From research to real life: New community outreach team builds on RJI engagement work
Posted: January 22, 2012 Filed under: engagement, Missourian, Teaching 4 Comments »This was first published on the RJI blog.
I spent last year at RJI studying audience engagement — reading, talking, interviewing, writing, more reading — and ended that year motivated to put what I’d learned into practice.
Luckily, the job I came back to was in a newsroom built on experimentation, with colleagues willing to go along on the engagement ride.
In August, we kicked off the Missourian’s community outreach team, made up of students in a class I teach called Participatory Journalism. (The class has existed for years and was developed by Clyde Bentley, also an RJI fellow.) This year, the focus of the class broadened to include more ways the relationship between journalists and their communities are changing.
The underlying principle lies in a diagram created by Meg Pickard at The Guardian, which crystallized my goals.
The team’s tasks are diverse. We started out with some specific goals, succeeded at some, failed at a few and adapted others. We made up a lot as we went along, and a spirit of experimentation and assessment guided us.
I want to share some highlights from our first four months, and I’d welcome your ideas, feedback and questions.
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Mindmapping participatory journalism
Posted: January 15, 2012 Filed under: Missourian, Teaching 2 Comments »A draft of the topics we’ll cover in my Participatory Journalism class this spring, and how they relate to each other:
What it takes to succeed on my team (hint: it’s mostly initiative + attitude)
Posted: January 14, 2012 Filed under: Missourian, Teaching Leave a comment »I’m prepping my Participatory Journalism syllabus for the spring semester and adding some descriptions of how I grade.
In my class, as with many others at Mizzou, the students are graded largely on their work in the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian. I’m their professor in the classroom, and I’m also their boss on the community outreach team. So while they’ll have some typical classroom assignments, the biggest column in the gradebook is for their newsroom performance and their portfolio of work.
Because of that, I like to include a narrative description of the grade ranges, so students can know what to shoot for and so I have something to point to when grading. Here’s the one I’m working on for this semester.
newsroom success:
The underlying philosophy if this class is experimentation, invention and enterprise. If you show up in the newsroom for each shift waiting for instructions, and do only what you’re specifically asked to do, you’ll get a C, for average performance. Here’s how I would describe what I’m looking for in the newsroom, and how that generally translates into grades (recognizing that no one fits every criteria for every grade range, of course). This applies specifically to the 60 percent of your grade that is based on newsroom performance.
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Join the Participatory Journalism party, as part of the Missourian’s community outreach team
Posted: December 6, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Interested in taking J4700/7700, Participatory Journalism? I have a few spots left for Spring 2012. Here’s what you need to know.
As a student in this class, you’d join the staff of the Columbia Missourian, as part of the community outreach team. Exactly what that means will be determined by us, as we go along. We’ll do a lot of strategizing, experimenting and assessing what works. You’d be assigned about eight hours each week to spend in the newsroom, immersing yourself in what’s going on there and bringing the community into the news as much as you can. You’d also be responsible for following through on whatever came up on your shifts, and time outside those shifts would sometimes be required.
I firmly believe that injecting a focus on the audience into traditional journalism is key to its survival, and the community outreach team is about how to find the audience, invite them to interact with stories, capture and value the conversations they’re having (with us and with each other) and look for ways to collaborate with them to do better journalism.
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A blog is just technology: A brilliant response to a tired argument
Posted: November 28, 2011 Filed under: Teaching 2 Comments »One of my favorite posts/articles of all time is Am I a science journalist?, from Ed Yong, author of the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog for Discover Magazine. In the post, he addresses the false dichotomy of journalists vs bloggers.
I had my class read it for today, and I can’t wait for the coming discussion.
Yong makes a point I often try to make about the very definitions of “journalism” and “blog.”
When I write for my blog, I do so in exactly the same way as I would for a mainstream organisation. I ask whether stories are worth telling. I interview and quote people. I write in plain English. I provide context. I fact-check… a lot. I do not use press releases, much less copy them. I don’t even own pajamas.
My point, and it has been said many times before, is that blogs are simply software. They are a channel, a medium, a container for all sorts of things including journalism. Meanwhile, journalism is a craft. It is about involving accuracy, the collection of information, the telling of stories, that can be practiced anywhere by anyone with the right set of skills. It is not a newspaper. It is not a job title.
Journalism is a process. A method of collecting, verifying and sharing information. There’s no certification necessary, and no membership card required.
Getting a master’s degree is more painful than childbirth, with a longer gestation period
Posted: November 19, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized 5 Comments »I took my first graduate class in spring 2005, started a master’s degree in earnest in 2007, and have been enrolled just about every semester since.
Seven years’ gestation.
Sort of like childbirth, I knew at the beginning that if I focused on the scary stuff at the end, I just might not make it. So I started off with stuff I knew I’d have fun with and tried not to think about how I’d ever make time to write a thesis.
No one moment during the nine classes I took seems all that difficult. But collectively, I spent a lot of hours reading and writing. And then came the thesis. And sort of like childbirth, there’s no way to skirt around that scary stuff at the end. The only way to the other side is straight through the pain. And in this case, no drugs can help.
I successfully defended my thesis on Thursday, so I’m officially on the other side, looking back at the pain. I’m not sure when I’ve felt such relief. Unlike after the birth of my two sons, I don’t have euphoria to distract me from the bad parts. Just relief. And a master’s degree. And a 5-year-old son who says I should be called Headmaster from here on out. I’ll take it.
Here’s what the dedication page of my thesis says:
To my husband and two sons, who have tolerated years upon years of multitasking.
To my grandfather, Donald Mathis, who is no stranger to fancy degrees, for telling me that a master’s degree is no big deal and that I should go for it.
To my colleagues at the Columbia Missourian, who inspire me daily.
To my first bosses in journalism, Sara Quinn and Janet Coats, for mentoring me and exposing me to what creativity, optimism and a sense of purpose looked like in a newsroom, and for setting the bar high.
And to my college newspaper adviser at the University of Oklahoma, Jack Willis, who quietly held me to the highest of standards, and who asked me when I was 21 if I was sure I didn’t want to stick around and get a master’s degree.
So, can anyone recommend a hobby?
Outreach team serves democracy, along with Taylor Swift fans
Posted: October 4, 2011 Filed under: engagement, Missourian Leave a comment »First published at the Missourian’s Transition blog.
On a Monday a few weeks ago, the Missourian’s community outreach team delivered a product that contributed to civic empowerment and democratic conversation. On the next Wednesday, I spent my day on a task that made me wholly uncomfortable.
All in all, not a bad week.
First I’ll discuss the pride. Then the discomfort.
Designers as user advocates: My talk at #sndstl
Posted: October 1, 2011 Filed under: Conferences, engagement, Teaching 6 Comments »I’m thrilled to be speaking this weekend at the Society for News Design annual shindig in St. Louis. My topic is a really happy marriage of the two primary focuses of my career: design and community engagement.
Turns out, they’re not so different.
Designers have long been speaking up for the consumption of information. For making information clear, accessible and enjoyable. That focus on the user experience is what I’ve always loved most about design, actually.
I’ll put my slides at the bottom of this post (though I’ve never made the kind of presentations that make much sense without the accompanying words coming out of my mouth).
The main purpose here is to share links to some of the projects and posts I mentioned in my talk. Usually, I make a custom Delicious tag and url, and just share that. But Delicious isn’t working so well these days. So here you go, folks who were in the audience today. And for the rest of you who stumbled by? Good luck making sense of this collection of randomness!
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The future of community news is bright: thoughts from Block by Block 2011
Posted: October 1, 2011 Filed under: Conferences, engagement 1 Comment »Once again, I’m coming away from Block by Block, a gathering of primarily local news startups, with dozens of innovative ideas and thought-provoking philosophies to chew on. Kudos to Michele McLellan and Jay Rosen for enabling this community of passion to get together.
Here’s some of what I learned and want to take back to my community outreach team at the Columbia Missourian.
— Engagement efforts can’t be the frosting on the cake. They’re the meat and potatoes and should make up your basic approach to community interactions. Don’t report a story, then figure out how to share it. Have a specific audience in mind from the idea-generation stage, and go about your reporting in a way that figures out how you can make sure the people who most want and need the content will find it.
The community outreach team: A progress report
Posted: September 28, 2011 Filed under: engagement, Missourian, Teaching 2 Comments »First published at the Missourian’s Transition blog.
In August, I wrote to Missourian readers about what I hoped my new community outreach team would do. Now I’d like to share some of what we’re doing day to day.
Here’s a running list of the tasks we’re assigned, beginning with some routine ones and leading up to some exciting experiments. Many of these come straight out of the community engagement discussion guide I published as part of my fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Many are also inspired by or directly borrowed from what I learned through a series of interviews.
