#jcarn

[keepfronting]

#jcarn #worldheroesperfect #neogeo #neogeomini https://www.instagram.com/p/BwtdGxIlUfmrEdrb0kdRcn3qK4dIcUj-6bct3I0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1gc35ui1ucbg6

[bison2winquote]

- Julius Carn, World Heroes 2 Jet (ADK) 

[grovesprof]

#jcarn: Finding the way to meaningful, long-lasting content

#jcarn: Finding the way to meaningful, long-lasting content

Author’s note: This post wraps up the responses to my earlier prompt for the Carnival of Journalism blog project. Feel free to contribute your own blog responses, and I’ll add them to the thoughts compiled here. 

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As I’d hoped, our group stretched my prompt about longevity and meaningful contentin a variety of directions. Engagement remains a fluid, malleable idea in today’s landscape, and I…

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[grovesprof]

#jcarn: Finding the communication 'jobs to be done'

My belated post for #jcarn: Finding the communication 'jobs to be done'

Note: This post is another installment for the Carnival of Journalism project, where people passionate about journalism are sharing ideas in the blogosphere about ways to preserve and improve the craft. This month’s prompt: 

How do you get your own creative juices flowing? What sparks innovation in your own thinking, your newsroom or classroom?

—

As an editor and newsroom manager, I had been…

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[aramzs]

Student news orgs are the future, not just for students, but for communities

College media's differences with non-student media have burned away in the journalism's economic crunch.

This month's question for the Carnival of Journalism is: "How would you set up a student news organization in 2013 or how could an existing college news organization modernize itself?"

In the last 10 years I'm pretty proud to have worked at college media, worked as university staff for college media and trained or worked with some of the best journalists I've seen, who just happen to have been students at the time. So this one is pretty close to my heart. 

One of the most important things to address is how college media has changed, just between the time I started and the time I left. The hit to print advertising revenues was just as bad in college media (if somewhat delayed) as everywhere else in journalism. The results were also pretty much the same: newspapers dropped in circulation and student journalists took to the web, some with enormous resistance, some like fish to water. 

So that's where college media is now. Exactly the same place as the rest of journalism. Just younger. 

So what should the student newspapers of the world do now?

Be the local, web-first, community-oriented professional news organization that students need for their clips and that campuses, towns and cities require. 

1: You're the local now

With the collapse of Big Media hyperlocal (Patch, EveryBlock and the continuing compression of Gannet local papers) there isn't anyone covering most of the communities that surround campuses. 

The biggest missed opportunity in student journalism is that they are perfectly positioned to step in to hyperlocal with commercial success.

College media should cover beyond the campus borders to everything that is relevant to students, which absolutely includes the community surrounding campus. 

More than that, they should be a news organization for the local municipality because there is a journalistic responsibility to cover local that has been falling by the wayside. 

Finally, they should do so because there will be no better way to get the clips, skills, experience and hand-on knowledge that they will need to succeed once they leave campus. 

2: You're a business, act like it

College media organizations need to run like businesses and they need to pay out to their student employees. 

The days are over when you could 'just be a journalist'. Even if students never get involved in the business side of a news organization, they need to understand how it works. Students can't afford to be blind to how the other side of the organization works any more. 

One of my significant moments as a student journalist: I was at the College Media Advisers conference in NYC (attended by journalists and sales students alike) and there was a session simply titled "How to make money online."

I was the only attendee. 

Telling student journalists not to care how the business works isn't just disastrous for their futures, it's disastrous for college news orgs. 

In 2011, I surveyed college media's online advertising. The results were startling. College media (which has to deal with ad agencies just like everyone else) offered 171 different advertising units with 76 different pixel dimensions. In all of that 3 of the 18 Interactive Advertising Bureau designated ad formats weren't included.

The range of pricing was just as wild, with a medium rectangle (the most popular unit in student journalism) ranging from $35 to $1,760.

A move to cover the towns and cities surrounding college campus will open up revenue, but only if ad sales and the business side are handled sensibly and seriously. The organizations that do so will have the means to pay their student journalists.

In college media, EICs often run the business which means they need to understand it. Since they often come up from the journalism ranks, that means all journalists involved in college media should understand the business of journalism. 

3: Require professionalism

Students should be covering the community outside campus, running the org like a business, and getting paid. Along with that comes a requirement to be a professional.

Orgs can and should be more flexible because of student life, but they should still require ethical behavior, enforce deadlines, provide a schedule and enact consequences for those students who fail to meet these standards.

One of the most persistent complaints I hear from folks that are responsible for hiring is that students are coming in without any experience of how to work, hold a job, be an employee or market themselves in an interview. I don't think the average university provides this training or experience to undergrads, but college media should. 

If a student news organization doesn't take itself seriously, how will the folks they chose to cover or solicit for ads?

More than that, understand that the internet means that everything has the potential to play out on a much larger stage, that can be great for the future of student journalists or terrible. It comes down to how they act. Orgs should require appropriate behavior. 

4: Do everything

Yes, out there in journalism land there are still jobs that 'just write,' but if you were born after 1985 they're not for you. Young journalists will be expected to be able to Tweet, blog, know HTML, understand how code works (and possibly be able to code), do community management and be able to use at least 2 programs in the Adobe Creative Suite. 

College Media organizations should pull all sorts of artists and makers into their ranks and then require their journalists to rotate through a variety of multimedia production tasks under supervision of student specialists in that media type. It'll improve the hell out of student media organizations and give the clips required to get a good job in journalism. 

For every year a student is involved with a college media outlet, they should have 'made' at least one journalistic project, anything from an audio podcast to a huge multimedia production. Students need to do multimedia and find a type of project they enjoy and keep at it. 

5: Web first

College media is unusual in that student audiences really enjoy printed editions, but that doesn't mean that students can get away with leaving the web to be an afterthought. 

Going web first is required for expanding coverage outside the campus borders, it's required to get the experience needed after graduation and it supplies the clips required to get the journalism jobs students want. 

It means:

Someone is going to need to learn to code. 

Many people will need to start aggregating. 

Orgs should be unafraid to pull in non-student contributions (say from freelancers) as long as students are in charge. 

Students are going to need outside training from reliable organizations because the majority of professors won't know the skills required.

Final thoughts:

It should all count towards credit, because journalism education that isn't hands on is useless. 

This is do or die. For now, college media is being kept alive by two big things: the higher education bubble and advertiser ignorance. 

Eventually universities are going to face an even greater budget crunch than what is occurring now and college media is going to get hit hard. 

On the other end, an increasing number of advertisers are reaching out to students through more direct means. The easier and more effective this gets the harder it will be for student media to pull in advertisers, unless they offer a superior product. 

College media has plenty of potential, I can't wait to see where it goes in the future. 

[emmacarew]

#jcarn: the future of student media

My rambling thoughts for this month's Carnival of Journalism

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When I look back at my experience in student media from 2005 through 2009, I know I had it better than most: we were entirely student-run, had a generous budget for most of my time there, published five days a week, and took advantage of the amazing network of alumni we had in the area for training opportunities. 

Still, things could have been better. I spent three of my four years at college (freshman, junior and senior years) focusing on reporting--and I learned from that experience than I did in all four years of J-school combined. But like most professional newsrooms, those were the years we were struggling to adapt to a modern, digital-first strategy. 

I've long criticized my J-school at the University of Minnesota for being behind the curve. The "web publishing" class I took senior year taught us how to use Blogger. There were no opportunities to learn how to build an online portfolio or data visualizations. One class was offered for computer-assisted reporting at the graduate level and I had to beg, borrow and steal to get myself a spot in the class as an undergrad. From what I can tell, shortly after I graduated, they appeared to get their act together.

Recently, Matt Waite, professor at Univ. Nebraska-Lincoln, put forth his concept of the “minimal viable participant,” or the base skills anyone looking to enter journalism must have. To his list of four: Tell stories, understand the internet, learn, execute on ideas, I wrote that I would add collaboration:

      “Journalism has always been a team effort: behind every bylined story there were editors, copy editors, page designers, graphics editors, etc. whose hands touched the story before hitting the final product. 

But collaboration now and in the future means looking beyond the confines of the newsroom and asking how you can work your leadership, business team, marketing team, and audience to make a better news product. 

The attitude of “I’m only a reporter” or “I just make the pictures” is rapidly falling out of vogue and will be of little use in the newsrooms of the future.”

Student publications should be a playground, the place where you stretch your wings and the place where you fall and scrape the shit out of your knees. In addition to professional internships, where assignments come from editors and students are asked to work within an established newsroom system, students need to use their time at campus publications to innovate and create new systems. Being completely student-run felt like fun at the time, but looking back, I wish we had had a voice of reason and a guiding hand to help us reign in the crazy but also push us toward the awesome.

I’ve often said that graduating in 2009 meant that most of us came out of school not only wanting to be great journalists, but also to help save it a little. Student publications need to give our rising stars those opportunities.

When I meet students who are working at their student publications, my question for them is always this: what are you doing that’s extraordinary?

For me, it was fighting with the university to get them to release the salaries of every employee in the system. And it was spending six weeks finding young survivors of breast cancer to tell their stories and being invited by one to witness her breast augmentation surgery. It was skipping school for three weeks straight to cover a criminal trial from start to finish.

 Students today have a daunting task ahead of them: mastering base journalism skills, like reporting and storytelling, while also tackling digital skills, like coding and data visualization. They’re being asked to do more and more with those four years, which is excellent preparation for when they land in their first newsroom.

Today’s (and future) student newsrooms need to focus on innovation and collaboration. Students need to break out of the “backpack journalist” mindset and learn to leverage their strengths against those of their teammates.

I would love to see student publications require all staff to spend their first year rotating through different positions in the newsroom: copy editing, web desk, visuals, multimedia, etc. And I believe student publications benefit from having the involvement of a professional journalist on some kind of advisory level. We joked about our newsroom being “Kid Nation,” but there were definitely times when it wasn’t a joke, and things really did feel all Lord of the Flies.

But the end game is this: students need to graduate with a deep and diverse portfolio, which many are failing to do. Stories about the Math department offering free pizza on the lawn and canned classroom exercises aren’t enough to instruct the next generation of journalism. Publication and creation must be mandatory for students graduating with a journalism degree. 

[emmacarew]

Carnival of Journalism: life/work hacks

Ok #jcarn team, I'm back in this month. Life/work hacks, as prompted by this month's host, Will Sullivan (aka @Journerdism), seemed like too good a topic to pass up.

Sullivan's prompt for us:

For this installment of the Carnival of Journalism we’re going to go ultra practical:

What are your life hacks, workflows, tips, tools, apps, websites, skills and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively?

I love this topic because it relates to a lot of the work that I do: trying to help my colleagues in the newsroom work more efficiently on the web. This has ranged from little things like tabbed browsing and Firefox extensions, to big things like how to leverage RSS and Google Alerts.

My favorite things (in no particular order):

Evernote. Try planning a wedding without one. I dare you. But seriously, the ability to get my info anywhere I have cell service has been awesome -- for work, AAJA and wedding planning. I'm also in a weird bind at work where we can't add our work email accounts to personal phones, so the Evernote clipper integrated with Outlook inbox has been awesome as well - I can take anything I really need out of my work mail and clip it to Evernote.

Pixlr Grabber extension for Firefox. It's "Print Screen" on steroids. Ability to clip any portion of a web page is fairly common among many extensions, but I like Pixlr's options of download to desktop OR copy to clipboard. As someone who  makes a ton of social media handouts for a living, this has been a huge help.

Diigo / Delicious + keyboard shortcut. Delicious worked great for me, and when I upgraded to Firefox 4, initially I couldn't get the Delicious add-ons to upgrade too. Someone told me that's since been addressed, but I had already transferred my bookmarks to Diigo and their extension works essentially the same. This is a huge help for showing my colleagues an example of using a new social media tool, so I can call them up by tag (and try searching under multiple tags).

Google Calendar/Outlook Calendar. This is kind of a no brainer to keep work-home-wedding-AAJA-etc calendars synced on PC, Mac and iPhone, but it works. I also keep a paper desk calendar for the occasions when I'm away from my desk or my phone is dead.

Google Docs. This was my number one tool when I was job searching. I uploaded all of my best clips, my resume and my cover letter to Docs, so I had them at my finger tips to print or email to recruiters any time I saw an opening I was interested in. This was a big leap for me after losing one too many thumbdrives that essentially held my lifelines.

CTR-SHF-T aka the best Firefox (I think it also works in Chrome? anyone confirm/deny?) keyboard shortcut I have learned all year. It opens the last tab(s) you closed in the order that you closed them.

2 computer screens. When I shifted into my new job, I immediately asked for two PC screens. When I'm editing the homepage AND trying to keep an eye on our social media accounts this has been absolutely awesome. Or the ability to rearrange stories in our CMS in one screen AND view the site in the other. If you can find a way to get two screens, go for the two screen set up.

Never get lost in a parking garage again. My fiance makes fun of me for this but since I got a smartphone, I take a photo of a landmark or a number near where I park whenever I park in parking garages. It's usually faster than digging out a pen, trying to keep track of whatever scrap of paper I scribbled it on, and I no longer have to attend conferences with "P-16" or "Orange level 3" on the back of my hand. Maybe you're pretty good at remembering where you parked your car and think this is kind of lame. To that, all I can say is Lucky You. :)

[bui]

Post-#jcarn thoughts

About 30 people sat in a room for a full day where our brains were squeezed for innovation. @digidave promised us we'd be out of brain juices and as always, he didn't lie.

The purpose of Hardly Strictly Young (If you're wondering, it's a reference to a bluegrass festival) was to look at four recommendations from the Knight Foundation and formulate actions based off of them. A few things to be noted: this wasn't necessarily about journalism, although we were 30 journalists, the words "journalism" and "newsroom" were rarely spoken. Knight white paper was about improving the information needs of communities. As vague as that sounds, it was possibly vaguer. The report was full of assumptions and for a number of the 16 recommendation implementations we made, we threw half of the words Knight used out the window, working from what we knew. 

These are 30 of the smartest, most innovative journalists I know. Everyone from coders, to project managers to evangelists and some flat-out amazing reporter/bloggers. Despite the constantly rotating selection of food and snacks Reynolds kindly provided us, we were wiped at the end of the day.

I want to stop here and not outline the implementations we came up with. You can hear about those on the stream of presentations.

What is worth commenting on is the tone and trends I noticed throughout the weekend and the thoughts I think are underlying.

Partnerships

A public media survey recently came out that more or less said that local NPR-member stations rarely, if ever, partnered with outside organizations and newsrooms (LINK). It's changing, for sure, but the process seems slow.

Despite this, I can't think of a single plan that we came up with that didn't involve meeting with other newsrooms and anchor institutions — everything from barber shops to churches to the Elks Club. 

In order for any fundamental change to occur in how we present information to communities and work with them to improve our reporting, we need to make better use of the existing resources. This holds particularly true in the case of inner cities and rural areas. After working in semi-rural areas and launching a site in an underserved urban community, I've learned nothing but that communities have been ignored, abused and sometimes cast of by the same journalistic institutions that are now scrambling to cover them. 

Let's not ignore the fact that journalism isn't the only answer to giving communities the connection and information they need, as well. DavisWiki and others were named in our recommendations, none of which are actual newsroom products.

We have to get over our egos and seriously think about what partnerships can bring us. Newsrooms are starting to work with blogs and small, local sites, but it goes a little beyond that. I had a straight-forward conversation with one of the few non-journalists in the room, Rahn from a foundation in Boston about journalism and foundation/non-profit partnerships and the hurdles we face. In essence, it came down to egos and transparency. Foundations are thinking about hiring journalists, knowing that the reports they release might be biased. Newsrooms are tip-toeing toward foundations, hoping there is a way to partner without appearing biased, even though the public may not care. The only solution Rahn and I could think of was transparency, but that doesn't even completely answer the problem. Can we trust the public enough to know that there are multiple "truths" to every story?

Get our of your box

The next words you read will not be revolutionary. Or new. But reporters need to go back into the communities they serve. 

Much of what was discussed was about that, but a step beyond. Evaluating communities' needs whether defined or understood was the purpose of a few implementations, including the CAT signal (possibly the quickest I've ever seen an idea from a conference become a site and Twitter handle).

This is where you bring in people like Brian Boyer and Daniel Braubacher. Numbers, analytics and opening pathways to discover community needs is what is missing. The issue with journalism is that we move at the speed of light, with little time to slow down and look at what is passing us by. Market research, evaluation and building systems to make authentic reporting easier simply takes too much time when we're under deadline. At least, it seems to.

We're past the age of investigative dream teams, where you have a year to report a single story. Newsrooms are squashed for time and resources. We've got to stop trying to do everything, slow down and do a few things well — including actually seeing the communities were serve for who they are.

Finding existing models

You get 30-some of incredibly well-read people in a room and you'll discover that some things you're dreaming of already exist.

Simply put: we can't spend money to re-invent the wheel. Few of us have VC funding to build like Facebook, but a number of things that have come out of start-up culture can be repurposed for journalism. @suzanneyada and @laurenmichell presented Basecamp for communities, a consistent theme "---- for communities/journalism"

It goes back to partnering outside of journalism. If journalists and the tech-community really, truly worked together, what could we come up with? It's the purpose of hacks/hackers and I wish more newsrooms were looking at it.

City-centric design

This may be my only criticism. Perhaps the issue is that many of the innovators in the room came from mid-to-large cities, but far too often, we're designing things for cities the likes of Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

I work in a large city, and I spend a good amount of time working in the context of cities. However, if I were Knight, I'd start looking at ideas and technology that serve smaller, underserved communities.  There are far more small publications than there are NYTimes'. This is not to say that we need to build Patches. NPR is in the process of launching Core Publisher, which will do well to serve small stations get on the web quickly and easily.

Conclusion

There were more ideas and themes that came up, but I hooked on these four. I wouldn't be surprised if you see some of the attendees implementing some of the ideas we came up with.

I want to make sure I say thanks to the Reynolds Institute and Dave for inviting me out. It was a great weekend and I'm pretty sure we're all BFFs forever now. Long live the #jcarn bus of awesome.