Experiments

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 a Reynolds 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.

During the last couple of months, most of my posts here have focused on the New Media Journalism Initiative’s work with the Block by Block community of independent news publishers.

That’s understandable, given how much activity there’s been in this aspect of our work. The Block by Block Community News Summit in September was a productive gathering of entrepreneurial publishers, sharing both common problems and potential solutions. Since the news summit, we’ve been doing some exciting work around financial sustainability. I’m hoping to start sharing details of what we’re learning from that effort after the first of the year.

Notes and observations from whirlwind visits to MSN Money; a GeekWire meet-up with Zillow founder Rich Barton; Capitol Hill Seattle blog founder Justin Carder; MSNBC; Seattle Times' managers of their local blog network; and editors of the print and digital Puget Sound Business Journal.

One of of the goals I had for OpenMissouri, when I started the project as a 2010-2011 fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, was to provide inspiration and tools to journalism and open-government groups in other locales that want to deploy data catalogs of their own.

My RJI fellowship is officially over, but the OpenMissouri.org team has been making strides since we launched the site March 17 at Open Missouri Day during Sunshine Week.