The simple fact: I have too many jobs. As a professor, newsroom manager, fellow, grad school advisor, technology and policy committee member, technology faculty council member… mom, wife, dog owner, home owner… I could go on and on and on. To build a community I would need to shuffle priorities and lighten my load.

This is a big reason why Smart Decision ’08 didn’t take off as a community. It’s why I’m not pushing too hard to publicize my current economy project. I had initially thought a collaboration of traditional media content that is aggregated into a single site would bring enough viewers to develop a community. After working with Jane Stevens and watching her project grow, it makes more sense to develop the community and supplement it with traditional media aggregation. Jane is working on creating a structure of web-based health communities that focus on specific topics. She’s also helped launch a journalism web community called the RJI Collaboratory. These communities need time, attention and commitment.

While I have tried to develop my Money Commons site, I have also taken all of my lessons learned to KOMU. I have changed the way we use Twitter. We have launched a social networking community. We’re trying to find better and more effective ways to use our Facebook page. I have had a chance to share what I’ve learned about social networking to media outlets and many more faculty and students than I evercould have talked to if I was working exclusively out at the television station. I’m so darn lucky for this opportunity. I hope to have better ideas on the steps to take towards expanding my Money Commons community. My time with RJI is coming to a close, but I’m going to continue to look to a future of helping the Missouri School of Journalism prepare for an unknown but exciting future.

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.

I found this note sent out to the Mizzou Mafia Yahoo Group from Hannah Jackson who works at RJI:

If you are on the list that received emails today from the Reynolds Journalism Institute….

We sincerely apologize for the email dilemma that occurred today (January 23). We have fixed the problem now. It was the result of a code error and was not a virus. Any reply emails including automatic replies resulted in a “reply all” to the entire listserv. Sorry for the inconvenience this caused you. We hope that people won’t hit “reply” or “reply all” to the original emails, because this may prolong the problem. If you would like to contact us, please email us directly at rjionline@missouri.edu.

Because the research and activities of RJI are important to journalism and our nation’s democracy, we look forward to sharing news of our progress. Again, we apologize for this unfortunate problem.

Sincerely,

Pam Johnson
Executive Director
Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute
www.rjionline.org

Contact Carole Christie with any questions at 573.882.8251 or rjionline@missouri.edu

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!

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.