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

By the way – if you’re curious about what I’m teaching in my class, here’s what this week’s focus is on: Building your name brand online.

Passion is such an overused word. But it was said everywhere I went during my time attending the conference. When I checked into the hotel, the woman who was getting me the room key asked me what I blogged about. I gave her the list of different blogs I run when she interrupted me:
“What’s your passion.”

I was quick to answer. It’s my website, Born Just Right, where I focus on advocating for my daughter and other children born with special needs. My daughter was born with a left arm that stopped right before the elbow. I’ve written about that experience from the very beginning. It’s an experience that’s helped me grow into an advocate for families of children born with limb differences and other conditions. I don’t know it all but I think I’m lucky to be able to find great stories, get to know wonderful people and I’ve learned that connecting with a community of families who understand is an incredible experience.

I’ve started writing a book about what I’ve learned for the last five years as Jordan’s mom, I created an LLC for my site Born Just Right and I’m working with a few people to come up with a logo. I’m passionate and I’m going to see what it takes to make it move forward.

It’s taken a crowd of friends encouraging me for the last year, but my time at SXSW and the BlogHer event has convinced me this is something I want to follow. I created an LLC, I’m working on a business plan and I’m encouraging my readers to contribute content to the site to help extend the stories and perspective. My mission: To help families understand everyone is born just right. In the end, it would be wonderful to help lead a campaign to change the public’s view of what is considered normal.

It’s exciting since this is something I’m working on outside of my regular day-to-day jobs at the Missouri School of Journalism and KOMU.com. But I think it’s worth it.

Since I’m following my passion, I started looking at other sites that are trying to do good. I am fascinated by LoveDrop. It’s a for-profit site that drops money and assistance to a person, family or organization each month. I’m a member and give $5 a month towards good causes. I’ve been impressed with the positive flow of assistance that’s come out of the site.

I also discovered Start Some Good. It’s a site where you can pitch your visions to do good in the world and possibly find community funders who support your cause. I’m certainly planning to put Born Just Right into the site and see what the community thinks.

I’d love your thoughts and ideas on initiatives that are doing good – be it in the world of journalism or any other genre. I’m certain that helping spread positive in the world is a wonderful goal. I feel very lucky to have the energy and opportunity to give this a try!

It’s a great idea, right? So why don’t I do that more often.

Obviously it’s because life is busy. But I should walk the walk if I’m going to talk the talk to my students.

Right now I’m helping launch a new content management system (CMS) for my newsroom. At the same time, we had one of the greatest engagement experiences with our audience during a major near-blizzard in our area. I blogged about the snow storm engagement on PBS’s MediaShift blog and I plan to write even more later in the week about that experience. But while I build the CMS, I’m thinking about where to go with our Facebook engagement. It’s really grown in the last month and I want to keep it going.

Now I’m pondering my next steps. There are two questions swimming in my head. Do we want to extend our brand into individual fan pages for our on air personalities? Do we want to start holding contests and other opportunities where our Facebook fans can win something if they click the “like” button?

Contests on Facebook
I talked to one of my favorite Facebook groups about my personal challenge when it comes to Facebook and offering winnings to people who like the page. I’ve seen newsrooms offer the chance for a free iPad and jump 14,000 fans. But I question how many of those fans will actually engage with the page. I realize a huge jump of 14,000 additional people would find at least a couple hundred of those fans engaging. But for some reason I love the organically grown community. You know, the kind that forms naturally because of similar interests and cares. The kind where you build a relationship that is founded on information and communication. I kind of see these prize drawings as a bribery. I’m saying bribery is bad, I just question that it’s the best option for a community’s foundation. In the last year, my newsroom’s Facebook page has grown from less than 500 to more than 5,600 fans. It’s a wonderful natural growth that really bloomed thanks to our snow storm coverage.

Personalities on Facebook
We have a couple of on air personalities who are already finding great interaction with our newsroom’s main Facebook page and their personal pages. I don’t want to fix what isn’t broken, but I wonder if I’m missing anything at this point. We have a strong Facebook news page, but we also have one anchor who is getting even better engagement from viewers who are her Facebook friends. These are people who she friended as viewers instead of viewers who clicked “like” on a fan page. We’re working on security permissions so she feels comfortable asking questions en masse but also posting pictures of her family. I might continue my “organic” feel with this situation. Our hub of Facebook delivery will remain our current fan page while our on air personalities will be asked to use their personal pages with security or create a fan page if they don’t want to use their personal profile. I think as Facebook continues to change, I’ll continue to change how we reach out and connect with our viewers.

I also reached out on Facebook to ask many people who are working in newsrooms… It’s incredible to see the many different ways Facebook is managed (or not managed.) I’ll try to walk my walk and document our successes and failures more often.

If you use Twitter, there’s the Twitter Vote Report project. All you have to do is go to your polling place, tweet about your experience and add “#votereport” to your tweet to get registered onto a national map of polling places. The site is also asking you to participate even if you don’t use Twitter. You can send a text message starting with #votereport to 66937 (MOZES). Also, you can call 567-258-VOTE (8683) or 208-272-9024. There are even apps for iPhone and Android users.

Facebook is targeting all users ages 18 and up to vote. There’s a notice at the top of each person’s newsfeed reminding you to vote. You can also tell others you voted by posting a vote badge onto your wall. Facebook also created a voter page where you can search for your polling place using Google Maps.

To top things off, Foursquare has created a map that tracks the number of polling place check ins across the country. It created a special “I Voted” badge and website for members to add to their collection. To get the badge, all you have to do is say #ivoted into the Foursquare message. You can also post it to Twitter by adding #votereport to include it into the Twitter Vote Report at the same time. (By the way, if you like Gowalla, you can get an “I Voted” pin if you use the word “vote” or “voted” when you check in.)

These are just a few of the interactive ways to share your participation on election day. I hope you get a chance to go out and vote!

Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook team announced a number of new changes that include being able to download the content you’ve posted to your profile and the development of groups. I asked my new Facebook group on Social Journalism about a link that summarizes the changes, and Craig Kanalley from The Huffington Post shared his explanation. Groups have existed before on Facebook. But this time, it’s alive.

I’m not kidding.

I was going to go to sleep. Instead I jumped in and found a lively, flowing conversation underway. It’s hard to explain, so I took a screen capture. (I asked permission first.)

Let me explain what you’re looking at. This isn’t your normal wall post. When you post, you just hit enter and it pops up. Seconds later, another person’s post pops up. It’s live. And you don’t have to be friends with that person to have the conversation. I’ve always said Facebook is a space where I can communicate with people I know and I’ve met face-to-face while Twitter is a place for me to have great conversations with people I don’t know. Well. This changes it all. For the last hour or so, I’ve had a conversation with people I know on Twitter but the conversation is on Facebook. This conversation is hosted through a tool I played around with during SXSW earlier this year called Hot Potato (I an assuming the live chat function is what makes this new group experience possible). The Hot Potato concept was creating specific online “rooms” where people could have Twitter-like conversations but only people who are interested in the topic would read it. That’s what’s happening with the Facebook group concept. I had envisioned Hot Potato as a great thing for conversations during conferences so my Twitter feed wouldn’t be so loud. Mark Zuckerberg saw it in a wider perspective.

So one person on this new Facebook group asked me if I know what kind of implications this brings to journalism. My initial reaction is this is an enhancement to the current Facebook fan/like pages. It’s an opportunity to talk about topics in real time with people who have similar interests… or a similar newsroom. I immediately created a new group for my newsroom. I run a mommy blog Facebook page and I’m trying to wrap my mind around the pros and cons of adding a group to the page as well.

There are different types of groups. The one I played in tonight is closed – that means I was invited in and you need an invite to participate. There are also open groups and secret groups. The open and closed groups are searchable. The secret groups are only known by those people who are invited. I created an open group for my newsroom and one I might use for current and former students of my #jenclass. The amount of oversight for these groups may be impossible. I’m not saying that is good or bad at this point. I am curious to see what could happen when my “traditional” newsroom hooks up with the general public with the new Facebook group experience. I am hoping we could create a new even more personal interactive experience.

*One quick warning - if you get invited to a new group, you’re immediately in the group. You can remove yourself or change the permissions of the group. I immediately turned off email notifications. That helped save an incredible mess inside my inbox as the conversations got really rolling online tonight.*

I will try as hard as I can to chronicle this process. But I also realize that my returning focus to daily work in the newsroom will make it pretty hard to blog more often. But I will do my very best! And if you’ve seen success in using twitter and other mobile tools on a daily basis in your newsroom, please share it with me!!

With my project, I’m starting to collect content from the partner newsrooms, KBIA, KOMU and the Columbia Missourian. I’m hoping to partner with other newsrooms in the area as we try to document and assist the mid-Missouri area during this recession. I’m hoping to add site-based content as well: a database of contacts who can help people in economic crisis, original content that is based on a web-first presentation and hopefully a number of easy ways for people to communicate with each other on the site. I’m currently playing around with Google’s Friend Connect tools. It’s a VERY young site and it doesn’t have everything it needs at this point. But it’s starting to roll. I’d love some thoughts on how to take this site and make it into an online hub of information. My goal is to help the community and help newsrooms collaborate. It has a better feeling than what happens when you visit Smart Decision ’08. But both projects have the same goal: bring multiple newsrooms together to better inform and collaborate with the community. That’s why I keep doing everything I’m doing. I want to help journalists remain relevant while helping my community. It’s a great feeling. I’m planning to talk to a group of students (and anyone else who wants to watch) during a Society of Professional Journalists presentation tonight. I hope to talk about this project and brain storm with the crowd about what could really happen on this little space on the web.

We could have gotten fancier, but I think the simplicity of it all is why it works. Plus, she tagged each post so you can easily search by topic or researcher name. I love it. Plus, the traffic to the site has been pretty consistently high for a blog that’s only been “advertised” on other autism blogs and periodically on KOMU’s air. Congrats to Ashley Reynolds and her team!On air stories start on the 3rd… But online stories are already posting on the blog!