents and enjoy the beach. I realize I never brain dump enough on this blog and it will be my resolution next year to share my thoughts more often and openly as I try to make the most out of my fellowship time.

At the same time, I hope I can use my university knowledge to help guide my fellow fellows Jane Stevens and Matt Thompson’s projects into the future beyond their fellowship. It would be wonderful to take advantage of their hard work and help find ways to institutionalize their ideas into the workflow of our newsrooms. It’s going to be an amazing four months. At the same time I hope to continue to work with my other fellow fellows (Bill Densmore and Mike Fancher) and faculty fellow (Margaret Duffy) to take full advantage of all of our amazing projects!

I’ve talked about social media here and in many different presentations at the Missouri School of Journalism, conferences and training seminars. I feel like all of my ramblings are a little more legitimate as more and more journalists debate on whether these trends are good or bad. Obviously I plant myself into the camp that this is good.

Feel free to view my PowerPoint slideshow.

Twitter isnt the end-all be-all for journalism, but I do see it as a growing news tool. The trick, you need to be in there to understand how it works. For the first time, I recommended to all of my students that they should join a few social networks and learn how they work. I started out in Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Motionbox, Vimeo (I could go on) for my personal needs online and I’ve transitioned that use into ways I can use them professionally. You cannot jump in and think you know how it works. That’s how you end up finding reports like this one. It is so easy to fall into a culture of fear. Journalists shouldn’t allow themselves to do that. I think we should act like journalists, investigate these tools and see how they can be helpful. People are using them. Let’s see how we can use them to our advantage to deliver better news to our markets.

Now I’ll try to stop ranting.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Twitter lately… Heck, a lot of my posts have been about Twitter since I started this nerd blog. But I have to say, Twitter came into its own this week due to the tragedy in Mumbai. It’s been a major focus since the attacks started Wednesday and many media outlets have noticed.

CNN: “Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai”
Forbes: “Mumbai: Twitter’s Moment”
Reuters: “Blogs feed information frenzy on Mumbai attacks”
ABC News: “Social Media a Lifeline, Also a Threat?”
CBS News: “Web a Reliable Resource in Mumbai Madness”
France 24: “Citizen journalism offers intimate view of Mumbai attacks”
The Guardian: “Twitter comes of age with fast reports from the ground in Mumbai”
The Times of India: “Twittering & blogging about terror”
New York Times: “Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks”

It’s fascinating to see how people flocked to share information onto Twitter and then watch how some of the more mainstream media tried to explain it. Amy Gahran (who is a consultant and works at Poynter) was kind to speak to a number of these media outlets to explain how information needs to be filtered. She tried to explain how social media is a news source and not an evil threat. Unfortunately, some outlets hear that call, others continue to play to the culture of fear. (Note the title of the ABC news article) She wrote a great piece for Poynter on how to be a responsible tweeter.

In reading the many articles online and watching the conversations on Twitter, I’ve come to a couple conclusions on why Twitter can be a wonderful news source for all of us to use during developing news. First, you can’t understand or rely on information from Twitter without becoming a part of the Twitter community. It’s very hard to trust or understand the information found on there unless you’ve been there long enough to build a community and a reliable chunk of people you follow. I knew about Sarah Palin’s nomination hours before it went puplic. My husband thought I was crazy to bring it up. I knew about the earthquake in China and the kind of damage it was causing before there were full accounts on the international media outlets. I knew about developments of smaller stories across the country because I follow people I trust and I’ve spent enough time following them that I knew what they are experts in. If a mom blogger suddenly started tweeting with financial tips, I would question that information unless she happens to be a day trader and a mom blogger (it can happen).

Second, I consider Twitter like how I work with scanners in a newsroom. When there is scanner squawk during breaking news (such as the #Mumbai hashtag) often it’s correct information… but you have to consider the source and confirm it. Twitter can be more reliable considering if you’ve been there a while you already know your sources, background and reliability. When there’s breaking news, you can follow it through a hashtag but confirm and do follow up with the people you follow.

I am visiting my in-laws for the holidays when I happened to hop onto Twitter this afternoon. That’s when I discovered the horrible news about an attack at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, India. But as I continued to watch the chatter on Twitter, the situation got worse. More attacks at the Taj Hotel and word attackers were taking people with passports from the US and the UK. Talk of grenade attacks and suddenly a list of people who were in Mumbai emerged. It was amazing to suddenly find people who were in the city give their perspective. I was almost immediately hooked to the Twitter search page where people were using the #mumbai tag with updates on the situation. At some points thousands of new posts would appear in a matter of seconds.

The most fascinating information emerging came from a Twitter user named Vinu. CNN reports his full name is Vinukumar Ranganathan. He had seen the damage first-hand. Many of the explosions happened a couple of blocks from his home. Along with his tweets, he started to upload dozens of photos he took while he was outside. While I read his writing and looked at his pictures, I noticed him comment that CNN had seen his tweets and wanted to talk to him on the air. His phone interview and his photos emerged on that network. His photos can be found online interspersed with AP and Getty Images on CNN.com. CNN started actively recruiting first-hand information through social networks and I suddenly realized the social network of news is going mainstream. It’s fascinating.

While I was having this awesome social media moment, a family member talked to me skeptically about how it was possible I could know so much about what was happening without following a “real” news source. I feel I was getting better and more accurate information following Twitter than anywhere else. Many of the facts I learned emerged 10 minutes, even an hour later through CNN or other outlets. Along with the Twitter feed, a help blog emerged and a wiki that was keeping up with the developments very closely. You can even follow Twitter real-time and within a 15 mile radius of Mumbai. It’s incredible how the world can combine to deliver awesome information.

UPDATE: A nice list of social networks used during this developing story can be found on Poynter’s website and here.

Of all the things I do online, I’ve found this blog is the one that gets the least amount of attention. It’s too bad since it’s the one place where I can really think about my career and the many projects I work on. This summer was not boring. I helped a group of students blog from Beijing while they worked for the public relations arm of the Olympics. They blogged about their experiences for two months in China. From time to time they also shared news reports that I used on the air. It’s so cool to be able to share video from across the globe so easily.

I’ve thought a lot about why I don’t seem to blog enough in this space and I realized why — I spend a lot more time on Twitter and Facebook. It’s a way I share and communicate my thoughts and ideas. But I’ve pondered over whether that is productive or not. To me, Facebook is more personal and not as professional (although I try to keep things relatively professional on my page). Twitter is a great space to share and communicate with professionals AND people with similar interests outside of work. I am able to learn about so many things and share many thoughts in a quick manner. That simplicity allows me to stay in touch and see what is important to so many people compared to the time it would take to read each person’s blog posts. But that got me thinking about this blog. Twitter seems so fleeting. The information shared is brief and often not a full thought. Blogs allow those ideas to flesh out and breathe.

I asked around Twitter to see how many other people have noticed a decrease in their blogging - and many consistent Twitter members agreed their blogging has taken a hit. It makes me think that I should try harder to break free of the 140 character discussions and share my thoughts here. I’m sure someone else would shudder when I say this, but I think blogging is more permanent. It’s a distinct record of thoughts from a moment in time. I should try to commit to spending more time here!

I have some big changes as a new semester starts at the Missouri School of Journalism. For this school year, I have a chance to focus on some pet projects and less time in the newsroom. I’m not leaving it completely, but I will be able to spend more time on Smart Decision 2008. I have some big ideas and I hope to be able to share those big ideas here soon.

I’m trying something a little different (don’t I always?). The Missouri School of Journalism is about to celebrate its centennial in September and dedicate the new Reynolds Journalism Institute building. There will be thousands of people attending this event. Most of these folks will be members of the journalism school’s alumni. If they’re anything like me, they want to talk. They want to share. They have experience that will benefit one or more people. There will be opportunities for meetings and presentations but there is no way each person will be able to share all of their knowledge.So I thought about creating kiosks that give anyone the chance to post thoughts and lessons about their careers or memories of the journalism school. Leading up to that idea, I set up a YouTube channel to encourage video posts with those thoughts. There has been some promotion through email, but not much and there’s been no video posts added since we set the channel up. It makes me sad and I wonder how the heck I can get people involved. Is it because I’m targeting an age group that just doesn’t do YouTube? Or is it because I’m working with YouTube? The channel concept removes the content away from the “other” content on the site and to me adds legitimacy to the product. But maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to hear thoughts on this one! Heck, even better… Click here and post thoughts for the centennial!

Aggregation. It’s a big focus of my life these days. I’m looking for easy ways to collect information and share it with the general public. At the same time, I’m trying to find ways to collect the websites and social networks I visit and aggregate it into one place. That’s why I’m curious to see how Google’s Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace’s dataportability may help play in this goal to link everything into one location on the Internet.

I look at this on two levels: How can it work for me and how can it work for my news website.

For me, I love social networking. I love chatting, learning and sharing. It’s kind of obvious from my previous posts. But I think it’s so cool to be able to share and see different perspectives from people I trust. It’s the same idea as having a get together with your friends - but I know I’m not alone when I say many of my friends live across the country. We move around a lot! Not to mention, my job has given me the chance to meet really cool and smart people in all kinds of locations. Social networking lets me stay in touch in ways that writing a letter and sending it in the mail can’t do. And in a slightly self-centered way, it gives me a chance to know what my friends are doing after years of them reading my family blogs and never leaving comments! They know all about me but I don’t know a thing about their most recent updates.

On the professional side of things, I want my news product used by my market! So that’s why I tried an aggregated website sharing the news from KOMU.com, the local NPR newsroom and a local newspaper as a test. We’re aggregating all of our election-themed news and sharing it into the SmartDecision08.com website. This is a way to create a one-stop information hub on the election season in Missouri, specifically mid-Missouri. I don’t have enough funding to make it function as well as I would like it to function, but it is deep. There is so much information and it’s delivered in a way that can really let a news and political information consumer learn a lot. I want to find ways to help collect information and give people the change to socially learn and share on this kind of level. Take news and make it personal. That’s been my goal for years. It’s so cool to see how today’s technology is reaching the concepts I thought about a long time ago.

I am trying out a new site called blippr.com - it gives you a way to socially share the things that entertain you: books, movies, music and games. It’s a level of social networking I haven’t really participated in before. Facebook has all kinds of options that include those items, but blippr seems to have a very clean, concise and non-gimmicky way to accomplish sharing entertainment reviews. It connects to facebook and twitter and friend feed so the idea is to use it as an aggregator of sorts to collect and share your likes and dislikes within the products you already use. I think that’s where everything is headed. I just wish I could wrap my head around how we can use these kinds of tools and still help inform online consumers the news they want and possibly need to know to participate in the non-computer based world where they live. I would have something really cool if I had money and programmers who would put up with my constant brain dumps!

I’m deep inside many different social networking tools. I use them personally in order to see how useful they are for my job. If it’s useful for my day to day life, then there may be a great reason for my newsroom to share its information using those tools. A year ago I got into Twitter, but no one else in my circle got into it so I left. I jumped back in last fall and it’s really picked up steam. Now I’m trying to think of ways these short messages can be helpful for my job and I’ve enjoyed what I can talk about in my life. Fun products like Tweetstats can show off what I talk about the most (like kids, work, meetings, newsroom). I spend a lot of time playing with these tools and thinking big — on a personal and professional level. I blog on Wordpress and Blogger, I tweet on Twitter, I post pictures on Flickr, I create “scrapbooks” on Scrapblog, I co-moderate a Yahoo group, I connect with people on LinkedIn and Facebook. I oversee a news website and an election website. I text, I surf the web from my phone. It’s a hell of a juggle and someday someone is going to find a way to merge all of these products and concepts that offer a connection into one cellphone based tool. I hope I’ll be able to join in and help with the creation of those tools. It wasn’t that long ago when my boss and I were talking about how he would love to see a small handheld video player — Oh you know, like a video iPod? I’m visioning the world’s most interactive iPhone where you can type, talk or post without any effort. That will be super cool. Who knows. Maybe’s Google’s Friend Connect will do that… When it goes live (and it’s rumored to launch today). This could have major implications on how to help a standard website (like komu.com) connect with its audience in a more social way. (The Washington Post explains)

…be an automatic system that can take my blog thoughts out of my brain and post them for me so I can get all the other work done!

I’m constantly looking for a way to guide anyone into contributing to good journalism. It’s been my goal for a long time. It should be easy for any person to learn about their community and then pitch in on what they know. Here’s a really interesting article about how the tide is turning.I’ve always felt that journalists can help deliver information better, but everyone should be able to contribute. This article explains the trend very well: “In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web.” It went on to talk about how many of the open source tools out there are too big and too time consuming. Journalists can help mashup that information for the viewer. (I chose the word mashup, not the writer of that article) I think it’s really interesting.I got to meet one of the creators of the EPIC 2014 project from back in 2002. They recently came up with EPIC 2015. It’s fun to speculate about what is going to happen to the journalism industry — and just the overall concept of information sharing and delivery. For now, I’m going to continue to try to deliver and share and help the public do the same. Trying to be realistic is not as fun as just speculating.