Experiments

Three minutes on an iPhone and Gary Symons, CEO of Vericorder, is well on his way to creating a full video package. Around the room, professors and students are a chorus of “That’s neat,” and “Cool!” and often, “Wait, what?”

As expected Apple has again raised the bar for competitors in the tablet market that the late Steve Jobs defined with the iPad. It also will put more pressure on publishers to make their iPad editions more compelling and visually rich.

I'm now officially allowed to share with you that our little journalism startup called adFreeq was selected along with 25 other startups from around the world to present tomorrow at the LAUNCH! conference in San Francisco.

The growth of measurement tools for observing how people mentally process and respond to media content including online news websites is exploding!

2011 was a big year for breaking news. Concurrently, it was yet another year of fewer resources, fewer journalists and smaller budgets. One potential way to cope with this is mobile journalism (MoJo).

Although industry professionals have been talking about MoJo for years, the current climate may be it’s time to break through in mainstream media. It gives greater freedom to newsrooms at every level; the technology is better, it’s more compact and often it’s affordable. Year by year, MoJo is granting more flexibility in the field of news.

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 a Reynolds 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