My feedback on Jay Rosen’s ‘digital thinking’ class

Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen, one of the leading thinkers in journalism and journalism education, is teaching a “digital thinking” class that I’d love to take and that I might sometime want to teach, stealing liberally from Jay.

But for now, he asked for my feedback. So I’m going to give the feedback here, because I want to spread the word about Jay’s thoughtful approach to digital thinking, as well as milk a blog post from my feedback to Jay. (Ask me a question that would result in a long email response, and I’m going to make it do double duty on the blog, unless it’s a private matter.)

In a Twitter direct message, Jay likened his class to my work on Project Unbolt during my last few months with Digital First Media. My initial reaction was that Project Unbolt was about action and Jay’s class is about thinking, but of course, the two go together. Digital thinking changes how you work and changing how you work changes how you think. One of my first blog posts for my DFM colleagues was about digital thinking.

Below are the main “currents and trends” Jay expects to cover in the class. He wants students in each case to learn “what it means, why it’s important, and where things are going with it.” I encourage reading Jay’s post, which has links to earlier posts he has done, as well as material from others.

What I do here is post Jay’s key points (in bold), followed by some of his explanation and my comments and any links to posts I’ve written that might be helpful. I recommend reading Jay’s blog to get all his comments and the links he shared, which elaborate well on his points. I’m ripping him off extensively here, but not totally.

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Why community engagement is good business

I’ll be discussing the business value of engagement today at ONACamp Phoenix.

I believe that deep engagement on three levels is essential to the success of news organizations in the digital marketplace:

• Newsrooms and individual journalists need to engage our communities effectively to produce outstanding journalism.
• News organizations need to engage communities in marketing our content.
• Engagement provides excellent opportunities to make money serving business customers.

I’ve blogged already about some of these ideas and I hope to elaborate in coming weeks on others. But I’ll elaborate a bit on all three here:

News engagement

I’ve blogged considerably before about engagement techniques that elevate our journalism:

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Planet Princeton shows how engagement improves journalism

In a discussion in the comments on a blog post this week, Dan Mitchell dismissed “reader engagement” as a “squishy phrase” with vague meaning and no true value. He called engagement an “overblown concept.”

I’m pretty sure I failed to convince Mitchell of the value of engagement. He has plenty of company in being dismissive of engagement as a buzzword without real value for news organizations. Many also confuse engagement with promotion (some of Mitchell’s points addressed web traffic).

But, as I’ve said for years, engagement is about doing better journalism:

Engagement/social media editor’s job: Lead newsroom to join, lead, enable, curate & listen to community conversation for better journalism.

— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) March 22, 2012

Krystal Knapp, publisher and founding editor of Planet Princeton, provided an excellent example. NBC News had proclaimed that Chief Medical Editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman was in a “voluntary quarantine” following her return from covering the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.

@NBCNews My team and I will head back to the States tomorrow and self quarantine out of an abundance of caution re:Ebola. @CDCgov

— Dr. Nancy Snyderman (@DrNancyNBCNEWS) October 3, 2014

Krystal reported that Snyderman, who lives in Princeton, had been seen out in public in the community. Jeff Edelstein, a columnist at the Trentonian, wrote about the situation and called it to my attention:

@stevebuttry Old pal of yours broke the Ebola and Nancy Snyderman story wide open. http://t.co/V44CL3p6AA @PlanetPrinceton — Jeff Edelstein (@jeffedelstein) October 11, 2014

I praised Krystal for breaking that national story (the state of New Jersey made the quarantine mandatory today and NJ News Commons curated the story):

Nice job by @krystalknapp breaking story on @DrNancyNBCNEWS not really observing quarantine: http://t.co/YQ4YSlGruT HT @jeffedelstein

— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) October 11, 2014

And she gave credit to her communty:

@stevebuttry @DrNancyNBCNEWS @jeffedelstein Thanks Steve! I have great readers who send me good tips.

— Krystal Knapp (@krystalknapp) October 11, 2014

That’s why community engagement isn’t squishy and isn’t a buzzword. It’s an essential technique for getting and doing better stories.

Update: After I sent Krystal a link to this post, she added this in a Facebook message:

I agree 100% about community engagement. I measure success based on engagement. If I am not engaging readers in my community I am not doing my job, given that I am a community news site.

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Engagement editors workshop

I led a workshop Tuesday at the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., for engagement editors in the Pennsylvania cluster of Digital First Media.

(The cluster actually includes the Trentonian and some weeklies in New Jersey, but the editor planning to come from the Trentonian had to cancel. And it includes the Charleston Daily Mail in West Virginia, but they watched the livestream rather than making the long drive to join us in person.)

Thanks (again) to all the participants and to Mandy Jenkins, Ivan Lajara, Buffy Andrews, Diane Hoffman and Vince Carey, who helped me lead it.

If you participated in the workshop, I don’t recommend going through all this at once. I asked you in the workshop to choose one or two things to do this week. I’d read the links and/or re-watch the slides related to those one or two things. And then move on next week to the thing(s) you decided to try next week. I encourage digging into a single topic rather than trying to absorb everything at once.

Here are slides from Mandy, Ivan, Vince and me:

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March Engagement Madness champion: Bay Area News Group Peeps contest

Update: The March Engagement Madness winner is the Peeps contest of the Bay Area News Group. The Peeps defeated March Pet Madness, 540 to 329.

Boxes of candy will be heading to both newsrooms, the bigger one to the champions. (BANG covers several newsrooms, but the candy is headed for Walnut Creek, where Joan Morris, who spearheaded the project, works.

Read about the champion and the runner-up below:

Let the voting begin for March Engagement Madness championship: March Pet Madness vs. Peeps.

In the semifinals, the Morning Sun’s March Pet Madness, which has won the most votes in each of the first two rounds, came from behind to beat the York Daily Record’s Remember Series, 136-104. In the other semifinal, The Bay Area News Group’s Peeps contest beat the Loveland Herald’s Easter Egg Hunt, 83-38.

Vote for your favorite entry in the championship round. I’ll cut off the voting an declare a champion at 3 p.m. Friday. I’ll send a Priority Mail box stuffed with Easter candy to the winning newsroom.

Pets vs. Peeps

Peeps diorama contest

Source: mercurynews.com via Joan on Pinterest

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“Peeps Blanket Babylon” by Dora Grinnell of San Jose, Calif.

Ann Tatko-Peterson explains:

Love them or hate them, Peeps are everywhere during the spring.

So as part of an annual contest, we ask readers to build dioramas using Peeps and submit photos of their creations. Three winning dioramas are featured in print; photos of the others make up an online slideshow.

All of the photos are posted in a Pinterest board. We also use Facebook and Twitter to draw attention to the contest.

Entries show each year how imaginative readers are — from a pirate ship and Dr. Frankenstein’s lab to a fire rescue and election-themed diorama.

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I’m accepting entries for March Engagement Madness

Let’s have some fun with March engagement projects.

My Valentine’s engagement contest resulted in 10 great engagement ideas. I’d love to get enough ideas for March engagement to use some kind of bracket in the contest.

Tell me about your newsroom’s March engagement project. It can be something related to the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament (as the Trentonian did last year in its best-bar bracket, shown above). You can do something relating to the start of spring or to St. Patrick’s Day. Your project can involve engagement around the March religious holidays: Lent, Easter, Passover or another holiday that’s important in your community. Or maybe you’ll engage around something else such as a community event.

What you need to do is use this entry form to tell me about your project (including a link). The engagement project doesn’t need to be finished to join the contest, but you do need to have announced it. The deadline for entries is March 11. I will launch the contest with a blog post the following day (a week before the start of the NCAA tournament). The entry form invites your suggestions for how the contest will run. I’d like to involve a bracket in some way. And I’m open to a two-phase tournament, weeding the field to some finalists (and allowing the finalists to provide updates on how their projects are going) for a second phase of voting.

The Valentine’s contests this year and last were limited to my blog. But we’re running this contest on both my blog and Inside Thunderdome (where you can regularly find weekly live chats with leading journalists, spotlight features on Digital First Media journalism, our monthly DFMie winners and other news about our company).

My Valentine’s contests were open to Digital First Media newsrooms. But we’re interested in learning from successful engagement by other newsrooms, too, so I’m opening this contest to non-DFM newsrooms. Any journalistic venture can join this contest. (I may have separate brackets for DFM and non-DFM newsrooms. And be warned that DFM staffers might be disproportionately represented among readers of these blogs. So you’d better plan on some campaigning for your entry.)

I also welcome your suggestions for reasonable prizes for the winning newsrooms. My default prize is boxes of candy, a bigger one for the winning newsrooms and a smaller one for the runner up. The Saratogian (winner) and Reporter Herald newsrooms celebrated their Valentine’s victories:

.@aubreecutkomp tears into our candy winnings for the #518love contest. Thanks @stevebuttry! instagr.am/p/V62_j6pFcD/

— Emily Donohue (@emilydonohue) February 19, 2013

Thanks @stevebuttry! reward for second place winners of a #dfm valentines contest. bit.ly/Y6yRITtwitter.com/JessicaBenes/s…

— JessicaBenes (@JessicaBenes) February 20, 2013

A final point: That entry form was really easy to make using Google Forms. If you’re not using them as an engagement tool, you might consider how to use them in your engagement project. They’re simple to use. Go to Google Drive (formerly Google Docs), click “create” and choose “form” from the options. From there, the options are pretty self-explanatory. You click Send Form to get the link to share. Or you can just click “view live form” and send that link. You can view the responses by clicking “responses” (one of the options is to create a spreadsheet for your responses, which I did).

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Valentine’s engagement winner: The Saratogian and The Crazy Things We Do for Love

Source: saratogian.com via Saratogian News on Pinterest

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Update: The runaway winner for the best Digital First Valentine’s engagement project is the Saratogian, with The Crazy Things We Do for Love. The Saratogian won 365 votes out of 750 votes cast, or 49 percent, a landslide in a 10-way race. A box of Valentine’s candy will be shipped out today to the new (and obviously successful engagement editor Aubree Cutkomp for the newsroom to share.

A second-place box will go out to the Reporter-Herald, which got 133 votes or 18 percent. Defending champion Smart magazine in York, Pa., got 78 votes, just over 10 percent. Thanks to all the newsrooms who participated, and congratulations on lots of successful engagement. Scroll down to read about the winning projects and the rest.

Here’s the original post: As lovers prepare to celebrate Valentine’s Day, Digital First newsrooms are engaging their communities in romance and fun.

Last year, I sent off boxes of Valentine’s candy to the York Daily Record and the Morning  Sun to reward their Valentine’s engagement, voted the best by readers of my blog. I was probably going to let the holiday slide by without note here, but Jessica Benes of the Reporter-Herald in Loveland, Colo., asked if I was going to reprise the contest. So I asked my colleagues to send me their accounts of what they were doing. I’ll let them make their pitches here (in the order submitted, with light editing).

After you’ve read them, please scroll back up here to vote. Again, the winning newsroom gets a Priority Mail box stuffed with Valentine’s candy.

It’s too late for you to compete for the candy if you’re not listed here, but it’s probably not too late to steal one of these ideas (give credit, please, as Jennifer Connor did in the final entry here) for some Valentine’s fun this week.

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Heritage Media teaches media skills in Michigan communities

Michelle Rogers leads a workshop for the community at the Heritage Media-West Community Media Lab in Ypsilanti, Mich.

Heritage Media-West in the western suburbs of Detroit is providing an excellent model of community engagement.

From Heritage’s new Community Media Lab in Ypsilanti, Managing Editor Michelle Rogers and her colleagues lead workshops for the community to help people in their community tell their stories more effectively using blogs and social media.

“The main focus of the lab is to teach technology tools and reporting skills to members of the community so they can share their voices and document the important events, traditions and news in their communities in partnership with Heritage Media,” Michelle explained in the blog post linked above.

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The Oakland Tribune: back downtown and open to the community

People gather for a reception at the Oakland Tribune’s downtown community newsroom Thursday evening. The Community Media Lab where the refreshments are served is usually set up with computers for community use. In the background is the Tribune’s newsroom.

I heard it again and again Thursday evening: “I’m glad to see the Tribune back in downtown Oakland.”

Martin Reynolds emcees Thursday’s opening reception at the Oakland Tribune’s downtown community newsroom.

Yes, the Tribune is back. I went out to Oakland for a reception to celebrate the return to downtown and to welcome the people of Oakland to a community newsroom with computers and meeting space for public use.

As companies like Digital First Media seek to develop a business model for the future, the brand names of newspapers are valuable assets to build upon. But the Oakland Tribune stands out for its rich heritage and emotional connection with its community, giving it almost iconic status.

When I worked for the Des Moines Register in the 1970s and ‘80s, it was a similar icon, delivered in every county in Iowa and covering statewide news like no other newspaper in the country. The Register won Pulitzer Prizes for agricultural reporting and gained national prominence for our coverage every four years of the Iowa caucuses that launched presidential campaigns. The Register had a brand identity throughout Iowa that was hard to measure and impossible to match. As a reporter, when I showed up in a small Iowa town, the Register name commanded respect (even from Iowans who considered our editorials too liberal) and persuaded people to talk unlike any other brand I ever worked for.

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GametimePA: NewsVroom and high school football are rolling in York

NewsVroom ready for gametime Friday night

Randy Parker, center, interviews sports writer Steve Navaroli as GametimePA producer Matt Goul shoots video for a livestream.

I’ll be blogging tonight from the launch of NewsVroom at Panther Field in York, Pa.

NewsVroom is the mobile community newsroom/classroom of GametimePA, ydr.com, Smart magazine, FlipSidePA.com and the York Daily Record. But tonight it’s a GametimePA van, carrying tents, digital equipment, ice, water, coolers, freebies, tables and chairs for journalists and the public as Central York and West York launch the high school sports season.

Managing Editor Randy Parker is leading the crew here and has headed planning for the NewsVroom launch since Digital First Media greenlighted this project earlier this year. Visual Editor Eileen Joyce is shooting the game for a livestream video.

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News-Herald opens new community meeting room

Northeast Ohio political candidates visit the new community meeting space at the News-Herald in Willoughby.

The News-Herald welcomed local political candidates to a lounge area Tuesday, part of a three-phase approach of opening its newsroom to the community.

The News-Herald, with Editor Tricia Ambrose, Managing Editor Laura Kessel and Community Engagement Editor Cheryl Sadler leading the way, has a strong record of engagement with its community, east of Cleveland in northeast Ohio. (Check out the community-submitted Olympic-rings photos, where entrants are competing for prizes from a salon, a restaurant and a hotel.)

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Pottstown Mercury opens Community Media Lab

Visitors use computers available for public use at the Mercury’s new Community Media Lab.

I was a guest speaker today at a ceremony in Pottstown, Pa., to celebrate the opening of the Community Media Lab of the Mercury, a Digital First news operation.

The celebration was a joint opening with the new Pottstown Visitors Center across the street in the Merc’s original building.

I have published a couple photos here, but others are in my DFM Engagement Tumblr started today. I also Storified tweets and photos about the opening celebration.

Here are my prepared remarks:

Perhaps you’ve heard that newspapers are in trouble, or even that they are dying.

I’m here to tell you today that the Mercury and Digital First Media have a bright future. The changes reflected in the Mercury’s new Community Media Lab are part of a transformation of our business that is delivering results and that will ensure a continuing role in Pottstown and the surrounding communities for the Merc and our journalists.

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