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.
Continue reading “Outreach team serves democracy, along with Taylor Swift fans”
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!
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.
Continue reading “The future of community news is bright: thoughts from Block by Block 2011”
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.
Continue reading “The community outreach team: A progress report”
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.
Continue reading “9/11 coverage includes going door to door with tips for parents”
It’s PanelPicker time for South by Southwest Interactive, and I’m starting my dive into the craziness that is 3,232 proposed sessions for Interactive alone.
Typically, the sessions I get the most out of aren’t on the journalism track. Two years ago, I was teaching multimedia design and went to several design and interface sessions that rocked my world.
Last year, I focused on community, social media and influence. I blogged about Doreen Marchionni’s session on conversational journalism, my frustration with ridiculous claims about social media ROI, and my advice for SXSW presenters.
This year, as I apply my community learnings back in my newsroom, I’m going to start by looking for true innovation among the journalism sessions and expand from there. As I do, I’ll keep a list here of the sessions I most hope to see.
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.
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.
Continue reading “A changing culture deserves an evolving, responsive newsroom”
I rely a lot on the research coming out of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, and I was thrilled this morning to get to hear Tom Rosenstiel himself speak to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies about the state of the media industry. It’s in New Orleans. At the Ritz. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
I was even more thrilled that his session was right before mine (which was about keeping the focus on the audience), because so much of the message I tried to get across was made more salient by the research he shared. In fact, I kept joking during my session that I was citing him too much! So Tom, thanks for the awesome intro you didn’t know you were giving!
Tom is one of the authors of “The Elements of Journalism,” a book that’s required for Mizzou journalism students. (I referenced it in a Nieman Reports piece this spring, adding my own obligation that I think journalists have to identify and attempt to connect with the audience.)
Tom shared some general observations about the changing culture of information consumption — nuggets of wisdom like:
— The power is shifting from journalists to their communities.
Continue reading “Tom Rosenstiel’s Seven/Eight/Nine functions of journalism”
Poynter shared the Scripps social media policy this morning, and I’m once again dismayed and depressed. Much as I was when I wrote about ASNE’s social media best practices.
We need to stop pretending that the answer to the Internet culture is having two personas — journalist as separate from real person. It doesn’t fool anyone, and it serves only to make us believe we’re still able to work under the boundaries we’ve traditionally set for ourselves.
If we value community, and our role in it as journalists, we’ve got to approach conversation with authenticity.
I’ve written before about what I’ve learned from small-town news. One key lesson is that, when you truly know a community and they truly know you, you don’t put on different hats in different situations. Your readers are your neighbors, and you don’t have the luxury of sharing different slices of yourself with different groups of people.
You can choose to be relatively private or in-your-face public about your views and your life. But the way you behave in person is how you should behave online. And the way you behave as an individual is how you should behave as a journalist.
We’re so scared to be human. A student actually asked me last week if she should respond to a negative comment on a story she wrote. My response was to ask how she’d respond if the person had come up to her in the grocery store with the same criticism. Unless the person is abusive or ridiculously rude, you wouldn’t just walk away.
That doesn’t just work in small towns. Check out the guidelines The Guardian gives its journalists. Please. Seriously.
Clarification added July 5: I don’t mean that journalists should never have more than one account. If you have distinct audiences and want to cultivate them separately, go for it. But let’s not pretend we can be real people, with real opinions, in one public social media space, and detached, “unbiased” professionals (or academics) on another. (And as an aside, can we stop pretending that any of us don’t have biases?)
Joy Mayer 