RJI in the News

Representatives from Hearst will provide students with information on the Reynolds Journalism Institute's fourth annual student competition at a meeting Wednesday. Along with Hearst, RJI is partnering with Adobe, Google and Sprint to sponsor the contest.

In a contest to foster journalism innovation - or even help birth a new breed of journalist-programmer - the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri is bringing together journalism students with computer science, engineering and business students to create new apps for Google’s open-source Android mobile operating system.

Joy Mayer notes that when it comes to measuring reader engagement, mere numbers don’t tell the story:

“Quality counts. Meaning counts. Investment counts. Not everyone who’s invested is going to share content on social media or jump into the comments section. Wendy Norris, a reporter in South Carolina, recruited citizen volunteers to help her crowdsource a story about condoms. Seventeen volunteers went to 64 stores to help her see how condoms are being sold. Seventeen highly engaged readers, who’d never show up in analytics.”

David Cohn is known as a rock star in the journalism world of “new thinkers.” The 28-year-old recently moved from working in his San Francisco apartment to a swanky office in Columbia, Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI). He’s working as an RJI fellow to expand his website Spot.us. (When you talk about the site, you say “Spot-Us.”)

It may not be possible to force innovation in journalism, but you may be able to guide it, starting with a little speed dating.

Mobile tools and skills offer journalists a range of new options for reporting. To help journalists decide how best to go mobile, this week Reynolds Fellow Will Sullivan published a mobile journalism reporting tools guide.

Some public records — such as court documents, campaign finance reports and business registrations — are already accessible online in Missouri. David Herzog is interested in the other ones.

In creating a new system to fund reporting directly by donations from a geographic or online community, Spot.Us broke some of the traditional rules of journalism — namely that reporting is funded through a combination of advertising dollars and subscriptions.

Isn’t it intriguing how the same good idea pops up at roughly the same time from a number of dissociated people in far-flung locations? I guess that’s how we collectively come to know that something is a good idea whose time has come.

Pictures of the Year International (POYi), a print and digital exhibition of photojournalism from 2010, will be displayed at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. from April to October 2011.

Matt Thompson of NPR's Argo Network produced a live blog of the session, which was inspired by a MediaShift article by Jessica Clark of American University's Center for Social Media.

"Obviously, Steve Jobs sees this as a significant revenue stream for Apple in the future," Roger Fidler, head of digital publishing at the Donald W Reynolds Journalism Institute, told the San Jose Mercury News recently.

The University of Missouri’s push to commercialize more intellectual property bagged it a $100,000 grant from the Kansas City-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, one of the largest foundations in the country.

The value proposition of new news businesses shouldn't be about saving journalism; rather, they need to focus on meeting consumers' needs and wants, and finding solutions, Mark Briggs, author of "Journalism 2.0" and "Journalism Next," told Missouri School of Journalism's David Cohn.

The value proposition of new news businesses shouldn't be about saving journalism; rather, they need to focus on meeting consumers' needs and wants, and finding solutions, Mark Briggs, author of "Journalism 2.0" and "Journalism Next," told Missouri School of Journalism's David Cohn.

A singularly insightful conversation about blogging was sparked this week by Marc Ambinder, who wrote a thoughtful goodbye post at his long-running blog at The Atlantic. In it, Ambinder parsed out differences between good print journalism (ego-free, reliant on the unadorned facts for authority) and blogging (ego-intensive, requires the writer to inject himself into the narrative). With the switch from blogging to traditional reporting, Ambinder said, ”I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called ‘Marc Ambinder’ that people read because it’s ‘Marc Ambinder,’ rather than because it’s good or interesting.”

Hearst Corporation's Innovation group announced today that it is partnering with The University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI), Adobe Systems Inc., Google, and Sprint Nextel to hold a student competition aimed at creating new journalism-focused mobile apps using Google's open-source Android mobile operating system.

A group of journalism students at the University of Missouri is blogging about mobile apps, hardware and best practices in mobile newsgathering, with the aim of creating "a sustainable and long-term resource guide for the industry."

The Washington Post has introduced an iPad app with a subscription option, apparently answering a sticky issue publishers have had with Apple.

Michele McLellan, Knight Digital Media Center consultant, leadership blogger, said her research at Reynolds Journalism Institute as a fellow last year showed that those who think about revenue at the beginning usually succeed, even if the business model changes.