Experiments

After the great response from readers, we decided to address some of the issues that we believe will lead to more brain friendly journalism.

News and commentary of interest to journalism innovators and entrepreneurs

I’ve heard it over and over and over again: There’s no financial model for intensely local news.

The group of 12 independent community news publishers we’ve been working with at The Patterson Foundation are demonstrating just how untrue that particular little truism is. And I want to say that it has been nothing short of thrilling to watch these publishers succeed.

Let me back up a step and bring the rest of you up to speed.

Immediately following a live broadcast of the Missouri governor’s annual State of the State address on Jan. 17, the RJI Futures Lab, in collaboration with the news staff at NPR-affiliate station KBIA/91.3 FM, engaged the mid-Missouri public radio audience in a live multi-platform discussion right from the rotunda at the State Capitol.

The holidays ate this blog.

That is the only reason I could come up with to explain why I’ve been away so long. I had promised I’d get back to this right after Christmas. Which became right after New Year’s. Which became as soon as the first week of January is behind me and I’ve made a dent in the mound of work that went undone during the holidays.

So here it is, with January almost gone before I finally made my return.

The last year was an eventful, fruitful, sometimes frustrating, always exhilarating one for me in my work with the New Media Journalism Initiative. In the last few months of 2011, we really gained momentum as projects with the Journalism Accelerator and the Block by Block network of community news publishers began to gain steam. We’ve gone from thinking-planning-testing to fully operational in our work, and I see exciting things ahead for this year.

News and commentary of interest to journalism innovators and entrepreneurs

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.

Newspapers and other news organizations are unlikely to get much benefit from subsidizing e-readers or tablets

As you may already know, G+ has rolled out to a limited number of users what's called an "On-air Hangout". It is essentially a broadcast tower embedded within Google Plus, the world's first face to face social network. The On-Air feature allows a Hangout to easily be broadcast (viewed) by the public anywhere in the world without having to join the Hangout. We TV News Buoys and Missouri Journalism School nerds who are using this new technology on TV on +KOMU 8 News & with the +Reynolds Journalism Institute are pretty geeked out about it. Here's why.

News and commentary of interest to journalism innovators and entrepreneurs

News and commentary of interest to journalism innovators and entrepreneurs

News and commentary for journalism innovators and entrepreneurs

Part of what makes working in news so seductive is the instant gratification factor.

There aren’t many jobs where you see the impact of your work so quickly. Every day, sometimes several times a day, you publish your work and the community responds to it.

That has been one of the biggest adjustments for me in the work I’ve been doing as part of the New Media Journalism Initiative. For the last two years, we’ve been building our work incrementally, learning as we go. Sometimes, when you are working to build something new, from scratch, it is hard to tell whether you are making any progress at all.

When Jane Stevens was an RJI Fellow in 2008-2009, she and a team of students and professors developed a prototype social journalism health news site called HealthCommons. After the fellowship, the Lawrence Journal-World asked her to join the organization as director of media strategies to oversee the company's 15 web sites and to develop a health news site based on HealthCommons. The result was WellCommons, which just won an EPpy. Here's why she thinks -- or hopes -- it won.