Microblogging toward productivity (Or: Why I play on Twitter a lot)

I’ve been thinking lately about how ideas and information make their way from my head to my blog. People who write for a living think about this kind of thing all the time, even if they don’t know they do. We try to find the best strategy, the best mindset, the best-decorated workspace, etc., that will get those creative juices flowing.

The worst, of course, is when this is all a writer thinks about. That would be what we call “writer’s block.”

I’ve been blogging going on six years now, across several different blogs. Some have been discontinued, modified, deleted, or outright killed. It’s part of my creative process. Some like to preserve things because their writing is like some sort of scrapbooking project. For me, my ideas need to be born and then (at times) die a horrible death. Or evolve. Something besides just sit out there in cyberspace. Read more

Wednesday is for links (11/25)

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. I blogged about Google Wave earlier in the week, but I really want you to check out Mashable‘s piece on how it is going to transform media. The idea of a “public wave” is intriguing to people like me who think about journalism’s role in public discourse.

2. Best thing I’ve read this week: Clay Shirky‘s piece about authority and credibility in the digital age. He’s using the term “algorithmic authority” to describe a process by which people put levels of trust in aggregators and filters on the Web simply due to things like hits and popularity. The piece is mind-bending and I’m still digesting it, but it has me thinking a lot this week about how the wisdom of the crowds works to create new authorities on matters even as we dismantle old ones. It has implications for how we think about people cutting through media noise in the era of overload. If you read anything this week, read this.

3. Twitter‘s basic question “What are you doing?” has been changed to “What’s happening?” This may not seem like a huge deal, but it’s a new paradigm. It is a signal that Twitter recognizes a shift from the service being a me-centered medium to one that is we-centered. And, it seems, that the audience has evolved past Twitter’s original intentions for what it would be.

4. Media coverage falsely framing ACORN by falling into the he-said-she-said trap rather than providing some context via, you know, reporting? Shocking! Editor & Publisher lays out the case.

5. Blog of the week: Take a look at Jonathan Groves’ corner of the Web. Jonathan’s a buddy from the doc program at Mizzou, now setting the world on fire at Drury University. Best post of the past week is his piece about the 10-year anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

6. Frontline did an episode recently on the now-famous “Neda” video out of Iran that went viral this past summer. There is some excellent reporting here, and they broaden the argument on why citizen journalism matters by giving us the context. My first thought is that I still wince every time I see the Neda video. My second thought is that it’s terribly important that we keep showing it, if only to reinforce the idea that good media use means we encounter abuses of authority structure that make us angry. We aren’t outraged enough.

7. Just for fun, what if Star Wars characters were socially connected on Facebook? Good times, that’s what.

8. If you read ESPN, you probably know of Bill Simmons (a.k.a. The Sports Guy). Well, he’s been told by ESPN to cool it on the Twitter thing for a couple weeks. His crime? Insulting a radio station that is a partner with ESPN. Just in case our students think the corporate conglomerate media structure that sacrifices competition for the sake of efficiency isn’t such a bad deal ….

9. From the invalidate-my-own-argument department, Jackson Sun columnist Tom Bohs makes the very scary argument that citizens can’t fact check well enough to produce consistent journalism like the pros can. So we should trust the pros. Such as the kind of pro who’d misspell “Berkeley” or the last name of Dan Gillmor (not to mention get his current locale wrong). And I’m pretty skeptical Bohs actually has read We The Media. It’s all sorta funny/ironic considering Gillmor was the prime target of this fine piece of opinion journalism. If only citizens could crowdsource the editing on this piece like a real professional journalist! Oh wait, they already are doing it.

First-time reviewer

This year I’m getting to do something fairly new to me: review other peoples’ research.

Actually, it’s totally new. I’m ashamed to say I never reviewed papers for the ICA conference as a graduate student. I know it’s the closest thing grad students have to a civic duty, but asking a grad student to conjure up free time at the end of November …. well, you might as well ask me to make fat/sugar free ice cream taste good.

Yes, other grad colleagues found time to do it. I am aware of this. They are phenomenal humans. Read more

Google wave, “Flash waves” and Journalism 2.0

So I’ve been messing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now, thanks to generous invites from former Mizzou PhD colleagues Mark Poepsel and Heath Hooper. I’ve been hearing about it since late last year and it has gotten considerable hype among new mediaheads.

My initial reaction after using it a bit is that the hype is well deserved. I’m going to scribble my thoughts below and probably add some more down the road.

We went over the Cluetrain Manifesto this past week in Media & Society and G-wave reminds me of one of those wonderfully simple-yet-powerful phrases contained in their 95 theses: “Markets are conversations.” The idea being that as communication technology evolves it has become more social (in the example Cluetrain was highlighting, tech’s impact on markets). We are deemphasizing mere publication in favor of conversation, hierarchy in favor of hyperlinks.

How do you describe G-wave to people who don’t have it yet? Turns out, it’s really difficult. Read more

Sarah Palin is a construct

Walter Lippmann has been rattling around in my brain for the past few weeks. Part of it is because my class, Media & Society, is right up his alley. The other part is because I’m being subjected to the latest pseduo-event in the news, the release of Sarah Palin’s new book.

I love exposing students to Lippmann because he elegantly strips away all of these ways we falsely see our world. His argument was that most of the things we think we “know” about the world come to us via media, which means that most of how we perceive the world is based on stereotypes. Media, after all, is an incomplete picture merely as a product of its function; we don’t ask what’s not in the picture when looking at a photo, because we don’t think to do so. We put together these individual media moments and over time construct our “view” of something based on little facts, images, and information we’ve consumed via media.

The simple example I use in class is to talk about Paris and then ask students what went through their heads when they heard the word “Paris.” Most of them name famous places – The Eiffel Tower, The Lourvre, sidewalk cafes, leisurely ways of life, etc. Our perception is so shaped by images of famous places, pictures, and writings that it astounds us when something shatters that construct we’ve created by our own use of media. When we hear news of ethnic riots, for example, it doesn’t square with how we view Paris. It sounds a lot more like Los Angeles.

This material is often new to students in M&S. Even the bright ones don’t think of media use as thing that frames our world for us. It’s just media – we’re so immersed in it that it just feels like life. It feels real. Read more

Twitter, Darfur, and Lehigh

The Brown & White student newspaper did an article today about a project I’ve been working on a little bit during my first semester here at Lehigh. For about a month now a group of students have been using Twitter to raise awareness both about the conflict in Darfur and the United Nations’ role in helping us find a way through it.

The article’s great and really shows the thought and preparation (not to mention the current hard work) put into this project. It’s off to a nice start, with students tweeting a few times a day, building an audience, and also following others for the purpose of retweeting (follow them at @DarfurConflict).

I won’t overstate my role in this, as really I’ve just been the Twitter adviser here to help shape students’ understanding of what this thing is and offer advice on how to make it work. They’ve done a great job both creating content and listening to their audiences. Twitter is one of those forms of media you have to use a little before you really have a handle on what it is. I’ve noticed a marked growth in the quality in the short time the students have had to get more comfortable.

This project is what I loved about Lehigh as I was getting to know the place while on the job market. Opportunity abounds here. The project started because someone at the U.N. contacted Bill Hunter here at Lehigh (we are a U.N. partner campus). Something that simple is the catalyst for something interesting.

Of course we are having to look hard at how to define success. Followers were scant early on, but they’ve picked up steam as we’ve gotten more of an audience. This is in part due to retweeting, I’d bet, but also because the students have shown interest in others by following like-minded folks on Twitter simply by searching the live feed for “Darfur” posts. I’ve been tracking followers by the day and it has been an interesting case study in building a social media brand from the ground up.

What’s most interesting to me is that these aren’t trained journalists. Most of them aren’t even studying journalism or communication here. It is a powerful reminder to me of what I already know, that the heart of what we do in media is still about telling stories and that is something people can identify with both as consumers and producers on the Web. Most of us are storytellers at heart in our own little way, and different media platforms are merely channels for our stories be it a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. Stories are the building blocks of social change and action, though, and so this is a field experiment at work.

I gave them a little bit of guidance by telling them to “find your voice” on Twitter, be it straight reporting, opinion, analysis, or a mixture. We aren’t editing or approving anything they write, and so I’ve really been testing out this notion of a light hand of direction that we learned with MyMissourian. We aren’t editing for style or grammar. It runs back to the basic questions: Is it true? Is it fair?

Wednesday is for links (11/18)

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. Missouri School of Journalism students are being proactive about curriculum updates. They’ve created a site, Letters From Young Journalists, that looks to be a continuing conversation about what journalism students and recent grads think they are missing in the current curriculum. MU is wrestling with this like everybody else, but if you cut out the specific course numbers and just listen, you’ll be surprised to hear what they’re saying. You can follow their discussion on Twitter using the #lfyj tag.

2. In a sign of the times and a nod to Facebook’s huge popularity, the Oxford Dictionary‘s word of the year is unfriend.

3. I think if I’d seen this from my airplane window, I would’ve freaked out a bit. Fortunately it was a space nerd WIN instead.

4. The latest Chronicle Review is a bonanza of good stuff for people interested in Journalism education. Good stuff by folks like Schudson on how academia could help keep the flame of public-service journalism alive.

5. New blog of the week: Check out Comics and Beer by my former PhD school colleague Bob Britten. It’s a blog about journalism, culture, comics, and beer. Some occasional Star Wars references, natch.

6. John Nichols, a contributor for the Nation, had some interesting thoughts about journalism business models and the possibility of public subsidies in the video below. I am skeptical about public subsidies, but he pretty succinctly states a view of journalism and democracy that I share. Hat Tip to my former J1100 student Taylor Dankmyer for passing this on.

7. This has nothing to do with journalism, but KU’s football team is falling apart. I couldn’t be more pleased.

8. Politico tends to annoy me with its Washington insiderish way of covering things, but kudos to them for going beyond the Daily Outrage headline about the health care reform debate and doing some real digging to discover that after all the bluster about the Stupak Amendment, the GOP health care plan covers abortion. This is the difference between being a reporter and taking someone at their word.

J198: So we took the plunge

We ordered more Zi8 cameras for J198. Each of the four groups is going to have at least one of these things for use in the field, but we’re also getting a few for the Brown & White for next semester. We’re also going to give each group a kit that includes a mini-tripod. We’re still testing it against others, but we need to know whether adopting this thing widely works for us.

I really think these cameras are going to be a hit. I showed the Kodak to another student who has signed up for the course and she showed some excitement about the camera just upon seeing it. Buzz is a good thing. I can’t teach buzz.

Also on order is one of the Flip Ultra models, which will give us a good comparison point for cameras in this range. So while I’m still pushing the Zi8 to see how far it can take us, I’d like to see what other possibilities are out there.

This is going to be an interesting test of Web video vs. TV video. We’ll learn ‘em a little bit of TV-style storytelling, but it’s going to be just another tool in the toolkit along other forms of video work.

What’s your number? It’s not 867-5309 ….

I got into an interesting discussion with a student recently as I was training him to work on a Twitter project we have cookin’ here at Lehigh.

I was explaining the concept of “retweeting” on Twitter and why it was such a valuable thing. For those who don’t use Twitter a lot, the idea is that your audience is opt-in (if they’re not clicking the button to “follow” you, they don’t see your tweets unless they bookmark your profile page). Thus any tweet really only reaches the people following you (oh, and also the millions of social media “experts” who troll the live public feed). A retweet, which has one of your followers copying and pasting your message and sending it out to their audience, is valuable because it allows other users who aren’t following you to discover you through social connections.

We call this process of discovery “serendipity,” a concept we use for other media to describe running into information that we don’t expect. Someone on Twitter (I forget whom, but I know it wasn’t me) once put it another way: Your tweets last about an hour before they are pushed down in someone’s Twitter feed, but a retweet extends its life another 5-6 hours just because of serendipity on other non-followers’ feeds. Read more

J198: Kodak Zi8: A good tool for the backpack

One of the cool parts of my job here at Lehigh is I get to play with toys. It’s a guy/eternal kid thing. If I had room for a couch in my office, you damn well better believe there’d be a fort made out of cushions. Throw in a dash of academia nerdiness and you can imagine how much fun it can be for me to do what I do.

The latest toy-playing has been trying out equipment for J198 Multimedia Reporting (I’m blogging my journey as I build this course, which you can access as a tag because that’s how I roll). Right now we’re playing with digital cameras in an attempt to choose the core devices for the course.

The class will have four groups of three people, and so we’re thinking of giving each group one or two finalist devices and using the course to assess the equipment. There’s a good reason for this, as what we end up using long-term will also potentially be adopted by The Brown & White student newspaper for general use (with perhaps a couple nicer devices as well).

My department chair Wally Trimble has been working with me to think through this after I have been passing on recommendations from my own research. There were a few things we felt like we had to have in a video device. The main one is we wanted something that would be a paradigm-shifter. We haven’t had multimedia here at Lehigh as part of coursework, so there is a potential problem with handing students a device that looks like something they’ve seen. Giving them something that looks like a digital camera would make them think still images. Handing them something that looks like a TV camera might make them think television news. We want them to think Web, and so it was important for us to have a device that looked like a Web tool first. Read more

Blogging out J198

Next semester will be my first foray into teaching multimedia journalism here at Lehigh. Planning for this course has been hard and exhilarating at the same time, because while I’ve enjoyed all the freedom I’ve had to plan this course it also is unnerving for a new PhD to know you’re doing something within a program that hasn’t yet been tried.

Thus, as with any venture like this, there are moments where I worry this airplane isn’t gonna fly. But that’s why I came to Lehigh. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I do really well when I’m handed challenges and given the freedom to come up with a solution. I’m OK even if I don’t have freedom or support (I did work at the Daily News, after all), but I find the result more gratifying when I feel like I’m given the tools to make it great.

The good news is that Lehigh has blown away even my high expectations. The students here are sharp and the faculty are top notch in terms of scholarship, interest, and support for new folks. Not a day goes by where I don’t feel blessed to have landed here.

Anyhow, back to J198 “Multimedia Reporting,” which we’ll offer next spring. It’s got two main components: weekly work and a semester-long team reporting project. Read more

The Texas Tribune gets it

The New York Times had an interesting piece about the Texas Tribune, a not-for-profit news organization that launched last week to quite a bit of buzz in new media circles. The Trib’s buzz has come from its unique business model: a mix of entrepreneurship, donations, premium content, and other revenue sources to create a product that is targeted to and paid for by a select audience.

It reminds me a bit of what they’re trying to do with Minnesota Public Radio, and indeed a colleague in my department said that the Trib’s model reminds him of a radio model that has worked internationally for years.

The Trib’s model interests me as a scholar and a journalist. The welcome change of the past few years is that we’ve stopped trying to save newspapers, which may not have ever been possible anyhow, and instead focused on figuring out how to try and save journalism. Newspapers can come and go, but American democracy is built on the notion that citizens need information to be self-governing. The re-emerging partisan press, while not mutually exclusive to a robust public debate, has weaknesses that are best addressed by a strong independent press. Read more