SXSW panels on the brain

South By Southwest’s panel picker opened today, so I officially have SXSW on the brain until next March. I wanted to talk a little about a panel I proposed and also plug a few others that I have voted for.

A shameless plug for our panel: If you like what you hear, please vote for us using the link a couple grafs below this one. It requires a short registration but you aren’t obligated to attend the event in Austin. Ours is the only panel tagged “journalism education” and so I think we bring a lot to the table here. Read more

Musings on AEJMC 2010

I love Denver. What a great city, and particularly what a great city for a convention such as AEJMC 2010.

This wasn’t my first AEJ rodeo (it was #6, actually), but all in all it was my favorite one so far. I’m not sure what it is about going as a professor instead of a graduate student, but I had the best networking time meeting new and interesting people. It didn’t hurt that people actually knew who the hell I was this time thanks to the fact I was honored with the Nafziger-White-Salwen Award (my remarks), but even that aside it seemed like AEJ was teeming with interesting people this year.

The best part was the good vibes. To be honest, the past couple conferences were a bit of a downer, what with the cratering of the print news industry and a solid dose of misdirected anger that sometimes pointed at new media folks. I’ve gotten the sense that a lot of academics were working these past few conferences to save the industry and restore what was. Not this year.

Thankfully, we’ve moved on. It’s not entirely about some of the new junior scholars, because a lot of long-timers are doing some innovating things both with news and in the classroom, but I think this year offered a sign that a lot of the younger guns like myself are making a mark. Maybe our research agendas are helping shift the research and teaching conversation ever so slightly toward newer forms of journalism.

Like I said, we aren’t the reason, but I felt like I was making an impact this year for once. I am not sure I ever felt that way before at an AEJ convention. My work is in areas that have had to work hard to gain even grudging acceptance at times (i.e. citizen media), but this year I didn’t feel like an outsider anymore. The conversation has shifted. Read more

Steps forward in multimedia reporting

This semester we took our first leap into multimedia reporting here at Lehigh University. I had an amazing class of 11 students who really embraced the material with a vigor and made this a successful semester. I am having them all blog about the course and evaluate where they are with these skills, and I told them I’d do the same for myself. Again, it’s hard to teach this unless you model it.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

• Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
• Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
• South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
• Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling. Read more

NBC, let me introduce you to this thing called the “Web”

I don’t care much about the Winter Olympics, but as a scholar I am interested in the media aspect of the Games. Lately, NBC has me beating my head against a wall. Judging by the #nbcfail tag that has gained popularity of late on Twitter, I’m not the only one.

These Olympics are made for an American TV audience. Vancouver is in the Pacific time zone, meaning that audiences all over the U.S. should be able to watch the drama unfold in real-time. NBC, with its ability to carry coverage live on three channels (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC), seems uniquely aligned to make that coverage all the more compelling in a real-time world.

The problem is that NBC seems to have not gotten the memo that we live in a world of media immediacy. Read more

Google Buzz is no Twitter killer, won’t make you more attractive

So do you have the Buzz yet? Not a buzz; it’s far too early in the morning to be asking that question.

I’m talking about Google Buzz, a newly unveiled service that has been rolling out since Tuesday to people who use Google products such as Gmail. You should know if you have it the minute you log in, as it will ask you if you want to try it. And if you try it and hate it, don’t worry; buried at the bottom of your Gmail page is a link to turn Buzz off.

How to explain Buzz? Imagine if you’re a media company that, oh, begins with a “G” and really doesn’t have a product ready-made for social sharing of news and information. You’d probably take a hard look at Facebook and Twitter, see what ideas work best, build your engine around those things and sprinkle in a few innovations of your own to encourage folks to make the switch.

What you get is Google Buzz, a service that is part innovation and part technological Frankenstein. It functions on the basic unit of sharing that drives both Facebook and Twitter: the status update. You can update people on what you’re doing, thinking, reading, etc. You can reply to others. And you can socially share things you are producing, such as blog posts, videos, photos, and so forth.

Google has a built-in engine for this last one, because it has over the years either bought out or created an array of choices from Picasa (photos) to Google Reader (RSS reader) to Blogger. It has a lot of features that über services such as Facebook have, but it’s never had a way to link them all together using social networks. Read more

Games made for social media

Forgot to post this last week when I tripped across it, but I was tooling around the NBC site for the winter Olympics and noticed a cool section called Olympic Pulse.

The page, linked off the main home page, is essentially an aggregation for Twitter feeds featuring athletes and NBC broadcast personalities. You can sort between these groups or have a combined feed. Off to the right are links to other social media outlets where folks can find Games content, such as via Facebook.

Blogging was the big new media thing at the Beijing Games in 2008. Missouri sent several students to China to work one media coverage as part of an internship-type thing, and in fact one of my students was blogging daily from the Games. And boy did blogging take off across all types of media, which is interesting because really it’d been a growing phenomenon for about four years before that point. Read more

Foursquare, journalism, and a sense of place

I have a confession to make. I live a secret life. By day you know me as the mild-mannered professor of journalism, helping guide young ones in the formation of their journalistic skills. But I have an alter ego.

You see, I am the mayor of Coppee Hall.

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about Foursquare, a mobile Web application that uses location-based systems to let you “check in” where you are using an application on your iPhone or similar smartphone device. If I had to compare it to something you already might know and use, it’s similar to Twitter except that rather than tweeting about what’s in your mind or what you are doing, it’s simply a status message about where you are.

My goal for this post is to sketch out some ideas in hopes that you’ll add yours at the end of it. I’ve been fooling around with Foursquare the past couple weeks after Mashable recently noted it was the social media offering worth watching in 2010. After using it for a while, I am seeing some of the huge potential it offers both fans of social media and journalists. And I see a lot of potential for it in terms of journalism education, as it offers a new way to tell stories and add to the record.

Read more

Rethinking online networks and engagement

The situation in Haiti has my mind churning this week. The images and stories coming out of this tragedy after the earthquake have been heartbreaking, but I have been mindful of how mediated the whole thing is for me even as I blog about it. I’ve never been to Haiti, unlike a few friends of mine. My whole conception of what Haiti is and what its struggles are (and were, long before this quake) are coming to me via media. As I get ready for another semester of Media & Society, that perspective is still as fresh to me as ever.

There’s another aspect of this though that has me intrigued, and that is the use of social networks to raise donations for the victims in Haiti. I touched on it a bit the other day when I wrote about the SMS campaign being used to raise aid dollars, but it’s much wider than that. As I’ve been sitting here this week editing down my 200-page dissertation to a 2500-word abstract for a professional organization competition, I realize that much of what I’m seeing as it relates to Haiti and social media reflect what I found in that research.

First, a story, then some theory, then some explanation. Read more

Ubiquity and accountability

It doesn’t shock me at all that the early stages of the Haiti coverage were built on social media rather than professional media. We’ve seen this before when big news events happen and traditional lines of transmission inhibit the ability of news organizations to get the message out.

In the case of Haiti, the 7.0 earthquake damaged so much communication infrastructure that communicating the stories and images out of Port Au Prince was thrust upon the locals still shellshocked from the devastation. That my first thought after the disaster was to wonder how the citizen journalists on the ground would tell this story shows how far we’ve come. As a scholar I’m no longer fascinated and in awe of the notion of the citizen reporter. In my case, I found myself wondering last night what they’d do with it this time, how it would be different and more meaningful than past events.

Within hours, the New York Times was curating a social media roundup on its blog, soliciting voices from the region. The Los Angeles Times was aggregating tweets and attempting to verify whether the voices were hoaxes or actually coming out of Haiti, just one interesting professional media use of social media that looked like a next step highlighted today by the Sydney Morning Herald.

But that’s all stuff we’ve seen before, and as Mark McGwire would say, I’m not here to talk about the past. 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?

The finish line, nearly!

In 48 hours, my dissertation final draft will be done and I’ll ship this thing out to my committee before my July 16 defense date. I’m exhausted from too many 15-hour days, but I sometimes marvel at the stamina I’ve acquired for research in graduate school.

I’ll wait to post a full abstract until this thing is fully defended, because I’m always a little nervous about putting the cart before the horse. But real briefly, I’ll say what it’s about. I surveyed a bunch of online community users of various types and over various sites to get a sense of their social ties. I tapped into ideas of social capital first theorized by Pierre Bourdieu and made famous by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.

The basic idea is that the thickness and the extension of peoples’ social networks is a powerful predictor of how we help one another and get involved in everyday civic life, types of engagment that span from voting to the reciprocity that comes with giving money to a friend in need.

Typically researchers measure offline social capital (offline ties for real-world local benefit) and online social capital (ties formed online for real-world local benefit). I measured those two as well as a third new variable I’ve created called virtual social capital, which measures online ties created for non-local beneft (I’m calling it Distance Engagement).

The one thing I can say so far is my created variable works big time as a distinct way of measuring online ties. So I’m thrilled about that.

But I’ve found some other stuff related to motivations for using online communities, social bonds, and the forms of engagement. I’ll save those results for later, save this teaser: social media doesn’t do squat for local engagement as a general predictor across all different types of sites, but it does surprising things for online forms of activism and helping. And the motivations/needs people bring to their media use is very important in determining how this all works. Viva la Media Choice Model!

Anyhow, 48 hours and I’ll send this thing out. Defense in 11 days, yikes!

AP’s response: A visual representation

AP has put out a FAQ about its new initiative to capture revenue from search engines and aggregators. Hopefully my linking to them doesn’t constitute stealing.

Just for fun, I created a tag cloud using their text using Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/):

The one word that jumps out to me is “authoritative” and in context it’s referring to the content that is produced and the fact it should be most visible to people looking for it. They’re trying to protect the value of what they do, obviously, but I can’t help but think this won’t go over well with people who understand that the Internet has leveled that playing field somewhat. Read more

The vacuum might not be that bad

There’s been some excellent traffic and discussion on my last post regarding Singleton/AP and Google News. Much of that has been generated through social media (Twitter and links on other blogs), reinforcing a lesson I try to emphasize with my students: Think of social networks, not web sites, as your platform.

Anyhow, read the post and add to the discussion if you like.

I want to pull out one response I have to the comments though because it is pretty salient to the discussion. What happens if all these newspapers go away or put up walls around their content? Will people pay for it? Will the newspapers collapse and take democracy with it? Read more

Three days unplugged

I spent last weekend on the West Coast and had basically five days with sparse internet access. Little on e-mail, less on Twitter or Facebook.

I realized how wired I am and how weird it feels to be unplugged. I have to say, I didn’t like it. The lack of social connection – even while spending time with friends and family – was a new sensation.

I might try the email fast sometime this summer. I’ve been kicking around the idea for a while, but I might want to take it to a new level and see what happens.

Gearing up to retrain

This summer, I’m going to help my students brand themselves.

In about three months I’ll get my second go-round here at Missouri with Online Journalism, the online-only course we teach our masters students through Blackboard. I taught it last summer and had a great experience and am looking forward to doing it again.

The MU Direct program tends to attract journalists looking to get their M.A. while retraining for a new set of skills. Last year we focused on blogging early on, perhaps a little too much. The student reviews, while positive, reflected a desire to do more. In fact, it was a hunger. Read more

Rupert Murdoch has at least one good trait

I had an interesting conversation with a fellow scholar who works in the organizational management and planning discipline about ways to innovate and push new media products into the market.

His analogy was interesting. He noted that Japanese auto makers such as Honda made inroads in the American car market in the 1980s by offering cheap vehicles that were high in motor quality but didn’t look that great. Slowly but surely, they added features while incrementally upping the cost. While the Fords and Chevys of the world couldn’t compete against a much cheaper product without stripping out major features, Honda slowly improved quality while keeping its image as a low-cost alternative, effectively squeezing its way into a crowded market. Read more

Twitter to news

MU’s own Jen Reeves, one of the most innovative minds here when it comes to journalism and social media, likes to compare the journalistic value of Twitter to a police scanner. When news sources use Twitter to follow the feeds of people in their community, they can glean what is going on in communities similar to what we have in newsrooms now, where police scanners are a window into what’s going on in the police and fire arenas.

Today I was part of a beautiful example of how it works.

My wife and I were walking across the MU campus today and I remarked how it smelled like burning wood, sort of like that first winter day when everyone in town fires up the fireplace. Soon we saw random pieces of ash-like material floating to the ground every so often. It was obvious that something was burning somewhere in Columbia. Read more

Playing along, not playing the part

I’m a little annoyed with journalists today.

On the same day Joe Matthews pens a column for TNR about the loss of watchdog journalism, we get this Alex Rodriguez spectacle in Tampa. In bemoaning the cuts at the Los Angeles Times, Matthews toes the line according to the standard argument of the day, we need journalists to investigate, uncover wrongdoing, and ask tough questions.

Cut to the A-Rod news conference this afternoon and you see a bunch of journalists either afraid or unwilling to challenge a guy who’s being pretty evasive. Every answer is “mistakes of my youth” or “I was naive” and not enough insight. Read more

“Forcing” technology in the classroom

An interesting discussion broke out on my Twitter feed today when MU RJI fellow Jenn Reeves (one of our brightest new media minds here) tweeted the following:

interesting- i’m seeing a number of students joining twitter and saying they were “forced” to join. Probably not a productive use of twitter

The tweet perked up my virtual ears as well as a number of others who follow her. Apparently several professors have forced students to join and register tweets as part of class material. It’s understandable from a professor perspective, because it’s a way to get students introduced to a wider media world and see the uses of technology. Read more

Breaking the news everywhere

Whether you’re a sports fan or not, chances are you at least saw a headline that New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez admitted today on ESPN that he used performance-enhancing drugs. This is the latest update in a story that started on Saturday, when Sports Illustrated broke the news using anonymous sources that A-Rod had tested positive for steroids back in 2003.

On the surface this is a classic news turf war. SI broke the story on Saturday and ESPN played catchup, but ESPN got the big snag today because this is the first time the story was relying on something other than off-the-record information. So, a classic news war at work. One-upsmanship at its finest.

The interesting subtext for me comes with the following question: how did you hear the news today? SI leveraged their status in Time Warner to break the story on several TW properties, including CNN.com. But when ESPN got the big “get” today, the first place I heard about it? Twitter. I subscribe to ESPN’s breaking news Twitter feed, and so the fact that I’m plugged into that feed all day via my Flock browser meant that’s how they captured my eyeballs. Read more

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