From the start, our team tried to learn and create without having access to analytical data that can show us the potential financial opportunity that hides inside social media-based audiences. U_News anchor, Sarah Hill, has steadily grown as a powerhouse of interactivity with an online and on air audience. If you’ve ever watched her juggle an on air segment and casually speak with a Google+ hangout during sound bites and commercial segments, you’ll see an incredible ease to communicate with two different news audiences. That ease doesn’t exist in the sales world. At least not yet. How can we take the power of her 900,000+ circles inside Google+ and translate that into funding for our news station? We don’t have answers just yet.

In January, the hour long U_News broadcast was moved from 4pm to 11am and moved to a 30 minute format. The interactivity and show content remained similar. But it wasn’t enough of a change for our traditional audience. Instead of canceling the show, we’re making more changes. KOMU plans to scale back on how we present interactivity in a way our audience is more willing to accept. U_News’ major changes are the show’s time (noon), name and format changes to boost its professionalism. The dominance of social media will be toned down. But it isn’t canceled and we will continue to use Google+ and other social media tools. This is partly the challenge of bringing new delivery to a traditional space. It’s also proof of the challenge of creating audience in new ways but not having the ability to measure the audience for sales to find non-traditional ways to fund the newscast.

The biggest lesson we’ve learned: When you try to launch new efforts on the news side of a broadcast environment, you need the sales side to also innovate.

Our efforts to bring more education and awareness to our market isn’t over. We will continue to share our skills with the community and encourage more participation in our market. So if you hear how KOMU’s interactive newscast was canceled, that’s wrong. It’s moving, it’s constantly changing and because I’m lucky to work here, we’ll continue to share the lessons we’re learning.

I’m lucky to work in a newsroom that is willing to take risks. I’m lucky to work in an industry that is trying to find ways to be flexible with an increasingly inflexible funding base. I’m also trying to learn how to better blend my skills with the growing entrepreneurial nature of the industry. Where do you balance your drive to do good journalism while seeking out funding in a traditional environment? Is the traditional newsroom more motivated to find non-traditional funding? If so, when it is right or wrong to cross the line of journalist versus sales? I’m not sure. So I’m hoping to keep track of how other broadcast stations are innovating and blending online and on air and finding ways to monetize. My favorite person of late is Matt Markovich at KOMO News in Seattle. He’s playing with live online broadcast and finding ways to gain sponsorship and an audience. It’s fun to watch and I hope KOMU will continue to experiment and report back what we’re learning.

At the same time, we aren’t backing away from the communities we’ve built and continue to build online. It may look different on air, but we will continue to learn, grow and help as journalism changes.

One of my favorite elements of Instagram is community. I’ve followed many people I know through Twitter and Facebook. But I’ve also found people just based on looking at who is liking my friends’ posts and different hashtags based on topics and regions. I’ve tried to create an Instagram community hashtag in my area (Often termed “igers.”)… but nothing has caught on just yet. My favorite igers are in Chicago. Check them out with the hashtag #igerschicago on Instagram or @igerschicago on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook. It’s a community that started as a hashtag on Instagram and has grown beyond the app. It’s pretty cool. (And the photos are awesome.)

Give it a try! You never know what kind of community you may discover or create!

In 2009, Facebook purchased FriendFeed. It was a way to keep watch of conversations across various platforms. I used it a bit and enjoyed it. This purchase made a lot of sense to me because Facebook was working on better aggregation of Facebook users. Just think of the many ways the Facebook news feed has changed in the last few years. The FriendFeed concept has led Facebook to include many third party apps into its feed.

In 2010, I discovered a cool app called Hot Potato. The guys who created the app were bouncing around the Austin Conference Center during SXSW. I loved the app. The idea was to provide a more private twitter-type conversation where you could converse quickly based on a topic or an event without overflowing your twitter feed. It was smart. I liked it. Before I could really like it, Facebook bought it. I realize this was the foundation to Facebook’s messenger system. I like messenger… but it still doesn’t meet all of my messaging needs.

I thought the purchase of Hot Potato was really smart. It was small and smart. Facebook snagged the technology at the right time: Before it got too popular. I looked forward to what Facebook would do. I was really happy for the Hot Potato developers.

The big app acquisitions continued in 2011. But my positive view started to change. There were two acquisitions that I felt ate up a product that was great, but Facebook didn’t use to its fullest.

It was clear in 2011 that group messaging was gaining in popularity so I thought I’d play with many of the group tools during SXSW. That was when I fell in love with Beluga. It was a great messaging service where you could have private conversations with a set of people. It would let you message the group and it would display your geolocation. I used it a lot during SXSW with my roommates and groups of people who I wanted to keep up with, but didn’t feel the need to physically follow around during the event. GroupMe is probably the closest tool that I’ve enjoyed since Beluga died, but that geolocation element was really great for me. So Facebook bought it up in the second half of 2011. The app disappeared and I had expected to see more of the Beluga features inside Facebook Messenger. I want Beluga back. I began to think Facebook was buying products up just to squash the competition, not enhance its current products. I hate it when that happens. (I take it personally when Snapfish bought up Motionbox and never made that technology available.)

And then there was the purchase of Gowalla. I LOVED that application. The badges I earned were beautiful eye candy and I enjoyed collecting items for my “passport.” (I even blogged about the ways newsrooms could use it.) It connected with Facebook really well. My check in’s not only showed up on Facebook, they showed up on my Facebook map. (Have you ever checked your Facebook map timeline? It’s kind of cool. It’s really cool if you used Gowalla.) The down side of the purchase? Facebook took all of my check-in history from Gowalla, but never returned my badges, stamps and pins from my long-term use of the app. I had built up a lot of my life story in there. It was fun and full of cool images. As Facebook ate up Gowalla, all of my cool collections disappeared.

So now Facebook has purchased Instagram. It’s an app I have used intensely for about a year but joined in 2010. It’s been a really wonderful community of pictures where you can talk to members and share using hashtags. I had planned to sit down and right a list of ways to connect using Instagram today since last week, Instagram opened the community to Android users. I have dozens of new friends inside the app and I had hoped to share my community building tips.

But before I write that post, I want to beg Facebook to keep Instagram intact. It’s one of the few communities where I’ve enjoyed sharing and loved the simplicity of it all. There’s a fabulous monthly photo challenge that started by a mom blogger last January and has grown each month. (I blogged about that topic on this blog.)

I get it. I really do. Just as Read Write Web wrote, this purchase is all about the investors. Many, many people were posting photos to Facebook through Instagram. The two started working better together recently. You can produce Instagram and Foursquare photo albums instead of just linking out to the app on separate websites. But I think there’s a bigger reason here. Google+ purchased Picnik so users could edit their photos inside the social network. Now, Facebook wants users to be able to “improve” their photos as well. This is a way to use technology to encourage more people to go to Facebook and post photos. This isn’t about the app. But I’m here to beg to keep the app alive. I don’t want to be forced to publish every Instagram photo to Facebook. I have 910 photos on Instagram. Many are also published to my Flickr account, some to Twitter and Facebook. But most are just inside my Instagram community and that’s the way I like it and I hope to keep it.

Google+ had me super excited when I watched its engagement at its launch last year. Since then, my newsroom has harnessed its vast power through video hangouts. We’re talking to people in our market and beyond about topics of the day live each day Monday through Friday. I love it. This week I signed up to check out On The Air – a tool that claims to be a bigger, more reaching concept for broadcasting webcam chats. I look forward to seeing how it works when it launches. Another site I’m checking out: Twylah. It takes your trending topics on Twitter and makes it into a personal brand page. I signed up for my page and plan to add my newsroom’s soon.

Today I’m talking to members of the New York Press Association. First, about my ongoing collection of free (and almost free) online tools for journalism. I try to update the list at least two or three times a year. (And I’m always happy to add more links if you see something you think should be included.) Second, I’m talking about why I think it’s worth your time to jump into new technology and explore. My tech curiosity made me the tech geek I am today. I love this stuff! I hope to encourage more journalist to learn to play and have fun when it comes to growing our skills as journalists!

For years I have bragged about the festival’s awesomeness. To me it’s like the Online News Association conference but with people who have similar interest across dozens and dozens and possibly hundreds of different career directions. The core interest in technology and innovation is similar across the board. I love that so much. Tools like Group Me made it easier to stay in touch with friends inside your already existing tribes: career path, friend history… heck I had a Group Me of people I only see during SXSW. Tools like these make it easier to stick within your comfort zone.

One tool that emerged during the festival that tries to make it easier to discovery serendipitous meetings through technology was Highlight. It shows you people you randomly passed by during the day and gives you a look at their background. I happened to be in rooms with fascinating people. It ranged from scientists and space engineers to reporters and authors. Highlight will tell you if you have similar interests based on your Facebook profile and connections. It was cool to discover people I’ve never met who are friends with my Facebook friends. I talked to a couple of people through the tool to say hi and introduce myself. (A passive introduction is by “highlighting” someone you might want to meet.) The challenge of actually talking face to face with people you’ve highlighted is the fact that by the time you have a moment to look at the app and see who are the interesting people in the area, they’ve already left and you have to go above and beyond effort to find a chance to meet this person face to face again. (Oh, and I continued my #PowerFriends power strip friend-maker. I love meeting people by sharing hashtag-based electricity.)

That’s why I kind of miss pre-app SXSW. (Yeah, Twitter existed… but Foursquare was just getting started three years ago! My how times have changed.) My best moments were and remain the random eye contact conversations in the hallway, while you charge your phone or wait to order a beverage at the bar. My favorite meetings have always happened this way and it happened again this year. I met brilliant librarians, filmmakers and leaders of popular social media tools that I love to use.

This tribal SXSW is probably going to continue. But I will focus on breaking through it and I highly recommend working outside of your comfort zone when attending a massive conference like this one. I tried very hard to balance the combination of sessions, serendipitous meetings and reunions. The more years I put under my belt and the larger this event gets, the harder it will be to keep my focus on new experiences. But for now, SXSW remains worth it to me.

What I didn’t expect was for my daughter to be born with a left arm that stopped just below her humerus bone. No elbow. No hand. I didn’t even know that could happen. So as I tried to wrap my brain around the idea of a child with a limb difference, I started to search for community.

I wanted to hear from other parents with similar experiences. I wanted to know what they did when they had a new child. How did they move past the thoughts of cultural fear and how to raise a child without feeling damaged just because of a missing body part or parts? I found an online Yahoo chat group. It was my first life line of knowledge. The whole time, I blogged. I had been a member of Facebook for about nine months before my daughter was born in December 2005. Pages didn’t exist. I didn’t have Twitter yet. But I knew I needed to find people to talk to. As I grew more comfortable as my daughter’s advocate, I felt more comfortable sharing the lessons I learned in to my online communities and my blog. Those lessons expanded onto Facebook and eventually Twitter (which I joined in 2007). I started blending the lessons I was learning from my mom world into my newsroom and classroom. Learning to converse on Twitter about my mom world helped me learn how to transition those skills professionally as a journalist. Eventually I blended my Twitter use into hashtag conversations. One hashtag is the core of an ongoing conversation in the course I teach at the Missouri School of Journalism. I help coordinate a hashtag community of journalists.

I added that Born Just Right Facebook page in 2010 because I was about to build a new helper arm with my daughter in Chicago and I wanted something easy to post updates. The mobile Facebook app has been pretty great for quite a while. I thought a new helper arm and live posting the process would encourage people to “like” it and keep me entertained during that slow process. It worked… and slowly the Facebook page has been as much if not more engaging than the blog itself. Facebook is already a space where people comment and share, so it isn’t hard for followers to contribute thoughts and posts on a Facebook blog page. Facebook posts are a huge driver for post when I’d share a link. The combination of search and the Facebook account for at least 60 percent of the traffic to my site. (which averages 7,000 to 10,000 views a month. It’s a small, but kind space.)

Fast forward to 2012 and not only are there communities for limb different adults, children and family members of those who are limb different… There are organizations popping up in forms of websites and social network pages to share stories and support left and right. I’m doing what I can to keep up with each day for about an hour after the kids go to bed so I can help my readers see what’s happening. All of these pop up communities are a big reason why I hope the tech community can work together with the special needs worlds to find better ways to communicate. The desire to find community and connect with others is deep when you’re in a special needs world. The support I found early (when there weren’t many spaces online) are why I feel informed, empowered and able to help advocate for my daughter and others. That’s why I’m really honored to have my Facebook page nominated for an About.com Special Needs Online Community Reader’s Choice Award. It’s so cool to get some recognition after years of engaging and connecting on many different online spaces. I don’t plan to stop but I do hope to continue to get better at it. I also appreciate that each moment of success on my personal pages teaches me lessons that can help me continue to improve the engagement experience on my newsroom’s social spaces.

But this is SXSW. I needed to share an even more specialized sector of my world. I decided to see if it was possible to blend my love of tech and social engagement with my love of the special needs communities.

And that’s exactly what I’m doing next month. I’m holding a session called Tech Unity Beyond the #SpecialNeeds Hashtag. Communities connecting on Twitter using the special needs hashtag is awesome… But there are other ways we can share. So many different sectors of the special needs world have their own circles. The challenge is, so many of these communities are discovering similar ways to help kids and adults succeed. The trick is getting the communication out there. It’s much easier said than done! So I’m calling EVERYONE who has a connection to the tech world or special needs world to come together and help us brainstorm. Spread the word, let me know if you can help. I would love to be able to share video perspectives or comments during the session. Here’s my YouTube video explaining the project:

Here’s what I am seeing: Broadcast journalism-focused students really understand how to broadcast content across multimedia platforms. But I think we need to teach the concept of engagement and listening earlier in the journalism school experience. I have a lot to do to try and encourage, teach and execute a comfortable engagement process for my young journalists to reach our news consumers. To me, engagement is why I got into this journalism business. The idea of connecting to the consumer and helping them better understand where they live and the decisions they make in life is thrilling. Technology makes that goal SO much more real than when I dreamed of it in the early 90′s. Broadcasting content inside social media is just the beginning. There are so many more ways to listen and learn after a newsroom shares information. One of my favorite ways to listen on social sites these days is a site called Kurrently. I stumbled onto a few additional facts beyond a new item our newsroom covered this past week.

In the KOMU 8 newsroom, we had a really difficult coverage of a three year old who died allegedly at the hands of his mom’s boyfriend. According to investigators, initially the boyfriend and mom staged a hit and run accident to try and hide the abuse. The details from the boy’s death was released and it’s all really heartbreaking. The small town where the boy lived had a small candlelight ceremony with a low turnout a day after his death. Comments on the KOMU.com site had a couple of people mention how they did not know about the vigil but they plan to attend an event next week. I hadn’t heard about the vigil until I read through the comments. That tipped me off to do some more searching. I used Kurrently and searched using the boy’s name. Almost immediately, I discovered a photography studio that has been taking yearly pictures of the little boy since he was a baby. The studio put out an album of photos in his honor on Facebook. More heartbreak. An hour or two later, mentions of the vigil started appearing in public Facebook posts. One person posted details, names of organizers and a phone number to one of the organizers. Our newsroom did a story on the event it over the weekend and we’ll be at the vigil later this week.

Instead of considering the job done after our newsroom broadcasted the details, I listened. I searched. I know our market wants to continue to learn more about this situation. According to our chartbeat statistics, it remains a top search item on our site. Simple mentions can go a long way by searching, listening and using tools that help.

The next step is taking the knowledge gained from social media and improve our engagement with our news market. There are ways to do that, no matter what size newsroom you’re juggling. We all are able to broadcast across more platforms and listen in new ways… What about using those skills to follow through with the true purpose of social media and engage? KOMU 8′s U_News show is one way we’re trying to merge traditional broadcasting with engagement. Our audience has a chance to jump into a web cam chat during our 30 minute newscast. We try to use our traditional broadcasting skills to offer our news market the chance to engage with other viewers or to let the truth come out on important issues. We can’t just broadcast our requests for engagement. We have to do the follow through. (By the way, one of my favorite people who talks about engagement is Joy Mayer. I highly recommend reading her insights!)

It’s so fascinating how I continue to help coordinate and expand the roles of journalists in my newsroom. It’s also led me to expand my attentions. I no longer have one central place (like this site) where I share all of my knowledge. I have Twitter (which I’ve used since October 2006), Facebook (since March 2005), LinkedIn (since April 2006), my Google+ page (which is new), Facebook journalism and blogging groups, my course Facebook page, my course Tumblr, my course blog, and my advocacy site and its many social outlets. (Oh, and I love Instagram.) I juggle all of these resources while encouraging my students to focus on one work brand (KOMU or KBIA) and one personal brand (on a portfolio to help them get a job).

It’s no wonder my brain feels busy all of the time.

With my experimentation of so many different tools, I wouldn’t recommend this mode of sharing. Keep it centralized as you build your identity online. Leave comments and share links of information that come from smart people you want to know and talk to. Write strong blog posts and find others who will be interested in what you have to say. You can’t assume they’ll come to you and learn. If you snag a job that lets you experiment… that’s when things can start to get messy. The important thing is to find ways to report back the lessons you’ve learned. I’m lucky to have a class and a newsroom where I can do that. I also get to share my knowledge in spaces like #wjchat and at local meetings for hacks/hackersIRE.

Of course, there’s this space as well. And it feels good to get back to sharing my knowledge here again.

(Photo courtesy of Aramil Liadon/Flickr)

UPDATE: I guess I should clarify after reading my student Max’s blog post. This is what happens when I dump the thoughts in my head. I juggle a thousand different social media tools for many, many different purposes. When I say focus, I mean focus on yourself, your interests and experiment for yourself (a portfolio and social media energy for yourself) and your career (managing multiple social tools for your workplace) before you start adding all kinds of other projects.

U_News is proof that taking the web to broadcast is challenging when you are still following the traditional sales model of a newscast. I’m hoping the show will live on long enough for us to experiment not only with different ways to deliver news but to find different ways to help traditional broadcasters take the power of social and remain profitable.

For now, the show is a 30 minute program at 11am. We’re adding “passwords” during the show to encourage viewers to drop the word on an assigned type of social media to win tickets or something cool. People sit in a Google+ hangout to discuss topics that matter to the local market and sometimes important topics from around the world. The show includes viral video, fun photos and serious news from the day. Hopefully we’ll also continue to grow and change just like a social program can… organically.

I’m headed into a new semester with new students and new ideas. It will be interesting to see what kind of ideas they find for the show and for the industry.

In the last six months, I’ve had a chance to speak at a number of really fascinating events, speak personally with incredibly smart people and participated in communities and experiences that are mind blowing. I will do the best I can to try to document these experiences more on this site. I’m also blogging at Born Just Right, my #jenclass blog (along with its new #jenclass tumblr), weekly at Support for Special Needs.