The most interesting turn my classes have taken this semester has been the step up in collaboration. Both my J198 Multimedia Reporting and my J325 New Media & Social Change courses have been made more use of collaboration in projects outside the bounds of the class itself. This has been my “classroom without walls” vision on steroids.

In J325, my students are collaborating on a social change project with students in Kjerstin Thorson’s class at the University of Southern California. This has been interesting to watch mostly because my main rule for myself has been to stay out of things. It’s in my nature to plan and micromonitor the learning process, but Kjerstin and I both have made the committment to let these projects develop organically. In plainspeak, it means I’m staying the hell out of it and being more of a guide and sounding board. Their pitches are due this week, with only one guideline: we want you to wow us.

In J198 we’ve always used community folks to help us build stories. The new wrinkle this semester has been the expansion of the classroom in a cross-university partnership with classes doing something similar to what we’re doing with multimedia. It began with a Twitter scavenger hunt, set up by at the University of Memphis, which had students at Lehigh, Memphis, West Virginia, Drury, and Oregon all doing the same assignment and following one another’s class hashtags. Read more

Next in occasional series of posts for J198. Gives you a window on my methods, ideally.

We’re entering the second phase of this class. Some of you are still getting caught up on Phase 1, but I’m moving forward. Now we’re going to draw that explicit line between information and community, and we’re going to put it to work for us.

I just posted a few things on Twitter using #J198 …. three posts with recommendations for local people and news sources to follow. If you’re not following these people, this is a good start. But it’s not the end. Look through their lists. Ask THEM who else locally is interesting.

Step one is building the network. Most of you have been doing a great job with it. At this point you should have around 120-150 people you’re following, so if your Twtter grade isn’t full credit that could be a main reason. As I said in class, you should be devoting the next couple weeks to adding a lot of local folks.

Why? Because step two is what we’re going to focus on now: using the network. This is what we’ve been building toward. Follow those folks, and ask them questions. Not just about people to follow, but also what stories they want to see covered. But don’t just ask. LISTEN. The beauty of Twitter when you have that network going is it’s like a news feed for conversation. You get a slice of what people in the area are talking about, and this can lead to new or different story ideas. For a journalist, this is gold.

Does this take time? Totally. Consider this research, just as you’d use Google for a story. But instead of searching web pages, you’re searching conversation. You need to make time for this, check in every so often and see what people are talking about. This might require reorienting your Web use, or installing a mobile app on your phone or iPod. Something. But this needs to be more of a priority for some of you.

Things I’ve learned in the past week on Twitter just from building a network: an explosion in Allentown, my school taxes are going up, there’s a cool festival happening this weekend that I want to attend, a restaurant I like is closing. And that’s just scratching the surface. When you’ve built that network right, you’ve built a community of information. You learn stuff. You become a better citizen. And in the process, you become a better journalist.

These are all things I want to see. About half of the class, I would surmise, is not spending enough time absorbing the wealth of information on Twitter, focusing on their network, or adding their own value to the community they are building. It’s a requirement for this course not just to get a good grade but to succeed with the material and truly grasp what we’re doing. I’ve been spending the first few weeks setting up tent poles, in a way. Your social media work is not the objective of this class – it’s the foundation for everything we’re doing from here on out. If you’re behind, time to start immersing yourself in it.

As a group you’ve had some discussions about your final project. I want a short writeup  on your group blog (2-3 paragraphs) about what you are broadly considering doing, due by Friday at 5 p.m. Only need one post. From there you’ll be asking the community about your story idea, but for now I want your topic idea.

I’ve watched more Al Jazeera today than I have in the past 10 years. The protests in Egypt have turned this into the news network’s coming-out moment, much in the way news events in the 1980s put CNN on the map. The reasons for this should be fairly clear for the professional journalist. We’ve been cutting foreign news bureaus over the years to squeeze out a few more bucks for shareholders, and so when crisis happens overseas we are not well positioned to cover it in any kind of detail. It’s why the Chilean miners coverage so much last fall; because of coverage like that, we cannot be ready for this.

In moments like this, there is a vacuum. So while U.S. journalists are still packing their bags to parachute in and cover Egypt, we turn to what we have. Al Jazeera is streaming coverage online. Citizens armed with mobile tools are , giving us video, pictures and Twitter messages. This is the building blocks of news now when the journalist-observer is not there to see it for themselves.

Given all of that, it’s hard to argue against social media as a tool for citizen journalism, but what about as a tool for activism? Read more

By now we’re familiar with The Error. I’m talking about how NPR (then Reuters, then MSNBC) declared Rep. Gabrielle Giffords dead within hours of the Tucson shootings, then had to retract the report after it turns out they had bad information. Then, of course, had to do the public mea culpa.

Errors happen in journalism. They aren’t our finest hour and certainly aren’t the thing that we aspire to, but we see this stuff happen every so often. Especially in breaking news situations where things are developing and people are emotional, that pull to confirm things quickly and get information out there is strong, and it’s almost an automated process. I remember on 9/11, for instance, how crazy the newsroom was. There is a lot of pressure and people don’t always think straight.

But, I’m not here to beat that dead horse. There’s plenty of coverage if you are interested, and journalism students in particular would do well to absorb this. No, I would rather talk about social media’s role in the way information spread. Read more

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

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 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

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 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

Mashable posted an interesting interview with Richard Binhammer about how Dell has turned its Twitter presence into something that will make it money. You can read the full piece, but basically the words of advice are as follows:

1. Be on Twitter to build better relationships with customers, not make wads of cash.
2. Have a diverse approach. Don’t confine yourself to one account, but maybe have several accounts with your company’s brand that serve several purposes (i.e. one for news, one for customer service, etc.)
3. Don’t just be a spammer. Ask questions of your audience. Listen to them. Show it in your tweets.

My favorite Binhammer quote from the article:

“Dell first heard about Twitter at SXSW a few years back and got excited about the listening aspect of Twitter.”

All of this made me think about , a wonderful book I’ve been rereading this month in preparation for two independent study efforts I’m doing with grad students this semester. Cluetrain celebrated its 10th anniversary last year but remains as fresh and relevant now as it was in the late ’90s. The book is packed with ideas, but what sticks out to me is this: As media move toward more interactive and socially connected operations, businesses that survive and thrive in this new world will be ones that use social media to reconnect with their customers at a human level. Read more

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

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 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 @).

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?

"We are The Twitter. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

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

I was explaining the concept of “retweeting” on 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

I  just sat in a couple interesting days of presentations and discussion here at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Dean Thorson and RJI hosted a gathering of scholars that was provocatively titled ” How Newspapers Could Have Saved Themselves and How Some Still Can” and brought together both academics and industry leaders to talk about marketing, econometrics, and research needs for the industry.

It was an intriguing couple of days and I learned a ton. I’ll post some more developed thoughts tomorrow as I get some time to ponder it during my travels to ICA in Chicago, but I did want to highlight one thing.

There were a few statements regarding social media that stuck out. One presenter referred to and as “fads” compared to the staying power of newspapers. During discussion today, when the integration with social media was brought up, several pointed out that Facebook isn’t profitable and thus doesn’t present a viable model for newspapers.

Two thoughts on this. Read more

Stuff I’m reading and thinking about …

USC has launched Intersections to help cover South Los Angeles, which is a terribly underserved part of the region. One of the stated goals is to “train a new generation of journalists for open-minded, culturally literate reporting.” I love the positive vibe of the way the community is presented but wonder whether it overdoes it at the risk of distortion. All things considered though, this looks like a cool project and is worth watching.

Claire McCaskill took the time to share she as a United States Senator would be interested in using Twitter. She notes, “As I am walking to a hearing, or riding the tram over for a vote, I think of what I want to tell the folks at home about my work or life. This, I believe, is a fairly decent way to stay connected.” A lot of people criticize her for not using Twitter “correctly” in that she has amassed many followers but does not follow anyone. I am not in that camp (partly because I’m not sure there’s a “right way” to use Twitter, although there are many wrong ways). Followers can still reply in real time to things she says. It’s not like she’s not hearing her constituents.

Scott Murphy thanked the users of DailyKos.com for helping him win the NY-20 special congressional election. Users were donating and phone banking on his behalf even if they couldn’t vote for him. This is partly the future of civic engagement and a major leg of my dissertation. People who want to help people or causes they care about are no longer constrained by geography.

Erica Perez at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a great story about professors using Twitter in the classroom. I’ve dabbled in it a bit this spring and plan to do more with it in the coming semester. Twitter itself might be a fad, but as an instructor it’s important to find ways to better interact with students.

Major media have been heaping on the past couple days about some of the misinformation about the swine flu outbreak being posted to .

NPR, for example, bemoaned how tweets about swine flu inject “noise” into the process of informing people. CNN piled on with similar thoughts and also tied it to the loss of centralized media operations.

Some of this is a basic misunderstanding of what Twitter is, but it should be noted that the trending topic has been going for about five days solid on Twitter, and that’s substantial. But Twitter has been a source of breaking news as well. I found out from Twitter today, for example, that Missouri had its first case of swine flu and have been getting periodic official updates from . Read more

Facebook went live with its redesign this week, and if I may take a moment to be a bad researcher and generalize from a small sample, everyone hates it. This is probably an exaggeration, but then again I can confirm that I’m the only one I know who likes it.

I like what they’ve done by making the home page a live feed of what people are doing. The ability to filter by user-created groups helps cut down on some of the noise, and it will probably hasten the use of this feature by people who didn’t know it was there before the launch.

It looks like Twitter, and I think there’s a reason for that. Twitter, while claiming less than 1/1000 of Facebook’s users, clearly is on to something with its rapid growth. And it is more mobile friendly right now than Facebook. This appears to be a case of Facebook tapping a good idea and also trying to stay ahead of the competition before it loses market share. Read more

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

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 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

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

The Online News listserv had an interesting post about a site called Breaking Tweets, the brainchild of Craig Kanal, that culls interesting Tweets from Twitter feeds on particular topics and puts a “human face” on things going on in the news.

A good example is the coverage on the site of the Australian brushfires.

Thinkers rightly note that, as with any media that is an aggregate of socially produced content, this ultimately means more noise in the stream of media conversation. Journalists often use this as evidence that this “noise” doesn’t matter and makes it inferior to professional jounalism. Read more

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