Pop-Up Newsroom Will Cover Election Day
Join the Pop-Up Newsroom, the temporary, virtual newsroom, by posting your election coverage (Tweets, photos, videos, audio) with the hashtag #popupvote.
Breaking the Mold: Innovative Ideas for the Future of Journalism
One of the key underlying questions at a number of sessions at today’s start of a four-day annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Denver was:
How can we save journalism?
The answer from Prof Larry Dailey, multimedia guru at U. of Nevada -Reno speaking on a panel called Breaking the Mold, was simple:
Forget about it. Instead, think about ways to save the roles journalism has played in democracy.
Dailey, who must be among the first j profs in the country to teach a journalism class in Innovation, touted Harvard prof Clay Christensen’s ideas about disruptive innovation, popularized in The Innovator’s Dilemma, as a lens for considering the journalism industry’s decline.
Successful businesses, driven by stockholder’s demands, stick with routines and the competencies developed to efficiently carry them out, and this inevitably leads to inflexibility and failure as the nimble innovator races between their legs, so to speak. Think music industry and Napster.
What the journalist of the future needs, then, is an ability to think creatively, to come up with new ideas, to learn to start out with what Dailey dubs “a crappy prototype” that might lead to a real innovation — or might not.
Other panelists included:
Mississippi’s Samir Husni “Mr Magazine” who emphasized creating experiences for audiences, citing examples from magazine covers that ranged from scratch and sniff to 3D to an audience favorite: peel the clothes from a cover boy. (Doesn’t take much to excite a bunch of middle-aged professors.)
Minnesota’s Nora Paul who discussed their Knight News Challenge-funded project that aimed to create an online game about Ethanol to see if a play format would attract and better inform audiences. The answer: um, not really. Er, sounds like idea that ran out of gas?
Ball State’s Jennifer George-Palilonis discussed cross-campus projects pulling together multiple departments and colleges to create innovative online media and mobile apps.
Investigative Reporters & Editors Conference 2010: The Takeaway
Trends from the 2010 IRE conference (Part 1):
Roll your own
One of the hottest new trends is to start your own non-profit investigative center. There must of been nearly a dozen centers or outfits that partner with them from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting to InvestigateWest to California Watch to the George Clooney of this “Ocean’s Eleven” (conference was in Vegas): ProPublica. There’s even an Investigative News Network representing 32 such groups.
Journalists are learning to write grants, court funders and still be afloat once the startup honeymoon ends and somebody’s gotta pay the rent. They’re talking about collaborations with other news outlets, non-journalism non-profits and universities. [Note to center starters: State universities, at least in California, do not have a bunch of extra employees who can provide free staffing for your center. We can, however, share our bad coffee with you.]
Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network‘s Laura Frank advised journalists starting a center to start small so if they fail, they don’t fall so far; identify multiple revenue streams (e.g., grants, partnerships, underwriting and services); and have a purpose (mission statement) up front.
The Berkman Center‘s David Ardia warned journalists to cover their asses legally (investigative reporting = lawsuits) and form a Limited Liability Company (LLC) or some other sort of legally recognized structure that separates your personal assets from the center’s.
No surprise then that the conference keynoter was Vivian Schiller, the CEO of the one organization with the greatest experience in this sort of journalism: NPR, which has prioritized investigative journalism lately.
Other centers, foundations and/or organizations showing them some love on the conference schedule:
Center for Investigative Reporting
What Can Journalists Learn from Novelists and other Writers?
Los Angeles Times Book Festival Notes:
Rebooting Culture Panel
Journo Nicholas Carr, who penned the viral article, “Is Google making us stupid?”:
- The printed book trained our minds to pay attention but this was “an anomaly in our intellectual history.”
- The human mind is scattered and easily distracted, so the fragments and speed of online information are more reflective of our natural state. We’re losing our ability to reflect and contemplate.
U of Washington English prof David Shields, whose new book is a series of fragmented aphorisms, 45% of which are lifted from a range of other authors, some serious, some not:
- The novel no longer reflects our lives. Its key components such as “setting” no longer are important because we experience space as a much less static phenomenon. Having a “plot” conveys a coherence that doesn’t exist.
- Mashups are the crucial cultural form today. Linear forms keep artists conservative.
- Copyright and even plagiarism need to be rethought. His book’s footnotes are printed on pages with a note encouraging readers to tear them out of the book.
Former hacker Anders Monson who wrote a half-print/half e-book memoir, Vanishing Point, which he calls “voice karaoke” whose latest book is a “collage” of over 100 other people’s memoirs:
- “the self is an inherently unstable thing.”
Panel: New Media Meets Publishing
- writers are rewriting a single narrative for multiple platforms in which the characters or even plot are changed
- involve the audience
- people still willing to donate a few dollars even for free e-books
- give away a preview to draw in an audience
- Wil Wheaton: self publish via epubbooks or Lulu
Was in the stand-by line for the panel on the collapsing US economy but decided it was too depressing, so I got an espresso instead. Panel on China as Next Superpower was “sold out.” Walked out of a panel on science writing because the moderator was annoying and had really bad hair.
My Flickr
|
