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 3 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 1 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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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.
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.
9/11 coverage includes going door to door with tips for parents
Posted: September 9, 2011 Filed under: Missourian 1 Comment »I have a lot to write and say about my three-week-old Community Outreach team, and how we’re hoping to expand the boundaries of traditional definitions of journalism and keep the focus of the Columbia Missourian squarely on the community it serves.
But today, I have to take just a few minutes to share the project that I’m most excited about to date.
In assessing our newsroom’s coverage plans for the 9/11 anniversary, we decided we wanted to stay focused on real people and real conversations. A couple of students wanted to put together tips for parents on how to talk to young children about 9/11, during a weekend when scary images and stories would be hard to avoid. So Lexa Deckert and Charesse James did the interviews and wrote a story. I think it’s pretty good.
And then we turned the information into a two-page handout (downloadable on the left side of the story, and right here) and distributed it around town. We’ve handed out about 400 so far, at the public library, daycare centers, popular kid spots and coffee shops. We have plans to take a few hundred more to kids soccer picture day tomorrow and a few other spots.
Let’s have practical conversations, in real newsrooms, about focusing on the community
Posted: August 16, 2011 Filed under: engagement, Missourian, RJI fellowship Leave a comment »In my community engagement work, I’ve felt too often that I’ve reached only people who have already drunk the engagement kool-aid. I mean, who’s going to seek out research on audience unless they already know it’s important? Who’s going to follow a fellow’s blog, if not to find out more about something they already find interesting?
But what about the people who don’t already know they should be paying attention?
If anything I’ve done all year has the potential to help change cultures of non-believers, or at least the uninitiated, the discussion guide that published last night is it.
“Community engagement: A practical conversation for newsrooms” is the final product of my RJI fellowship. And I’ve known all year that it, or something like it, would be more useful and more understandable than my other reports.
A changing culture deserves an evolving, responsive newsroom
Posted: August 9, 2011 Filed under: Missourian 1 Comment »This was originally written for the Columbia Missourian, where I’m the editor of a not-quite-named team focusing on the community.
There are a lot more ways we in the newsroom can listen to you than there used to be. And I think we have an obligation to do so.
We can listen to what you say in the comments on our website, and we can join in the conversation.
We can listen to what you’re saying online in general, on social networks (did you know Twitter will search by location?) and on local blogs, for example.
We can spend more time listening in person, attending events and hanging out around town not to cover anything specific, but just to hear what’s on your mind.
We can “listen,” in a way, to what kind of news you’re looking for by paying attention to our web analytics. We can know (collectively, not individually) things such as what you’re reading at what time of day, what you’re searching for and which stories you spend the most time with.
Along with all this information comes a duty to be responsive. If we’re really listening, we should be changing what we’re doing based on what we hear. We should pay attention to what you like, join in the conversations you’re having about the news and respond when you get in touch with us directly, whether you’re walking into the newsroom (which you’re welcome to do anytime — 221 S. Eighth St.) or commenting on our Facebook or Twitter pages.
How I’ll teach community outreach at Mizzou
Posted: March 7, 2011 Filed under: Missourian, Teaching 7 Comments »As much as I’m enjoying my RJI fellowship (lots of thinking. lots of quiet. not enough chaos.) I’m really excited to get back in a newsroom. If you ask me what I do for a living, I’ll say I’m a journalist. So I’m ready to be back doing journalism.
Next year, I’ll be back as an editor at the Columbia Missourian, this time in a new position. I’m going to take what I’ve been learning all year about community engagement and bring it into the newsroom, as a community outreach editor (or some other title yet to be discussed).
