Moving On

We talk, and we talk, and we talk,  and we reinvent the wheel again, and again, and again.

Some days, I want to cry uncle.

If you know me, you are probably rolling your eyes right now because you’ve heard this rant I’m about to launch into before. For years.  Let us ALL hope we can stop talking about this, and start focusing on concrete ideas for the future.

Back in 1997, Bill Kovach,  Tom Rosentiel and the Committee of Concerned Journalists  convened a series of forums throughout the nation, bringing together no fewer than 3000 journalists, academics, First Amendment scholars, and regular folks to identify and discuss the core values of journalism.  [Yes, they were my bosses for three years in a  fantastic job I had with CCJ. Maybe I'm just biased. But read on.]

They also partnered with a team of university researchers who conducted more than 100 three-and-a-half hour interviews with journalists. They conducted two national surveys. They did 12 content analyses of news coverage.  And finally, they did their own extensive lit review of the history of journalism.

They compiled the results in a little book called The Elements of Journalism. Here’s the cheat sheet. This book is not, as I’ve heard some academics refer to it, “the Kovach and Rosentiel view” of journalism. As the previous methodologies described attest, these core principles are widely agreed upon, and indeed, they are at the very core of the professional identities of every good journalist I know.   Truth, accuracy, a discpline of verificaiton, transparency,  independence from faction, watchdogging the powerful, committment to conscience, and more. Each individual journalist/news organization might apply them somewhat differently in a particular situation, but these principles honor and respect that.

I refer to the book, only slightly in jest, as the Bible of Journalism to my students.

These are our values. Anything out there that follows these values is journalism. Anything that does not is something else. I’d even go so far as to argue that the “something else” isn’t per se bad. But it IS different.

So WHEW, now that we’ve figured that out, let’s take these values and carry them into the future. How can we make them come to life in new media? How can we help audiences to understand these principles that guide us? How can we build community and actively engage our audience in becoming partners with us in carrying these principles out?

Ah, but yet.

Still.  Still I have to try to convince a small group of academic colleagues that “the blogs” are actually just a content management system, just as newsprint is also a vessel for the National Enquirer.  Are bloggers journalists? Ah, but that fraught question has such a simple answer. If a blogger follows these principles, why indeed, she is. If a blogger opines in his pajamas without any basis in fact, he may be adding quite productivley to the cacophony of voices that makes free speech and democracy great, but nope, not a journalist. Can a “citizen” BE a journalist?  Sure they can, if they follow these principles – although I’m among those that certainly believe that healthy democracy still depends on people who can actually make a living wage doing this.  But I digress.

Today I “attended” virtually a symposium sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at my alma mater, Mizzou. One of the fellows, Mike Fancher, formerly of the Seattle Times, did a year-long project on modernizing the “journalist’s creed.”  He pointed out the importance of conscience, a discipline of verification, and “telling the readers how we know what we know” which Kovach and Rosentiel call transparency. Now, I agreed with every word that Mike said.  It was an intelligent and thoughtful presentation, and it was only five minutes long, so I’m sure he was barely able to scratch the surface of his work.  But I couldn’t help but be struck that we’ve been here before.   Do we need to continue re-doing the same research that produced Elements – or should we move on to figuring out, in the concrete sense, how to bring them to life online?

This is the focus of my own research, which I hope to start blogging about more now that the semester is over.

If anything, the Internet is the best thing to happen to journalism, as Steve Rhodes smartly argues. Yes, we need a new business model (Fine folks at RevenueTwoPointZero have brilliant, concrete ideas on that.)  But let’s move forward and quit getting distracted by the same debates.  I don’t have all the answers, but I’m excited as heck to try and find them.  After all, democracy depends on journalism. Let’s do it.

Serious, Long-Form Multimedia Journalism that WORKS

Since it’s so rare to find good journalism-related news these days, I thought I would report one of the positive  things I learned from the College Media Advisers conference last week in New York City.

One of the keynote addresses at this conference, attended by journalism students and their professors/adivsors, was by Brian Storm of MediaStorm, who was also incidentally the speaker at my recent Mizzou PhD graduation. Storm is a funny, irreverent, and new media savvy guy, and his small multimedia production studio produces freelance work for the likes of The Washington Post and National Geographic.

If you’ve never checked out the MediaStorm Web site, I would strongly urge you to do so.  Breathtaking photography and exquisite multimedia storytelling on the extremely important issues, such as the legacy of  Rwandan genocide, that mainstream news orgs are increasingly short on budget to produce:

Their storytelling philosophy, Storm said, is to let the subjects speak in their own words. They use on-screen text to connect the dots and drive the narrative, but the audio is in their sources’ own words.  They combine stills and video to great effect and always incorporate some kind of surprise for the audience.

Great and all, right? But there’s two exciting take home messages for other news organizations that had me frantically taking notes on my iPhone during the speech.

PEOPLE CARE. THEY WATCH. Get this. I’m not making this up: They have a 65 PERCENT completion rate for one of their 21 minute videos. Meaning that 65 percent of those that start watching stick with it to the end. Unbelievable.

I’m one of several folks who have wondered of late how much proverbial bang for the buck news organizations are getting when they produce beautiful, slick multimedia packages. I love those pieces, in theory, but in reality, I often see them and feel overwhelmed by the time commitment. I confess that I want to be able to skim text, not sit down and actually watch something or play around with various options and links. I feel guilty about this because I deeply appreciate good journalism in all its forms, but it’s true, and I wonder how many others have a similar issue.

Does Storm have an answer for this? How does MediaStorm succeed in getting and keeping those eyeballs?

1. Quality, quality, quality.  They are selective about the work they do, and they invest time and money in doing it RIGHT. No denying that’s a part of their success. But it’s not hard to convince journalists of THAT. Most I know are dreaming of being told that is true. Check out number two.

2. AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS. If you plunk a big time-consuming multimedia project on a Web site where people have come to expect relatively short news and feature stories they can skim over fast on their coffee break at work, or where they come to find local breaking news in bite-size chunks, they will feel just as I do – appreciative of your effort but too overwhelmed to take the time to really explore what you have to offer.  Instead, think about creating a separate site for your very best work, where you can cultivate a different set of expections.

3. Put your content in front of people in as many ways and on as many platforms as possible. Make it easy for them to share it – via email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Get your techie folks to work hard on making sure the user experience is as seamless and non-frustrating as possible. For example, they include the code that allowed me to add that photo you see above in this post to this blog in a matter of seconds: Cut and paste.  Once you’ve created that separate home for your high-quality stuff, push it out to the online world in as many ways as possible.

Yes, MediaStorm is a small organization, so I’m not arguing that what works for them would necessarily work to sustain a large newsroom. But the fact that they are doing well financially while doing serious, long form journalism is a reason for hope.

In Storm’s view, if you stick to your values,  you’d be surprised by what just might happen. I  couldn’t agree more. Embrace the future and all new media forms, but stick to your guns when it comes to the enduring journalism values of accuracy, quality, good reporting, and engaging storytelling — and I predict a positive long-term future.

Get Your M.A. For Free and Help Change Lives of Memphis Teens

Earn your master’s degree in journalism at the University of Memphis and help change the lives of some bright, hardworking teens. We’re looking for an eager and energetic journalist who is flexible and loves to work with young people. The position pays your tuition and includes a $7,000 stipend.

The successful applicant will become the new assistant coordinator of The Teen Appeal, the Scripps Howard citywide high school newspaper published in the U of M Department of Journalism. He or she will begin in August 2009, have an undergraduate degree in journalism, strong editing skills plus experience in layout and design and reporting for a campus or commercial newspaper.  Multimedia and Web production skills strongly preferred.

We’ve been operating for 11 years as a partnership with the Scripps Howard Foundation, our Scripps Howard daily newspaper in Memphis, The Commercial Appeal and Memphis City Schools. Many of the students we work with come from lower-income households, and, in part thanks to our program, our alumni are now working in a number of prestigious positions in journalism and other fields.

This position will allow you to learn more about the Web news habits of a critical demographic group that newspapers and other media nationwide hope to attract,  making this position a potential resume booster.  We have high hopes of improving our Web site in the coming year.  A redesign is in progress, but you find our temporary site at http://www.teenappeal.com/.

Please send a letter, CV/resume, and three writing samples (may be in the form of links to online work) to Carrie Brown, assistant professor, University of Memphis Department of Journalism, Brown.Carrie@memphis.edu You can also reach her at 202-251-5719. You will also need to go through the normal University of Memphis graduate school application process. See https://umdrive.memphis.edu/g-journalism/grad.html for more information about the program or contact graduate coordinator Dr. Rick Fischer at rfischer@memphis.edu

Skills and Knowledge EVERY Journalism Student Needs

The journalism department at the University of Memphis is in the early stages of updating  our curriculum to help our students build the knowledge and skills they will need in the new media world.  I would love to get your feedback as we embark on this project.

Currently, we have three news/editorial sequences:  newspaper/magazine, broadcast, and the rather unfortunately named “Internet journalism.”  We are exploring the possibility of collapsing these sequences into one – but maybe still preserving the opportunity for students to develop an emphasis in one area.

A key aspect of a curriculum revision in this era of converged media is  identifying a set of skills/competencies you’d like ALL of our graduates to have.   Here’s my current list – admittedly these are coming off the top of my head and are fairly general in nature.  I’ve included both “traditional” and the “new” skills here, and many of these we already teach.

I’m doubtful that we could ask our students to develop expertise in ALL of these skills, but I’d like to see them develop at least some familiarity with the majority of them – and maybe go deeper in one or two specific areas. Please add some or comment on these.

(A caveat: The MOST important aspect of a college education in journalism, in my view, is to develop a strong ability to think critically and creatively. These skills I list here are more mechanical in nature – critical thinking is something that must be part of all coursework.)

Skills We Want ALL of Our Students to Have:

• Writing a)Basic grammar and style b)Standard news story c)Feature/Strong narrative writing ability d)Developing a online “voice” on a (beat) blog f)writing a script for video/podcast
• Reporting and covering a beat
• Interviewing, developing sources, talking to people
• Computer-assisted reporting/databases
• Basic video shooting and editing (Final Cut?)
• Basic principles of Web design and some coding (CSS)
• Basic principles of shooting photos/ability to put together a slideshow (e.g. Soundslides)
• Record audio and produce a podcast
• Writing headlines AND basic search engine optimization
• Content curation – how to select good links/content and make sense of it to readers, and offer context/background on an issue for going deeper (akin to NYT Topics pages)
• Using social media to a)report b)promote your work c)foster community d)cover a beat e)figure out what’s going on in your community
• Flash? Creating (simple) Web graphics? (I know less about this myself..)
• How to produce live reports – via text, via Twitter, via CoverItLive…
• Be able to answer the question: What is the BEST media to use to cover this story?
• I’d tend to argue that layout e.g. InDesign is no longer as relevant – but I never had to take a class on it when I got my degree in the 1990s either, so I’m no expert.

Knowledge:

• Core values of the profession – Elements of Journalism (and ability to think critically about how to apply those values in their daily work – and in new media)
• Ethics
• Media law
• What is going on in media/journalism today? (All students should be armed with ideas for new business models, ways to deliver content how/when people want it, etc.)
• Basic knowledge of the institutions of civic life, e.g. county/city/state/national government
• Entrepreneurship? Learning how to freelance and work for non-traditional organizations?

In 2009, Let’s All Be In This Together

Old media vs. new media. Tired, tired, tired.

I’m far from the first blogger/Twitterer to point out that it is getting old, but yet, it persists. New media folks love to congratulate themselves over how smart and cutting edge they are and to snuffle at those who just “don’t get it.” (The journalism Twitterverse was alive with self-satisfied, condescending giggles at year-end “you’ll miss us when we are gone” columns appearing in force in newspapers). Old media types are still quiver over the inferiority of “the blogs” et. al. and how these uppity upstarts “can’t replace” their standards and their judgment.

Let’s try something new in a new year. Or perhaps better put, let’s remember something old.

What this fight is really about, at its core, is journalism. I believe in journalism like I believe in few other things. Journalism is, according to the hundreds of journalists, academics, and citizens interviewed around the country by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, a process governed by a set of core principles for the purpose of giving citizens the information they need to be free.

These principles (which bear review for all of us) are what define journalism – not who practices them or what organization (or lack therof) they work for. Anyone CAN be a journalist, provided they do work in accordance with those principles. Also, journalism is not a FORM. Journalism can take place on a blog, on a You Tube video, in a newspaper, or on TV (etc.). These things are just the shell, the tool, the vehicle.

Distilled to its essence, journalism is ultimately a search for what the brilliant Stephen Ward calls pragmatic truth. It is a method that assists us in the constant struggle for an inherently imperfect understanding of the world around us. This struggle has been around long before the printing press and the term “journalism” was even invented, though through the years we’ve continued to adapt, and (mostly) improve the method. Journalism tells us stories about ourselves and the time we live in. It binds us together. It keeps us free.

Advocates of citizen journalism who would just as soon see newspapers implode and the most curmudgeonly city editor out there who sneers at the self-absorption of those who Tweet, I think, agree on some fundamental level that journalism – if defined this way – is good. It matters. It is worth fighting for.

This is not an either-or, zero sum game. Traditional and new media are BOTH vital – we are on the SAME TEAM. The “Internets” — as we fondly called them in graduate school — make journalism BETTER – offering a host of ways to make those principles come to life.

The current rub is that most (not all) of the people who abide by these principles of journalism work at newspapers. And at the other “mainstream media” outlets as well. Newspapers are still the largest employers of journalists in local communities. Just because everyone CAN be a journalist doesn’t mean that everyone WILL – funny how it helps to have a paycheck, health insurance, and a 401K to really get things DONE. It is hard work, after all. The important thing is certainly not the dead trees or the form but the PEOPLE whose job it is to do this very important thing called journalism.  What we need to do is find as many creative ways as possible to keep those people doing journalism – in whatever form it may take and regardless of who ultimately signs the paycheck.

What we are REALLY up against, all of us, in my view, is a poor education system that does not do a very good job teaching people the basics of government and the fourth estate nor prepare them with the writing and information gathering skills they need to be more than passive media observers.  We are up against a broken business model that hugely undervalues the service we provide to our communities. We are up against apathy and anti-intellectualism. We are up against mind-numbing reality television and infotainment. We are up against a culture that makes having work-life balance an ever-elusive goal, a culture in which we barely have time to breathe much less truly care about and invest in our communities.

OUR new years resolutions should be less infighting and gloating, more solutions. More transparency. Do our part in a variety of ways to empower the voiceless in our communities to learn how to create their own content and to recognize the value of journalism.

All hands on deck, people. We’ve got a wild ride ahead.

Changing Journalism Education

There’s been quite a bit of discussion online of late about what the heck journalism schools are doing while Rome burns. Patrick Thornton, editor of Beatblogging.org, posed some questions on the subject yesterday on Twitter (#jedu #jschool) asking how educators are keeping pace with innovation and if not, what the hold up is.

My perspective after nine (non-consecutive) years at three journalism/mass communication schools (Wisconsin, Annenberg East, and Missouri) and after joining the faculty at the University of Memphis is that we ARE making progress, but slowly.

Some of us are increasingly incorporating blogs, social media and a Web 2.0 mindset into our courses. Each of my media writing students must create a blog and are required to Twitter for a week (this after I nearly had a heart attack when not one of them even knew what it WAS). We talked about and got a little practice using these tools to make them better reporters, to build community, to promote their work, and to find out what people are talking about. I also regularly harangue them over email and in lecture about new trends they need to keep pace with (I think some of them have come to dread the inbox deluge).

Like Mizzou and many other schools I’ve heard about, we are also having many discussions about how to update the curriculum and course requirements to better reflect the digital age. At Memphis, we are working to build partnerships with our local paper, local television stations and Web sites that will give the news organizations much needed labor and content and our students training and a place to showcase their work. We’ve also established a mentorship program that connects students with professionals, and all students have a faculty adviser who interacts with them regularly to give them guidance on the kinds of skills they need to develop.

However, there are a number of barriers at all academic institutions I’ve observed or been a part of. Any student of organizational change has to point out that change is always hard for a number of human and bureaucratic reasons, NOT because the individuals involved are a bunch of recalcitrant jerks.

One problem has long been that the academy values research more than teaching and interaction with the proverbial “real world.” I’m personally fortunate to be part of a department that values it much more than most, but all PhD students are taught early on at academic conferences that “publish or perish” is alive and well and that the most important aspect of getting tenure is journal articles for other academics to read. Now, there’s some excellent research on journalism and new media going on out there (along with the sadly ongoing onslaught of predictable stuff like the upteenth framing study), but where we fall down is on translating that to both the classroom and the “real world” because, frankly, there aren’t many incentives to do so.

I also believe that some people forget or don’t realize that a lot of what journalism students need is the VERY BASIC stuff. Do you remember what it was like to really not know ANYTHING about journalism, back when of course you didn’t even read/watch news all that much because you were fresh out of high school and still trying to figure yourself out, much less the rest of the world?

I love my students, I believe they are very smart, and I’m not used to playing the curmugeon role. However, students MUST learn how to write and do basic reporting before they learn anything else. You can’t write a good 140 word Tweet if your sentences are largely unintelligible. If you don’t know how to ask good questions and interact with others, you can’t write a very good blog post that goes beyond your own blather or manage an online conversation. I’m all for incorporating new media early (my aforementioned media writing class is the first skills class our students take), but you need to walk before you can run.  If you learn the basics and develop critical thinking skills in college, you will thrive in any environment you find yourself  in when you graduate.

In addition, comparing notes with friends nationally tells me that shrinking state budgets are wreaking havoc on public universities all over the country. My sense – I don’t know this for sure – is that there may be some fear at most universities that any changes in course requirements might be read by the bean-counters as possible areas where “efficiencies” could be found, even though these changes are most likely more demanding on faculty asked to stretch their own skills, not less.

Here’s one thing I personally would like to see happen.  I think schools should be  decimating the individual media sequence in favor of a “journalism” major. It doesn’t make sense to have a “newspaper/magazine” and a “Internet journalism” sequence anymore; you should be able to have an emphasis in an area that interests you, but ALL of our students need to learn at least basic skills in all media and not to narrowly focus on the kinds of jobs that might not be around when they graduate. We’ll see what happens.

Journalists and Social Media

Mary-Louise Schumacher, art and architecture critic at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and one of the smartest reporters using social media around, is conducting training sessions for leaders and staffers at the paper and has started a broader conversation among journalists on how to use social media intelligently to report, build community, and promote our work. Check out this post and link to the Seesmic conversation here.

My contribution to the discussion, for what it is worth, is above. You can easily see why my background is in print!!

Theory (of all things) Can Shed Light on Jarvis/Rosenbaum Dustup

I read about the tiff between Ron Rosenbaum and Jeff Jarvis today with some interest – and not only because like any cantankerous journalism type, I’m drawn inexorably if reluctantly to conflict.

In a nutshell, Rosenbaum, writing for Slate, basically calls Jarvis a pompous pontificator who thinks he has all the answers and who almost appears to gloat as mainstream media journalists lose their jobs in droves; Jarvis fires back with a bazooka, essentially saying that far from callous, he’s working as hard as he can to come up with fresh ideas and light a fire under journalists’ butts to get them to hold themselves more accountable for building a sustainable future for their craft.

Both of them, in my view, have a point. (Jarvis does come across as arrogant, but our industry needs provocateurs right now.) But what’s more interesting to me is what theory on how organizations change (or don’t) can tell us about this tendency for the “old guard” and the “new guard” to get into spitting matches as Rome burns.

Research by Schein (2004) on organizational culture shows that assumptions about the nature of human relationships affect the ways in which organizations resolve conflict and make decisions about the future. My research seems to indicate that journalists generally tend to take a very individualistic view of organizational life, which causes leaders to focus on “who is with us, and who is against us?” rather than examining common values and larger systemic factors that contribute to — or inhibit — change.

The journalism blogosphere is full of frustrated rants about various ways in which individual resistance is one of the biggest impediments to change (and believe me, I too have been one of the frustrated). Even in individual newsrooms, some people are tagged as those who will embrace change readily and will as thus be relied on heavily to step up (and keep stepping until they are nearly burnt out) to contribute in a variety of ways to adapting to the digital world; others just are dim-witted and must be worked around. Not incidentially, from a psychological perspective, this allows many in leadership roles to bump up their own status as ones who are savvy enough to “get it” while simultaneously giving them a scapegoat for lack of progress — those “other folks” who just don’t and never will.

The truth is, the more time you spend with individual journalists listening — really listening — to their ideas about their role in the future — lo and behold, you find people who are smart enough to have read the writing on the wall and have actually thought quite creatively about how their particular skills apply well in an online world. They remember the typewriter fondly but are nevertheless incredibly articulate and passionate about the role of, say, page designers or graphic artists in a new medium. Some of these folks are, yes, the kinds of people who have more structured learning styles and aren’t the first to jump in to take risks, but that doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t take them in the right environment.

What’s holding these folks back is not so much individual failings, but systems. Newspapers are still putting out a print product every day, and the routines that make it possible for them to manage chaos and produce the daily miracle on dead trees each morning are notoriously hard to change partly just because they do WORK to make that possible. People who have built up power and status in a particular specialty are scared of change that calls the knowledge and experience that got them there irrelevant. Underlying assumptions about the importance of hierarchy and the relative prestige in print are still operating. Publishers shortsightedly cut resources. Most mainstream media journalists are working long hours just trying to stay afloat with a massively increased workload.

These systemic issues are not insurmountable. The key, though, is to stop seeing this as a “I get it, you don’t” environment and start working at the organizational level to identify specific impediments to change and collective solutions.

Newspaper Leaders: Stick It Out Or Step Down?

I’m in the final throes of wrestling my dissertation out of my head and onto the page, not to mention teaching, serving on various committees and all the other frantic doings of a new professor, but I couldn’t resist commenting on the question posed by David Westphal on who should lead the digital transformation in a piece he wrote in the resurrected Online Journalism Review.

Westphal is a senior fellow at USC Annenberg Journalism School’s Center on Communication Leadership and until recently the Washington bureau chief of McClatchy.  His piece came on the heels of the departure of Steven Smith as editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, a paper I admired for its robust and creative embrace of transparency.

Westphal wonders if editors deeply invested in print-centered culture and routines are the best people to lead their changing newsrooms, or if this task would be best given to younger folks who have less to lose.

My own research and the literature developed among scholars of organizational change doesn’t answer this question directly, but it offers some insight.

First and foremost, I should say that this literature warns against saying that any particular leader or staff member is “the problem.” All too often, systemic factors are at work and it may turn out that the sense that “if only we could get rid of THAT guy (or woman)” proves to be a red herring.  Individual personalities and leadership style of top editors are indeed important factors in organizational effectiveness, but this is something that has to be carefully evaluated on a case-by-case basis and can often be improved through executive coaching and the like.

Although editors have clearly read the writing on the wall and have the best of intentions in moving their newsrooms into the future, it is true that unconsciously they may resist the kinds of changes that undermine their authority and the skill set that took them to the top of their profession.  The Web’s need for immediacy tends to push decision-making authority down, and figuring out what goes on 1A – the most powerful job in the newsroom – is no longer as relevant as it once was.  This strikes at the very core of top editors’ professional competence. Not to mention that for better or worse, it is so easy to measure the response of readers to individual stories online that these metrics are increasingly driving the prominence of stories on newspaper Web sites.  There is still clearly a place for seasoned journalistic judgment in any media, but the hierarchical structure of the newsroom is no longer as effective as it once was.

For example, here’s a question – how many newsrooms that talk about being “Web first” really do put the Web first at the traditional morning and afternoon news meetings?  I think that many do – but what was the time gap between the time when top newsroom leaders started encouraging their staff to embrace the Web site and the time when they changed this most fundamental of newspaper rituals, which arguably is the one thing they have the most control over?  (Staff members can “work-around” other directives, but that news meeting is often still run by the editor or managing editor.) This is a big opportunity to set the tone for the entire staff, telegraphing what is important and what will be rewarded, and in many cases, I suspect it was missed for quite some time.  What else is being missed?

It may sound a little wishy-washy to talk about editors’ “unconscious” resistance to change, but the research shows that this can be a powerful thing because it does have such a profound effect on what they reward and what they pay attention to in the thousands of small interactions an editor has over the course of a day – much more impactful in the long run than sweeping pronoucements made at staff gatherings.

In my view, I’d prefer frankly to see most editors stick it out.  I think that those journalism values that Westphal references via a quote from former Plain Dealer editor Doug Clifton – “powerful, meaningful reporting, urgency, passion” are as important now as ever – we just have to figure out how to deliver them in a way that works better for new media.  However, I’d also like to see more senior leaders – obviously this is somewhat self-serving – bring in more researchers with knowledge of leadership and its impact on organizational change, as well as those studying audiences’ news needs online.  It’s time to learn a lesson from other businesses around the globe – we don’t have to figure this thing out all alone.  Sometimes research really IS practical.

Do Social Media, and Do it Now

Although many Web-savvy journalists have embraced social media in a variety of creative ways that enhance reporting and help them fulfill core journalism values, evidence seems to abound lately that far too many are still behind the curve.

After attending sessions on the future of news at the Missouri School of Journalism’s big centennial bash last week, a professor described trying to explain social media to newspaper folk who still think Twitter is something a bird does. A colleague of mine got the hairy eyeball in an interview for an assistant professor position in a journalism school because he said that he would require students to Twitter and use other social media in the classroom. And while I’ve seen a large number of journalists popping up on Facebook, many of them are pretty quiet on the site, observing more than participating.

It also kills me when I hear academics refer to “the blogs” as though they are some monolithic entity and bemoan the lack of original reporting they produce as though that was a matter of the form itself, rather than of function.

I’ve learned a lot by writing this blog and being an active participant on Facebook that I don’t think I could have learned just by reading the trade press or otherwise being a passive observer of technology trends.

For those who haven’t realized this yet, social media is a great original reporting tool – you can learn a lot about “what’s going on.” Every good journalist I know talks about the importance of hanging out in diners and coffee shops and other mechanisms to figure out what regular folks, not just “official sources” are talking about, but most say there is less and less time these to do that kind of out-of-the-office reporting. Well, social media may not ever be able to replace the shoe-leather, but it tells you a lot without you needing to leave your desk. (Here’s one example of how it helped journalists covering the Republican National Convention; they abound if you read any journalism blogs or Web sites).

I also find it a little funny that people whose work by definition takes some of the things that were, in many cases, once private and makes them public tend to be a little bizarrely concerned about their own privacy. Sure, you don’t have to and, well, probably shouldn’t bare the secrets of your soul on Facebook and the like (hello). But I just don’t see why it’s so scary to share some of yourself and your life beyond the byline with the public sphere. By doing so, you are engaging with your readers – and potential readers – in new ways, and you are creating the conditions by which more meaningful conversations can start.

I don’t mean to suggest that no journalists are doing this – some certainly are. But I’d just like to see a little bit more active participation. If nothing else, I’ve seen great conversations about the future of the profession pop up in these forums, and it’s also the best way I’ve ever seen to keep track of friends scattered around the country and even the globe in our mobile society.