Jen Lee Reeves » komu

Back to “normal”

Jen Reeves — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:56:39 +0000

With the end of my fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute, I’m transitioning back into a full time role in my newsroom, KOMU-TV and KOMU.com. As part of this transition, I’m taking on new roles as a morning editor in charge of our morning assignments and online initiatives. In many ways, I’m putting my money where my mouth is… I’m working on finding ways to get my day turn reporters to think beyond the original broadcast goal of reporting for the morning, noon, 5, 6 or 10 newscasts. That’s not how things work anymore. My general assignment reporters will be expected to tweet, send cellphone photos, email information directly to the newsroom. It requires a new mindset. It doesn’t require many different rules of video or still image editing or even the tenets of being a journalist. It just requires a wider scope of focus when you are collecting information.

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!!

Talking about my work

Jen Reeves — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:28:46 +0000

As a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, I have the opportunity to focus on projects that I wouldn’t normally have as much focused time to get the job done. So it’s exciting to see many things starting to emerge here at the Missouri School of Journalism. I’m teaching 21 students this semester and I have them all working on fantastic projects. Some of them are working on the projects from my “fellow fellows” Jane Stevens and Matt Thompson. Some are working with me on a project I’m calling Money Commons. Some are putting together content to give to new journalism students when they get an iPod Touch with their computer package. Some are working on social networking for KOMU. I also have a group that’s trying to create a self-sustainable high school basketball series. All of these projects are in various levels of execution. What’s fun is watching how we’re all doing things a bit differently.

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.

When cool things happen

Jen Reeves — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:48:26 +0000

I think I have a blog that is really rolling for the Big 12 Championship. A group of students are live blogging their road trip from Columbia, MO to San Antonio, TX. It’s a blast and I’m finding great ways to help them chat with viewers and share the experience. The traffic is starting to jump and it’s great to see how a small news station can interact with cool behind-the-scenes information using free online products.Check out Chase for the Championship

A different way to report

Jen Reeves — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:27:19 +0000

One of my students came to me and said she wanted to engage the Autism community and get input in a major Autism reporting project. I set up a really simple Blogger blog so she could add content, offer viewers a chance to post comments or email thoughts (giving the student the chance to review the posts and then add them to the blog). She then gathered a team of researchers who documented the project every step of the way. They did first-person video blogs, they posted pictures and they blogged about what they saw and learned. The lead reporter asked questions of the online viewers and shared how the project was getting constructed every step of the way. It’s amazing.
I highly recommend visiting her website: Combating Autism From Within

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!

Getting the audience to interact

Jen Reeves — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 03:27:46 +0000

I am constantly looking for ways for my web crew to interact with our audience online. For the last week I’ve encouraged the KOMU-TV audience to submit photos that show how they are Mizzou fans. I’ve only gotten 10 or fewer pictures. But today was amazing. A terrible explosion happened in the state capital. A tanker full of explosive fuel blew up, killing the driver. The explosion damaged a bridge and knocked out a lot of the city’s power. People who were nearby and far away started taking pictures. A viewer who was really close to the scene emailed us photos – Amazing photos of the devastation. Other people joined in and shared their perspective. It ended with this slideshow. We’ve had more than 870 views in the last four hours. For a small market, it’s amazing.

As a side: I don’t keep up with television schedules anymore thanks to TiVO. But here’s a funny thing: My husband was watching PTI on ESPN this evening (on TiVO) when they mentioned Charlie Brown’s Christmas special was on. So my husband hopped onto the TV schedule, hit record and now I have a cool show to watch with the kids sometime soon. I didn’t know anything about the show until I saw someone’s IM status mention the show. I said how disappointed I was that we missed recording the show and my husband smiled to show me he had already captured it. It’s a changing world.

**Update – That slideshow ended up getting more than 2,000 views in one night. Pretty darn cool.**

If collaboration was easy… I’d sleep more.

Jen Reeves — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:59:39 +0000

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.