That’s what I’ve done inside Google+. It is a fresh start and I think Google has taken the lessons learned from communities built in Twitter and Facebook. Facebook offers privacy while Twitter allows openness. Both established social networks created ways to build lists and groups to help organize your contacts after the social networks were built. Google+ allows you to establish circles from the start. I have built a personal profile and a non-official professional profile for KOMU8. Inside each space I’ve learned what may work for journalists inside this new and evolving space. I have 5 reasons why you should give it a try.

1. Get in on a social media space from the beginning.
Very few newsrooms quickly jumped into Twitter or Facebook. Many are playing catch up. This is an opportunity for journalists to be there at the beginning. I created a KOMU News account inside Google+ because newsrooms are good at sharing. We vet information, we share and people trust us. Why not become a leader inside a new space?

2. Reach out and find your audience.
The Google+ search is improving by the day. As a person, I’ve created circles of professionals and friends who I want to follow. For the newsroom profile, I’ve created regional profiles where I have circled people who live in different towns, counties and work in different organizations. I’m still trying to see what works best, but when someone comments on a newsroom post, I almost immediately know where that person is from because I can hover my arrow over their name and see what circle they’re in. Take the time to search for major businesses, topics and locations that may show additional people from your area who could be added into a circle. As additional people follow the KOMU8 brand, I look at their profiles and add them into regional circles. If a circle for their area doesn’t exist, I create one. I haven’t decided if regional or employment (or both) circles work best, but it’s worth creating regional Google+ scanners and see if it works when there are more people inside this space!

3. Play with hangouts.
We’ve gone live in two broadcasts (and another in less than an hour) so far with a Google Hangout discussion. It’s simple to find people we trust to attend these hangouts and it’s so cool to have found the technical ability to not only feed our computer into our broadcast control room, but also because you can hear it. We haven’t figured that technical challenge out before. I love how new technology pushes us to try new things. Our broadcast hangouts created quite a buzz. So much, I ended up on a local talk radio show talking about the uses of Google+. We’re having fun and expanding the conversation way beyond this new social network. You can read about our Hangouts here and I wrote an earlier post about it here.

4. Encourage followers to circle others from your organization.
Since we are all in this social media world together, once you have additional folks contributing content into Google+, make sure your followers know about it. I’m regularly updating a list of KOMU8 News folks and making sure each person’s profile is links for easy circling. What’s really great is I can just edit the original post and add the latest names. Then I reshare the post to let our followers know I updated it. I don’t have to recreate this post multiple times. (Think of all of those topics you’ve tried to promote again and again on Facebook. You wouldn’t have to rewrite and rewrite, you can just share and share and share.)

In an ideal Google+ world, I would ask our followers to tell us what circles they’d like to be in. I’d love to offer our audience the chance to get extra information if they really like weather or sports or specific news topics like courts, development or politics. These opt-in circles could get live blogs and extra video and images that the average news consumer may not want but our newsroom could deliver it on demand to the appropriate circles. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say we’re tweeting too much information about a specific topic or someone on our Facebook wall says they have heard enough. We could tone down those complaints and actually play more content to those who want it.

5. Experiment and ask people what they’d like to do with Google+.
We’re all in this together. Be open and share what you’re learning and ask what others are learning. Share your ideas and include your audience in the learning. My profile is very open and explains what I do at KOMU8 and the Missouri School of Journalism. I also made sure the KOMU8 profile mentioned I’m the wizard behind the smoke and mirrors. The most interesting input I’ve had so far are from people in my market AND others who are just really interested in what KOMU8 is doing online. I’m getting great input and ideas from far and wide.

I don’t own an Android, but I’ve been told Huddles could have great implications as well for journalists. Maybe an Android journalist could let me know what he or she thinks.

If this is the first post you’ve read from me, feel free to check out my first impression post about G+ and you might be interested in this Google Doc where Google fans put together a guidebook with more than a hundred people adding content to it. I think that’s pretty cool.

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.

What I also found from all of these talks and discussions is how everyone would love to have a picture of what the future looks like. I wish I had that answer. But I’ll give you a few ideas.

Forget everything you know now and watch it become more organic. The information you want will be at your fingertips online or on your cell phone (or whatever the future of a phone looks like). You get to choose how you get all information. Video on demand, feeds of information, photos, conversations. You pick when you want it and you learn about new developments on your own terms. I envision journalists to be the people who help you take all of those pieces of information and get more context behind them. If you are interested in a new business in town, you’ll hear and read what other people you trust are saying and you’ll go to the journalism source to give you the history of the building, the owners, the food and the restaurant’s safety history (if its been around long enough). We’ve all had to make a conscious choice to be informed or uninformed – It will be so much easier to be informed. But it will also be much easier to be informed on your own terms. You’ll have to reach out to make more sense of it all. You’ll have to make a choice to confirm the information you gather.

I talked to a reporter at the Baltimore Sun about how the Baltimore Police are using Twitter to announce shootings and other illegal activity in the city. The reporter told me how she wondered if people who read that Twitter feed will think they’re fully informed about the city’s activities. I told her that at first people will think they’re informed. (It’s novel! It’s transparent!) But after a while, they’ll want more. Hopefully they’ll look to the local newsrooms to help provide more background from those 140 character alerts. The trick: The newsrooms need to be paying attention to where people are gathering their own personal information. The newsrooms need to take those sources and provide a deeper understanding to they continue to be an important part of informing the public. That’s always been the goal of journalism – And I truly believe that will never go away.

The last time I visited Washington DC, the new Newseum hadn’t opened yet. It was close, but not quite. So when I returned this week, a little piece of me kept urging me to go there. It kind of feels like a building that is supposed to represent everything I do and teach. So Saturday morning I decided to hop on the Metro and just go. A mix of a beautiful day and the stillness of a Saturday morning let me just wander around the area to enjoy the huge buildings and monuments. DC has such a rich history – it is really wonderful to see a massive monument to journalism mixed in with it all.

Inside is full of interactive and simple exhibits that try to tell the enormous tale of journalism… where it started, how it developed and where it could go. The most meaningful exhibit for me was the September 11th display. It touched me and brought me back to where I was in my newsroom that day. Hearing the stories from the many reporters and photographers who were on the scene at the time just really moved me. Most of all, I learned more about Bill Biggart. He died as he took pictures of the World Trade Center. Somehow his cameras were found under the rubble and 150 of the digital pictures he took right before his death were able to show what he saw. His gear is on display for everyone to see. Pretty awesome.

The other section was inside the Internet, Radio and Television section where a display looks at the future of the news. The exhibit already included the closing of the Rocky Mountain News and the effect Twitter has on the journalism industry. I ended up having a great conversation about the future of journalism with some of the other people visiting the museum.

In all.. I think it’s a good place. It’s wonderful to touch and see the history of journalism. I didn’t need convincing that journalism is important… but it might help convince skeptics. The museum has so many stories about heroic men and women who go above and beyond to help tell the stories we may or may not know we want to hear, watch or read.

If you want to sit down and watch part one, go here.
If you want to see my notes on Twitter basics, go here.

And now… Part two:

1) Working Journalists and the Changing News Environment
Moderator: Rem Reider (American Journalism Review)
Carl Stepp (University of Maryland)
Tom Fiedler (Boston University/Harvard University)
Philip Meyer (UNC)
Jennifer McKim (Orange County Register – Neiman Fellow at Harvard)

This was an interesting start to the conference. There were a number of very different opinions on the state of the professional journalism industry. It started with Carl Stepp talking about his belief that managers need to give journalists more freedom to think and invent. He thinks it’s possible one person in a newsroom could change the entire industry.

Tom Fiedler countered and said the business model will have to come from someone on the outside. He thinks the temperament of journalists is to do what they love and that’s gathering news. They aren’t going to be the people who are inclined to worry about a business model. It doesn’t fit their role.

Jennifer McKim (who is a Neiman Fellow) talked about how there are many demoralized professionals in the industry… But they have the passion and talent and want this industry to work.

Philip Meyer has a lot to say after the first three folks. He had an idea that has a lot of buzz in the room: Find a business model that is supported by the elites. A multi-step flow of information would eventually get that information to the general public. CCJ‘s Mark Carter mentioned The Economist as a possible model. There were audience members questioning if that was a viable business model on a smaller readership/viewership level.

2) Communication Research and the Changing News Environment
Tom Patterson (Shorenstein Center, Harvard)
Robert Entman (George Washington University)
Scott Althaus (University of Illinois)
Vincent Price (University of Pennyslvania)

I’d hate to bury the lead on the next panel but the highlight happened near the end. I’ll just quickly summarize this portion of the conference. The group talked about how there’s a discord between scholarly journalistic research and the practice of journalism. My favorite quote from Robert Entman was his thoughts on the state of the journalistic industry: “changing course may be the less risky path.” He may be right.

Scott Althaus showed how just a little knowledge of the past can give a ton of context to how we cover the news of today. He showed combat video from WWI through Iraq and the varying degrees of reality journalists showed through video.

Vincent Price talked about the mainstream media in perspective of the political season. He looked at what is new, what hasn’t changed and the effects changes have on news. His overall message: the mainstream media (MSM) operations are now working in a much more complicated environment. The interactions between the MSM and all of the current information sources (supplementary campaign information, web, audiences) will continue to change the way information is transmitted. He commented on how entertainment can bring the audience to MSM but its up to us to turn that into a teachable moment.

But since the overall message from the group was to encourage practicing journalists to use scholarly research, the most interesting comment was made. Ira Chinoy from Maryland asked the opposite of the researchers. He asked the question over whether it was possible for there to be a problem with scholarly activity. Then he offered a couple of suggestions. First is to have the scholars write for a general audience. He also suggested scholars take the time to conduct confrontation interviews before releasing studies with a one-sided result. If not, give an opportunity for a pre-publication review by some kind of representative audience. There were all kinds of murmur about that. Entman retorted that the current scholarly community looks down upon researchers who publish for the general public.

3) Citizen Journalism
Clyde Bentley (University of Missouri)
Jan Schaffer (J-Lab)
Ryan Thornburg (University of North Carolina)
Steve Yelvington (Morris Communications, Founder of BlufftonToday.com)

Clyde Bentley talked about his work with MyMissourian.com and research on citizen journalism (CJ). He likened CJ to cave drawing from long ago. He also compared citizen journalists to members of the national guard: a citizen soldier doesn’t want a career in the military, he or she just wants to help. Bentley also talked about how Martin Luther could be credited with starting citizen journalism. He opened the idea to the general public to question priests. He showed other forms of current CJ and the differences between how traditional journalists cover information while citizen journalists share information.

Jan Schaffer had some great thoughts on this topic as well. She showed so many ideas and projects that the J-Lab has sponsored. She talked about the trends and how the journalism of the future is the “architecture of participation.” Ordinary people become the “plankton” in the “media ecosystem.” In some ways, journalists would have the job to sift through the plankton to come up with a functioning ecosystem. Another thought that I enjoyed is how this “isn’t about covering community, it’s about building community.” CJs or as Jan put it, citizen media-makers are looking to make a different in tangible ways. Her idea is deputizing a person who has the job to network all of the citizen media in the community. An editor would have the job to figure out what topics need “Big J” journalism for the larger audience. If there’s a pattern in citizen media conversations, it may be worth bringing it to a larger audience.

Ryan Thornburg gave some great perspective about how citizen media is playing a huge role in the political process. Citizen journalists’ impact on politics means more voices in the discourse of a political season. Social networks are offering a more efficient way to deliver those messages. Currently politicians are doing things already that he said newsrooms should take note:
*build an infrastructure for citizen participation
*give volunteers/CJs recognition for the participation
*allow volunteers to easily connect to each other
*have fun
Of course he reminded everyone that this requires “authentic leadership.”

Do you see a consistent trend in these conversations? There is great potential for professional journalists to guide and lead citizen journalists/media creators. I have a lot of hope in these ideals.

Steve Yelvington talked about how most reporters of today are young, underpaid and have no community connections. He feels today’s “broken journalism can be repaired by learning how to participation in unfolding conversations” of citizen media.

You could feel some of the skepticism in the audience. There were concerns over who is liable for libelous blogs. One person considered blogs as a bar conversation. Another wondered how can we ensure blogs remain a supplement to quality journalism.

4) Panel on Innovation in Journalism Education
Tom Fiedler (Boston University/Harvard University)
Wolfgang Donsbach (Technical University, Dresden, Germany)
Nick Lemann (Columbia Graduate School of Journalism)
Peter Shane (Ohio State Law School)

Fielder and Donsbach presented a paper they wrote with recommendations for the future of journalism education. It is still in the vetting process and if we guage the reaction of the audience to the research, there’s more work to be done before it’s published. I’m not going to get into too many details but I’ll mention a couple of things. There was a recommendation to throw out undergraduate journalism programs because it’s too trade-based and not liberal arts enough (Dean Mills of Missouri was pretty quick to counter that). Also, there was a recommendation to “outsource skills.” They thought journalism schools should teach theory and farm out the skills training elsewhere.

There was an unsteady rumble during the many, many PowerPoint pages of thoughts and assumptions. I happened to sit next to UNC’s Dean Jean Folkerts. She gave a very eloquent response to the presentation and the rest of the audience joined in agreement. (I actually asked if she would type out her words – it was written down on paper – and I’m hoping to link to her thoughts when she gets them online) After the room was pretty hot and bothered for about 20 minutes, the conversation continued into drink time and into dinner tine. Long day, lots of thoughts and a TON of emotion.

**Update – Jean Folkerts posted her thoughts from the experience. Take a look.

I’m planning to twitter live during the conference and hopefully blog about conversations on this blog. It would be great to have even more conversations spin off from this event. I’ve been to Boston before – but never Cambridge. I looked at BU and BC, but never Harvard or MIT. I look forward to a new experience and great discussions about our grand industry.

Honestly, I think it’s a mess.

Some of my students really get the software and they’re going to snag AMAZING jobs.  But the average student shouldn’t be expected to understand the nitty gritty of CSS and Action Script 2.0 and 3.0.  I think most students should understand what technology can do.  If they understand the potential, then they can team up with someone who knows the tech side of things and communicate his or her need.  Even better… If I show them the basics, they they can take the initiative to learn more outside of class.

Right now, I teach the basics of Flash to my students so they understand its potential.  If I understood Flex and had a basic understanding of that, I’d do the same with it.  I think students who can think on a multi-layer, interactive level can think about delivering news differently.  Once you know how to deliver news differently, you start to realize that life doesn’t have to be linear anymore.  There are new ways to present, explain and share.  Until now, journalism had a starting and ending point.  Now it can be up to the online user to decide what they want to learn.  They can stay as long or as short as they’d like.  They can come back and learn more if they want.  They can choose to ignore all of it or expand their research beyond what one website has to offer.

It’s a new world.  Not everyone is going to take advantage of it all.  I hope I can at least offer the gift of understanding what’s out there to my students.