It’s summer break. I taught during the first half of the summer session and took a FANTASTIC vacation with the family. I followed that up with a not-so-fantastic knee surgery to reconstruct my left ACL and meniscus. (Not fun.)

So I’m finally emerging from the fog of vacation and knee pain medication.

I need to focus.

I returned to my newsroom with a lot of focus on. Our newsroom attempted to launch an updated CMS and it didn’t go as planned. Many CMS launches happen that way. I’m trying to be patient and not freak out – since I’m not able to control the situation. But I have to retrain hundreds of students. The hardest part is the rules are changing on a regular basis until we get a handle on what works best for the system. Luckily our entire newsroom how-to guides are built into a wiki-structure so any of my employees can help me update the many changes. While I try to keep up with these challenges, I still have daily assignment desk duties where I need to help manage our general assignment reporters, make sure they tweet, answer questions and get stories from callers and try to keep up with conversations on Twitter and Facebook.

I need to focus.

My job requires me to focus on so many tasks at the same time, I’m losing focus. I started using CoTweet to keep up with all of our reporters and anchors to keep a constantly updated Twitter feed. I’m now looking at tools like Seesmic and Hootsuite so I can do the same oversight with our Facebook page at the same time. So far, none of the tools I’ve found meet all of my needs. And it needs to help me stay focused.

I’d love to hear from others who are finding tools that help coordinate and focus the many things we have to do at the same time these days.

In the past year, I was able to build interaction with our page and take the number of “fans” (now they people who clicked “like”) up from 250 to 1330. It is not very large, but a nice start. I expected younger, more digital news consumers to participate. But in the end, I’ve found people 30 and older are more likely to comment. They are also more likely to share photos and stories with our Ning network. But on slower news days, the interaction stops. Also, very sunny and nice days slow down the conversations as well. It makes sense.

But I didn’t really understand Facebook interaction and its potential until I took my mom blog about my daughter to Facebook. I invited people I knew to “like” it. Then I started adding little stories that would never make it to the blog. I shared and met and created better online relationships with people I know and don’t know. In two weeks, it has boosted the blog’s site traffic by 100 percent. Readership time increased by more than a minute per visit. I think it’s fascinating.

On our news page, when we link to our site, it boosts traffic. But I have found building a relationship with our news readers are not as easy as it has been on Twitter. Our news users visit and maybe comment but there is little community I seem to be able to build there. It may be my fault. It may be our market. Maybe I just haven’t found the right way to take full advantage of the Facebook experience. But when I work with my mom blog page, there is consistent interaction. There are people who have liked the page who have never met me or my daughter. There are people who made new connections with us and the website that would have never happened without the Facebook experience.

With these positive experiences, I’m trying to find ways to take my new knowledge of Facebook page success and move it to our newsroom’s page. I added my name to our news page’s info box to try and add transparency to the “wizard behind the screen” feeling a Facebook page can give. I try to not over post, but worry about days when we under post. I have not given many people access to our Facebook page. I don’t have a tool that helps me manage access like CoTweet which I use to manage our many, many KOMU Twitter reporters. I’d love to hear other ideas out there.

I have had a chance to get involved in great conversations about privacy as well. A long time ago, privacy was easier. The majority of our actions were behind closed doors and they stayed there. Work activity stayed at work. Home life stayed at home. But with the ease of sharing and communicating, we are all much more connected. That means we are also a lot loss private. So what is privacy now?

I am okay with parents at my kids’ schools knowing that we spend a lot of time participating in sports and other after school activities, but I wouldn’t be happy if Nike and LL Bean knew about it without my permission because I talked about hiking boots or a soccer game on Facebook. I get creeped out any time strange businesses try to tweet me about services just because I mentioned server space on Twitter. But I know every word I see and every action I mention on Twitter is public. I’m more aware and I’m careful with what I say in that social space. So I’m learning about a new level of privacy. And I think many people are starting to realize there’s a new level of privacy that we may not have control over.

That’s why the changes in Facebook’s privacy structure scared a lot of people. I’m fascinated with the Like Button site… and I have shown it to many people who were shocked by how easy it was to see what our Facebook friends “like.” I added the “like” buttons to this blog and my mommy blogs. But now I feel like I may have made an error jumping into the “like” craze so quickly. Am I invading my readers’ privacy? My fascination may be a privacy invasion to another person.

I have not decided where I stand in my opinion about Facebook. I’m deeply involved in that space. I joined in 2005, I teach my students how to use it as a tool to connect with my newsroom’s audience and how to stay in touch with potential contacts that can help get them jobs someday. I use it to link to people I would never stay in touch with but Facebook makes it possible. I do feel a bit used by the Facebook leaders. But I also feel like I am willing to give up some privacy for the service it provides… I’m just not sure Facebook is transparent enough about what privacy I’m giving up by using the site. Have you seen the New York Times graphic that shows all 170 steps to customize your privacy? Wow.

Where does the news business play in all of this? Well, we need to understand how the general public feels about privacy. The challenge right now is each person has a very different opinion about privacy. Our audience/readers/viewers/whatever you want to label people who consume information you produce are in the middle of such an amazing shift of privacy that we are serving them while privacy expectations range from “Not in my house” to “Please make sure you tell me before you share anything to advertisers” to “Aw heck, I don’t mind.” We need to be mindful. We need to participate in social spaces while being aware of these many different perspectives. We need to be as transparent as possible. We CANNOT do what Facebook is doing. We have to be open at every step. As Dana Boyd wrote as a follow up to yesterday’s blog post, Facebook is a utility. Journalism is a service. There’s a difference there. I think it’s an important one. And it’s a conversation that we need to talk about a lot. And Facebook is just one element of a much larger shift in our culture.

(Image courtesy of Horia Varlan‘s Flickr page)

I keeping thinking back to Kent Fischer who was at the peak of beat blogging for the Dallas Morning News‘ Dallas ISD Blog – the paper’s beat blog on the city’s public school district. Last year he announced he was leaving because he didn’t feel the newspaper industry was stable enough for his comfort. The site beatblogging.org quoted him saying:

“But the news business no longer provides stability or financial security. If I was young and single and didn’t have two kids under 3 and no mortgage … I’d probably stick around to see how this all ends. But I got all those things and more. So, I’m out…”

Often I talk to people in this industry and we talk about our dreams. It often revolves around the idea that we would work in an untraditional environment where we can try and fail or succeed until we find a way to do good work while making enough money for those shelter, clothing and food needs. But if I was offered a chance to experiment with a new career in an unsure economic environment, I’d probably say no. I have a job that lets me play with technology a bit while working in a traditional news environment AND I can make enough consistent money to pay for most of our core needs. Jumping away from that is scary.

So who gets to play with experimental news environments? Who gets to come up with the greatest and newest ideas and put them into fruition?

It’s those people Kent Fischer talks about who aren’t tied down to responsibilities.

I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of these people. Most often they are men in their mid to late 20′s who were able to get enough of an investment to launch a small (or big) idea while being able to at least survive with shelter, clothing and some food. Most of these guys are skinny mind you. Either way. They have my dream. They’re brave enough to jump outside the norm and try their hardest to make something work for this industry that we love.

I guess I’m not brave. I can talk a great talk and I’ve tried to take a lot of my ideas into my traditional environment. But if I really walked the walk, wouldn’t I jump and try something new?

I’m not sure.

I know I have the itch to expand into unknown directions. The more I think and try to change my traditional setting, I know more “new” settings need to be created before we all know what is really going to happen to journalism. But I also know my kids need their piano, swimming, baseball, dance, soccer, football… Whatever. And that may keep me away from any of the real industry changes.

Is this fair? Are there solutions? Who can step forward and help big thinkers like me who want to take action, make a difference and make sure I have healthcare for my family? If someone knows, sign me up.

UPDATE: I have heard from a number of current soon-to-graduate students who take this blog as a negative and scary outlook as they head into their career. Please don’t think of it this way. Back when I graduated innovation was me trying to bring a TV newsroom to work with a local newspaper. Now innovation is beyond my wildest imagination. Your imagination is open to do anything and everything. Take this time right out of school to make a change, save the art of journalism in this changing world. Be strong, be brave and have fun.

We’ll see how it goes, but this is just the first one. I’m hoping to add more branding with the support of the Gowalla team. After that, I hope to add a walking tour of the local towns in our viewing areas.

I’ve also blogged about how I hope to launch a Newbie Tour – a trip that focuses on all of the locations in Columbia, MO that you should visit to help you feel like a local in town.

I love blogs. I blog about blogs… I help people launch blogs. I periodically think about joining the BlogHer network and market my daughter’s blog. But for four years, I’ve run my class through an old Dreamweaver template I created in the summer of 2006.

This morning I went in to work at 4 a.m. to help oversee possible school closures (I did the same three days in a row last week). The school closings were slow so I dropped another WordPress install into my server and decided to try and build a class page built in a blog theme. I ended up with this. As I built it, I decided that I would post a blog post that reviews the class. It was fun… and it was really cool to see how my class discussion floated out into Twitter and Buzz and I was able to bring it all together.

Ahhhh. Blogs.

How early is too early to worry about a person’s brand? If you search for my kids, you’ll find a picture of my son from the local newspaper and nothing about my daughter unless you know the name of her blog. In this searchable and cached world, how early do we need to worry? Do I just spend too much time talking about branding and parenting in separate venues that I’m merging these two topics because I’m obsessed? I just thought I’d throw it out there. I might be off topic for this blog but at the same time I wonder if I’m on the right track.

I also learned about a website called Prezi today. I’m clearly behind the ball on this one. But the site created a new free version for students and faculty to use for presentations. I jumped in, created an account and created this step by step process that explains how to succeed in my class:

I also have an interesting challenge with my students. We’re all going to look for ways to take GPS-based games and find ways to bring news into those games. Right now I’m a fan of foursquare and I’ve been able to finally play it in my town when the site opened up to any location. (It used to only let you play in certain cities) I’m curious to see how news can get involved in games. Could we insert historical or newsworthy information about various locations? I’m curious and I’m planning on looking into that.

We have a whole bunch of projects to work on and I look forward to sharing the progress we make as the semester continues.