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!

The end of the 2008 election season wrapped up a piece of my online obsession - SmartDecision08.com. Along with helping keep that site running with content from KOMU.com, KBIA.org and the ColumbiaMissourian.com I also decided to turn the partnership up a notch and produce a multi-newsroom webcast. We ended up also including a new internationally-focused newsroom called Newsy.com into the webcast as well. So for four hours we worked with content from four newsrooms and conducted interviews with participants in a big non-partisan watch party we created to coincide with the webcast. It was pretty fantastic to be able to combine multiple newsrooms AND the community all into one event. I’m proud of the dozens and dozens of people who helped make the event happen. I’m exhausted from it all still.

I actually had to run out of town the very next day for family reasons so I haven’t been able to truly digest the many things we were able to do since SmartDecision08.com launched a year ago. I don’t want to see the site die - so I have to come up with ways to let it continue to grow even without any funding. The great thing about RSS feeds is the content continues to flow, so I’m trying to conceptualize a way to help the website follow political news and issues even if I’m not overseeing it often.

In the meantime I’m about to go halfway around the world to train some journalists in China. I’ve never had this kind of opportunity before and I am excited and nervous to go. I’m planning to spend some quite, focused time preparing for the trip. When I get back, I hope to spend more time digesting and sharing the lessons learned from the SmartDecisoin08.com project.

We officially launched smartdecision08.com last week and I’ve found my audience is not quick to sign up. I have teams of people trying to go out into our communities and encourage participation — And I’ve found when local organizations are introduced to the idea of blogging or video blogging, they are not interested. I wonder why. I have worked with a group of people to try and create an opportunity for the community to feel involved. A place where candidates could go to see where the conversations are headed. But so many people are turned off by the idea immediately.I’d love to hear opinions on how to get people interested and driven to collaborate, write, share and communicate online.

I’m working on a collaborative project where I’m hoping we’ll have multiple sources for video, audio and images. The Splashcast player seems to be our best bet. Here’s what I’ve worked on so far:

I’m working towards a massive project. I’m trying to find a way to collaborate with three different newsrooms (one NPR station, one local paper and my NBC affiliate station). I’d like to give my market the most thorough election site possible for November 2008. Content from all three would feed into the website so no one has to hand type in the links to each newsroom’s election content. That’s not even the hard part.

The hard part is learning how to communicate with each newsroom. I set up a project using Base Camp… But I’ll be honest. I think most people ignore the comments I and some project members post. Either way, it is a good place to keep all of the thoughts, documents, links and images that we all need to talk about. If someone claims that I didn’t tell them, I can prove that to be untrue. So I’m glad to have a place to collaborate work. There are a number of other open-source/free sites that have popped up since I started working with Base Camp this summer. One of my favorite is a very fun brainstorming tool called bubbl.us. I’ve tried it out a bunch of times to help sort out the many ideas that churn through my brain. There area couple of other products that have popped up, but I haven’t had time to test them.

Anyway. I’m trying to collaborate with three different newsrooms that have different workflow and different personalities. I’m obsessed with workflow and communication. But I have to say, this has been some of the most challenging conversations. The good news: As I continue to communicate, I’m starting to figure out ways to reach everyone.  I’ve also found using a database training manual as a good way to reach many of my student/employees who work on the komu.com content. A student of mine and I put it together with the help of Drupal. It’s also the content management system that we hope to use to build our election website.

So much to do, so little time.