BeGIn meets Observant

By: Charlotte, Mousumi, Max & Kiki

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FINAL CLIENT PRESENTATION - MAY 23rd

Last Thursday, we met in the office of the Observant for the third and last time.  Feelings were mixed between proudness, sadness and hungriness. 

Proudness: As a team, we are very proud of what we achieved throughout these 5 months. Our mentor, Sueli, was also very appreciative of our final results. According to her, we have shown a lot of independent and critical thinking and have adopted a bold and creative approach to the problem. It is with great pleasure that we can now say that we have met all her expectations. 

Sadness: “All good things come to an end...” I am sure that you are all familiar with this saying. After 5 months of constant opportunities to learn and challenge ourselves, the members of Team BeGIn will go separate ways and might never meet again. However, one thing is sure: we all have learned a lot from this experience and will leverage our new skills and knowledge in our future careers. 

Hungriness: “A job well-done should always be rewarded.” Throughout the PREMIUM programme, rewards were usually related to food. No, we obviously don’t mind! As you can see from the picture, we got some chocolate from the client as a present for our good work. Sadly, Kiki was not physically present for the meeting and will have to wait next week to eat her chocolate. 

Before to let you all go, we would like to thank again the following people:

Sarah & Renée, our competence coaches, for helping us personally for the past few months.

Sueli, our mentor, for always challenging us to be bold and keeping us on the right track.

Riki & Cleo, the staff members of Observant, for trusting us with this project.

The PREMIUM staff, for giving us the chance to participate in this fantastic programme.

Good luck to you all for this final step and see you on Wednesday at the closing event!

Team BeGIn

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FINAL REPORT MEETINGS - MAY 15TH/16TH

This has been a busy week for team BeGIn. We are finally in the process of putting together our findings and writing the final report that will be presented to the client on our last meeting on Thursday. Our final report will be a comprehensive overview of what we did over the course of this last few months, from our meetings with experts and our literature review, to our one-on-one interviews with students and staff. This overview will conclude with our final recommendations for the Observant team. Through this process we hope that we will provide the Observant with all the necessary information and tools to move forward and improve their community engagement and visibility across the university.

Our team met twice this week and will still do a final Skype session to go over the final editing of the report on Monday. Since we have taken on a very difficult and demanding task, we had to get the necessary supplies. Hence the pizza, coffee and croissants! ;) It’s always important to give yourself some motivation.

Kiki

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University Newspapers & Social Media

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made it a lot easier for journalists to embed themselves as part of the community, to report on issues and to crowdsource story ideas or new angles. It has also made it easier for community members i.e. students and staff in the case of the Observant to exercise their right of reply, or to simply add something new and interesting to a story.

As part of our research, we reached out to the social media editors of various university newspapers and this post contains a brief summary  of our insights. We have interviewed the following editors thus far:  

1. Henk Strikkers, the web editor-in-chief of the Folia, the University of Amsterdam’s newspaper

2. Elmer Smaling, senior editor at Erasmus Magazine of the Erasmus University Rotterdam

3. Ries Agterberg, editor in chief of the DUB of Utrecht University.

These newspapers - or rather digital media organizations - were chosen because they all have a digital-only presence (without any print copies) in addition to being bilingual (both Dutch and English).  

The goal of these interviews was to understand how these newspapers view their purpose of serving the informational needs of the community and providing an independent voice of criticism and analysis (nor is this very different from the way the Observant views itself). All of the editors agreed that digitalization in general and social media in particular had played a major role in transforming the journalistic process and making it more participatory in nature, such that there were often multiple points of convergence between the journalist and the community.

The social media accounts (all three of the media organizations maintain accounts on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram, while Folia & EM also maintain accounts on Linkedin) were bilingual, with posts being made in both Dutch and English. There is a filtering process that is used to decide which news article is promoted on which platform (and in which language). Most articles are published on Facebook and Twitter throughout the week (with relevant articles for domestic and international students being published in Dutch and English respectively), whereas Instagram has the stories which are more conducive for attractive pictorial depiction. Linkedin, on the other hand, was used by EM to publish more professional and academic oriented articles. However, not every tweet or post is about an article - journalists post (or reblog other relevant posts) throughout the week about various issues and also in case of “breaking news” - for instance, if a university team wins a sports prize.

Social media has also fundamentally changed the way university newspapers connect with their community, making it easier to crowdsource story ideas as well as to start a dialogue (with the newspaper as well as other members of the community). All the editors interviewed agreed that quite a few of their stories elicited negative reactions (for example, this bilingual post about gun violence at an international student housing complex by the Folia which generated a lively online debate amongst readers about multiculturalism and its impact on Dutch society and Amsterdam), but felt that these negative reactions were valid and helped to push the debate forward and shed light on different perspectives. A caveat though - intellectual debate can sometimes devolve into racist, sexist or hateful comments (as with this series of articles about sexual harassment of a student published by Erasmus Magazine), and it is the duty of every media organization to monitor and moderate the discussion so that the line is not crossed.  

Social media has also made it easier to garner audience reactions and facilitate audience interaction so that the story continues and develops even after it has been published. It can also help journalists to build their own brands as experts on certain issues, in addition to establishing the university newspaper as the  single stop for any information that students need about the university. This is strikingly similar to the advice given to us by Drs. Denis Ancion & Geert van Doorn (recounted in this post) about the importance of always being true to the core message of an organization to create a genuine connection with the audience.

- Mousumi

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MEETING WITH THE COMMUNICATIONS OFFICERS – MAY 9th

Last Thursday Max, Charlotte and I had a meeting with Dr. Denis Ancion and Geert van Doorn, who are the director of Marketing & Communications and the Issue & Reputation Manager/Spokesman for the executive board of Maastricht University respectively.

We decided to reach out to the communications experts that work for the university and ask for their advice and expertise on how Observant can improve their image and promotion strategy.

The meeting turned out to be extremely insightful, not only because the two gentlemen were very experienced and knowledgeable on the topic, but also because they have a deep understanding of the UM community dynamics.

Our line of questioning focused primarily on their job description, building a considerable reputation and brand name for the university, and how they tackled issues, such as establishing the target audience and its preferences.

The main takeaways from our meeting were that Observant should invest more in creating a strong brand name. This can be achieved by defining what the mission of the newspaper is. Once this is established, is important that Observant maintains a strategic and consistent approach in how it communicates that mission to its audience. In relation to this point, Denis emphasized that Observant should make their mission more focused, since this way marketing themselves would be more easy and effective.

Another interesting point was Geert and Denis’ advice to always have a communication approach that is customized to your target audience. Based on their experience and the work they’ve been doing over the past few years, this can be achieved through frequent research into the audience and re-adjusting Observant’s practices annually in order to stay relevant and in sync with their community.

This meeting offered us valuable input and added a new perspective on our project that up until this point we had not considered. All the constructive advice and criticism that Geert and Denis gave us will be incorporated in our final report and will definitely drive our decisions and  recommendations to the client.

Kiki

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Interviews

As part of our project, we were supposed to find out who does not read Observant and why. After finding this specific target group, we were then supposed to come up with possible ideas that could help Observant increase their readership and their reach. Although the initial request of the client focused solely on the readers and the paper itself, our research suggested that more interactive and unconventional approaches could play a determining role in keeping newspapers relevant in the new era. Our goal was and still is to provide results that are respectful of Observant’s tradition and identity, but also give our client the competitive edge they need in order to communicate their message.

We conducted face-to-face interviews with UM students and staff members. As the Observant wants to get people involved to participate in university life, it was worthwhile to also consider the newspaper content critically i.e. to what extent is the Observant writing about things that students/ academics care about. The purpose of the interviews was to identify certain characteristics about our target readers and gather insights into their preferences.

We divided the team in two: Charlotte and Kiki went to FaSos, FHML, FPN and SSC whereas Mousumi and I went to SBE, LAW, FSE and ICL in order to get as many answers as possible. As a matter of fact, we ask people about their “relationship” with Observant as well as their ways of reading news, using social media, and their interests in general. Some of the interviews were transcribed or recorded and they included both staff members and students from the various faculties. The results we got from those face-to-face interviews were relevant and helped us to better understand our client's target group. Some of the interviewees even came up with ideas that could benefit Observant.

As we can see in the video, the student originally from Sudan has already heard about the Observant but he never read it. He also mentions that he tries to avoid social media and uses other platforms to get general news. That information given by the interviewees will help us to write the report we want to present during the last meeting with Observant. Thanks to the interviews we conducted, we will propose creative solutions to help our client to reach their goal!

Max

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TEAM MEETING - APRIL 30th

Between tutorials, homework and thesis deadlines, scheduling a meeting for all of us has been a constant struggle, especially over the past few weeks. That’s why this week’s meeting was held on Tuesday evening at the Inner City Library. Despite the late hour, our meeting after dark turned out to be very productive. Here’s a short overview of what we did.

First, our team focused on scheduling the remaining tasks, such as setting up the deadlines leading up to finalizing the report that will be presented to the client. In addition to that we determined our availabilities and proposed different potential dates for the final client meeting, based on our mentor’s schedule and our own.

Next on the agenda was the structure of the final report. We agreed on the different sections that should be included and who is going to do what. So as of now, I am responsible for summarizing the notes and insights from our Adam Thomas interview and Charlotte will organize the main points of the available literature. Max and Mousumi are in charge of editing the interviews with the university communications directors and social media editors of other Dutch university newspapers respectively.

The analysis of the staff and student interviews we have conducted, as well as, setting the final recommendations for our client will be done collectively in our upcoming team meeting in the 15th of May.

In the following days and leading up to our final meeting, our team will conclude the final faculty interviews and meetings with experts. This way we will have all our data compiled before finalizing the report.

Stay tuned for next week’s post, where we will give you a small taste of our interactions with some of you and an insight to what students think of Observant.

Kiki

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TEAM BUILDING DINNER - APRIL 25th

Team night out! A job well-done should always be rewarded. So last week we decided to treat ourselves to a fancy dinner and enjoy each other’s company over a few drinks. Here’s a peek from our fun night out!

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TEAM DYNAMICS MEETING - APRIL 24th

Last Wednesday, team BeGIn had the chance to meet for the Team Dynamics Meeting. Unfortunately, Renée was not able to join so Sarah had to lead this meeting by herself. The purpose of the meeting was to guide us in a reflection on team performance, roles, communication, and conflict resolution. Being aware of the different team roles and what the varying responsibilities mean is a crucial part of working on a project in a team.

Sarah initiated the discussion by asking about our impressions about the team synergy. We realised that we have learned a lot since the beginning of the project. Indeed, we learned how to deal with team issues as well as project concerns. The meeting was informal which helped us to honestly reflect on the previous months, our behaviour and how we conducted ourselves as a team. In order to visualize our progress during the project, we divided the whiteboard into 3 different parts: Positive Actions, Negative Actions, and Points of Improvement.

We think that being able to meet with our coach and discuss exclusively how the team has been functioning and not about the project itself helped us a lot. It allowed us to be honest with each other and clearly see what we have done correctly and what we should improve to be even more efficient while working. One of the points of improvement we analyzed was being direct timeously. It is true that sometimes, due to the fear of offending someone in the team, we let things going as they are, whereas if we had acted on them directly we could have avoided some miscommunications. Also, at that time, we had not taken the time to organize a proper team building to spend fun time together (no spoil… next post). By discussing our team development, we came up with the solution to give regular intra-team feedbacks in order to improve our personal work and attitudes toward the project.

We would like to thank Sarah for having led this meeting in a very nice way. The competence coach is there to support us through the process of professional development throughout PREMIUM at an individual as well as at a group level.

Max

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Politics & University Newspapers (Post #3 of 3)

Why is it relevant for a university newspaper to report on politics, you ask?

In an age of rising populism and extreme movements, media outlets also have a more important role to play in safeguarding democracy and preventing polarization. In the age of social media, fake news and alternative news sites can create an echo chamber that drowns out rational voices and encourages extremist behavior. A study conducted in 2009 tried to quantify the echo chamber effect by examining web-browsing histories for 50,000 US-located users who regularly read online news. They found that social networks and search engines are associated with an increase in the mean ideological distance between individuals. However, they also noted that people are ultimately creatures of habit - the vast majority of online news consumption is accounted for by individuals simply visiting the home pages of their favorite, typically mainstream, news outlets, tempering the consequences of recent technological changes. More recent research also suggests that the desire for opinion reinforcement plays a more important role in shaping individuals’ exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. The Neiman Foundation, Harvard’s journalism lab/ think tank, found that local newspapers play a very important role in reporting news from the grassroots community – in fact, the decline and closure of smaller local newspapers was in part held to be the reason why all major news outlets missed the support for Trump in the 2016 US presidential elections.

As a period when college students come of age as voters, university newspapers can help students to think critically and examine all facets of an issue before coming to a conclusion. In fact, there is a considerable body of academic research that indicates that students would welcome non-campus related information in their local university newspaper, provided that it was presented in a relevant and engaging way.

-Mousumi

P.S: If you haven’t checked out the latest issue of the Observant, we urge you to do so here! They have an insightful coverage of the upcoming EU elections (in English).  Shout-out to our fellow Premium team @debaastricht who have been working hard on the Live Viewing Party at Vrijthof for the Maastricht Debate on 29/04! 

Part 1: Empathetic Journalism & What it Means for the Observant 

Part 2: How University Newspapers personalized a national issue: The case of the Waterboard Elections

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How university newspapers personalized a national issue: The case of the Waterboard elections (Post #2 of 3)

In the 2nd part of this 3 part series, we consider the Waterboard elections held in March 2019 and the way that university newspapers tried to use the event as a platform to forge new connections and strengthen existing ones with its community.

At Team Begin, we are comprised of a diverse group of people from different parts of the world with different backgrounds. However, one thing that we all have in common is that we are international students facing certain common challenges and issues when it comes to integrating with life in Maastricht while studying at a Dutch university. The language barrier does pose a problem at times, for instance when trying to become politically engaged and active, as with the provincial and waterboard elections that were held in March 2019.

As an international, non-Dutch citizen, I was surprised to receive a “stempas” from the Geemente in my mailbox one morning in mid-March – apparently, I was eligible to vote in the upcoming waterboard elections. As I was not aware of the relevant political issues at stake, I decided to educate myself. I found that university newspapers are pretty good sources for explaining the basics for the first time voter.

The Ukrant, the newspaper of the University of Gronigen, does a good job of unpacking exactly what the elections are about, and also goes on to specify exactly who is eligible to vote in which election (provincial & waterboard) in this article (in English). The Erasmus Magazine, of Erasmus University Rotterdam, went one step further and interviewed multiple students and professors at voting booths to try to get an idea of the issues that they felt were important in this English article.  The Folia, the newspaper of the University of Amsterdam, carried out an exit poll at two stations and gave a brief break-up as to which way their sample had voted (in Dutch).

Once the election results were out, the Observant of Maastricht published this analysis (in Dutch) detailing a city wise break-up of the votes garnered by the various parties (The Forum for Democracy, or FvD, led by Theirry Baudet, emerged as the single largest party in the Senate with 13 seats). The Ukrant carried out a detailed analysis of this “upset” victory by carrying out a detailed interview with three RUG students who had voted for FvD to figure out what they were motivated by ( in English). This profile piece is differentiated by the genuine effort undertaken by the journalists to connect with the student body and the effort to cover their views in an unbiased and balanced manner.

What do these election results mean for universities? The DUB, the University of Utrecht’s newspaper, posted this piece (available in both English & Dutch) about certain statements that Baudet had made in the past regarding the quality of education and even “indoctrination” at universities.  The Folia interviewed multiple staff members and academics about what they thought FvD’s victory implied in this Dutch opinion piece which elicited quite the debate amongst readers in the Comments section. The Observant also recorded the UM staff & professors’ response to Baudet’s criticism in this Dutch article that summarizes the contents of an open letter by academicians (including 70 UMers) to the FvD.

The study association InDuplo of Erasmus University of Rotterdam invited Baudet for an open debate specifically about his views on climate change, and to ensure that the focus remained on the issues, discouraged live media & TV stations from attending the event – this was rather a refreshing change for someone like me who is used to non-stop live telecasts from politicians.  

You may be wondering why national politics is a topic of relevance for the university newspaper in the first place. In the next post in this 3 part series, we go on to answer that question and describe why university newspapers are so crucial in fostering independent and critical thought in civic life.  

Stay tuned for the final part in this series! 

- Mousumi 

Part 1: Empathetic Journalism & What it Means for the Observant

Part 3: Politics & University Newspapers

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Empathetic Journalism and what it means for the Observant (Post #1 of 3)

PoIn the digital age, wherein content has been commoditized, copies are free and news can be shared with a click, most media outlets are struggling to stay relevant. Local newspapers, which had a smaller audience and readership base, are in even more dire straits – they are struggling to stay afloat and keep their doors open.

The Observant, UM’s independent newspaper, is to a certain extent shielded from these financial concerns as it is run by an independent foundation whose funding is provided for by the University. But the Observant is not completely insulated – the wider demographic changes that have led to a decline in the readership of print newspapers have also affected the Observant. As readers migrate to digital channels (this is especially true for younger audiences, which comprise the core demographic of university newspapers like the Observant), newspapers have had a hard time trying to keep up with them.   

But the outlook certainly isn’t all gloom and doom for newspapers with a specific audience (local & university papers). Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest men, invested US$ 344 mn in 2013 in purchasing 28 print newspapers because he realized their value and relevance in the local community life: 

How can the Observant implement these principles in its newsroom? Prof. Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Center of Journalism at the City University of New York, has coined the term ‘empathetic journalism’ to describe the way he thinks the profession ought to be: a tribe of listeners, not lecturers informing passive subjects. As he describes in this article,  local newspapers play the crucial roles of (1) reflecting communities, (2) diversifying media, (3) serving people, and (4) convening communities. Journalists are not only storytellers, but they are also facilitators, connectors and community representatives. Many of the ideas described under the umbrella term of “empathetic journalism” are closely linked to “engaged journalism” as Adam Thomas (director of the European Journalism Center) described it when we interviewed him (read more about the interview here). 

So how do university newspapers achieve the shift from their community as subject (receive), to consumer (demand/ choose), to citizen (participate/ create)? Many university newspapers in the Netherlands are trying (and succeeding) in their effort to achieve this goal. In the next post of this 3 part series, we will describe the way university newspapers localize and personalize national level issues to forge new connections and strengthen existing ones with their community by considering a practical example (the waterboard elections held in March 2019)  .

Stay tuned for an update!

- Mousumi

References

EJC. Changing the chip: What would journalism look like if it was generated from within communities? https://engagedjournalism.com/assets/pdf/What-would-journalism-look-like-if-it-was-generated-from-within-communities.pdf

Part 2: How University Newspapers personalized a national issue: The case of the Waterboard elections

Part 3: Politics & University Newspapers

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MEETING WITH ADAM THOMAS – APRIL 16th

As stated in the last post, we had the chance to meet with Adam Thomas, the director of the European Journalism Centre (EJC).

What is the EJC and what is its mission?

“Our focus in 2019 is building resilience into journalism. Our media organisations, journalists and societies need it more than ever.” – Adam Thomas

The EJC is an organization that supports and consults with independent and smaller media organizations or freelance journalists. It provides them with the expertise and tools to survive, innovate and stay competitive in a sustainable and ethical manner in an era of multiple challenges, such as being co-opted by authoritarian governments, being streamlined and sold off, or trying to generate new revenue streams. Throughout the meeting, Adam Thomas told us about the multiple tools and activities that can be found on the Engaged Journalism Accelerator: grants application, case studies, guides and mentors, community calls, trainings, events (e.g. News Impact), workshops and a very interesting database.

What did we learn from the meeting?

It was a real pleasure to talk with Adam Thomas about the media crisis, which he believes is a problem that every media organization is facing nowadays, especially the local ones. According to the director of the EJC, 7 out of 10 local newspaper disappear every year.

Here are the main takeaways from our insightful discussion:

1. The bilingualism of Observant should be seen as a selling point and not a problem. The staff of Observant must analyse both segments and find a way to change this potential weakness into a strength. The same logic goes for the printed version of the newspaper. Nowadays, most news organizations are completely online. Observant must reap the benefits of having a free printed version.

2. Before even thinking about the content strategy, the first thing that Observant should do is understand their current audience. In order to do this, Adam Thomas suggested different ways: data collection from their website using tools such as Google Analytics and face-to-face interviews with open-ended questions to current readers and non-readers to understand what is relevant for them. This is why we, team BeGIn, asked the client to share their data with us in addition to the interviews that we are currently conducting in every faculty.  

3. After having asked your audience what it likes to see covered, a content strategy can be built. Here are some tips and remarks from Adam Thomas related to the content:

It is useless for Observant to include (inter)national news, unless they can rewrite it from a student perspective and somehow differentiate themselves.

Quality over quantity: editors must focus on the 20% that really drives the traffic.

Be unique and distinctive: write something relevant to the community that no one else talks about.

Start at the customer level and complete the feedback loop using calls to action. According to Adam Thomas, stories from and about the readers bring more traffic and loyalty.

Keep a good balance between short videos and long reads.

Leverage your content strategy with your most popular columns.

People seem to like articles about corruption and critical news stories from editors.

The diversity in the newsroom should ideally reflect the diversity of the audience/ readership base, which in turn influences the choice of articles.

Stay tuned!

Charlotte

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MEETING WITH THE CLIENT – APRIL 16th

On Tuesday, we had the chance to enter the office of Observant for the second time. The purpose of the meeting was to clarify some aspects of the project and make sure that we were still on the right track. We would like to thank again Cleo Freriks for her time and detailed answers to our questions. 

Kiki initiated the discussion on behalf of the whole BeGIn team and explained the reasoning behind our wish to meet again. The main aspect that we wanted to clarify was the overall goal of the project. After our first meeting with the client, we were under the assumption that the client emphasized the importance of increasing Observant’s visibility through their print newspaper. However, our research over the last few months has showed that the main mission for a newspaper like Observant should be to get their message across and establish their value. The way they do that should not be the point but rather fulfilling their mission of informing and reporting. We were happy when Cleo reassured us that the print newspaper was not the only focus because it will allow us to look for more creative solutions. However, when Max asked Cleo about the importance of the print version of Observant, Cleo insisted on the fact that she believes that it is a key aspect of their value proposition and thus a strength of Observant. In her opinion, the printed version makes Observant visible. She doesn’t see an immediate future in which the Observant goes completely digital. 

Once the objective was clarified, we could finally ask Cleo about the expected final product that we will need to deliver in less than 2 months. We agreed that a final report would be the most appropriate in this case. It is needless to say that this report will include all the important steps of our progress – problem analysis, literature review, interview findings, etc. – before writing down our recommendations. We also noted the importance of doing a presentation before the PREMIUM closing event. Cleo said that she would try to have the whole team of Observant on board. 

We finished the meeting with more practical questions. First, Mousumi had prepared questions about the business model of Observant such as how they derive their income and if they have a fixed budget. Then, I switched to their current plan of actions set to increasing their readership. Cleo gave us more details about the start and frequency of these specific actions. We were positively surprised to learn about their junior journalist position that we hadn’t heard about in the initial meeting. We will keep this in mind when making our final recommendations. Finally, we asked Cleo about concrete data regarding their reach. Observant is already using Google Analytics to screen their readership. Cleo promised that she would share the data with us. 

This meeting was very insightful and actually not the only meeting we had that day. Our next post will be dedicated to our meeting with Adam Thomas, the director of the European Journalism Centre. Stay tuned!

Charlotte

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Dr. Rasmus Kleis Neilsen: "The Latest Findings of the Digital News Report" | Talks at Google

Dr. Rasmus Kleiss Nielsen talks about the latest findings of the Digital News Report released by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This...

REUTERS DIGITAL NEWS REPORT

For the past 10 years, Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has been conducting a survey of more than 70,000 people in 36 countries about their digital news consumption. In the following video, Dr. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of research at the Reuters Institute, presents the findings of the latest Digital News Report.

Although his presentation covers a multitude of different aspects concerning news media and journalistic practices in our times, I will refer and explain the main points that seem relevant to our project.

One of the recurring tendencies mentioned in the latest report has to do with the way people access and discover news. The study looks into the various social media platforms, the more established news organizations websites as well as messaging apps. The findings suggest that social media still remains the main source of news and information. But, unlike the previous years, their percentage has remained static. There’s been, however, an increase in the use of direct messaging apps like Whatsapp as a mean  to access and get news.

The Digital News Report findings provide a useful and valuable framework for our focus points during the student interviews and observations we will be conducting in the following weeks.

Apart from the survey findings, the speaker also offered advice for news organizations. Dr. Nielsen highlighted the importance of establishing a strong brand presence. He acknowledged that this is even more challenging, considering the easy access and the quantity of available sources. But he suggested that this is important for the survival and development of news organizations.

Observant is also facing this challenge. Even though it is the one and only independent university newspaper of Maastricht, its presence among the university community is not strong. This point is worth-mentioning and is something that our team will keep in mind, when writing our final report and designing our suggestions for the client.

These are only a few insightful topics that Dr. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen touched upon during his presentation and interview. He also reminded everyone that taking interest into news allows us to be more involved in public life, more engaged with our community and more informed about political and institutional processes. His comments summarize the importance of our project and the reason why Observant still is and will continue to be relevant and necessary for the community of Maastricht University.

Kiki

Useful Links: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/

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What time is it? It’s weekend time!

Before that, team BeGIn would like to share with you an assessment of Observant’s strengths and weaknesses in their various channels.

In the first stage of the project, we looked into these aspects as part of the problem analysis in order to evaluate the current situation. We consistently assessed the weak and strong points of the different channels of Observant: newspaper, website and social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram).

These various observations drove our choices and course of action. Now that we have identified the weaknesses of Observant, we can make sure that they will be addressed in the solutions that we will deliver to our client.

Til next time... Have a great weekend!

Charlotte

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Community engagement through social media: Sarah Lee at TEDxKalamazoo

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TED...

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

One of the main issues that Observant is struggling with is engaging with their audience. Despite their long history and their attempt to stay up-to-date with social media practices they fail to expand and engage with their community.

This video is a TED-Talk about “Community engagement through social media” by Sarah Lee, director of Marketing at the Kalamazoo Community Foundation. In her speech she identifies the following steps that play into generating community engagement through the use of social media:

1)      GATHERING INFO

Lee suggests that if you, as an individual or organization want to build a relationship with your audience, you have to get to know the people. There lies the foundation that make up a community. This has been one of the driving forces in our project. We constantly try to figure out new ways and questions so that we can better understand the needs of both UM students and staff. For this reason our team is conducting several interviews in all the University faculties. We want to reach out to the students and staff and find out their interests and habits.

2)      KEEPING ATTUNED

The speaker goes on to say that after gathering information and details on the members of your community or target audience, you have to critically analyze them. It is important to see through the emerging patterns in such information, because this then serves as a link between the organization and the community. This point is very useful for Observant. The results of the interviews will serve as a way to identify the common interests amongst their audience. This way the staff can produce and curate content, specific to their community’s needs and desires.

Sarah Lee concludes that the people that follow you on social media are your community. Whether these are your friends or business connections, social media help connect people to a commonly shared idea. So in a sense through these platforms, you don’t just represent yourself or an organization. You are managing a community that provides access to connections and information. Similar to what Lee says, Observant should act like a bridge between the University and the people involved in it, create connections and raise awareness about issues that concern all of us.

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TEAM MEETING – MARCH 29th

This has been a very busy time for team BeGIn. Between assessing the feedback we got from the mid-term presentations and the individual mentor meetings, we decided to discuss how we will move forward. Our team met this past Friday. It is exam week for many students and University spaces are hard to find with everyone studying and all. So Charlotte was kind enough to host the meeting at her place.

One of the major topics of this meeting, was scheduling and task assignment. I (Kiki) was put in charge of setting up a meeting with the director of the European Journalism Centre, Adam Thomas. Mousumi was put in charge of monitoring Observant’s social media activities and comparing their practices with other bilingual University newspapers here in the Netherlands. Charlotte took over the academic literature review and researching other online sources on the media crisis. Finally, Max was assigned to get in contact and consult with several communication officers who work within the University.

These activities cover all the steps that we talked about during the midterm presentation. However, during the feedback, another PREMIUM student insightfully pointed out that we should keep looking into the students, since they represent the larger part of Observant’s target group. Therefore we split into groups of two and assigned different faculty buildings we could visit and conduct field interviews with students. Charlotte and I will be visiting the buildings of FASoS, FHML, FPN and the Student Service Centre, whereas Max and Mousumi will approach students at SBE, LAW, FSE and the Inner City Library.

Though our team has managed to avoid the mid-term ‘dip’, we realized that there is not much time left till the end of the project. So in order to make sure that we will manage to deliver effective results for our client, we re-evaluated our organization. Considering that PREMIUM is a program that gives students the opportunity to gain professional experience and further develop their personal skills, we did not want to assign one team leader. Assigning a team leader would mean that only one person could exercise their leadership skills and it would also cause for an uneven distribution of responsibilities. For this reason, the team came up with what we called the ‘buddy’ system. Each member of the team is responsible to monitor another person’s progress and commitment, by keeping track of their deadlines and assignments.

Despite having a somewhat short meeting, team BeGIn managed to take care of a lot of things and prepare for the upcoming weeks and holidays. Keep up with our Tumblr page to see how the following weeks turn out and to learn more about our upcoming expert meetings.

Best,

Kiki