Participatory Journalism class at Mizzou, May 2, 2012

I always leave conversations with Breeze:

1. Smarter
2. Determined to change the culture of journalism
3. Optimistic about opportunities for change
4. Wondering if she’s hiring, because I’d love to work with her

I want to share just a few of the highlights from today’s conversation.

• “If something is going to be institutionalized, it should be tracked and measured.”
• Whenever possible, tie specific projects and efforts back to an organization’s strategic plan. If you have a mission that talks about bringing in more voices from the community, and you can tie specific efforts to that part of the plan, you have clear backup for your ideas. You also have a way to hold people accountable — something to point to that offers justification for the strategy.
• Know what you’re tracking and what you’re not tracking, and track metrics that address your goals. This is another way of saying one of my favorite metrics mantras: The ROI of analytics data that lead to no action is zero. Track only what helps you make decisions.
• Newsrooms are not used to being held accountable. Digital journalism has given us a window into audience, and being responsive to that audience is not always comfortable.
• To reward people who focus on engagement, credit staff by name whenever possible. Don’t underestimate public praise as a motivator.
• Think about what concrete steps reporters can take to make their stories engagement-friendly. This is one my newsroom is about to take on — a best practices guide for implementing the diagram on the wall of our newsroom showing the kind of journalism we value.

Here are a bunch of links I’ve saved related to job-hunting.

Here’s a smaller, curated list of the best ones for new grads. I made it last summer when I was teaching at the Poynter College Fellowship program.

So, what’s your story? Is it consistent across platforms? Do you have the quick version ready to go in case you find yourself in an elevator with your dream employer and have seven floors to make an impression? Do you have a longer one that makes for a killer cover letter? Do you have details to back it up for the interview conversation?

Have you properly investigated what prospective employers will learn about you online? Do you make it easy for them to the find the things you most hope they’ll find? (Too much emphasis is placed on fancy portfolios, I think. Often, a site like about.me and some nice delicious links of or about your work function nicely. And check out this fantastic use of Storify by @scottrocketship to showcase skills, availability and personality.

Have you made it clear what someone will get if they hire you? I’m not talking about just skills. What would your last boss say about you? Do you have a fantastic ability to solve technical problems? A way of listening that makes you a good collaborator? An efficiency that means you have time for continued learning? What’s your outlook? What are you like to work with? What energy will you bring to the position? What’s your story?

Julia Thompson, a Mizzou grad now at the Des Moines Register, visited the Missourian newsroom a few weeks ago. She said something I loved: hire for attitude, teach for skill. I’ve written before about what it takes to succeed on my team, and no one who works with me would be surprised to hear me say that attitude, work ethic and follow-through are more valuable to me than innate ability or talent.

I go back periodically to this fantastic New York Times interview with HSN Inc. CEO, Mindy Grossman. She lays out the kind of culture she hopes to nurture. She talks about how she asks prospective employees about their interests, values and risk-taking. Then she says that she hires only Tiggers, no Eeyores.

There are a number of things that are really important to me. One — and people laugh that I have this philosophy — is that you only hire Tiggers. You don’t hire Eeyores. It doesn’t mean they have to be loud, but I need energy-givers and I have to get a feeling that this person is going to be able to inspire people. Are they going to be optimistic about where they’re going? Are they going to attract people who are like that?

This certainly doesn’t mean that everyone has to be a bouncy extrovert. (As a natural extrovert, I learned a lot from this great Wired piece about the power of introverts.) It does mean, though, that the vibe you give off needs to be one of optimism and energy, not excuses and out clauses.

So please, be a Tigger.

They’re in good company. Young journalists learn early that their mistakes have big consequences, that they have to learn in the public eye and that jokes they find funny are lost on a larger audience.

I know about these situations personally because I was one of those students. As the editor of my college paper, The Oklahoma Daily, I was the object of an outraged audience’s wrath not once but twice. Both times, I published something I thought was going to be helpful for discussion about race relations on campus. And both times, the audience made it clear just how wrong I was.

And boy, was I wrong.

In both cases, I could — and did — try to persuade people that my reasons for publishing were sincere and that I hadn’t intended to offend anyone. And in both cases, my intentions didn’t matter much. My decisions as an editor distanced me and the newspaper from groups of students on campus who I actually wanted to improve communication with.

My beloved college newspaper adviser, Jack Willis, wrote a column for the Oklahoma Gazette in 2010 about these kinds of mistakes, and he interviewed me. That interview offered me a chance to reflect on my primary mistake, which had to do not with what I published but instead with how I responded. I got defensive. I was hurt that my motives were being questioned, and I wanted badly to convince everyone that I was really a good person at heart. I talked more than I listened. (I don’t think that same mistake has been made with the student editors at The Maneater.)

You know what else is different? I didn’t make my mistake in the Internet age. There is no digital record of exactly what I published. I’m sure I wrote a column in response to the situation, but I’d have to call Norman, Okla., to find a copy in the archives. There are no social media posts, from me or anyone else, regarding the situation. If you google my name, I think only mention of my college days is a reporting award I won.

Not so for today’s young editors.

That doesn’t, however, mean that their journalism careers are over when they’d hardly begun. They have a chance to make sure that when I google their names, more comes up than criticism and apologies. They have a chance for their lessons learned to be just as public as their mistakes. They have an opportunity for a large conversation about the relationship between satire and news in the days of The Daily Show. They should blog, a lot. And post, a lot. Get their names out their in positive ways.

They can, however, have bright futures as journalists. The mistakes my 20- and 21-year-old self made really have made me better, smarter and more humble. To quote a recently overused but effective message: It gets better. There is life after mistakes, scandals and embarrassment. You will be better for it.

And damned if you don’t have the best possible answer to the age-old interview question: “Tell me about a time you made a mistake.”

Anyone in the mood to share a big mistake you made early in your career? I’d love to hear it, especially if it was really embarrassing. And especially if you survived it.

Shirky tells the story of the little girl who, while watching a DVD, went behind the TV to look for the mouse.

He then writes:

Here’s something four-year-olds know: a screen without a mouse is missing something. Here’s something else they know: media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those things make me believe that the kind of participation we’re seeing today, in a relative handful of examples, is going to spread everywhere and to become the backbone of assumptions about how our culture should work. Four-year-olds, old enough to start absorbing the culture they live in but with little awareness of its antecedents, will not have to waste their time later trying to unlearn the lessons of a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island. They will just assume that media includes the possibilities of consuming, producing, and sharing side by side, and that those possibilities are open to everyone. How else would you do it?

The girl’s explanation has become my motto for what we might imagine from our newly connected world: we’re looking for the mouse.

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.

Handouts.

The low-tech option is often the right one. On three occasions we distilled coverage or resources into a one- or two-page handout and took it out into the community. The underlying goal here was to identify who would most want and need some information and then to take the content directly to them, rather than hope they found it on their own.

— 9/11 parent resource: Our team reported a story about how to talk to kids about 9/11 with the intention of distributing hard copies. We got permission from after-school programs, daycare centers and the public library, and showed up at soccer picture day and some coffee shops. In all, we distributed 800 handouts. Parents and proprietors were surprised in some cases, but almost universally enthusiastic and grateful for the resource.

— City Council budget talks: With a reporter and editor, we distilled a week’s worth of coverage to a potentially contentious (and definitely well-attended) budget meeting. Our goal was to put facts in the hands of people who were having emotionally responses to controversial proposed changes. We took 100 copies, ran out and had people asking for more.

— School redistricting: When proposals were announced for new public school boundaries, we summarized the key points and key coverage, then took about 600 copies combined to several elementary schools to hand out as kids were picked up.

INVESTMENT: It cost roughly $30 to print these three batches combined (0.02 cents per page times 1,500 pages). Also, 8-15 hours each (of my time and combined student time) in repackaging and distribution.

ANALYSIS: Success can be partially measured in community reactions and awareness. People were surprised we went to the effort, pleased to have the information and, in some cases, helping us distribute further. Especially for 9/11, it’s safe to assume that of those 800 copies, at least half actually (conservatively) made it into the hands of people who would both find the information useful and be otherwise unlikely to find our content. That’s outreach. The external benefits in this case are extended reach, community awareness and community goodwill. The internal benefit is an awareness of this delivery method as a valid option for information sharing.

Analytics reporting.

Real-time analytics from Chartbeat; projected on the wall of the Columbia Missourian newsroom.

We began producing two analytics reports, one for overall traffic and one for local traffic. That represents a big step toward more sophisticated analytics reporting. Some highlights of what we learned can be found in this presentation. We began tracking the effect of social media on traffic. We also started using Chartbeat, a sophisticated real-time analytics service. We project real-time data on the wall of the newsroom, and that has raised the general awareness of the room.

 INVESTMENT: Four hours a week by one outreach team member preparing the weekly report, and another four spent by another team member on longer term analysis.

ANALYSIS: Based on our use of google analytics, we know more than we did about our audience, and specifically our local audience. We are working more closely with the business side to help them understand who we serve. We have at times used the analytics to make decisions about what information users are looking for and adjust our coverage based on it. Big steps will come next, to get more sophisticated about our analytics reporting and more strategic about what we do with the information.

Social media use.

We had a goal of making our Facebook and Twitter accounts more consistent, more social, more conversational, more productive (in terms of referrals), more responsive to users, and more useful to the newsroom. We also wanted to reflect back to the community what people are saying about the things we cover.

— We’ve used Storify to reflect what regular people are saying about news topics (such as the first snowfall and a new UM System president and #freetotweet day) and also for weekly peeks into football players’ tweets, and several of those files have showed up on the site’s most-read lists. Those files are reflections of the nature of social media, reflecting what people are saying, not just distributing links.

— We’ve created several Twitter lists (including one for MU football folks and one for media in SEC towns) that could be a valuable resource. Unfortunately, we’ve done a poor job publicizing them.

A crowdsourced Facebook photo album of staff and reader photos of Columbia in the fall.

— We’ve had a few successful collaborative efforts, the most awesome of which is the CoMo Fall Facebook photo album, which generated more contributions and interaction than anything else we tried.

INVESTMENT: Significant. There’s no way to quantify the hours spent between my team and the Interactive Copy Editing desk on social media this semester. It would be the equivalent of a part-time employee, probably.

ANALYSIS: Referral traffic is way up. Traffic from Twitter grew 104 percent between August and December. We responded to most of the comments and @ replies to us that merited responses, though we still have much growth to do in how we use social media to listen to what the community is talking about. Traffic is high to the stories we do that aggregate comments or reaction.

Peeking behind the scenes of the newsroom.

We’ve offered users glimpses of newsroom life and plans. We published three behind-the-scenes videos (about a murder trial, the football press box, and changes in newspaper production) intended to personalize some individual people and be transparent and inviting about newspapering. We also looked for ways to share what we were working on ahead of time, including posting a picture of a white board of brainstormed story topics and asking for questions or input about stories in progress.

INVESTMENT: The three videos was produced by the outreach team and did not take more time than other video stories. The sharing of our process on social media did not take significant time.

ANALYSIS: We had more clicks than we expected on the picture we tweeted from a brainstorming session. Traffic was in the high triple digits for each of the behind-the-scenes videos, and time on page indicated that people watched the whole videos.

Updating how we handle comment moderation and participation.

We set out to assess our online comments, to make them more constructive and to increase newsroom involvement in them.

We did a review of media comment policies and examined our own. We were responsive to comments ourselves. We instituted a new method for banning spam and moderating problem users.

We also published a questionnaire, online and in print, and asked the community for input about civility and appropriateness. Afterward, we prepared a tweak to our public policy and, more significantly, a guide for the newsroom staff for participating in and moderating comments. The newsroom has indicated willingness and interest in being more active responding, fact-checking and perhaps guiding online conversations.

INVESTMENT: Significant time on the part of the outreach team.

ANALYSIS: This work involved a lot of collaboration with users. It also has the potential to lead to big changes in our newsroom’s communication with its audience. I’m really excited for the potential here. We will also begin tracking staff comments as part of our analytics reporting.

Newsroom culture.

Perhaps the least tangible but most important change has come in the way our engagement philosophies have been adopted by the newsroom. Our work has been generally embraced. Editors can be overheard asking who the audience for a story is, curiosity about analytics abounds, individual reporters are availing themselves of outreach team services and the culture of the newsroom is shifting more and more toward acceptance of audience-focused principles.

I’ve said all along that my ultimate goal is for the community outreach team to work ourselves out of a job because the newsroom has so embraced our philosophies. We have a long way to go, but progress has been made.

A few other projects.

USER CONTENT: We created a byline for the Missourian Reader Community, and it’s a fun way to track when content has been created entirely by or significantly contributed to by readers. We also are in the beginning stages of a big change: Beginning to publish stories from readers on ColumbiaMissourian.com rather than on MyMissourian.com, a citizen journalism website developed by Clyde Bentley in 2004. We think highlighting stories from readers alongside our own stories will both draw more attention to the user content and make our own report more complete. Stay tuned.

PHOTO ARCHIVES: The CoMo in Retrospect Facebook album has looked for timely and interesting ways to offer a glimpse into Columbia’s past. Two of the posts have led to “where are they now” stories.

MEDIA DIRECTORY: The CoMo InfoHub is a directory of 80+ information sources, about Columbia or based in Columbia. It’s organized by topic, not by type of media, and lets people know where they can learn about parenting, food, sports, hobbies, business, etc., in and about Columbia. It’s nearing publication.

COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS: We’ve developed a relationship with the journalism teacher at an alternative high school and have visited her class twice. She’s interested in bringing some of her students to the newsroom for shadow shifts, and she has called on me for advice and critiques as they restart their school newsletter.

DEVLOPING INFORMATION RESOURCES: We’ve provided context-rich resources, such as this one on understanding the bond issue and this one on the Occupy movement.

What’s next?

As the spring semester kicks off next week, I have some clear priorities in mind.

OUTREACH BEATS. I’m going to attach my team members to reporting beats, so they can develop expertise and get involved in coverage earlier. They can also provide analytics feedback for specific topics, solicit community content on those topics, create social media listening strategies and participate in beat brainstorming.

PUBLIC INSIGHT NETWORK. Our crowdsourcing efforts are about to go to a dramatically new level, as our partnership with the Public Insight Network gets off the ground. The system will roll out in our newsroom sometime this spring.

BEING OUT IN PERSON MORE. My outreach team members will be assigned to go to more community events, to represent the Missourian, answer questions, solicit community content — and listen. In addition, we’re working on how our editors could be more visible and accessible.

COMPARING ANALOG AND DIGITAL CONVERSATIONS. Say we want to ask the community to identify its priorities going into a municipal election. What if we did it on social media AND outside Walmart and at the public library? Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what kind of response we get — both in attitude and in content?

READERS BOARD. We’re going to restart a lapsed readers board, forming a group of people who can advise us and who have an interest in what we do. My goal is to find a way to make that just as beneficial to the participants as it is to us. (I’m especially eager for examples and ideas on this one.)

Thanks for reading. I’d sure welcome your feedback on any of this. What do you predict will have the most impact? What do you wish we’d try and report back about? Get in touch anytime, at mayerj@missouri.edu, @mayerjoy on Twitter or 573-882-8182.

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.

If you earn an A …

You understand and work to carry out the philosophy of the community outreach team. You continually question, challenge and assess our strategies. Around the newsroom, you evangelize for the community and the audience. Your work makes an impact in the newsroom and on the community. You routinely suggest new ideas and strategies. Your work, communication and attitude are thoroughly professional, and you consistently follow through to everyone’s satisfaction. You work well as part of a team. You have a sense of urgency and are a solid journalist. You seek feedback and adjust your work based on what you hear. Your work improves each week. If another editor called me looking for an employee, you would be a strong candidate.

If you earn a B …

You mostly seem to understand and work to carry out the philosophy of the community outreach team. You sometimes contribute by questioning and challenging our strategies, and you understand the basics of assessment. With a few projects, you have made a real impact on the newsroom or the community. You rely on being given assignments more than some students. You generally work well as part of a team. You might sometimes need to be reminded to follow through on tasks, and you might not always remember to communicate with your colleagues. Your work has on occasion included errors or a lack of journalistic urgency. When you have remembered to seek feedback, you have been generally quite responsive to it. Your work improves, though not as quickly as it could. If another editor called me looking for an employee, I would say you had great potential but would likely need some nurturing.

If you earn a C …

You go through the motions on the community outreach team but do not seem to fully understand its philosophy. You carry out tasks as assigned but do not generally take them beyond the basics. Overall, it’s hard to see the impact of your work, and you do not often provide adequate assessment of your work. You often need to be reminded to follow through, and you sometimes miss deadlines. Your work is sometimes satisfactory and sometimes contains errors. You sometimes seem to lack journalistic urgency. You don’t actively seek feedback on your work. Your work has not shown significant improvement. If another editor called me looking for an employee, I would not be able to recommend you.

If you earn below a C …

You have continually been unreliable and unprofessional, or have compromised the integrity of the team or the Missourian through your work or your behavior.

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.
In this class, the experiment is sometimes the point, more even than the content we create. You’d be part of defining that experiment, assessing how it’s going and adapting along the way. It’s not the kind of class where you’d be told exactly what to do. You would need to come to your newsroom shifts with ideas, enthusiasm and the ability to follow through on them.

This blog post about what we’ve been up to this semester might help.

We’re going to focus our efforts a little more tightly next semester, and might not be quite so wide-ranging in our efforts.

Some of the projects I’ve been most proud of and excited about this semester are:

— Taking fliers with important facts to community meetings, such as city council and school boundary forums. The goal is to reach people where and when they most need information.

— Using social media to spark conversations and find sources.

— Diving further into our analytics, strategizing around how we can be responsive to what the community seems to want, and learning more about what local readers want versus overall readers.

— Live tweeting breaking news.

— Producing behind-the-scenes videos with reporters and other staff.

— Working with reporters and editors to get the community more involved in our processes.

— Working on longer-term projects, such as a revised comment policy, a directory of media in Columbia, partnerships with schools to provide student reports for MyMissourian, a plan for how much information journalists should share about themselves on their bio pages, and a Twitter strategy for the newsroom.

There’s a drawing on the wall of the newsroom that’s explained in this blog post, which also might help you understand where I’m coming from.

Please let me know if you have questions, and feel free to talk to the current members of the outreach team. You can find them on this Twitter list.

NOTE: There is also a one-hour version of this class, without the staff requirement. Liz Brixey is teaching it in the spring. It’s a topics class, so you can find it under J4301/7301. Look for the section assigned to Brixey. It’s an awesome option for people who just need one credit, or who want to learn the material without working in the newsroom.

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.

I tend to define journalism broadly and inclusively. But even when defined narrowly, the definition needs to be separated from its form of publication. Surely we can all agree that whether or not a specific piece of content counts as journalism is not contingent on whether it appears in a traditional news outlet or is created by someone employed by a traditional news outlet.

So if we get that argument out of the way, can we please be less uptight about what journalism is, and let go entirely of trying to identify who is a journalist?

Back to Yong, who shares this useful analogy:

So are these people all journalists? Here, I find it helpful to think of modern journalism in terms of mental disorders. The field of mental health is moving away from sharply defined diagnoses to spectrums of behaviours. In a similar way, there is a spectrum of journalistic values, norms and techniques, which are present to different extents in different people or even individual pieces of work.

I know I fall somewhere on that spectrum. Am I a journalist? Honestly, I care less about the answer than I once did. I am not being blase – I care very deeply about journalism, but there are few things more boring than journalists arguing over what counts as journalism. We live in a world full of stories, about amazing people doing amazing things and terrible people doing terrible things. I will use every medium I can to tell those stories. I will try to tell them accurately so people aren’t misled. I will try to tell them well so people will listen. If people want to argue about what to call that, that’s fine for them.

I would rather just do it.

Sing it.

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?