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 grand announcement for the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s innaugural class of fellows took place during last Friday’s dedication of the RJI building on the University of Missouri campus. I’m lucky to be part of this class. If you’d like to meet everyone, visit this link.

I consider this an awesome opportunity to take my Smart Decision ‘08 tool as a way to engage a regional audience. I hope to have more time and resources to push this project into a high place than I could have done if I had continued working on the project in my spare time. At the same time, I get to hang out with a really great group of people who are my “fellow fellows.”

In the aftermath of the Missouri School of Journalism’s centennial celebration, I’m happy to say I had a pretty successful experiment during the event. I had 114 freshmen, gave them access to WordPress, told them to attend sessions and asked them to blog about the various events. Some of the students were given the task to take Flip cameras and talk to journalism school alumni and collect answers about their careers and lessons learned during those careers. It’s all gathering into a pretty great channel on YouTube. We also had a backchannnel on what was going on during the event on Twitter. All in all, it was a lot of fun. Exausting but fun.

This week is a very historic week for the Missouri School of Journalism. We are celebrating the school’s cenennial and dedicating the Reynolds Journalism Institute. I’m very lucky to be a part of this event in many ways. The coolest is how I’m helping manage 100+ freshmen and a handful of upperclassmen who will pour through the events, document them and post what they gather to a blog, Flickr and YouTube. I’m exhausted with all of the planning but I look forward to finding out what we can do with this project.

In its simplest form, students will document the sessions. In the extreme form they will do that and collect photos, additional interviews and video. While some centennial reporters blog, I have another group of teams who will take Flip cameras and interview alumni for a massive YouTube project that I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I’m looking for alumni to share their experiences gained through the Missouri School of Journalism and their many jobs that followed. (Most journalist don’t stick around in one newsroom for long… Others are fortunate to work in the same one for a long time. I’m hoping we get all kinds of perspective) In the end of the project, I and a small team of students hope to create playlists of these interviews that have useful insight for the many industries represented by J-school graduates.

I will probably blog here with more insight after the event since I can’t even think right now due to the many logistics that go into this!!

I’m trying something a little different (don’t I always?). The Missouri School of Journalism is about to celebrate its centennial in September and dedicate the new Reynolds Journalism Institute building. There will be thousands of people attending this event. Most of these folks will be members of the journalism school’s alumni. If they’re anything like me, they want to talk. They want to share. They have experience that will benefit one or more people. There will be opportunities for meetings and presentations but there is no way each person will be able to share all of their knowledge.So I thought about creating kiosks that give anyone the chance to post thoughts and lessons about their careers or memories of the journalism school. Leading up to that idea, I set up a YouTube channel to encourage video posts with those thoughts. There has been some promotion through email, but not much and there’s been no video posts added since we set the channel up. It makes me sad and I wonder how the heck I can get people involved. Is it because I’m targeting an age group that just doesn’t do YouTube? Or is it because I’m working with YouTube? The channel concept removes the content away from the “other” content on the site and to me adds legitimacy to the product. But maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to hear thoughts on this one! Heck, even better… Click here and post thoughts for the centennial!