Tag: netj

A few last notes on the Networked Journalism Summit

Ryan Sholin1 Comment

Thanks to everyone who took a few minutes to talk with me yesterday. The whole putting-faces-with-names bit is really underrated. In no order (I’ll give chronological half a chance), with no hope of remembering everyone, here are a few notes to folks I met in person for the first time at the summit:

  • Scott Karp: Eager to see your choice of features for Publish2.
  • Rick Burnes: 9Neighbors looks promising – why not feed those posts back to an Atlas map?
  • Derek Willis: Somebody should be building an open source form-to-database tool in Django for quantitative data gathering, networked journalism style.
  • Jeff Jarvis: Excellent work with the invisible gong, sir.
  • Jay Rosen: Please don’t let the NextAssignment be something meta about the media.
  • Lisa Williams: Placeblogger is looking good these days!
  • Steve Garfield: I wonder if I can run iMovie HD and iMovie08 at the same time, IE6/7 style?
  • Dwight Silverman: Seriously, if I ever finish the preliminary data gathering for my thesis, you’re almost certainly on my list for a case study interview.
  • Barry Parr: The Central Coastsider Network?
  • Travis Henry: Reverse publishing can’t be the only carrot to drive participation, can it?
  • John Hassell: There must be a few hundred BaristaNets in Jersey who have never tried blogging; give them a chance.
  • Dave Winer: I’m having a good time with Flickr-to-Twitter. Check your picstream for one of you.
  • David Stern: Do you think it would work for breaking news, a la Wikipedia on big stories?
  • David Cohn: See you on the West side.

More blog posts about the summit here. Posts on the summit blog by CUNY students here.

[UPDATE: I didn’t mention Jan Schaeffer or Chuck Olsen, both of whom I’ve met briefly once before, and Squared slipped my mind for no good reason. (What happens at the lunch table stays at the lunch table?)  I’ll see who else I can remember. Andy Carvin and I met in an amusing Tweet–to–handshake scenario.] 

A few ways to teach the Pro side of Pro-Am Journalism to J-School students

Ryan Sholin1 Comment

Jay Rosen was just on stage talking about NewAssignment.net (see his lessons learned post at PressThink), and one thing that comes up is training on both the Pro and the Amateur side to smooth the process of writing/editing stories and gathering/parsing data.

So how can J-School students who need to learn these new skills (this would be the Interactivity part of the trinity) pick them up in school?

A few ideas:

  • Create Facebook and MySpace identities for your student media outlet and then manage/promote them.  Start discussions about campus news and find the online communities that are already in your neighborhoods, then tie into them.
  • Create a Ning social network for a niche at your school:  Club sports not getting enough coverage in your paper?  Ning ’em.
  • Find a tool to gather data from your campus community.  It can be simple as a Google Map or as complicated as a database project, but take a common problem or question on your campus (parking, for example) and start asking your readers to contribute answers to those questions.

Does anyone have examples of student media taking these steps? (I know you do…)

And maybe more important, is this something you teach in a class, or are your students pretty much left to figure this out on their own?

Who’s your community site manager in the newsroom?

Ryan Sholin1 Comment

Questions I have coming out of the first session:

  • For newspapers with community sites, like Bakersfield and Raleigh, who is the go-to person in your newsroom for managing threads, policing comments, and general cheerleading for the site? Do you have a dedicated position leading it or is it rolled into other Web roles?
  • Is cloud-seeding on these sites only necessary in the early days of the site, before the crowd starts to manage itself, or is encouragement, seeding, and moderation from the newsroom an ongoing task?

A quick informal poll:  Who handles your community site, and is it an every-single-day job or just an occasional role?