I’ve never noticed this phenomenon, but Michael Rosenblum says that Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Dean Nick Lehman “recoiled” at the notion of creating an entrepreneurial journalism program. Wow. Yikes. That surprises me.

My journalism school at the University of Memphis  is not nearly as elite or well-resourced as our New York City counterparts, but we are making strides in this area. One of my colleagues, Dr. Lurene Kelley, is leading an effort to transform one of our graduate courses that used to focus on “administration” into an exciting entrepreneurial class in which students will learn to build a business plan and pitch it. She is partnering with LaunchMemphis, a local group working to grow our city’s entrepreneurial community, and students will get real, hands-on exposure to the world of startups.  I’m thrilled about this development and hope to help continue to expand these efforts in our department.

I also agree that making money can release journalists from the thankless, soul-sucking constrictions of moribund institutions. To speak for myself, if I wasn’t shackled to a largely irrelevant and outdated academic system that rewards me primarily for publishing studies recycling tired ideas in journals nobody reads, I could be doing much more innovative work to help prepare students and journalists for the 21st Century.

To take just one small example, just yesterday I saw the call for proposals for the Knight Community Information Challenge. I already know of some local foundations that are interested in this issue and could be possible partners with our journalism school in creating something new and exciting on the web and on the ground – and our community, wracked by massive cutbacks in local news organizations, desperately needs it. Instead of pursuing this, I will spent 15 hours over the next couple of weeks changing the academic citation style in a paper I wrote, which is rote, useless busywork.  Things like this do make you want to go into business for yourself so you can take advantage of these kinds of opportunities in the exciting time we live in. Maybe one day I will.

However, I will say this. Being SKEPTICAL about money and its power to corrupt good journalism is a different thing. I think that is perfectly healthy. The desire to make money doesn’t mean that I will do anything and everything to make that happen, and, in the long run, that’s good for business, too, given that what we sell is credibility. Journalists *are* particularly sensitive to financial pressures because in the course of their work they see how money corrupts the political process, the environment, and so and and so forth, though it also can do good, as evidenced in this article about Paul Allen I found inspiring. When I worked for the Committee of Concerned Journalists, almost 10 years ago now, long before the idea of entrepreneurship in journalism was “hot,” venerable but forward-thinking journalists like Bill Kovach talked all the time about the foolish false dichotomy of the old proverbial “Wall” between the business and editorial side of news organizations. Both sides need each other. Newsrooms need to communicate with and share information with the business side, but yes, financial pressures on editorial will ultimately compromise the business.

I already commented on her post with my agreement and thoughts, but it occurred to me that I didn’t really know much about open-access journals in my field. Quite possibly I’m an idiot for not already knowing this, but part of the problem is that I’m not a publishing machine like some in my cohort. But I polled some smarter folks than I and I’m posting a list here. If you know more, holler in the comments.

Open Access Journals in Journalism and Mass Communication

International Journal of Communication

Journal of Computer Mediated Communication

First Monday

M/C Journal

Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication

JOMEC (Journalism, Media, Cultural Studies)

Thanks to Amy Schmitz-Weiss, Josh Braun, Sue Robinson, Matt Carlson, Nikki Usher, and Chris Anderson for their input on this list.

FedEx Social Media Summit

Thought I would post a few quick highlights from the panel discussion that featured representatives from Google, Twitter, Facebook, GE, Visible Technologies, and NYU. I’m going to apologize for a bit of bad journalism – I don’t have names for all the panelists. Normally I wouldn’t publish without them, but given time constraints, I will just try to add them in asap.

Brands have accepted the obvious – social media is not a fad. The summit  focused on social media best practices and how to measure and maximize return on investment. If I had to offer  my biggest take-homes in one paragraph, it would be this:

The biggest opportunities for brands in social media are in content creation,  customer service, and data-based message targeting.  Although the panelists didn’t so much come out and say it in as many words, it seems pretty clear to me as a journalism professor that to cut through the clutter and produce the kinds of messages that have the emotional impact that compels people to share with their friends,  brands are going to have to hire storytellers with strong writing and multimedia creation skills. Second, good customer service has a powerful impact in social media because it can not only control the damage from negative reviews, but, if done right, turn the disgruntled into brand ambassadors, multiplying the effect of your investment – especially if the customer turns out to be a top influencer or has some influential followers. Not every creative campaign is going to go viral, but a consistently strong effort at good customer service can have a huge impact on how people experience and perceive brands. Finally, it’s no surprise of course that big companies are using the massive amounts of digital data generated by social media to better target ads, deals and messages to individual customers, but the most interesting applications of that come with the increasing ability to use location data to snag  people very close to the point of purchase, when they are right outside your store.

A few other highlights:

• Return on investment is a tricky thing. It’s not that there is a dearth of metrics or tools to measure social media, panelists said. The challenge is to develop specific social media business goals and then align your metrics with them.  As moderator Colin Sutton put it,  you have to know if  you are looking at Eyes (e.g. earned impressions, number of fans), Minds (e.g. page engagement, post response), or Wallets (e.g. coupon redemption, registration). For example, NYU adjunct professor David Vinjamuri  noted that sometimes variables like influence can be hard to measure because it is not just the number of people who are listening, but who those listeners are. If you are a technology blogger with a small audience of only about 100 people, you might be tremendously influential if just one of those readers is Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg. He gave another fascinating example of a campaign for o.b., maker of feminine products. When the brand was first launched in Denver, its splashy and expensive campaign was largely judged a ROI failure; 25 years later, the company had an incredibly strong brand presence in Denver, 3X as high a share as it had in other cities. Clearly the campaign had a much greater long-term ROI than anybody had realized. Twitter’s Guy Yalif also noted that it’s not just the number of followers a customer has – it’s who follows them and how influential those followers are.

• GE rep:  Our brand is the experience you have with us.  I prefer negative comments, because it’s an opportunity for us to find out what is wrong, to surprise and delight customers, educate them, solve their problems, etc. You can turn people with complaints into brand advocates. We try to respond to everybody. We don’t prioritize influencers, although if there was a major crisis, you might have to do that temporarily because it would be impossible to respond to everybody. Everybody has the right to a response.

• Google:  Don’t just say you are listening to your customers. Make real business decisions based on what you hear. eBay did this when it launched a new mobile platform; today they are making a mobile transaction every minute.

• Twitter’s Guy Yalif:  Tie your brand/campaign into what people are already talking about on social media. Unilever introduced an ice cream brand in U.S. that had long been popular in Europe. They decided to do this around the Royal Wedding, so they bought a promoted trend. This drove great results for them.

• Facebook: Use social media to make your campaign local/personal or “mom and pop at scale.”  Wal-Mart is increasingly building a Facebook presence for its local stores, in which managers speak to the local community. Instead of corporate-speak, they might talk about high school football games, for example. They include things like local maps of stores and photos of local managers and employees.

• Fun fact about Promoted Tweets from Yalif:  They get an engagement rate of 3 to 5 percent. Brand Twitter followers are 50 to 60 percent more likely to comment about the brand on a blog or news site. When Volkswagen relaunched the Beetle, they had 52% engagement rate with their promoted tweet. Al Jazeera English bought the promoted hashtag Demand Al Jazerra, and used it to showcase their reporting during the Arab Spring, increasing their traffic from Twitter 25X.

• Google: It’s important to integrate paid search with your other efforts. For example, Old Spice’s tremendously popular viral campaign was made more effective because they bought a lot of paid search terms, invested in promoted video. It is key to be sure that if somebody is looking for you, it is really easy for them to find you.

• Google: 20% of searches have local intent. For mobile, it is 1 of 3. Those numbers will get even bigger.  We are constantly looking for innovative ad formats and to help advertisers up their bids if they know a customer is right outside the store looking for your brand.

• NYU’s David Vinjamuri:  Be nimble when you launch a social media campaign. Create a feedback loop so you can make quick adjustments. Some will blow up in good way, some won’t. You have to figure out what is working and make adjustment on a daily basis. 

• Becca Ramble, Visible Technologies:  If you don’t see the conversation you want to lead or follow, create it. ADT mines conversations around home security, and they found that most of it is very spammy. So they decided they wanted to really build a better conversation around  home security.

• As social media increasingly goes global, many big companies are creating local/national accounts in the local language/culture. But it is important to have good internal communication so all the account managers know how to help or refer customers that might contact them.

As a journalism educator, a big part of my job is convincing students to try new tools and cultivate the habit of using them regularly, so I’ll focus first on that part of the prompt. I teach reporting and social media, two courses in our curriculum that emphasize multimedia and experimenting with new technologies. Contrary to popular belief, many of these so-called “digital natives” are often neither savvy about new tech nor exceptionally eager to go beyond their Facebook and Internet Explorer (?!) comfort zones.

As David Cohn of Spot.us puts it, my main goal is less to teach mastery of any particular tool or software, but to “teach a mind-set of problem solving.” But cultivating the motivation in students to grapple with new things that may be initially frustrating is often difficult.

A few techniques I use:

• Show as many examples of high-profile journalists using these technologies as possible. Yes, I will stoop to pimping Katie Couric’s Twitter account or showing them People magazine’s Facebook page, as well as many accounts from the New York Times, CNN, local journalists, and the like.  It’s hard to argue you don’t need to do it when you see the pros, especially the ones you have heard of and respect, are doing it.
• Similarly, I show as many examples of students at other schools using new technologies as possible. Those of you at elite schools where your students on average are more motivated or have access to all the latest gadgets and shiny new labs help show my students the way and foster a little sense of healthy competition.
• Find ways to generate a quick community of fellow beginners by fostering cross-campus conversation. For example, last semester my students participated in a Twitter chat with Bob Britten’s class at WVU and Jeremy Littau’s students at Lehigh, among other collective activities.  When you are new to a social network, it often takes time to cultivate enough contacts to make the experience meaningful; this technique lets students learn more about engaging with a community in the shorter semester time frame.
• Make it fun. Scavenger hunts or live tweeting the Grammys may not be the most noble of educational or journalistic pursuits, but enthusiasm pays it forward. Classes that have fun doing assignments together also tend to get along better with their peers, and in intangible ways I don’t entirely understand, this raises overall effort level in the class.
• Similarly, harness students’ passions. I used to be more adamant about “hard news” assignments. I’ve learned, however, that if you want students to learn, say, WordPress, let them blog about whatever they want. All the same standards of original reporting, verification, grammar, etc. still apply, of course. But when a technology is new to you, it helps to have a genuine sense of excitement about what you are trying to use it for. As students get more advanced and take higher-level courses, they do more meaty and investigative work, but when you are introducing lots of new tools, giving them some agency in deciding their final objective helps.
• Do it yourself. The whole “do I say” thing is not a cliche. You’ll lack credibility if it’s obvious you aren’t really using these tools yourself.

By the way, I know some of you are probably aghast that not all young journalists are inherently curious and eager to learn “cool” new things, but remember many college students are not long out of high school, where their access to technology might have been limited to sporadic trips to the computer lab. I teach in the Mid-South, and although I’m seeing a much higher rate of smartphone adoption recently, my students don’t all have access to the expensive devices, either – and the culture here is not one in which education is necessarily highly valued or prioritized, regardless of what you study. Students who work long hours waiting tables or similar may not have many regular technology-related habits or experience developing them.

As far as my own tech adoption goes, well, I think others have described it better than I could.  I think  University of British Columbia professor Alfred Hermida’s post offers some great insight into thinking through your social media strategy, and Cohn’s thought process is pretty similar to mine – I keep an open mind but probably won’t use it often if it’s not simple to use.

I think that as journalists and journalism professors we all have the responsibility to experiment with Google+ and try to learn as much as we can about its potential as a source, distribution channel, and engagement network for news.  If Web 2.0 has taught us nothing else, it is that we have to go where our audience is, and we can’t wait until after these sites become behemoths – better to get in early and start building credibility now.  But I think the jury is still out on how important Google+ will be and how active journalists need to be there.  A social network is only as good as its users make it, and I’m not convinced that it offers enough that is better than or different from Facebook and/or Twitter to make it an essential space, although I’ll concede it is possible it could become one.

As of right now, most of the activity of my feed is dominated by the super-techies like Scoble, and I’ve seen little meaningful use by regular folks. That may change. But sometimes I worry that sometimes the tech-journalism crowd becomes a might bit self-referential and myopic by preaching too often to the same choir of like-minded folks- at least when Google+first launched, it seemed like most of this tribe were downright giddy and calling it a full-on game-changer.  I wholeheartedly wish that everybody out there would love new technology and care passionately about journalism, but assuming that others think like we do is one of the things that hindered innovation in the print domain. We need to be a little careful about projecting our enthusiasm onto others.

In fact, even I, early adopter and huge social media nerd that I am, have found myself personally to be oddly curmudgeonly about Google+. Maybe it’s because Google+ was launched right in the middle of my vacation, when I had the exceedingly rare luxury of concerning myself more with lakeside cocktails than what was happening on my omnipresent screens. But my first reaction was a sense of powerful fatigue at having yet another space to monitor and contribute to. When people whine to me about how social media is too time intensive, I usually tell them too bad and suck it up – it’s too important not to make time for. But for once I too was overwhelmed, and I think journalists who feel utterly exhausted by it have a legitimate beef, especially in this time where they are being asked to do so much with so much less. To make a new network worth the time, it’s really got to offer something exciting. And for me, I didn’t quite get that from Google+.

Hangouts are great, and they will be an incredibly useful classroom tool I’ll employ in the fall. And the rest of the Google+ features are all perfectly fine.  In many ways, Google+ adroitly combines elements of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. But maybe the second reason I’m less enamored with it than many in my peer group is my status as a privacy outlier, as I’ve written about before.

I have little to no interest in segmenting my personal life from my professional one. I am more offended at people who presume their right to judge me  than I am at their ability to access information about me. Having to add people to different circles is, for me, a pain that I derive little benefit from. Yes, even I occasionally do have things I want to share with small groups of people and not the public at large, but that is a need I already meet with existing tools like email, the phone, and face-to-face conversations. It’s not what I do on social networks. I’m not stupid enough to think that everybody wants to listen to my nerdy rantings, but the majority of my social media posts are about topics I’m deeply passionate about, and therefore I’m generally seeking the largest audience possible for them. I know it’s largely a lost cause, but I want even non-journalists to care about the state of our media today and its implications for democracy, and I often also share links to news stories about public issues I find important or enraging. Google+ allows for public sharing of course, so this isn’t a direct knock on it, it’s just that circles aren’t especially exciting to me.

I think our knowledge of this may develop, but I also don’t have a sense of what content it makes the most sense to share on Google+, other than longer posts that won’t fit in the length limits allowed elsewhere. I already post similar stuff on both Facebook and Twitter – should I add one more repetition? Hard to say. Feels like overkill.

However, when all is said and done, if people move en masse to Google+, I’ll find a way to spend more time there, and even with this pessimism, I still am using and experimenting with the site.

A tough question, this one. The criteria for a great online project may be multiple and varied, and naturally, there’s plenty of slippery subjectivity involved. But if I was to make a broad statement,  quality in online  journalism is primarily determined by how  innovatively it combines the enduring core values of journalism with the features of the online space.  Smart applications of technology are necessary but not sufficient. Great online journalism uses the features of the medium like interactivity and multimedia to make journalism more accurate, more engaging, more transparent, more relevant, more comprehensive, more independent, more able to hold the powerful accountable.

I don’t think it’s a question of gee-whiz technology OR solid reporting/social impact – it’s both, and how well these two outcomes have been executed together in ways in which each one serves and enhances the other. The technical features should not only be cool and fun to use, but they should engage readers, tell powerful, important stories and allow others to be part of our reporting and vetting processes in the ongoing, pre and post publication pursuit of larger truths.

This may be somewhat obvious, but I think there are examples out there of big splashy projects that look glorious but lack substance, and projects that may be online but not truly execute when it comes to genuinely engaging readers, etc.

I would also tend to reward risk-taking and big thinking. Executing innovative ideas in newsrooms remains extremely difficult; the culture is still, despite platitudes to the contrary, risk adverse and easily threatened by change and new ideas. I think Jan Schaffer’s idea of rewarding ideas that “work” is important,  but I would tend to a favor a project that maybe is less-than-perfect but represents a clear willingness to experiment with ideas outside the box, make things happen, and use the lessons learned to continue to improve the project.

I think rewarding profitability, as some have suggested, is a little tricky – as Lisa Williams has already alluded to, profitability is often a longer-term goal, and I’m not sure a snapshot in time would necessarily represent overall “success.”

A brief word about the somewhat tangential discussion that arose on the list-serv about whether or not journalists are or should be uncomfortable with money making. I’ll take the unfashionable step of saying – yeah, I AM “one of those” who have, to some degree at least, some sense of discomfort with the profit motive, though of course I’ll qualify that substantially. Let me emphatically state that I do NOT believe that running a successful business is in any way opposed to doing good journalism or inherently evil or any such silliness.  I want to see sustainable businesses and people paid good wages and independent journalism all that. Duh.

But, yeah, I do think journalists aren’t quaint or stupid to have some skepticism about greed and its potentially corrupting influence. Have we come so far down the road of pettiness that this, too, is going to be an all or nothing proposition? Journalists are skeptical of money making because they’ve seen first hand that it can certainly influence coverage. They’ve watched while top execs at companies like Gannett pocket the big bucks while newsrooms are gutted, which might make even the most happy capitalist a little disgusted.  I applaud every dollar a news startup makes, but yes, I do still believe that journalism plays a vital role in our democracy, and therefore I think some healthy skepticism along the road to profitability is warranted.

Finally, I’ll end with this. Thinking about quality made me think about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig. I need to reread that book. Here’s a quote to ponder:

“The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you have a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.”

Like many of those Piled Higher and Deeper in Journalism, I have always taken nerdly glee in organizing things, office supplies, lists, and websites/apps that promise to track our every movement and squeeze more productivity out of our already impossibly over-committed selves. Nearly all of my academic friends can point to some geeky child project they once did, like my lending library that was complete with a due date stamp and check-out cards and my friend’s highly organized Entertainment Weekly collection.

However, I’ve tried to consciously let go of some of this impulse because I fear that these things can easily get out of control and end up taking up the time they are meant to save, at least for me. I think back with some remorse over those color-coded notebooks, impeccably written assignments and carefully designed study sheets I made in high school when I probably should have been drinking Natty Light down by the river or otherwise spending time really living in the manner of normal American teenagers. These days, I embrace a messy desk and some self-organizational disarray, to the point where the husband semi-regularly calls me a slob, and I know that right now that there are items languishing on my over-long to-do list that I probably promised somebody long ago. Sometimes you just have to put out the fires and hope for the best,  best usually meaning actually quitting work prior to 10 p.m.

That said, yes, I do have some of my own lifehacks, though I kind of doubt any of them are especially original to the types of people who participate in journalism blog carnivals. I’ll begin by focusing on the one I get asked about all the time: How do you possibly have time for all that social media? I’m sort of my department/university’s “That Social Media Person,” not because I’m some kind of genius at it, but, well, because I’m the Enthusiastic Early Adopter, and let’s face it, it doesn’t take all that much to attain dreaded “guru” (ugh) status in academia where technology is concerned. I’m the one you call if you can’t set up a Facebook page for your campus organization, the one you forward any and all emails to announcing something tangentially related to social media to, etc. But this recognition-of-sorts also comes with it some gentle derision, e.g. other people have Very Important Work To Do and can’t imagine how they could possibly find time for social media like I do, often implying that I must be perishing in the publish or… world of academia. I’ve even had an old high school friend tell me that if they used Facebook like I do it would amount to nothing short than child abandonment.

So HOW DO I DO IT you may ask? Well, contrary to popular belief, I monitor the time I spend on social media networks pretty carefully, limiting myself to no more than 10 minutes on Twitter and Facebook a few times a day, e.g. morning, afternoon, and evening, barring a situation in which I’m waiting in line or similar and it’s the perfect way to pass the time, or a big deadline that keeps even the likes of me semi-offline. I may pop on quickly to share a link that I’ve read or a thought  at other times, but that’s it, and I’m pretty rigorous about this.  But, yeah, I do make social media a priority. It’s important to me. To be honest, I question those who say they don’t have time to keep up with what is going on in their profession and the world.  This is what leads to stale, outdated, ineffectual teaching and research and poor citizenship. I’m often shocked at basic things about journalism and the web that some academics and reporters and editors don’t know. I think it’s our responsibility to know those things, even when it’s hard. It’s impossible to keep up, but you have to at least make an effort to try. The most challenging thing for me is not social media itself, but of course the zillions of great links to smart and interesting stuff shared there. I save non-pressing or longer articles on Instapaper for reading later, even though I sometimes get giggled at for sharing links that are a few months old when I get behind, though let me just point out that articles don’t “go bad” like spoiled food in a few weeks, even those dealing with “newer” media. I do much the same thing with email, and I definitely don’t turn on notifications or I’d go crazy. I tell students and others that if you need something from me immediately, send a text.

So, what else? One thing I’ve done over the past couple of years or so that has been very effective is to designate one hour, just one, every day for an important but non-deadline long-term project, which in my case means research. It doesn’t mean this is the only hour I spend, but it ensures that in an otherwise chaotic day of trying to do pressing stuff I spend at least some time working on it. When you are teaching and serving on a billion committees and managing various organizations, yeah, often it is the only hour, but it’s better than nothing, and  it adds up. At least you can move the ball forward on various projects a little bit. I also try to shift focus between my handful of major projects so that I work on a different one each week – time enough to dig in, but changing it up often enough that all of them show at least some progress instead of most utterly languishing.

I’m an extremely heavy user of Google Calendar and Google Tasks, synced with my phone, which is how I organize my life, appointments, and to-do lists. As previously noted, I’d need a search function to even find some items on my massive Google Task’s lists, which I have separated into work/personal. Every day I prioritize the very top of the list and star items that absolutely must get done today. I try to bite big projects into small chunks as all the gurus tell you to.

I’m a major fan of Delicious for tagging and saving links for later use in my teaching, research, and writing. I would be utterly lost with out it. Who needs to assign your students an expensive, outdated, poorly-written textbooks when you have a bazillion great links on stuff like reporting and writing written by respected journalists and Poynter leaders saved and searchable? And I don’t know how else you can keep track of things like the short videos we show in class to engage students and give them multiple ways of learning information – I am especially fond of my stable of Daily Show videos where Jon Stewart gives us hilarious but apt insights into core journalistic concepts like the importance of verification.

I love Dropbox and thank it daily for not forcing me to carry around a friggin flash drive all the time, and it makes collaborating with far-flung colleagues on research projects about one million times easier than constant emailing, although I do wish they had a way to know if somebody else was editing a document at the same time as you, because conflicted versions is the only drawback.

As noted, nothing too crazy here, but this is what I do. Been loving reading the savvy tips of others and have been inspired to try again to get into an Evernote rhythm – I’ve tried and failed before, but maybe this will be the time I can integrate it into my workflow.

Our topic for May is full of fail – literally. We are tasked by our fearless leader David Cohn  to write about our lessons learned from one of our biggest personal or professional failures. 

This post was proving hard to write not because I don’t fail. I do, in countless little ways, all the time. But I can’t point to a spectacular, massive journalistic or academic undertaking that crashed and burned in a memorable, thrilling way. My failures seem, well, too mundane a litany to be interesting to others. Papers written but not edited and sent in for publication. Lack of timely feedback for my students. Inattention to relationships that matter to me because I’m so focused on work. Etc. Etc. Personally frustrating, but run of the mill.

But ah-ha, you might say. Therein lies the fail.  The fail of not having the courage to try something big. And then try something bigger.

My greatest fail is fear.

It took me far, far too long – but, hopefully,  it’s not too late – to learn that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good.

To have enough confidence to know that failing does not mean that I would have no worth as a person.

To not be so afraid to fail that I was often debilitated by paralyzing anxiety.

Sure, I always could have parroted back for you all the cliches about “failing early and failing often” and learning lessons and all that, but I wouldn’t have believed it, not really, at least not for me. For other people, I have always been quite compassionate. Just not for myself.

Academia is a fear-based business, and although I also worked in the real world as a journalist for several years, most of my life has one way or another been spent as part of the academy, and that’s where I work now.  We use fear a lot to keep students in line, and now as a teacher, I find myself using it too, to motivate the slackers. The problem is that the people it really works on tend to be the students who don’t need that kind of exhortation at all, but nevertheless are the ones actually listening and absorbing a worst-case scenario view of the consequences. I spent most of my time here convinced that the very next test, the next paper, would be the one where I proved that it had all been a sham and I couldn’t hack it after all. Irrational in my case? Sure. But it didn’t really matter.

And it goes on. Tenure is a freakin fear festival. I’m sure you’ve heard the words “publish or perish?” Yeah. Ask any tenure-track faculty member how many times well-meaning senior peers have ominously intoned in breathless terms the importance of publication, as though we hadn’t all heard that at least 10 million times already from the day we stepped into graduate school.  You can’t throw a stick without somebody giving you advice on “what not to do” and how to properly finesse the tenure process. Not blaming – people are genuinely trying to help.  We choose how to react. For years, I reacted to this kind of stimuli – sometimes subconsciously, in ways I couldn’t entirely control – with epic anxiety and fear.  You might not have known this unless you knew me well. I’m pretty good at faking at.

It’s only been in the past year, maybe two, that I’ve had this wonderful, liberating realization, beyond platitudes, somewhere deep in my brain, and that is: Screw it. Failure is underrated. I’m tired of fear. It’s getting us all nowhere. I can’t do this any more and stay sane.

I decided that not getting tenure, for example – a kind of worst-case scenario for most professors – would be, well, suboptimal and a little embarrassing, but I’d get over it, and find another damn job. As much as I love my job, there are gigs that pay better for half the hours that I put in, and it’s just not worth the sacrifice to become something you are not.

And ironically, ever since, I’ve been at least ten times more productive. I’ve done more research in the past year than in the three years before it. I’ve designed two brand new courses and a number of projects where my students were able to collaborate with other students around the country and even in Cairo, Egypt. I’ve helped start a Safe Zone program for LGBT students at the University of Memphis and got grant funding for it. I’ve managed a city-wide high school newspaper.

The big lesson, then is that when we are freed from fear we can really start #winning.

I haven’t done anything even close as spectacular, good or bad, as i’m sure many of the other carnivalers have. But maybe that’s to come, now that I’ve gotten over the biggest fail of them all, which is to not start.

P.S. Apologies for such a self-helpy post, which is striking me as a bit cheesy and cliched on second reading, but this was the best I could do and still be totally honest. 

I think those of us who teach at universities are especially well-positioned to add to the diversity and quantity of local news sources, and indeed, my colleagues and I are trying to do just that right now.  What else do we have but willing and able students who need to master reporting, writing, and multimedia skills not by listening to lectures, but by actually DOING journalism? Yes, our students are still, by definition, learning how to practice journalism and may not be quite up to par with the pros (though I’ve seen a few that could give some pros a run for their money), but they have faculty members who have years of newsroom experience to serve as their editors and guides. [Sorry the image here isn't edited properly - burning the midnight oil here and running out of steam to fix.]

Probably the most impressive effort to increase local news sources at the  University of Memphis is just launching now. My colleague Dr. Lurene Kelley and our new multimedia capstone class are taking on the hyperlocal reporting challenge by providing extensive online coverage of one community: Cooper Young in Midtown Memphis. Their site just launched this very week, and they hope to not only give these senior-level students a culminating experience that brings all of their writing, reporting, photojournalism, video and web production skills  together, but also to offer this neighborhood the kind of extensive coverage not available from the major metro media. Because this is a new course, enrollment is small, but will grow in subsequent semesters, and Kelley plans on expanding to other neighborhoods as well.

In my reporting and social media courses, each student chooses a beat and creates a beat blog, which may range from anything as serious as local politics to something more fun like Memphis music or MMA. While the beats aren’t explicitly local per se, in-person reporting is required so they definitely have at least a local angle. These blogs are often fledgling efforts by inexperienced students, but local voices get heard that might not otherwise get media attention. You can check out my undergraduate and graduate students blogs via the blogrolls on our class sites. We are just getting started this semester, so there may not be much content yet.

My student Nicole Blum took this great Twitpic of a local fundraiser for St. Jude.

This semester, my social media students are also using a variety of tools such as Twitter and Flickr to report the news and share stories. For example, during a major snowstorm in Memphis last week, my students took photos and reported on everything from road conditions and wrecks to sledding spots from all over the greater metro area using the class hashtag #j4801 and #snOMG. My students have also been participating in campus and city-wide “Scavenger Hunts” that in a sense are also a form of local news reporting as they gather photos and quotes that tell a story about university and civic life. In fact, if you check out the hashtag #j7200 this week you could learn a little bit about some of the places and people in Memphis.

My goal is to continue to build upon and expand efforts such as these and get more of our courses involved in these efforts.

First of all, let me say that I think this recommendation is nothing short of critical. As the metropolitan/local news ecosystem continues to experience layoffs and economic strife that decreases the quality and quantity of the available journalism, journalism schools have to step up and be innovators and news providers. Lacking the same commercial imperatives that newsrooms face, we need to be bold even if  our unexperienced charges can’t fully replicate the work of a long-time professional. It’s good for society and it’s good for our students, who can benefit from every ounce of real-world experience they can get.

Here’s how I think we need to make this ACTUALLY happen, beyond the lip service and pontificating the academy is all too fond of:

• Journalism schools are increasingly likely to bring on aging former editors who worked for major national or local publications and can lend their glossy imprimatur of prestige to the school’s faculty. This is all well and good, and many make excellent professors – this is not any kind of attack on qualified and dedicated individuals, really, so don’t get in an offended huff, people.  But I think we need to also consider making riskier hires of younger and digital-savvy folks with big ideas and the energy to carry them out. Asking people who have made their entire careers off of a dying industry to now re-create an utterly new one at the twilight of their professional life is a tall order at best. You can also often hire a lot of younger people for the salary you pay the bigwig. Just sayin.
• Support, cherish and reward student innovators who are making efforts to do things like modernize school newspaper’s websites, create entrepreneurial news ventures and the like. They will experience many obstacles in their path and they need our mentorship. Students, like members of any organization, respond to what leaders reward and what they punish, so we need to be conscious and deliberate about the messages we send to them. Yes, sometimes those that try new things will fail. That’s okay. Flexibility and fearlessness and good-old-fashioned effort will take them far. Please believe me that right now many face discouragement, fear and catastrophizing instead of support.
• I think all students, regardless of major, should take a digital literacy course that empowers them to not only become more critical and wise consumers of media that will demand and support the best journalism, but also be savvy media creators comfortable with new tools.
• It takes a village, to use a tired cliche. Universities need to foster an environment that supports the free and open flow of information and the foundational efforts of young journalists who MUST learn by doing, not just by snoozing through a lecture. Administrators, other professors, public officials, and the like need to be responsive to interview and information requests from student journalists and be willing to work constructively with them to improve the accuracy and quality of their work. Being aggressively pompous, belittling and/or denying them access will NOT help them grow as journalists nor serve the larger public good. We journalism professors work very, very, very hard helping our students improve, but we need others too – making up for a deficient primary and secondary education system (not to mention freshman English composition classes at our own universities staffed by overworked graduate students that so may borderline-illiterate students seem to pass) that leaves many students grappling with basic sentence structure is not something we can do all on our own.
• Instead of having students turn papers in on dead trees to be seen only by you, increasingly find ways to integrate class work with actual online news production. It’s so easy and cheap to do. Got a neighborhood that never appears in your daily paper unless a crime is committed there? Send in some students, set up a blog and a Twitter account, and get them going. I’m biased as an alum, but the Missouri School of Journalism has been doing this FOR YEARS. It can be done. Even if the results aren’t perfect, they are often better than nothing and I nearly guarantee a better learning experience and buy-in.
• Encourage innovative research into new media instead of yet another safe and predictable study on framing or agenda setting that does little to advance existing knowledge, instead just providing that nice tenure-padding on a vita. Research begets good teaching because it helps professors stay on the cutting edge of their field. I’ve been at conferences where professors who think that maybe the more interesting research path is not in print media are called “furry digital mammals” who are delusional and don’t understand the lasting primacy of print. Really. Not helpful. I’ve also seen really good research (not talking about my own here) denied inexplicably while yet another framing study rolls forward (I have nothing against framing, it’s just that we’ve kind of been there, done that.)
• Finally, faculty need to USE new media. You can’t teach it credibly unless you DO IT. Students know when you are just blowing hot air. So try it. Get on Twitter, blog, what have you. Embrace new things. There’s a great community of committed journalism educators for you to join. It will be worth it.