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News and commentary of interest to journalism innovators and entrepreneurs

Journalism's guiding principle when it comes to content production and delivery appears to be give the audience more and give it to them faster. This has become even more evident to me as I prepare to conduct an experiment investigating how the content and packaging of online news stories and advertising effects the way readers pay attention to, learn from and respond to online news content. If results of my experiment turn out the way I predict, not only will the research demonstrate the value of applying brain science to online news production but it will show how the manner in which most online news websites are structured goes completely against my notion of "brain-friendly" news content.

The Sunday Classifieds are a way for me to share with you what I find most interesting in the week in regards to newspapers, advertising, and classifieds.

News and commentary of interest to journalism innovators and entrepreneurs

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 Sunday Classifies is a way for me to share with you what I find most interesting in the week in regards to newspapers, advertising, and classifieds. Here's what caught my eye this week.

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

Break out the sparklers and the cake: Happy birthday to us. We're almost 220 years old.

It's a tweet-able celebration.

On Dec. 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights went into effect. On that day, many Americans (though tragically not all) were guaranteed some of the core freedoms that we enjoy today: the right to bear arms; the protection against unreasonable search and seizure; the right to a fair trial; and trial by jury.

What's 220 years old yet remarkably vibrant still today?

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.

It's true anything can happen on live television. Of course sometimes anything can refer to an unwanted expletive from a college sports announcer, a streaker running across the tennis match, or maybe even something more profound like watching a revolution live in Egypt or mass amounts of Americans celebrating the death of a hated enemy. This all can happen and has happened on TV in the past year. But something that hasn't happened is molding all four of these random events into one conversation, and I'm not talking about one random conversation with a close friend.

Social media has become an important part of the news. Journalists are tweeting links to their work and posting videos and pictures to Facebook to reach a broader audience.

It goes even further at KOMU’s U_News @ 4. The show is a compilation of views and opinions based on trending topics at the local, national and international level to provide a fresh perspective to the daily news.

Breeze Richardson, director of strategic partnerships at Chicago Public Media (WBEZ-Chicago), provides a detailed explanation of how her organization is developing specific metrics to measure a full range of engagement with the community it serves.