Having temporarily relocated to beautiful Columbia, MO the Journalism Accelerator project is now in full swing. The experience by sheer proximity to a thriving University tens of thousands students strong is nothing less than awe-inspiring. Plus the Tigers took Oklahoma this past homecoming weekend, home of the first school of Journalism in the nation, and as my friends at the University tell me, also the first campus to celebrate homecoming. The time here as a Fellow has only just begun, but is already flying by, and it's only October.
With work well underway, the project’s current focus covers three main areas:
1) Review and feedback around what has been code-named the Journalism Accelerator. The early beta launch, or technology platform preview, was released late September (2010). Community news site folks have been generous offering their ideas and feedback at the recent Block by Block event in Chicago, with many conversations ongoing. The event inspired a range of ideas, issues, priorities and hopes for organically grown methods that contribute to sustainability, accelerate learning and fuel information exchange.
2) Research, analysis and content creation working with student teams here at Mizzou, we're exploring areas of innovation to chronicle a number of experiments in the field. Feedback from the "new news" community has identified a short list of priority topics; a brief preview of a couple of the topics is offered in this post.
3) Conversations with existing community or innovation focused news networks to kick around the idea of shared infrastructure to serve multiple network communities.
Refinements to the Journalism Accelerator will be incorporated reflecting what we learn through these conversations. We'll optimize the social platform based on the feedback collected from news community site operators, plus findings from a brief survey that will come out a little later this year. All of this will inform the first full release slated to launch early 2011.
The big "take aways" so far: utility, and simplicity, are essential to support the folks on the front lines of news creation and community reporting.
The role of the platform, as its first step, is to test its ability to function in service of the news and community site networks it serves.
The intent is to provide capacity for information sharing through open source tools to enable social collaboration and information exchange across news innovator networks.
Collaboration in this context referring to the late Latin definition meaning "to labor together." With the added dimension "to labor together and share findings to make the work of many more efficient." Or as Janet Coats has summed up the strategic intent of the collaborative platform as a way to "connect journalism innovators to help make good ideas better and big problems smaller."
Serving as a kind of "rapid response system," the platform will offer a means to surface ideas with immediacy across news content producers and their networks.
The platform framework is envisioned as a virtual space to debate ideas, call attention to policy issues, exchange information, point to and discuss experiments in innovation; a network of networks serving as an easy to use online point of access for content creators to cross pollinate ideas and share resources. An added bonus is our intent to allow users to be able to bookmark, or tag conversations and their posts, so we preserve the wisdom of the tribe one exchange at a time.
In addition to the shared creation of a collaborative platform, four Mizzou student teams are developing a batch of case study content and recommendations that explore several areas.
A recent Mizzou J-School master's program graduate is working on a series exploring the early impact of Patch across three different parts of the country. The story will offer two points of view from three geographically different communities. Each story in the series will offer the perspective of an established hyper-local news site operator as well as the perspective of the local Patch start up in that same community. The series will be informed by interviews, research and some analysis of the business model Patch has in play.
Convergence Team: Capstone Crew
Tracy Record of West Seattle Blog made a couple insightful comments during a brainstorming and discussion session at Block by Block in Chicago. The first comment Tracy likened to crime forensics asking "what would be lost if your community site wasn’t there?" The second comment encouraged deeper thinking around impact.
Tracy suggested thinking more about sets of metrics that reveal community "relational innovation" to better assess the benefits communities gain from their independent hyper-local news sites. Bringing back these insights to the Convergence team, has inspired research around relational innovation "indicators" with findings to come a little later in the year. Deeper analysis is concurrently underway to explore how to better cluster sets of metrics to reflect the unique impact different community news sites deliver to their readers.
So what comes next?
Next steps include listening in and learning from this week's ONA conference in Washington, DC.
There is also a community information gathering session in the works targeting mid-November in Seattle hosted by Journalism that Matters (JTM). We'll be learning about the JTM community's capacity needs related to collaboration across the "new news" landscape. We'll drill into the ways the JTM community currently uses social technologies, as well as the areas members see a need for more connection with one another.
A survey will circulate later this year, welcoming you to and weigh in and share your take. I'll be posting more here as we listen, learn and the project continues to take shape.
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