Networking means more than getting a reference; it means getting work done

Thirty years ago this fall, I came to the University of Missouri to study journalism.

An 18-year-old from a small East Tennessee town, I had been to Missouri exactly once before, for a campus visit the previous spring. I knew no one at the university. I knew no one in Columbia. I didn’t know a single soul in the whole darn state.

But my choice to come to the study at the School of Journalism was an easy one for me. I made it because the school was the world’s first J school. I made it because of its reputation for excellence.

I made it because of the Missouri Mafia.

It was that network of alumni, with connections into newsrooms all over the nation that was the most powerful draw. I had no personal network to connect me to journalists at all. By coming to journalism school at Missouri, I would make the School of Journalism’s network my own.

We live in networked world. In some sense, this has always been true because humans are social animals, motivated to reach beyond ourselves to cooperate in ways that may prove mutually beneficial.

In a digital world, our ability to connect and cooperate is accelerated far beyond what I could have hoped for when I became part of the Missouri Mafia. As Clay Shirky describes it in his book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,’’ our “native talent for group action’’ has met up with powerful new tools to enable that action:

“Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, lots of new groups and not just more groups but more kinds of groups…. We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.’’

Since I left the newsroom almost two years ago, I’ve been focused on how those who are leading innovation in journalism connect with each other. My work at The Patterson Foundation in Sarasota, Fla., has been focused on the question of helping innovators to find each other to share both common problems and possible solutions.

In doing this work, I’ve been watching how networks of practitioners evolve. My initial interest was focused on shiny objects – the new tools people can use to connect. But as I’ve watched and thought more, I’m intrigued not just in how practitioners use tools to connect, but why they reach out to each other in the first place – the idea Shirky outlines that social tools enable not just more groups, but more kinds of groups.

These connections seem different from the professional networking I did as a reporter and editor – networking that, in all honesty, was focused not so much on learning and growing but on professional advancement. I spent years developing a network that first led me toward jobs with more responsibility and prestige, and then I spent turned to that same network as a way of identifying and attracting talent to the newsrooms I led.

What intrigues me about the emerging networks I see now is the focus on sharing experience and knowledge. It’s not that the professional network has disappeared or become obsolete. But the ability to solve problems, to avoid duplicated effort and to give momentum to promising ideas is the opportunity that these emerging networks present.

It’s not networking around the hospitality suite at some convention. It’s an opportunity to do real work. That’s what I’m hoping to explore during this year at RJI – how the real work of creating journalism is getting done through emerging networks.