Jackie Hai | Convergence Commons

A quick thought before heading out the door today:

What if news websites already running on open source content management systems made their entire sites — content, databases, applications, templates, etc. — freely available to the community? It could simply be a matter of packaging their nightly backups (which any smart organization should be making anyway) into a downloadable file and putting out an open call for users to submit code contributions. This could also serve the twofold benefit of defraying the costs of web development and providing an educational resource to j-schools and other organizations.

I’m thinking that college news outlets are the more likely candidates to adapt such a practice first, but as we continue the trend toward increasing transparency, others in the professional world might be willing to try it too. Can anyone think of possible downsides to this?

A while back, someone in the Twittersphere (I think it was @danielbachhuber) pointed me in the direction of an interesting essay by Jamais Cascio. Jamais discusses the concept of resilience economics as an alternative to the monolithic corporate model most businesses, including newspapers, follow today. Futurist John Robb writes a concise takeaway on his blog:

Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a 
system are “too big to fail”–that is, where the failure of a single 
part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes 
from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), 
collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized 
from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively 
respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected 
loss of components.

I think we can apply this concept to new journalism enterprises: the daily metro newsroom of the future will be decentralized, with self-sustaining branches located in each neighborhood of a larger geographic community.

The growing popularity of hyperlocal journalism supports this theory — people want stories and information that affect them most directly, and local news down to the block ranks high on the list. Funding for the operations of each branch can come from a variety of sources, including highly targeted advertising from local businesses, hosting of community events, and crowdfunded investigative reporting. Link journalism and a portal page for the region as a whole would then pull all the elements together.

A budding example of this model in action can be found in California’s Bay Area, though their portal page functions more as a directory than a news site in its own right at the moment.

I also plan on starting up a similar effort upon my return to the Boston area this summer, with the help of Amherst Wire veterans and local reporters. So if you’re a journalist in the area and want to get involved, be sure to hit me up.

The fine folks at CoPress hosted a session at Saturday’s BCNI Philly on reinventing j-schools, sparking off some interesting conversations (see a live blog of the event by Greg Linch).

I’d like to expand here on a thought that bubbled up during the session, in the middle of a discussion about the inclusion of entrepreneurial journalism in j-school curricula. I had suggested that j-schools should apply the basic theory behind link journalism — do what you know best, and link to the rest — to structuring their own programs. In other words, focus on teaching the craft of journalism and its fundamental theories, techniques and tools within the major, and “link out” to peripheral knowledge bases (business/advertising, information technology, programming and design) by sending students to other schools within the university system.

So what does that look like in action? Let’s take the UMass Amherst Journalism program as an example: currently, students enrolled in the major must complete an official minor, concentration or second major in order to fulfill the requirements for graduation. Now suppose the journalism department established interdisciplinary programs with the other schools and, in collaboration with faculty in those schools, created specialized tracks for j-students. This opens up a wealth of possibilities:

• A student who wants to get into the business side of news would take a planned series of courses in the school of management concurrent to classes in journalism, then apply that knowledge to a hands-on master class in entrepreneurial journalism.
• A student interested in environmental beat reporting after college would take a class on environmental policy in the department of natural resources during the same semester as a newswriting class, and practice writing stories for that beat.
• A team of students could take a programming class in the comp sci department together and develop apps for journalism as part of an independent study.

And so on. The advantage of an interdisciplinary approach is that students get exposed to a much wider range of knowledge, while journalism faculty can focus on teaching to their strengths.

UPDATE
Betty Medsger’s essay, Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way, was brought to my attention and contains a similar line of thought:

Journalism faculty should become gate openers to the entire university, rather than guardians of journalism studies. As such they would work far more closely with colleagues in other disciplines. They would develop the relationships needed to recruit excellent students from other disciplines, not to a major or minor in journalism but to an intensive senior year introduction to journalism. The curriculum would be truly interdisciplinary. Assignments in journalism courses would make use of what students have studied in their major areas of inquiry and also tap the expertise of faculty in other disciplines.

Today’s entry is a guest post by Richard Caesar, news director at UVC-TV 19 and an editor of the Amherst Wire. Richard and I will be attending BCNI Philly on Saturday, April 25.

The degree to which media is changing and the factors that have influenced this change have been surprising in some cases, less so in others. They all, however, indicate that this shift from what the media has been traditionally is far from being complete.

Personalization and unbundling are two trends that show empirically the changes media has gone through to become the product we consume today. More importantly, they give a steady pattern to lay out a possible direction in the future.

In my estimation, the trend of unbundling is probably going to be the most influential going forward. From records to MP3s, each new form of music has made it easier to get to what you want and listen to just that. In cinema, you hardly ever see a theater running a double feature or showing a cartoon before the main feature anymore. Folks just come in to see the one movie they want and barely even have patience for the trailers to upcoming titles which they’ll probably get online anyway. Likewise, unbundling the newspaper ensures that readers can just pay for the section they want to read instead of the whole product.

Following this line of thinking, I see a very real possibility that the media market’s appetite for niche products and marketing will explode. Mainly because so many bundled products will either break up or be broken up by this trend that each facet will find an audience in those people who were just interested in that part of the product. Hence from a public that will have a far greater pool of informational and entertainment resources to choose from, we will be getting media outlets and providers with more and more narrow areas of expertise and function. The media output will probably increase in quality since all these different little providers will be focusing so much effort and resources into smaller and smaller niches.

This plays into another influential trend: personalization. The smaller and more focused the media becomes the more it will become apparent that the ways in which the media reaches individuals needs to become more personalized. This would be to take advantage of the niche media’s effect on the public. Each person would have their own combination of media preferences — it’s quite possible to imagine that 20 years into the future no two people on Earth would have the very same media experience. This trend of personalization would continue, as it has in past, to influence the hardware aspect of the media.

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This is a proposal I recently made to the UMass Amherst journalism department. The idea is to hold a week-long boot camp teaching the basics of multimedia journalism at the end of every summer, geared toward incoming freshmen but open to all j-students.

» PDF: Sample program schedule for a multimedia journalism boot camp

Why have a boot camp?
Immersion-style learning is the best way to pick up new tools. A boot camp will teach students the fundamentals of storytelling and establish a baseline for proficiency in multimedia. I can see a natural progression as the program funnels new students into campus media outlets, where they continue to gain practical experience while learning about media history, criticism and ethics in classes as freshmen and sophomores.

By the time students become upperclassmen, they can take master classes in specific subjects — broadcast, radio, photojournalism, advanced multimedia, etc. — spending less time learning how to use the tools and more time actually using them to practice the craft of journalism, producing mature, complex works.

Nuts and bolts:

• Students must apply for entry into the program by mid-summer.
• The boot camp runs for 5 days right before the start of fall semester.
• Students pay for on-campus housing and meals, but can gain advanced placement in certain classes and receive 1 credit counting toward their journalism major requirements upon successful completion of the program.

Who will run it?
Whoever on faculty wants to. Summer programs are a great way for students to get to know professors outside of a classroom setting and to feel a part of a welcoming community within the department. Due to the accelerated nature of the curriculum, a different professor can come in each day to teach their area of expertise, whether it’s ethics, news writing, photography, etc.

I’m personally willing to volunteer my time as a program coordinator for the boot camp, living in the dorms with the students, handling communications and teaching several of the workshops. I have two years’ experience as a Resident Assistant in freshmen halls at UMass, and also served two years on the administrative staff of the UMass marching band (which runs band camps in the summer, so I know a lot about the logistics of these things).

Further benefits:
Incoming freshmen can get familiar with the local area and make friends with fellow student journalists before classes start, giving them an extra boost in confidence at the beginning of their college careers. The summer program can be a bonding experience that strengthens our community of students and faculty by making the journalism department a place students can call a second home.

Finally, boot camp participants will get a head-start on technical skills, setting them up to become peer mentors in the classroom as they help other students surmount the learning curve.