When I walked into my media entrepreneurship class at San Francisco State University last week, I felt a little like a kindergarten teacher. Construction paper? Check. Toilet paper rolls? Check. Colored markers, scissors, glue sticks? Check, check, check. Pipe cleaners? Oh no! They were at home, in a shopping bag along with the pieces of colored felt I’d bought the night before at a craft store.

I scrambled to find multi-hued Post-its, paperclips, masking tape and other office supplies that could, in a pinch, double as craft materials.

A classroom is transformed into a workshop where students can prototype products. Photo by Scot Tucker.

But an hour into the class session, my students didn’t seem to mind the dearth of bona fide art supplies. They were all intent on their work, busily cutting, sketching, measuring and stapling.

After all, they had just 10 minutes to create a prototype for a new product.

And though their prototypes were primitive – a toilet paper roll doll, a hastily sketched computer, a smartphone constructed of paper — I could detect the glimmers of pride and excitement that shone through as they presented their product ideas.

This is the magic of design thinking.

A human-centered approach to innovation

Design thinking is a problem-solving method that grew out of the fields of urban planning, design and architecture and is now all the rage in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurship programs and startup accelerators like Citrix in Raleigh, NC; Amplify in Los Angeles; and Matter and Y Combinator in San Francisco are building their curricula around the people-focused, prototype-driven approach that’s at the heart of design thinking.

In a post for his blog Entrepreneurship Matters, Boston University management instructor Paul McManus goes so far as to say that “design thinking transformed Airbnb from a failing startup to a billion dollar business.”

Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, a global design and innovation consulting firm, is something of a design thinking evangelist. He writes about the process on his blog, Design Thinking, and offers a good definition on the company’s website: “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

San Francisco State University photojournalism student Sara Gobets crafts her prototype. Photo by Scot Tucker.

The d. school at Stanford has popularized design thinking by creating an easy-to-follow, scripted template that allows trainers and educators – even people who have never participated in a design thinking workshop themselves — to teach the technique to colleagues and students. This Virtual Crash Course, complete with an instructional video, worksheets (available in German, Japanese, Spanish, French or Basque) and step-by-step instructions, leads you through the design thinking process:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Some of the terms might sound a little jargony, but the idea is that before you can solve a human problem you have to understand the emotions involved and empathize with the user. You then define the problem and ideate, or come up ideas for solutions to that problem. Next you create a prototype and then you test that prototype to see what works and what doesn’t.

Redefining gift giving

The Stanford d. school’s exercise challenges people to “redefine the gift-giving process.” Participants are paired up and instructed to interview each other about the last time they gave someone a gift. They are encouraged to probe deeply and pull out the often buried emotions involved in the process of choosing, buying (or making), wrapping and presenting a gift to a friend or family member.

For the next few steps, each participant reflects on the interviews they conducted with their partner. They take note of their partner’s needs, and jot down insights revealed through the interview. Based on these needs, they define a problem – which may or may not directly relate to gift-giving – and then sketch out ideas for solutions to the problem. Participants are instructed to think in ways that are radical and creative.

The partners then come together, sharing their solutions and giving each other feedback.

Then they are given a few minutes to sketch a solution and, finally, to create a prototype, a model of the product they want to create.

Intimacy leads to empathy

The exercise is fast-paced, yet intimate. Participants, who may not know each other at all, are compelled to reveal details about personal relationships and about feelings they may not even have realized they have.

The students use simple craft supplies — origami paper, cardboard toilet paper rolls, markers and paper plates — to make prototypes of their ideas. Photo by Scot Tucker.

“The idea of sitting with a stranger and talking about the gift-giving situation was challenging for me and my ‘buddy,’” Trine Simonsen, an exchange student from the Danish School of Journalism, wrote in an email interview about our design thinking workshop. “We opened up and talked about why we remembered this situation, how the person reacted to the gift, and what we talked about with the person who received the gift. The process of opening up to a stranger was a really a good learning experience in the process of trying to develop a new product.”

Simonsen’s partner had given a gift of healthy food to her ailing father. From that Simonsen recognized a need for sick people and their loved ones to share information and advice about diseases and she came up with an idea for an app that would facilitate this sharing.

Other students thought up products that would help geographically distant friends connect and multigenerational families find fun things to do together.

Jennifer Sarkodie, a journalism major in the class, said the design thinking exercise helped her understand the steps involved in product development.

“Using this process made it more clear to me how to get from thought to prototype,” she wrote in an email. “It made it clear how much work it takes to actually build a prototype. It also helped me to try to think about need-finding and to brainstorm multiple solutions to needs rather than just going with the first idea.”

Design thinking has obvious applications in an entrepreneurship course or workshop, but it might be used in other settings, as well. A student newspaper, for example, could use it to stimulate ideas for improving coverage and better serving readers. A radio or TV station might employ design thinking to generate ideas for new programs or services.

Design thinking is a fun and engaging way to get students to think creatively. As one of my students, Mona Chiu, said, “It opens up my eyes, ears, and heart for the needs of my interviewee and (sparks) ideas. This process loosens our mind to throw out ideas freely.”

Rachele Kanigel is an associate professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, where she advises Golden Gate Xpress, the student newspaper, and teaches reporting, writing and online journalism classes. She was a daily newspaper reporter for 15 years and has freelanced for magazines and websites, including U.S. News and World Report, TIME and Prevention. She has directed summer study-abroad programs for ieiMedia, the Institute for Education in International Media, and is the author of The Student Newspaper Survival Guide. Follow her at @jourprof.

Attending a wedding in Ireland several years ago, Mark Little saw fellow guests looking at their phones, as they learned that Michael Jackson had died. Soon, the group was dancing to Thriller as a tribute to the late star. That dance, Little said, happened 15 minutes before the Los Angeles Times had even officially announced Jackson’s death. At that moment, he said he thought, “Wow, that’s the way news is being consumed.”

As the founder of Storyful — a global news agency that finds, collects, and verifies social-media content — Little has served as a leader of our massive information shift: How is news changing? How are stories changing? And what are the ethics involved as traditional media outlets transition from being the gatekeeper to being part of a worldwide reporting network in which every citizen can contribute to — or even completely tell — our world’s most important stories?

Just an hour before I met Little, who spent two days at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications as the first speaker in our Innovators Series, I had lectured to a group of about 275 students about the importance of “story.” I do this because this particular class is made up of both journalism majors and non-journalism majors. While the students in our field know (or at least should) the value of “story,” I find that others can look at the word story through a paparazzi-type lens: Just out to get a story. Trying to drum up a story. Anything for the story.

So I discuss common narrative themes — such as human vs. human, good vs. evil, the underdog rises to hero, the love story — and I reference a Scientific American piece that explored why stories universally appeal to humans. I try to reinforce that stories — whether the message is good or bad (or more likely somewhere in between) — are inherently good because they have the power to connect us all in a way that other forms of communication do not. I worry about stories, though, because of all of today’s noise, because of the emphasis on immediacy, because of our click-click-click-funny-kitty habits.

Bridget Grogan, WUFT assistant news editor, interviews Mark Little as part of the University of Florida J-school’s Innovator Series. Photo by Steve Johnson, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communication.

After watching Little speak to students and being involved with smaller discussions with him about such important issues as newsgathering, verification, social-media archives, and the notion of impartiality, I did a mental fist pump when he said, “For me, this is the golden age of storytelling.”

It is for many reasons — because traditional media outlets don’t hold exclusive rights to stories anymore, because of the potential to tell richer and deeper stories with sources closer to the center of action than any media member could be as news breaks, because so many brands are redefining how they will use storytelling to share their messages. (To be fair, there are dangers and ethical issues that come with this expansion, Little said — ranging from propaganda being used through social media to all kinds of hoaxes to thinking about how we compensate and credit our non-traditional storytellers.)

Mark Little’s Storyful.

These are some of the key things Little said that I’ll remember while trying to educate our future storytellers.

1. “Authenticity is more important than authority.”

Part of Storyful’s mission is to go to the center of the story — finding the social-media posts that are the closest, most authentic, and most accurate sources that are watching the news unfold. They do this by using technology to see hot spots of social-media activity, then filtering that content to pinpoint what’s important and what’s real. This is different than how we traditionally teach journalism, especially to introductory students, where we heavily rely on information that only authoritative sources can confirm. Part of what we will have to teach our storytellers is to balance the experts with the witnesses who are posting information themselves — and that the person-on-the-street interview isn’t a throwaway quote, but can be the heart of the story. If you find the right person.

2. “If you want to own the first 10 minutes, good for you. I want to own the next 20 minutes.”

In our news cycle, there are two types of disseminators — the reactors and explainers, Little said. While some outlets will continue to want to be the first to break news, that’s really an artificial distinction, because there’s so little value in who got it first, since everyone now has it within seconds. In both our traditional and social-media models, some of us will always be hardwired to want to get it first, as our Innovator Series moderator Bridget Grogan pointed out. The deeper value that storytellers can have is in providing niche content and quality content with depth, Little said. Even in this technological age, he said, we’ve seen a shift in where we place value of online sites — from the content farms to the click-bait sites to more of an emphasis on longer and quality content that encourages eyeballs to linger on a page.

3. “Journalists hate failing. We don’t want to make a mistake. That makes for a terrible entrepreneur.”

One of our challenges in the academy will be teaching students about risk-taking and about failure. We’ll need to create ways to reward them for failure (because the education came from the attempt at innovation, not necessarily the result). This, as Little pointed out, is hard for journalists to think about, because we’re programmed to be accurate at all costs. Better not to publish than to be wrong. Many of us will need to spend more time thinking about ways that we encourage experimentation from our student storytellers.

4. “Everybody wants to be the person who tells the story.”

Little said this when someone asked him why he thinks people create Internet hoaxes, but his quote also reinforces this notion that we couldn’t be in a better (or more complex) time for storytelling. We all want to tell the tale, pass it on, deliver the news — and ultimately connect with people as we do. As Little said, “Every news event creates a community.”

You can watch a video of the Q&A with Little on the Innovators site and check out social media activity around his visit at #UFInnovators.

Ted Spiker is the interim chair of the department of journalism at the University of Florida. He primarily teaches courses in magazine writing and sports media. You can follow him @ProfSpiker.

We were nearly halfway into the Women’s Hackathon on Wearables, and one of my team members blurted out: “Our idea isn’t going to work.”

I was mentoring a team of six women at the hackathon, and we’d been working under a tight deadline that started at 8 o’clock that morning. We settled on a problem to solve, and we thought we had our solution. Then came this objection. We had just listened to a presentation by Hilary Topper, a commentator on wearable technology, who promoted wearables as useful tools for journalists.

My initial reaction to our team member’s objection was a bit of shock. Surely we hadn’t gone through all of the problem-solving work that morning for nothing. But I saw the benefit to being challenged. “This is good,” I said. “Let’s stop and listen.” We dug in, and in the end this reflection and discussion made our final concept stronger.

We were one of eight teams at the Hack the Gender Gap women’s hackathon on wearables at West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media, co-produced by PBS MediaShift. Each team had a facilitator and was given the challenge of creating a start-up use for wearable tech that solves a problem relevant to the media industry.

WVU Reed College of Media Dean Maryanne Reed and hackathon participants interact with the women leaders in technology symposium at Google. The symposium kicked off the Hackathon Friday, Oct. 24, 2014. Photo by David Smith/Reed College of Media.

More than 50 women from WVU and other universities including Penn State, Howard, Syracuse and Carnegie Melon participated in the weekend event that kicked off with a symposium at Google of women leaders in the technology industry. Through Google+ Hangout, the symposium was streamed live, with two-way interaction with the hackathon participants in the College’s new Alexis and Jim Pugh Media Innovation Lab in Morgantown, W.Va.

The symposium covered #gamergate, the pay gap between men and women, and whether tech companies should provide benefits for egg freezing. It was a frank discussion from women leaders in technology, and it launched a weekend focused on helping women influence technology development. See a Storify recap of tweets shared during the symposium and hackathon here.
Women make up more than half – 57 percent – of professional workers in the U.S., but they hold about one quarter of the professional computing jobs that exist, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Numbers among college females tell a related story. In 2012, more than half of all college graduates were women but less than 20 percent of these female graduates were majors in computer and information sciences, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

These stats and the growing presence of digital technology in daily life and the job market show there is a true technology gender gap. That is one reason WVU’s Reed College of Media decided to host a hackathon for just women.

“No boys allowed”

A female-focused hackathon is a relatively new concept. Microsoft Research and other organizations sponsored the third International Women’s Hackathon earlier this month. Traditional hackathons tend to be male-dominated, making them less accessible and welcoming to women.

“This is a soft entry for women to venture into that realm without necessarily having the hard coding skills,” said WVU Reed College of Media Dean Maryanne Reed. “The idea is to give a hunger for learning more.”

Beth Laing, PBS MediaShift events coordinator, said this hackathon was different than others MediaShift has produced in the past, in part because of the all-female environment.

“I think the atmosphere, it’s so much more comfortable. They don’t feel like they’re going to put themselves in a bad position by asking a question, be thought less of,” Laing said.

Dana Coester, assistant professor at the College of Media and creative director for the College’s Media Innovation Lab, wanted the hackathon to focus on wearables, because she says women still have an opportunity to influence this emerging market.

“It’s about shifting people from being consumers, sort of a set thing, to being makers,” said Coester. “Hacking, you know there’s pejorative connotations of the word, but it’s also about making it your own, making it do what you want it to do.”

Ready, set, go…

The hackathon included short Ignite-style presentations on topics such as design thinking, entrepreneurship and the latest trends in wearable tech. But the majority of the time, participants worked in teams to develop a new use case or solution for wearables, such as Google Glass, the Apple Watch, and even Fitbits. The challenge was intentionally a bit vague.

“After we issued the challenge, I thought there would be a dazed, uncertain look, but people shot out the door essentially to get going, and we haven’t seen people since,” said Coester.

When my team set off to begin the challenge, I encouraged them to first think of problems they’ve encountered in daily life.We then wrote anything they came up with on a board. Next we looked for themes within the list of problems.

Once we completed this step, we allowed ourselves to start brainstorming solutions. It was important to not rush through any step of the process to allow the best ideas to bubble to the top.

My team escaped the confines of four walls for fresh air as they continued working on the idea outside. I left them alone there while I gathered sound for a story I was producing for public radio on the event.

When I rejoined the group a little later, they had solidified their idea and were planning their pitch. My team came up with a wearable targeted to educators. Combining a hands-free wearable that records voice with an app that searches academic databases, teachers and students could then search for scholarly and news articles related to class lectures.

In hindsight, it was ambitious and probably too detailed. Simpler ideas seemed to gain more traction. We didn’t win (more on that later). In fact, our idea failed; however, if I were grading this team, they would certainly receive an A. The idea-generating process they undertook and the collaborative effort they adopted from start to finish exemplified the environment that’s best suited for innovation.

A lesson on teaching innovation

Photo from the Hack the Gender Gap Hackathon at the WVU Reed College of Media. Photo by David Smith/Reed College of Media.

Walk into any class or meeting and tell people they need to be innovative, and they may sit up straight and take note, but they probably won’t know exactly how to translate that into their daily work.

Innovation is not a hard skill one can teach or acquire. It’s a shift in thinking. It’s an acceptance that you will fail and that’s OK as long as you learn something from that failure. That’s the environment that was created at the hackathon.

Reed said the event was a great exercise in solving problems quickly that could be applied to a variety of fields.

“The whole idea of accelerating your thought process, being creative, being open, learning from your mistakes and coming up with solutions quickly is a radical departure from the typical academic process,” Reed said.

And the winner is…

The hackathon ended Sunday afternoon with eight teams pitching their ideas.

In the end, all teams successfully completed the challenge: from idea generation by thinking about problems around women, wearables and media, to creating “solutions,” to finally pitching their idea to a panel of five judges.

All of the ideas were different, although a majority focused on wearables and apps that would help women better monitor their health. Only one group developed something that applied specifically to journalists.

The winning team’s concept was an attachment to the popular Fitbit wearable.The BioBit would measure biomarkers, such as vitamin D, iron, and hormone levels. Judges told the creators to seek a patent on their innovation immediately. There was no monetary award, but the winners will receive a platform from MediaShift to share their concept and access to a network of women technology leaders.

This hackathon was focused on the process, not on the product, with the goal of helping participants understand how to develop and present their innovative ideas. WVU student Katie Heller said she now has more confidence in her ability to generate ideas for new media technology.

“I think that when women get in an uninhibited environment, then we do amazing things, and this really showcases our ability.”

More than confidence, Coester hopes the event sparked interest in wearables and that the young women who took part in the Hackathon will continue to think about wearable technology as something they can have a hand in creating.

“I honestly hope that by bringing these women together at this particular age, that this is something now that they will begin to develop as an expertise,” Coester said.

Emily Hughes Corio teaches journalism at the West Virginia University Reed College of Media. She joined the faculty as a Teaching Assistant Professor in 2011 after working ten years in public media. In April 2014 she received a Broadcast Education Association’s Festival of Media Arts “Best of Festival” award for a story she produced for NPR’s “All Things Considered” on the restoration of a the Cheat River after years of mining pollution.

The Online News Association is now accepting applications for the second round in its Challenge Fund to help stimulate journalism curriculum innovations through live news experiments. Supported by the Democracy Fund and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism, Knight, McCormick and Rita Allen foundations, the Challenge Fund offers $35,000 micro-grants to journalism programs willing to explore the possibilities of new and collaborative approaches.

Schools currently in the midst of projects funded in the first round of the fund gave us updates on what they’re doing, what they’re learning and where they’re headed.

Arizona State University

Rebecca Blatt, Public Insight Network Bureau Chief
rebecca.blatt@asu.edu

Project: Finding the Middle Ground

Description: As part of this year’s News21 investigative report on gun rights and regulations, we engaged hundreds of people across the country throughout the reporting process and are evaluating the impact that engagement had on reporting and the lives of participants.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

We’ve learned that many people are willing to share their perspectives on controversial topics like guns if they’re given an opportunity to do so in a supportive environment. We hosted a six-week online discussion about gun issues with 34 people from across the country, many of whom said they didn’t feel comfortable talking about guns with their friends and relatives, but they were willing to have an honest conversation in a private group moderated by one of our student journalists. This makes us hopeful about opportunities to engage other audiences in open dialogue to deepen understanding among journalists and community members.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Assemble a strong team of partners who are excited to collaborate, develop a timeline for the project and stick to it.  Our partners were all incredibly busy with other responsibilities, but we set out a list of milestones that kept us focused and accountable.

CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Sandeep Junnarkar, Associate Professor and Director of Interactive Journalism
sandeep.junnarkar@journalism.cuny.edu

Jere Hester, Director of the NYC News Service
jere.hester@journalism.cuny.edu

Project: Stop the Mold

Description: Teaming with the NY Daily News, we’ll test high- and low-tech approaches to crowd-sourcing to engage New Yorkers who are not hyper-connected to news. Working with public housing tenants, we’ll quantify the scope of a pressing mold problem, work with tenants to test for mold and track NYC’s court-mandated cleanup

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

We knew going in that we were trying to reach a segment of the population that has good reason to be suspicious of promises from authority figures and to be skeptical of the media. What we underestimated was the level of fear some tenants have about speaking out, a fear that extends to possibly losing their apartments or being otherwise retaliated against by management or even management allies within some developments. We’ve addressed this by redoubling our efforts to connect with tenant leaders, community groups, etc., to help build trust. We’ve discovered that the mold problem and related health problems – at least in the developments we’ve initially targeted —  appear to be even worse than we anticipated. 

How are students or your community benefiting from your project?

Each community member is getting to see that they are not isolated in facing the mold epidemic because we are showcasing many voices on our site. City council members are also taking notice and starting to tweet our efforts, which we hope will lead to action. Students are learning, through trial and error, the journalism of engagement and collaboration. That collaboration plays out on several levels: with tenants, community leaders and other stakeholders; with players in different departments of a major news organization; with one another as a team charged with a challenge as exciting as it is daunting. Our students were told from the start that their ideas are not only valued but necessary to drive this project. 

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Carefully weigh the differences between partnering with a small news organization and a larger news organization. They each have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, smaller news partners want more content (and more frequently); they have less less hierarchy so big decisions can be made in a more timely way. But their reach might be less developed in terms of drawing a large audience, which might lead to less crowdsourced information. Having a bigger news partner involves running requests up the chain of command and can delay decisions. But you are able to entice a community to participate because they understand the power and impact of a larger publication’s coverage.

Florida International University

Robert Gutsche, Assistant Professor
rgutsche@fiu.edu

Project: Sea Level Rise: South Florida

Description: Our website, eyesontherise.org, aims to raise awareness and to educate South Florida communities about the impact, challenges and threats of sea level rise to create possible solutions for a sustainable future.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

We’ve changed our ideas of audience, broadening it beyond traditional ideas of legacy and even new media, to include our students, community partners, and those who engage with this project outside of news. While we are focused on creating journalism for programming audiences, we are also interested in the civic nature of news-making and the audiences who come to learn about science and communication processes inherent in public discussion of sea level rise.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Grantees should continue to help expand discussion about how such work is represented in tenure and promotion policies, the organizational challenges, politics and communication related to taking on complex social issues, and the role of program evaluation when dealing with so much experimentation.

San Diego State University

Amy Schmitz Weiss, Associate Professor
aschmitz@mail.sdsu.edu

Project: What’s in the Air?

Description: This is a collaborative between journalism and science students from San Diego State University along with inewsource, a nonprofit news organization, to experiment with the concept of using electronic sensors to test air quality in San Diego in an effort to help the public be more informed about pollution and its impact on the city.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

We have learned a lot about the science of sensors and how gas and particulate matter sensors differ from one manufacturer to the next. We are doing beta tests now to identify the best prototype to take into the community. It’s been a constant learning experience and a fun one to explore these nuances as we look at air quality. 

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

Students will be enrolling in a special class next spring and the community will be able to get involved once we have our air quality sensor prototype that they can build for themselves and deploy in their own backyards.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Be specific about what you would like to explore, build or create. Make sure to have several partners or collaborators — such as other departments on campus, nonprofits in the community, nonprofit news organizations, and the general community involved. Be agile. Allow room for changes in your plan/project. As things will change and when they do, you can easily pivot.

San Francisco State University

Jesse Garnier, Assistant Professor
jesse@sfbay.ca

Project: Newspoints

Description: We are building Newspoints, a smartphone app that guides student journalists through multimedia reporting with on-screen prompts and guidance. We will measure the effectiveness of the tool by deploying student interns and measuring the speed, accuracy and thoroughness of their reporting.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

Newspoints is scheduled to deploy to our community partner in January 2015. So far, a series of meetings and discussions have shaped the app’s development and an emerging editorial plan. Multimedia editorial coverage will begin after deployment and will benefit the Mission District by sharing stories that accurately and compassionately cover a community.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Your idea is only as strong as your team!

Texas State University

Cindy Royal, Associate Professor
croyal@txstate.edu

Project: TexasMusicViz

Description: TexasMusicViz combines data visualization and application development to tell the important stories as of a community related to music: its history, culture and interaction.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

Programming and data skills are vast and complicated to teach and learn. It will take more than one course to provide students with the skills they need to be effective interactive storytellers. We are proposing a major that will provide a digitally immersive experience for students who want to focus on these skills. Cross-department collaborations are possible, but they require compatibility of goals and communication. The community benefits by having more news experiences that are interactive, personalized and meaningful.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

Students are very excited to learn these skills. They recognize the importance of programming and data to storytelling and want to use them in their careers. This project has set many of them on a path that they wish to continue.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Don’t be afraid to try out new ideas as experiments. Push yourself to learn new skills for the benefit of your students. Seek feedback, learn and adjust. Innovation happens in small increments or innovations. 

Georgia State University

David Armstrong, Director of the Department of Communication
david.armstrong@georgianewslab.org

Project: Georgia News Lab

Description: Four university journalism programs, including two HBCU’s, are teaming with two major news outlets to train a new generation of investigative reporters and help diversify newsrooms.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

Collaboration is the future of investigative reporting. Everybody benefits: students, universities, news outlets and the public.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

Students are working with professional journalists, learning skills they could not obtain at their home universities, and the public gains from access to stories that could not be done without students doing the legwork.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Find great partners. Fill in the gaps. Do what’s not being done anymore that needs to be.

Missouri School of Journalism

Roger Gafke, Director of Program Development
gafker@rjionline.org

Project: The Town Square: Social-Media Driven Public Affairs Programming

Description: Using intense social media in a traditional commercial television station to deeply explore public affairs topics.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

We have learned that a commercial television station can again provide serious public affairs programming by using social media as a reporting and promotion tool.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

Students are learning by doing (The Missouri Method) social media, sending out messages before, during and after the on-air presentation of a public affairs topic. They engage in conversations with members of the community. They discover new sources for the traditional reporting process. These topics are aired during 20-minutes of the 12 noon newscast.

University of New Mexico

Michael Marcotte, Visiting Associate Professor
mm@mikemarcotte.com

Project: The New Mexico News Port

Description: A collaboration hub for shared public service journalism in New Mexico, based at UNM, Albuquerque.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

Students, faculty, professional journalists and donors all want to see growth and success in strong, ethical journalism … but many are just too busy surviving the present to go about creating change for the future. That’s why people love our project. It takes on the time and risk of change.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

Students are growing tremendously in experience, skills and confidence. The community is getting more coverage than before, from more perspectives.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Roll up your sleeves and go for it. A lot can happen quickly. In fact, the urgency is helpful. There will be discomfort, some loss of total control, some stumbles… but it is a small price to pay for the new vision and the new opportunities you can unlock.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, Assistant Professor
kbculver@wisc.edu

Project: The Confluence

Description: Reporting project with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism to cover urgent water supply and quality issues in the state.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

In addition to finding out exactly how many gallons are in all the Wisconsin Dells waterparks (16 million), we’ve learned that project-based reporting on a single topic is easier than daily reporting. Almost all our participating classes are packaging multimedia pieces rather than getting out to cover meetings or events.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

The most important benefit: Giving everyone the freedom to try and fail without fear. We’re opening up minds to the very idea of experimentation.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Both you and your media partner should be in a constant quest to keep each other honest about deadlines and progress.

University of Illinois

Brant Houston, Professor and Knight Chair of Investigative Reporting
brant.houston@gmail.com

Project: Intersections

Description: We are creating a portal that makes it easier to search and analyze social media content for a specific geographic area.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

We have found much more intriguing content — events and issues — through our archiving and review of social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter, than we expected. It turns out that the the commonly used digital tools for searching social media do not overcome some of the challenges of collecting and archiving content from Facebook and Twitter for a particular geographic area.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

We have just finished the initial stage of our project and students are beginning to look for information on specific topics. We will encourage community use in the new year.

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Patience. It takes time to develop new archiving and analytic tools for live news experiments and to learn how to use them effectively.

University of Oklahoma

David Craig, Associate Dean and Professor
dcraig@ou.edu

Project: Talk With Us: Poverty in Oklahoma City Neighborhoods

Description: The project is using mobile video, in tandem with GIS data, to report on and create a conversation about poverty in Oklahoma City between residents of low-income neighborhoods and area leaders.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far in your project? Why?

A successful collaboration with a media partner takes careful upfront planning. Our partner, Oklahoma Watch, helped the project tremendously by doing preliminary test interviews with mobile video in the neighborhoods over the summer and developing protocols for students to help them with matters such as sound quality and interaction with residents.

How are students and/or your community benefiting from your project?

As one instructor put it, the project has helped students learn “how to interact with a variety of people and situations. It has pushed student out of their comfort zone and made them mature in their craft in a much faster way than they normally would just interviewing people on campus.”

What piece of advice do you have for future grantees or others trying live news experiments?

Include a test/trial phase the summer before the project begins on any techniques that haven’t been used in the participating classes before or are being used in different settings.

Visit the Challenge Fund directly for more information on applying for the second round. Any of the grantees above with an email address linked are willing to talk with potential applicants and offer more about their proposals and what is working and floundering.

Meagan Doll is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying journalism. She is an intern for the EducationShift section at PBS MediaShift.

With rapid changes in technology, journalists are working harder than ever to keep up with cutting-edge developments. It can feel like a scary and uncertain time. Yet Silicon Valley veteran Steve Blank says this increased pressure has created room for journalists to occupy the front lines of business model design and consumer development and truly become innovators.

His take isn’t necessarily intuitive. The lines between entrepreneurship and journalism have only begun to break down and many university courses are beginning to weave together the strands of reporting in the public interest as well as breaking ground with technology.

Cue Blank’s Lean LaunchPad course. Lean LaunchPad is a hands-on class that integrates business model design and customer development into practice through customer interaction and business model iteration. As a retired entrepreneur-­turned-­educator, Blank currently teaches the class at Stanford, Berkeley and Columbia. He also offers a free online version of Lean LaunchPad through Udacity.com which more than 100,000 people have signed up for. EducationShift talked with Blank about his curriculum and why it could be an important addition to journalism education.

Q&A

Why is it important to integrate entrepreneurial education in journalism education?

Steve Blank: Well, I know I don’t have to tell you that of all institutions that are changing radically, journalism has been affected as much as anything. So if your curriculum looks like the 1990s, you’re essentially teaching outdated material. You need curriculum that, at least in part, teaches journalists that the world of journalism is not only not the same, but it’s changing as we speak.

Steve Blank

For students to understand what the future of journalism is going to be, they’re going to have to invent it. It’s a big idea. We don’t know what journalism is going to look like in the next three years, let alone the next 10 years. Being just a reporter is dying breed because there is no such thing as a guy with a little hat that says “press” anymore. It no longer works that way. So, what this has to do with entrepreneurship is that unfortunately journalists also need to be creators of new forms of content delivery for journalism.

Where are the right places to work? And more importantly, how do they turn that into a viable profession? Traditional media no longer pays like it used to. The thing I teach is a model of entrepreneurship that says that all you have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses, which is a fancy way to say that all you’re doing is guessing. If a journalist in my class says, ‘The future of media looks like this, and I’m going to put together a news business that looks like this,’ I would smile and say, ‘Great set of hypotheses. How are you going to test it?’

The traditional answer would have been to raise money and start this business. My model is very different. Rather than raising money, what’s the cheapest way we can run a series of experiments? Can we put together a prototype of what this newsfeed would look like? Can we see if we can get interested readers? Those are called minimal viable products, meaning essentially cheap and incremental prototypes. And the whole process is called the Lean Startup. This allows people who are inventing and trying to figure out what the next generation of journalism will look like to experiment without investing years or millions of dollars.

How is access to entrepreneurial opportunities and resources changing with the media landscape?

SB: In general, it used to be that entrepreneurship and information about entrepreneurship was limited to a very small set of what were called entrepreneurial clusters, or concentrations of entrepreneurs and inter-capitalists—people who gave away money. Those tended to be in places like Silicon Valley or Boston. A couple of things happened in the last decade and only in the last decade. The Internet disrupted traditional media, but on the other hand, it made entrepreneurship available everywhere. When I first started down in Silicon Valley, the ability to get information about how to even figure out how to do a startup was limited by your caffeine intake. Information was transmitted by coffee. And it was coffee only in a certain, limited region with people with knowledge.

Now, in fact, information is everywhere on the Net. So the good news is that not only is information everywhere, but there are meet-ups, incubators and a whole ton of other things that are available for any entrepreneur worldwide. The only bad news is that while entrepreneurship is everywhere, risk capital — funds for high-risk, high-reward ventures — is still kind of clustered, particularly for large-scale capital which is still in small number of cities. Problem two is — and this could be ignorance, but I think it might be a fact — while there are incubators, or places for new entrepreneurs to experiment with medical or hardware startups, I have yet to see an incubator for new journalism startups. And I think that’s an opportunity. That’s what we’re missing.

Photo by hackNY.org on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons License.

How can journalism educators incorporate more of this into their curricula?

SB: That’s an interesting problem because journalists are not typically founders of companies, they’re employees of companies. And yet, what we’re describing is that the jobs for many of those employees have gone away. The bad news is most of those who were looking for those jobs are not going to find them, and some small percentage of those who are looking are actually going to turn out to be more creative than just journalists. They’re going to actually be founders of classes of media. That’s not who most journalists are. The same now is true for journalism education. If you’ve been teaching on how to write for a newspaper, that’s not the same class as how to think about how the new entrepreneurial opportunities are in media. So, in fact, it might take new people and it will take new classes. New courses, new thinking will need to go side-by-side. We don’t need to get rid of the old classes; we just need to understand that environment in which journalism used to work no longer exists.

What are some common entrepreneurial mistakes to avoid?

SB: One of the mistakes we’ll make because we’re human beings is to believe that your vision is a fact. That’s the natural optimism of human beings. But the reality is that day one of a new startup is a faith-based enterprise. The core tenant of what I teach is there are no facts inside the building. When we come up with a new idea, we tend to slide into our own reality distortion field to convince ourselves and others. And that’s not healthy. I teach a process to separate out the faith and rapidly turn it into fact as quickly as possible. So it’s OK to start with faith, but the process allows you to test it rapidly.

Photo by hackNY.org on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons License.

What advice would you give to educators teaching entrepreneurship?

SB: If you’re a traditional educator, the odds are that you’ve never seen a startup or started one. Therefore, the class is effectively taught best when you pair a traditional faculty member with an adjunct. You really want to have a partner who understands what the real world is like. It’s not a replacement, but truly an adjunct. Anybody who has gotten a journalism degree in the last 10 years is obsolete. Not because anybody is being stupid, but because the industry is changing faster than the curriculum. The question up until now was, then, what should we be teaching? Now we have a curriculum that’s worked across a whole set of industries that easily adaptable and adoptable by journalism, as well.

How do you incorporate real-world experience into your courses (online or otherwise) and why is it important?

SB: Once you come to the realization that we’re just not all going to fit in small offices of the Times or the Journal or the Post, the question is, what do we want to do? How do we get content and how to we run these experiments? That’s where the Learn Startup comes in. It allows us to build very cheap and fast experiments. The class I teach called the Lean LaunchPad has an open-source syllabus and we teach 200 educators each year how to teach it. We’ve yet to see any journalism educators come take the class, but I sure hope that they or their department heads start showing up, because you could easily add this class to a journalism curriculum. The same changes that were occurring with newspapers that occurred in the 20th century are occurring now. So, this class can, and I believe should, be taught as part of any journalism curriculum. I would call it ‘Inventing the New Media.’

View a course summary and syllabus to learn more about the Lean LaunchPad online course.

Meagan Doll is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying journalism. She is an intern for the EducationShift section at PBS MediaShift.

My heart was flip-flopping as our moderator went down the lineup of teams pitching their solutions for women news entrepreneurs at the International Women’s Media Foundation/Ford Foundation “Cracking the Code” hackathon on January 29-30 in New York City. My team was last on the list, and I sat in agony as eight other teams took the stage. The ideas included LaunchMeet, a matchmaking site for founders and coders; The Gender Report, a tool to analyze the ratio of female and male sources in news stories; and PitchCoach, a mobile app to help founders perfect the all-important pitch, among others.

The TrollBusters team won one of the top prizes at the International Women’s Media Foundation hackathon in New York City on Jan. 30, 2015.

The judges were scrutinizing each pitch on four criteria: usefulness, creativity, technical difficulty and user-friendliness. They peppered each team with questions: How does the user navigate the interface? How are you different from other products like this? How do you maintain privacy on your app? What technologies are you using to implement your ideas? How will you make your idea sustainable?

I should have anticipated the questions … I’ve sat as a judge for many startup competitions, taught media entrepreneurship and even coached teams on the art of the pitch. But now, I was on the proverbial other side of the fence and trying to keep from hyperventilating. And I was learning from it.

The Cracking the Code organizers said startups use hackathons to drive innovation. I think educators can use structures like these to experience the startup culture and understand the media entrepreneurship experiences we create inside and outside the classroom for our students.

Focusing a vision

My team and I had started the journey toward our startup idea just 24 hours before during an evening brainstorming/lightning round pitch of ideas. Then women journalists, front-end developers, designers, and educators gravitated to the ideas they wanted to implement. I’d pitched two ideas and gotten traction around both. Both were ideas that were personal and ones that I had tried to implement in various ways in the past.

But one held a severe pain point for me and many other women online: how to address cyberharassment, cyberbullying, trolling, denial of service attacks and other online behaviors designed to shut down voices of women. Recent media coverage of Gamergate and attacks on celebrities and women scholars online would resonate with our audience. And I knew if we could craft an elegant solution to fight hate with love, we could honor and support those women no matter what the hackathon outcome.

The TrollBusters team takes one of the top prizes at the International Women’s Media Foundation hackathon in New York City on Jan. 29-30. Image courtesy of the TrollBusters Team.

Our team included Debbie Galant of Montclair State University’s NJ News Commons; Louisa Reynolds, a IWMF Fellow and a U.K. freelance journalist; Berta Valle, general manager of Vos TV from Nicaragua and our hacker Sneha Inguva, co-founder of Perooz, a browser service to refute false claims in news reports. Others gave support to our project but ultimately selected other projects to pursue.

I went to bed that first evening with ideas chasing sheep. And awoke to a nightmare. The team wanted to pivot -– change our idea back to the first idea I had pitched. “I can go either way,” I said. But I had engaged my online community late the night before, asking for help as our “virtual team” on the “TrollTracker” idea. They would be disappointed, I thought, but we could move on.

We studied the judging criteria. We studied the judges. “Which idea was closer to the ideas of the conference?” we deliberated. After nearly an hour of precious time, we decided that we could tell the story –- our story –- of online harassment and those of women publishers and friends online. And that our solution would help women journalists — but also a lot of other people too.

And so TrollBusters was born. We worked for 12 hours to define the problem, find statistics, determine what services and supports we could offer technologically and emotionally to women under attack and we hacked and created wireframes to visualize our solutions. Our international team helped put in perspective that trolling was one part of a problem that sometimes included lost jobs and in other times lost lives. And that trolling is not just an American problem.

Tools help forge a solution

We used Zoom and Google Drive to share our work, GitHub to create our project and server space with MySQL, Javascript and HTML5 tools. We used Photoshop to mock up our interface design; SlideShare to upload our pitch deck; and ChallengePost to share our pitch along with other hackathon teams. We also engaged a virtual team online using Facebook, including the group Binders Full of Women Writers teeming with people who had experienced and shared their stories of cyberbullying; Shireen Mitchell of the Women’s Media Center with whom I had discussed this issue; and my network of women and men in technology, media, immersive design, gaming and journalism. We crowdsourced feedback to our draft deck and got asked hard questions by our online followers on privacy and protections for women that we went back to the drawing board to address.

Our TrollBusters solution was three-fold:

1) S.O.S. Teams: Countering cyberattacks in real time by creating a hedge of protection around targets by engaging their own network of followers to counteract hate messaging with “attagirls,” positive messaging like quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., and other reputation endorsements.

2) RAID: To use the online community clustering technology to find “nests” of trolls around topics like #BlackLivesMatter or #Gamergate and rescue others under attack.

3) SUPPORT: To provide the legal, psychological and technical services to address denial-of-service attacks on women-led sites.

We leveraged a proprietary technology that came out of Ohio University’s Scripps Innovation Challenge 2014 winning student team called C.A.T.S. – Clustering Audience Targeting Shooting — as a way to detect communities online using natural language processing. We are using the technology to detect “nests” of trolling activity online using network analysis and natural language processing to make visible the top trolls and areas of their operation online.

After I pitched the ideas to the group, our team discussed the idea and next steps. Image courtesy of the TrollBusters Team.

We had five minutes to impress the judges. As our team mounted the stage, I was channeling the isolation, pain, loss of reputation, income and lives of all who had been cyberbullied online. No matter what, we were #winning, equalizing the online playing field for women.

We didn’t get through our slide deck; we got through our live demo though. And we used the judges’ questions to backfill the other slides we hadn’t had time to present. Then it was over. The waiting was agony as the judges deliberated over the team ideas. We played music, danced and celebrated that the hard part was over.

And then the awards: Our idea received one of the three top prizes of $3,000 and a strong endorsement from our judges that our idea had traction. Our team will determine who will choose to continue to develop the idea.

The experience was nerve-wracking, exhilarating, inspiring, collegial, competitive, fun — and even lucrative! But as an educator and entrepreneur, I’ve come away from this hackathon with even stronger conviction about the importance of media entrepreneurship and activities like these inside and outside the classroom for our students — and for ourselves.

Postscript: Thoughts from the Team

Louisa Reynolds: From the moment I listened to Michelle Ferrier’s pitch at the start of the hackathon, I knew I wanted to be part of her team. She spoke eloquently about her own personal experiences as a victim of harassment and the idea of creating a tool that would identify online trolls and support victims definitely resonated with me. The Internet should not become a space of impunity where people feel they can hide behind the anonymity of an online alias and use social media to spew venom that destroys lives and aims to silence female voices.

Debbie Galant: It was incredibly fun working with a team to iterate and build out an idea in less than a day. Fostering civil discourse online is an incredibly important goal — and not just for women and women publishers, but for everybody who cares about democracy and the marketplace of ideas. (Debbie is leaving the project due to her weeknight and weekend work on Midcentury/Modern, a new startup funded by J-Lab.)

Berta Valle: This was my first experience at a Hackathon, and I am amazed to witness what can be created in collaboration. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to share the work with such talented women like team TrollBusters. Hate speech and cyberbullying is affecting many women publishers around the world and my country Nicaragua is no exception. That’s why listening Michelle’s idea, it was easy to identify with the intention to do something to stop this trend. In my career as TV anchor, I had to face unpleasant situations in social networks, so think of a “space” that can support other women who feel attacked in the exercise of their duties, fills me with enthusiasm.

Dr. Michelle Ferrier is associate dean for innovation at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University. She is the author of “Media Entrepreneurship: Curriculum Development and Faculty Perceptions of What Students Should Know,” published in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, September 2013. Ferrier is vice president of Journalism That Matters and creator of the “Create or Die” startup weekends. She is a former columnist, digital content architect and online community developer who has been involved in new media for more than 30 years. Her research interests include media entrepreneurship, online journalism, online communities, digital identity and reputation management and hyperlocal online news. Contact her at ferrierm@ohio.edu.

Top journalism students and faculty from across the country traveled to Arizona State University last week to envision cutting-edge media products to help underserved communities as a part of PBS MediaShift’s 2nd Annual Journalism School Hackathon.

The two-day event brought approximately 50 students and 30 faculty members to ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in downtown Phoenix, where teams developed a variety of sustainable media products. The winning team created Basics, a mobile app designed to serve the homeless community and those battling poverty.

Basics gives charitable service providers a direct way to communicate with the underserved community, giving them real-time status updates of available resources. The team said the app would help eliminate the issue of those in need arriving to a closed food bank or a full shelter by sending text and online notifications.

Photo by Johanna Huckeba and Laura Davis/Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“We stuck with the idea of simple information and a way to get it out there,” said Edgar Walker, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Because that’s what matters: Are they open? How much do they have? And how long will they be available for?”

Walker was joined by fellow students Katie Callahan of Point Loma Nazarene University, Grace Fenlason from Northern Arizona University and facilitators Danielle Cervantes from Point Loma Nazarene University, David Morgan of the Cochise County Record and Pat Shannahan of the Arizona Republic.

Shaping a Startup Mentality

In all, 10 teams competed over the February 28/March 1 weekend, developing projects in one of three threads: gaming, data or audience engagement. Other notable projects that earned recognition included [Rec]ollection, an app providing a digital way for individuals to preserve their stories; Uproot, a scavenger hunt and trivia app focused on African-American history; and Accessible Phoenix, an app providing accessibility information on Phoenix restaurants and shops for people with disabilities.

PBS MediaShift launched the first hackathon last year in partnership with the Reese News Lab at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication focused on solving issues at local media outlets. While most hackathons center on coding, PBS MediaShift Executive Editor Mark Glaser said this event is designed to shape the next generation of journalists through entrepreneurship.

Photo by Johanna Huckeba and Laura Davis/Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“I think it’s important that schools and their students get entrepreneurial training to do startups, and I hope it spreads,” Glaser said.

This year’s hackathon participants heard from veteran entrepreneurs, who offered guidance and advice on funding and product design. Speakers included Alan Lobock, co-founder of SkyMall, Mike Alonzo, the chief operating officer at Storybyte, Retha Hill, the executive director of the Cronkite School’s New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab, and Elizabeth Mays, assistant director of Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.

Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan said ASU recognizes the importance of entrepreneurial training. He said the hackathon is one of several events centered on innovation at the Cronkite School.

“I think this was a great opportunity not only for Cronkite, but for the other journalism schools here to see some of the thinking that goes into entrepreneurship and coming up with innovative ideas that can actually be applied,” Callahan said.

Related Coverage:

How the J-School Hackathon Turned Me Into an Entrepreneur, by Tresa Tudrick

My Experience in Developing ‘El Remedio’ at the J-School Hackathon, by Alex Arriaga

J-School Hackathon at ASU: Coverage, Video, Photos and More, by Sonia Paul

Lia Juriansz is a freshman at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and an intern for the Cronkite Journal.

To most, Feb. 27 was a typical, ordinary Friday. For 50 top students from 13 journalism and communication schools, this was the beginning of an intense, innovative experience at PBS MediaShift’s 2nd Annual Journalism School Hackathon at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in downtown Phoenix.

Like many students, I went with an open mind, unsure of what would result.

University of Florida student Ayana Stewart said she was nervous about the Hackathon.

“I have no coding experience at all!” Stewart said in a Facebook message. “The name threw me off.”

Networking was expected, motivational speakers as well, (hopefully a tasty lunch too), but what I couldn’t predict was developing a project that would turn into something bigger.

Drawing a Wild Card

I drew from Mark Glaser’s hat to determine my group, Team Harley Quinn’s, fate. I picked a wild card — meaning we would pick the underserved audience of our choice. Right away, the team went to work having only met each other just minutes before. With less than 24 hours to design and create a sustainable project for an underserved community, we had our work ahead of us.

Topics were tossed back and forth. Ideas bloomed and others were shattered. But Team Harley Quinn decided on serving first-generation college students.

According to AZCentral.com, as of Saturday, March 7, the Arizona legislature slashed $99 million in funding for higher education. With the recent budget cuts, reaching out to first-generation college students is more vital than ever before.

Team Harley Quinn brainstorming audience for our #wildcard. Throwing around rural and first gens. #jschoolhackathon pic.twitter.com/xLFIjvs39z

— Jessica Porter (@jessicacporter) February 28, 2015

This is the End

By dinnertime, we felt stuck in our tracks, mired in quicksand. We were falling slowly but surely down a deep dark hole of no return. Our idea was still conceptual and lacked an actual product. At dinner, pizza was served with a side of puzzled journalists with an extra helping of “how in the world are we going to pull this off?”

After eating our sorrows, we had two hours left to make this concept come to life. Something about deadlines and journalists just works — like Thanksgiving and football.

Ideating & iterating w the brilliant @jessicacporter @LeannaScachetti @tresatudrick @_yesimkatieg #jschoolhackathon. pic.twitter.com/tXGozMvpbO — Margot Susca, Ph.D. (@MargotSusca) February 28, 2015

“First Gen Next Gen” was our idea — an app designed specifically for first-generation college students. Our app pitch can be seen here at the 12-minute mark:

Did our pitch win? No. Did my fellow journalists inspire me about what can be accomplished in a day? Certainly.

Post-Hackathon Feelings

It’s been two weeks since the J-School Hackathon, and this experience is all I can think about. The problem with so many workshops I’ve attended in the past is that after the event, the creativity and motivation get put behind responsibilities and real life.

What keeps me going back to First Gen Next Gen is the outpouring of responses I’ve received from first-generation students at my home university, Northern Arizona University.

NAU first-generation college student Lou Peralta said in a Facebook message that an app like this would help in many ways.

“I absolutely believe that if there was a way to get to know other first-gen student on campus as well as across the country, it would help a lot,” Peralta said. “Sure there are programs like STAR, SSS, and First Scholars on the NAU campus, but they can only help so much … a way to create a support system among your peers without having to go through an office would be so beneficial.”

Other first-generation students like Morgan Lightburne also said in a Facebook message that if there were a way to connect to all NAU first-generation students, it would help and encourage her.

“In a way … this would help students know that they are capable of many things that may come as a challenge now but once you step forward, you can achieve many things,” Lightburne said.

Making First Gen Next Gen a Reality

I never would have labeled myself as an entrepreneur before the Hackathon. Sports journalism is my passion and what I am comfortable with. I didn’t believe I had “entrepreneur” in me. With the support of my fellow teammates, I want to make First Gen Next Gen a reality.

The best part about this experience has been meeting such a strong group of women in the field. By collaborating and using all our specialties, we were able to create something that will hopefully benefit future first-generation college students.

I’d encourage anyone to attend who is even slightly considering going next year. You’ll go with no idea how this will play out in the end and leave with new friends, ideas and a desire to serve your community.

To some, 2015 may be just like any other year, but for me, it’s the year I become an entrepreneur.

Related Coverage:

My Experience in Developing ‘El Remedio’ at the J-School Hackathon, by Alex Arriaga

J-School Hackathon at ASU: Coverage, Video, Photos and More, by Sonia Paul

PBS MediaShift’s 2nd Annual J-School Hackathon Encourages Entrepreneurship, by Lia Juriansz

Tresa Tudrick is a graduate journalism student attending Northern Arizona University. She is a sports reporter/social media guru passionate about fitness and women’s equality. Tudrick is a proud Italian first-generation college student who loves her family and friends. Her dog, Slugger Brady, keeps her on her toes. Visit her website at tresatudrick.com or follow her on Twitter @tresatudrick.

Click the image to read the whole series. (Public domain image from DARPA)

When I moved to Morgantown almost three years ago to teach journalism at West Virginia University, the sketchiness of the local news coverage shocked me. The one newspaper that covers the Morgantown area is owned by a family who have amassed a fortune in the coal and limestone industries, and the paper either doesn’t know how to do investigative journalism or doesn’t want to. So when Journalism program coordinator John Temple approached me with the idea of starting a news service so that students in our Multimedia News Publication classes could publish their work, I hopped on board.

I thought that perhaps this service, which we named the Mountaineer News Service, could be a way to provide quality, data-driven journalism not only to local residents but to financially strapped news outlets throughout West Virginia that have been hard hit by the Internet’s assault on their traditional business model (advertising). The goal was to forge a working partnership between the university and professional news organizations, giving them quality content and allowing our students to showcase their work.

Professor Alison Bass talks with students during her investigative reporting class. (WVU Reed College of Media/David Smith)

Our initial plan was to distribute student-generated content through the West Virginia Press Association, which agreed to send its member papers our story budgets with links to the multimedia features on the news service. But that soon hit a snag because the Press Association lacked the resources to send out the stories in a timely manner and only a few newspapers picked up the content. So I began reaching out directly to some individual newspaper editors as well as national environmental news sites, which picked up several of the multimedia packages published on the Mountaineer News Service. Here is one story that Mother Nature Network published on the struggle to develop alternative energy sources in West Virginia.

Importing Innovators

Then last fall, the College of Media hired as its Ogden Newspapers Innovator-in-Residence, Derek Willis, an interactive developer and data journalist from the New York Times. Willis was assigned to work on a data-driven elections project with students in two classes, including my Investigative reporting course. The goal was for students to use data to cover the midterm elections in West Virginia in a more granular way that many regional news outlets were doing.

Willis showed the students in my reporting class and in our data visualization class, taught by my colleague Bob Britten, how to access and analyze voter registration rolls in five counties of the state. He also showed the students how to access, sort and analyze (using Microsoft Excel) campaign financing data filed by candidates for several statewide races to the Federal Elections Commission. The students used this data as a springboard to develop interesting story ideas, which they then reported out.

My students learned a number of valuable lessons from this exercise. First, just because they had the names, phone numbers and voting history of individual West Virginians, didn’t mean that voters would respond to cold calls, particularly from journalism students. After getting hung up on many times, a few of my more enterprising students began knocking on doors (they also had voter addresses) and began finding more receptive sources. As one of my students later noted, this taught her an important lesson.

“Most people don’t like to talk about politics and a soon as the word ‘Senate’ or ‘election’ was throw into the conversation, many people shut down immediately,” said Caitlin Coyne, a sophomore journalism major. “This, however, had an upside because it forced me to become more persistent as a journalist.”

Persistence pays

Through their persistence, Coyne and a classmate were able to find great anecdotes and quotes to flesh out a data-driven story showing the rise of independent voters in West Virginia over the last decade. (While voters were leaving the Democratic party in droves, they weren’t flocking to the Republican party. Instead they were registering as Independents or with no party affiliation, which gave them more flexibility in voting in both the primary and general elections). The students’ story was published first on the class blog we set up for the elections project and then picked by The Journal in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the Sunday before the election.

A few weeks later, students in the data journalism class published a compelling graphic that broke down this increase in independent voters in county-by-county detail. It would have been better, of course, to marry the text story with the graphic and distribute them both at the same time to professional news outlets, but the delay in publishing the graphic illustrates one of the bigger problems we encountered in our effort to bring together two classes in one project. While most of the students in my reporting class had some prior experience with news reporting, most of the students in the data journalism class had never done a graphic before. Learning those skills took longer than expected and they missed the first deadline we set for publishing stories that we could share with area media.  Lesson learned: If different classes collaborate again on a future project, we need to bring the students in those classes together earlier to work as teams in developing multimedia content for a deadline.

Students Sarah Wisniewski, left, and Tyler Mertins create a graphic during Bob Britten’s Data Visualization class. (WVU Reed College of Media/David Smith)

On the whole, however, the elections project was a great success in forging a working partnership with a growing number of West Virginia news outlets. Several newspapers, including The Journal in Martinsburg and the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, published a number of student-generated election stories examining how the state’s coal culture was driving voting trends and the role outside spending from corporate and conservative groups played in the landmark race to replace West Virginia’s longtime senator, Jay Rockefeller. West Virginia editors I spoke to afterward said they were impressed with the enterprise content our students delivered and would be interested in picking up more stories in the future.

“The articles provided to us by WVU students during the 2014 election helped us fill Sunday editions of our newspaper with high-quality, well-researched content of immediate impact on our readers,” said David Emke, regional editor of The Journal. “Keep them coming.”

Events to build partnerships

As part of our efforts to forge a partnership with area news organizations, Derek Willis, myself and other faculty led an all-day free data workshop for reporters and editors from area papers. Journalists came from as far away as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Charleston Gazette and we had representation from radio (West Virginia Public Broadcasting), as well. The workshop, which was funded by the Ogden Newspapers Seminar Series, not only reminded everyone about the wealth of data available online (ranging from demographics, election financing and labor statistics to crime and corporate information), but Derek also showed participants how to use Excel spreadsheets to sort and analyze data in different ways.  The reporters who attended the workshop found it highly beneficial.

“This was very inspiring,” said Rich Lord, an investigative reporter with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He said he could use some of what he learned about Excel’s Pivot tables “right away” and then asked when we were going to do another data workshop.

Mark Rochester, left, Rich Lord, center and Chris Potter, all from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, during the Database Reporting workshop at the WVU Reed College of Media on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2015. (WVU Reed College of Media/David Smith)

Glynis Board, a public radio reporter, said the workshop had been a great refresher for her. “The compilation of all the sources and information you showed us is invaluable,” she said. “And I’ll be able to turn this around for an instructional day in our newsroom.”

This semester, my Multimedia News Publication class (the capstone class for senior journalism majors) will once again be preparing stories for the Mountaineer News Service. Now that we have established a reputation for quality, data-driven work, I’m hoping that the multimedia packages the students put together (which include a written feature on a timely issue, two photos with captions and a short video or audio slideshow that complements the text story) will be picked up by a greater number of regional news outlets than before.  My dream is to build the news service into a reliable source of student-generated content that can help fill the gaping hole in watchdog journalism that exists in many parts of West Virginia.

Alison Bass is an assistant professor of journalism in the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Getting Screwed: Sex Work and the Law (Fall 2015), and Side Effects: A Prosecutor, A Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award in 2009.

Niche-themed video channels are an emerging subject of study within journalism education programs, as instructors endeavor to prepare students to work in an ever-changing media landscape. Familiar legacy news organizations and consumer brands, including the New York Times and Starbucks, are embracing web video as a way to engage audiences, inspire social sharing, and bring compelling stories to life. Rather than limit instruction to studying existing channels, we challenged our students at the University of Oregon to create one.

We noted there are food channels, sports channels and animal channels. However, we could not identify a book channel of any significance. Given the role of books in our culture, the idea made sense. It also seemed like a natural fit for a university, and for our journalism school, given our collective commitment to expanding access to knowledge. Even people who don’t consider themselves avid readers recognize the influence of literature in their lives, from texts required in school to popular written works that make their way into film and television. Given the low barriers to entry that YouTube and other social media have, we were energized by the possibilities.

Booklandia Trailer from SOJC on Vimeo.

Channel Creation

Fueled by enthusiasm and ambition, a dedicated class of undergraduates set out this past winter term to create Booklandia.tv. The original concept of launching a book channel came from a student previously enrolled in our media entrepreneurship class. Now in its third year, that course was informed by my participation in the Scripps-Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute, held annually at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School. Awarded fellows and their journalism schools commit to adding media business courses to their curricula and to creating incubators that foster innovation within their programs.

Our innovation incubator is Allen Hall Studios (AHS), named for Eric Allen, the first dean of our 100-year-old journalism school. AHS is a project-based course that meets weekly each term as a laboratory for experimentation. It is aligned with Eric Newton’s teaching hospital philosophy for best practices in journalism education. The course is capped at 25 students who must apply and be cleared to register. However, the only real prerequisites are passion and commitment. The course’s exploratory non-structure has resulted in several award-winning special projects, distributed through collaborations with a growing list of regional media and corporate partners.

Serving Society

We also viewed the channel as an opportunity to fulfill a societal need. According to several polls, the number of Americans who don’t read books has nearly tripled since 1978. Despite recent increases in eReader sales, Pew Research reported in 2014 that nearly a quarter of Americans had not read a single book during the previous year. Education level tends to be associated with the numbers of books read by Americans. Students with minimal college education read far more, on average, than men and women who only completed high school. Research suggests the reason may be that people who grow up reading are far more likely to go to college.

We set our sights on broadening the scope of the book channel project beyond our main campus in Eugene, Oregon. We were inspired when we learned that Portland, less than two hours away, was named the top city for book lovers in 2011 by livability.com. Having our school’s Agora Center for Journalism Innovation based there provided infrastructural support to bridge the distance.

Powell’s Books, acknowledged as the largest independent bookstore in the world, proved to be a natural partner. Their main store encompasses a full city block in Portland’s Pearl District, and it hosts top named authors nearly every night of the week. We negotiated a win-win agreement with Powell’s that includes access to their author events, cross promotion, and co-branding. We agreed to supply the Powell’s marketing team with an initial run of 5,000 Booklandia.tv bookmarks for point-of-sale and mail order distribution, and provide links to Powell’s on our website.

Early on, we established a few philosophical ground rules. We committed to creating a channel that maintained editorial autonomy and integrity. Our objective was not to sell books. Rather, we were out to promote reading and intellectual exploration.

Key to making the deal with Powell’s was support from our dean, Julie Newton, and from Chuck Williams, who heads UO’s Office of Innovation. Williams and his team are intentionally in place to support faculty and staff in navigating through obstacles that can be inherent in large institutions. They assisted us with domain registration, web hosting and drafting terms of service for the site.

UO’s adherence to the quarter system allowed us just 10 weeks to prepare for our April 6 launch date. Maya Lazaro is our project coordinator and mentors our students. We enlisted Tyler Rogers, one of our exceptionally talented students, to code and design the website. Within the class we established production, marketing and distribution teams. Students developed and prototyped several ideas for regular feature segments. They included novel person-on-the street interview features, like “What’s on your nightstand?” and “Judge a Book By Its Cover” under the segment “Book Smarts.” “Kid’s Corner” was conceived to include young people — from toddlers to high schoolers — musing about their favorite books. “Epilogue” is our regular feature on book-related news. And “The List” was fashioned after The Soup with Joel McHale

In addition to “Author Q&A” interview features, students developed a “Writers on Writers” segment. We also created “Book Banter,” a scripted animated segment that pairs historical literary figures engaged in humorous conversations, much like Jib Jab.

Launching Socially

To leverage the power of social media, students conceived an Instagram campaign centered on having the public share “shelfies,” much like selfies that feature people pictured with their favorite books. By March, a short spring break and a feeling of nervous anticipation were what separated us from Booklandia.tv’s debut.

Over the break, several members of our team participated in a journalism excursion to Havana, Cuba, which provided opportunities for our cameras to tour a handcrafted book publisher’s establishment and to capture stories about the country’s high literacy rate.

Several campus area launch events marked our successful debut on Monday, April 6, including scavenger hunts, giveaways and contests.

Our students best speak to the value of immersive experiential learning. “Going from a simple idea to a full-blown web channel where people from all over can interact and see what we’ve done, all the countless hours we’ve spent to make sure that the content we produce is great, is amazing,” said Fahma Mohamed, a junior in the class.

“Booklandia gave me the confidence to talk to walk up to strangers and engage in conversation without knowing anything previously about them,” added Judy Holtz, a senior.

Booklandia.tv – Behind-The-Scenes Preview from SOJC on Vimeo.

Our full vision for Booklandia.tv includes active participation from student media groups from other colleges and universities internationally, in the form of submitted content. We also welcome content from K-12 teachers and their students. We’ve created style guides and tutorials, available on our site, and are pursuing corporate sponsors and foundation grant funding.

With an eye toward facilitating an international dialogue about books and reading, our emerging distribution model encourages media outlets (newspapers, radio and television stations, and bloggers) to embed our content within their websites as a public service.

Ed Madison holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon (2012), where he is now an assistant professor. He is an Apple Distinguished Educator and an Adobe Education Leader. Madison’s multifaceted career in media and journalism began as a high school intern at the Washington Post-owned CBS television affiliate in Washington, D.C. during the height of Watergate. At 22, he was recruited to become a founding producer for CNN. His own subsequent companies have provided services for most of the major networks and studios, including CBS, ABC, A&E, Paramount, Disney and Discovery. The Digital Skills Workshop project will be chronicled in more detail in his forthcoming book from Teachers College Press (Columbia University) on journalism, student engagement and the Common Core. Follow him @edmadison.

If there’s one thing Rafat Ali has learned how to do well, it’s to build something out of nothing. He has a history of of making connections other people just don’t see. Once he was a prototypical “blogging-in-a-bedroom” story. No longer.

Now, Ali is the CEO and founder of Skift, the world’s largest industry, intelligence and marketing platform focused on travel. He recently visited the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications as the fourth guest in the college’s Innovators Series, where he imparted his own experiences with keeping start-ups successful.

“This is an online digital arena from an audience perspective, and it’s been great,” he said. “It’s such a giant industry, and we’re just getting started.”

Skift has risen from a staff of two people to 17 in just three years. And they’re already turning a profit.

Ali feels that being able to cover a niche like travel from all angles is part of what makes Skift work – something aspiring journalists can learn from.

Engineering a Career

Ali earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from AMU in Aligarh, India, then hopped around, working in public relations and other spheres. Once he decided he wanted to write, Ali knew he had to head where the action was. He came to the U.S. as a Knight Fellow at Indiana University, where he completed his master’s in journalism in 2000.

After graduation, he started a blog called paidContent – and people liked it. Soon others started inviting him to speak at conferences. Advertisers wanted to be a part of it. All of a sudden, something different was going on.

“PaidContent was an accidental company,” Ali admitted. “I was a journalist turned blogger turned entrepreneur.”

He learned on the job, a good skill for aspiring journalists to have. He stayed with paidContent for nearly nine years, covering news, information and analysis of the business of digital media.

When the UK’s Guardian News and Media came to him with an interest in buying the company in 2008, Ali accepted. The company sold for an undisclosed sum just months before the financial crisis. 

Rafat Ali, CEO and founder of Skift, speaks to journalism students and faculty as part of the Innovators Series speaker set. Photo by Ryan Jones.

Ali spent two years traveling, reading books and learning more about the media landscape. He also was a co-host of “The Mediatwits” podcast on MediaShift.

Lots of people have tried to make travel startups and many fail, he said. Ali employed a test: he wanted his new company to be indispensable.

“If your media brand died tomorrow, would anyone miss it?” Ali asked. “Will your shutting down harm the ecosystem you’re a part of? Nine out of ten cases would probably fail this test.”

“Skift stands for today,” Ali added. “It’s defining the future of travel. There are no qualifiers to what we do. We do what we do.”

Making Connections

In the early days of the Internet, industries were rigidly separated. Media, entertainment and music industries existed in separate spheres. But Ali knew that for his companies to stand out, they had to succeed in bringing many groups together.

“I took that theme of connecting the dots and brought it to Skift,” he said. “Consumers use searches to jump across [various sectors]. There needs to be a digital info brand to connect all those dots across the sectors. We cover everything in travel. And that original vision has stayed.”

See the need, then build, Ali said. Building a direct channel to users is the most important part.

Building Company Culture: Do More With Less

Rafat Ali, CEO and founder of travel startup Skift, speaks to journalism students at the University of Florida. Photo by Ryan Jones.

Skift has a staff of 17, each with specific tasks. Being a travel company means, of course, that the company travels. Their employee summit takes place in a different exotic location each year, such as Iceland earlier this year. The company also regularly profiles unique cafes, puts out trend reports and holds an annual conference that about 800 people attend.

Finding the right people to fit his company’s culture and voice is tricky, Ali said.

“I don’t want a jack-of-all-trades,” he added. “I want to hire the master of one. In my field, specialization matters.”

As a CEO, Ali has to be able to weave all the threads together. Building the company while tuning out the “noise” of the media world is essential, he said. He said journalism schools that can achieve this will be able to stay relevant in the changing digital age.

In the past, Skift pushed out close to 40 stories a day. Now, editorial works on five – and pulling back on creation hasn’t hindered the company a bit. Less is more, Ali likes to say. Five pieces of daily quality work is more important and impressive than 40.

Quality of life is important. His staff never comes in to work on a weekend.

Advice to Startup Journalists

Starting a company and starting a career carry similar lessons. Ali impressed many of them on the student journalists he spoke to.

He suggested that the two most important things for getting started are to spend money on a good lawyer to help you set it up correctly and invest in a good design.

“A good design helps you punch above your weight,” he said. “The reality is everyone else’s was so crappy. The sheer fact of showing up and doing something slightly better helped us.”

Networking is important. Having a voice “out there” is important. Ali believes that print media, when employed strategically, still have a future. But there’s a lot more to it now – audience acquisition has changed.

Finding what channels work best to reach readers is an art that is difficult to teach. Social media, content marketing and email newsletters all play a factor. Journalists, he said, should work on this sense of analytics. After all, their stories have to be read in the first place.

Ali encourages journalism students to work while in school and create a body of work to show employers. In school, you can make mistakes and learn by doing.

“Don’t get caught up in the future of journalism,” Ali said. “The debates are circular and endless. What you need to care about is the future of your career and the subject you’ve chosen.”

Ali chose travel as his sector and said no matter the “noise” in media, there is always room for another startup.

“Building those skills matters,” Ali said. “Media will always be there. You will always be in it.”

Dahlia Ghabour is a senior at the University of Florida studying journalism. She currently works as an editor at the university’s NPR affiliate, wuft.org.

Co-authored with Joel Beeson

“Fail fast.” “Fail often.” “Reward failure.”

It’s easy to evangelize a fast-fail philosophy in spirit, but it is much more difficult to put a reward system for failure into place. It is especially difficult in the classroom — after all, an F in college is not a badge of honor.

Add to this Millennials’ oft-cited propensity for perfection, desire to please and conform, and reluctance to challenge the status quo, and you don’t exactly have a recipe for high-risk innovation. Studies have painted a portrait of this generation as risk averse, and even emotionally fragile, in the face of uncertainty and stress.

James Hamblin, MD and senior editor at The Atlantic, pokes fun at the style of parenting that has created a cosseted generation in this Teaching Failure to Toddlers video, which attributes “helicopter parenting” and too much structure as obstacles to the kind of creative exploration that creates a life-long appetite for risk and a higher tolerance for change.

“Teaching Failure to Toddlers” is tongue in cheek, but some educators assert that a decline in student resilience is a serious problem for our campuses. It also raises concerns for employers for whom graduates may arrive in the workplace ill-equipped to adapt to the volatility of the industry.

John Keefe, senior editor for data news at WNYC and our current Knight-funded Innovator-in-residence, says that while failure may seem antithetical to the pursuit of fact-based journalism, “the best journalists know failure. If you knock on 20 doors — or 200 doors — before finding someone who’s willing to talk … that’s a lot of failure for a story.”

“The same is true with finding a new way to get at hidden data: Being creative might lead to failure,” he notes, “but it could lead to something awesome.”

One practically minded student asserts that it’s not as much about fear of failure as it is about time management, reflecting the business adage “what gets measured gets done.”

“If you’re not incentivized to innovate, its really hard to make the mental space to do that,” said West Virginia University student Colleen Good. “But when you have a more collaborative grading system, it gives you more space to play around with your own idea of what it means to do meaningful work.”

Changing traditions

And there are larger cultural issues at stake when grading models reinforce a status quo. Traditional grading metrics don’t necessarily account for the diverse insights, backgrounds and learning styles that actually fuel innovation, notes Doug Mitchell, Project Founder of Next Generation Radio for NPR and co-founder of The Journalism Diversity Project. While Mitchell takes exception to the notion that millennials lack change agent skills – after all, he notes, they’re responsible for leading change by their user behavior – he also urges educators to challenge the traditional grading models that reinforce narrow social constructs, dampening innovation in the process.

“What I see from teaching and my projects is not a fear of failure, but an adherence to a construct created generations ago … an ancient class grading and standardized testing system that determines value, self-worth and presumed contribution to society.”

Or as broadcast junior Shaleah Ingram says, “Innovation starts with realizing that each of us comes from a different background, and we see and interpret information differently. If we can accept that and piece together our differences, we can be successful.”

In our effort to invite different ways of thinking, we sought a way to flip the “F=failure” grading standard last spring in an experimental class at the West Virginia University Reed College of Media. Our goals were to cultivate more tolerance in the classroom for uncertainty (a pre-emptive strike against student angst); to generate more risk-taking; to prod students to question the conventional reward systems; and to instill agency in them as inventors of new practice.

From left, journalism senior Tessa Bonnstetter, forensic science graduate student Allyce McWhorter and journalism graduate student Sarah Wisniewski use a forensic technique to illuminate writing on a WWI combat helmet worn by an African American war veteran as part of their reporting. Photo by Michael Ellis.

From Teacher: Students to Mentor: Creators

This particular class already didn’t fit in a box that made conventional sense. We were trying to define a new form of forensic journalism in partnership with our forensic science department and experiment with augmented reality. Oh and virtual reality too. We were having a hard enough time getting a handle on the project ourselves. Faking expertise was not an option.

We decided to just be up front about the dilemma and ask students directly, “What do you need to feel comfortable in an experimental environment?”

Journalism students from this experimental class at Reed College of Media explored old and new technology for augmented and virtual reality user experiences. Photo by Joel Beeson.

The first assignment of the semester was this grounding essay prompt:

“We are collaborating in this class on defining a new genre of journalism. We could wait until someone else defines the field … or we can experiment, immerse, define and narrate this genre ourselves. This changes the nature of our relationship from Teacher: Students to Mentor: Creators. And it changes the nature of the classroom itself. You will need to help set ground rules and expectations for the class. You need to tell me what you need in order to effectively innovate within this class.”

This assignment served a dual purpose — not only to generate excitement about the experimental topic of the class, but also to be clear about the inherent challenges, enabling students to drop the class if they wished (one student took the opportunity and dropped out).

Thus we started this experiment with a collaborative “Fail Camp” session that put students in the grading driver’s seat with surprising results.

As part of culture and knowledge building, students are introduced to a a variety of innovation scholarship. Photo by Dana Coester.

The “I” Word

To set the scene, we first introduced students to our Top Five in innovation scholarship.

“It’s not just a buzzword. It’s science,” we assured them.

1) Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns

In order to fully grasp the challenges of change, we shared this quote from futurist Ray Kurzweil:

Illustration by Dana Coester.

In his now cult-classic 2001 essay, Law of Accelerating Returns (which has been required reading for our experimental classes since 2006), Kurzweil helps a non-tech audience anticipate accelerating shifts in technology, or as Steven Kotler recently called it,  “The acceleration of acceleration: How the future is arriving far faster than expected.”

The gist is that an exponential change graph is relatively flat for a very long period of time but always reaches a point where the curve becomes vertical, and in terms of digital technology, we have reached that point.

We explain to students that in order to confront a future that is on top of us, we have to explore a different way to prepare for changes in our field. We have to forgo incremental skills acquisition and linear training. We have to leap.

2) Clay Christensen’s Disruption Theory

If Kurzweil’s vertical curve represents the sheer cliff of technological disruption, we note that in disruption theory, you’re either climbing it or you’re falling off of it.

To illustrate why early adoption (or abject experimentation) isn’t reckless, we use Christensen’s concepts to help students understand who stands to benefit in a disrupted industry (i.e., they do).

• Incumbents (Established experts, large companies) underestimate their competition
• Traditional metrics are challenged (such as grades)
• New skills are valorized (agility, novelty, risk)
• Incumbents face higher risks (the collapse of their business model)
• New entrants move upmarket (students = new entrants)

3) Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory

While this classical curve has been revisited, adapted, shape shifted and challenged many times since rural sociologist Everett Rogers theorized it in 1962, it remains critical in understanding the nature of the early adopter-to-late adopter continuum. It also helps students visualize and understand how innovations have diffused through their own social systems.

4) Brass and Burkhardt’s First Users Model

First User benefits can be particularly persuasive to students, and the model has been at the core of our early adoption research for years in rural communities. We’ve extended this model to provide a compelling framework for students that addresses the question, “what’s in it for me?”  If you experiment in unknowns, we tell students, you will likely gain:

• Increased power
• Increased access to resources
• Close association with other innovators
• Increased opinion leadership
• Become a change agent

5) Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragility Model

Taleb’s work Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder can be read as an elegant homage to the natural distress, ambiguity and chaos that characterize states of innovation. He flips the notion of fragility on its head and defines a new state of “antifragility” as an empowered realm imbuing not only high tolerance for, but also an ability to thrive in states of distress and disorder. We use this as a rallying call:

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

Fail Camp

Certainly there’s a balance between total chaos and the controlled classroom — as there are differences between what defines productive failing and what is just sloppy work. But we’re discovering our students know the difference and can achieve on their own terms. Here are a few of our take-aways from flipping the grade:

• Students need to help identify what are suitable rewards and motivations for risking failure in the classroom or project.
• Helping to define their own measurements increased their accountability to those measurements as well.
• Students needed explicit permission to take risks.
• Faculty need to be candid and transparent with their own vulnerabilities and model productive risk-taking. This can be as simple as narrating that process out loud, and it can shift navigating uncertainty into being part of the lesson.  “I have no idea if this is going to work because the technology we’re using didn’t even exist 6 weeks ago. You are the first users, you’ll get to discover what works or doesn’t work. How cool is that?” 

This is important to build trust and to demonstrate a sense of shared mission – “we’re all in this together” – when it comes to experimenting.

To reproduce your own Fail Camp with students, here are the prompts we used to guide our collaborative session and to help define the course’s expectations:

1. How comfortable are you with narrating experiments and failure as a student in this or other classes? What does “rewarding failure” mean to you?
2. This class will involve unknowns. Characteristics of innovators include being comfortable with ambiguity, having more questions than answers, and an acceptance that being comfortable inhibits innovation. How can I make being uncomfortable more comfortable?
3. How do we collectively define “productive” for this class? Forget the syllabus, the grading scale and grades. If you had to list six outcomes that would make this a successful class from your perspective, what would those outcomes be?

Telling data from our experiment is that most students answered the last prompt with a version of “Let loose and have fun.” Risking failure and rewarding the process should naturally involve an anthropological notion of play – a teaching strategy educators may find difficult to adopt. As Thomas Malaby, in “Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience” observes, Western culture historically has maintained a long-standing distinction between work (productive) and play (non-productive), but digital technology, among other factors, has challenged that distinction. “It is difficult to deny that play is often productive, and that work, rather than always a matter of routine, can be shot through with the open-endedness we most often associate with play.”

It may be that our Fail Camp is really Play Camp, a classroom that promotes curiosity, a sense of joy, and an eagerness to improvise in the face of a perpetually changing and provisional media world.

Dana Coester is an assistant professor at the PI Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, and also serves as creative director for the school’s media innovation center. Coester’s work focuses on community media and the economic development potential in technology disruption. Her research examines the future of storytelling with special interests in mobile, augmented reality and wearable technology at the intersection of narrative and neuroscience. Coester earned her master’s degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1993.

Joel William Beeson is an associate professor at the WVU Reed College of Media. Beeson’s current research in virtual reality is informed by two decades of research in race and representation, emerging media and documentary studies. Beeson has M.A. and B.A. degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia and received his doctorate in American Studies at the Union Institute and University investigating how oral histories with Critical Race and Feminist Standpoint theories can inform counter narratives in social documentary projects. Beeson produced and directed the award-winning documentary, “Fighting on Two Fronts: the Untold Stories of African American WWII Veterans.”

This article was written in collaboration with Susan Jacobson and Jacqueline Marino.

It had been years since Alexa Jane used markers, tape, scissors and pens to make something. Today, though, she and others are taking to cardstock and paper, taping and drawing to discuss the next generation of mobile news.

“I prefer to have the hands-on,” says Jane, a Digital Media Studies major at Florida International University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “It’s easier to illustrate this way what we like instead of using text.”

Audience Analysis undergraduate students at Florida International University pilot a session of paper prototyping for funded research into audience interest in long-form multimedia journalism. by Robert Gutsche, Jr.

Jane and her team construct screens and designs for interactive graphics to insert into a folder with a spot cut to the actual size of an iPhone 6 Plus.

By cutting and pasting text and interactive elements on long, narrow strips of paper, the students work to transfer a long-form style article about rising sea levels in South Florida from the laptop to the mobile screen.

This is paper prototyping – a method of using Post-its, pens and imagination to design features of interactive media.

A cut-out of an iPhone 6 Plus takes center stage in prototyping where students use paper to create new features and screens for a web-based long-form project that they redesign for mobile use. Photo by Robert Gutsche, Jr.

Used throughout the professional world to varying degrees and with a variety of alterations of the method, paper prototyping engages journalists and media users with thinking about design, interactivity and functionality of new formats and platforms.

Research Project at RJI

The prototyping these students are doing is a pilot for part of a research project led by three Research Scholars at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

Building upon an article about digital long-form journalism published in the journal Journalism, the project engages students and media users from communities in Ohio and Florida in ways that explore the degree to which long-form multimedia journalism is desired by audiences. It also looks at how the form may be molded for mobile audiences or altered to become a sustainable form of journalism for large and small media outlets.

In the process of preparing for this project, we challenge the role of funded research in the classroom, the value of qualitative methods in audience studies of journalism, and the influence of social and cultural approaches to complicate both the field of Journalism Studies and students’ classroom experiences.

And, of course, sometimes things are worth doing, too, because they are just fun. Talking about paper prototyping, Jane says, “I don’t even remember the last time I was that crafty.”

Research Happens

Starting this summer at Kent State University’s IdeaBase, Jacqueline Marino has been using with eye-tracking to see how users interact with long-form projects, such as the Guardian’s Firestorm and rue89.com’s piece on Haiti on iPads.

A heat map from eye-tracking done at Kent State University shows where users focus their attention on The Guardian’s Firestorm multimedia project. Image captured by Jacqueline Marino.

Participants in that study have been reading long-form projects while wearing Tobii 2 glasses. Marino is analyzing the data collected by software that measures what types of content the participants view and for how long. When combined with other forms of inquiry that are part of our project, we can surmise as to what attracts and maintains audience attention in long-form journalism.

As part of funded research from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, researchers use eyetracking to examine audience interactions with long-form journalism. Video courtesy of Tobii.

This semester, researchers at FIU are finishing up a second round of focus groups with paper prototyping that have participants design long-form projects for mobile devices. An earlier set of focus groups asked participants to describe how they liked viewing content on both laptops and mobile screens.

Also this semester at FIU, Susan Jacobson is examining the step-by-step experience of users who view online apps, including an interactive map related to sea level rise designed by students and faculty here last year.

These opportunities provide students with further insight into the research role of many faculty and universities and the purpose of research to better the industry. Additionally, these funded opportunities not only contribute to new knowledge and innovation by bringing much-needed public and private funding into classrooms in ways that shape courses and student experiences.

True innovation in the classroom, though, appears in the convergence of engagement, practice, and theory.

Critique & Criticism in the Classroom

Paper prototyping in a course on Audience Analysis introduces students to issues and challenges of funded research, qualitative methods, and cultural approaches to media studies. by Robert Gutsche, Jr.

In an age ruled by analytics, media classrooms must continue (or, in some cases, begin) to embed student experiences with critical/cultural interpretations of production, content and audiences.

Students interacting with concepts of long-form journalism through this experience are also introduced to cultural interpretations of media symbols, social and cultural messaging through literary forms, and participatory methodologies.

By reading Nightingale’s “The Handbook of Media Audiences,” students were able to join classroom experiences that combine theory and practice, such as scenario planning, cultural examination of news, and community-based journalism.

“It was hard to read because of the disruption with the pictures and the sound,” said undergraduate Daniela Estrada, who has worked on piloting focus groups for the RJI project. “I guess nobody likes to read that much nowadays.”

Still, questions remain that can be played-out in future engaged research-based classrooms:

• In what ways do we assess students’ interactions with research? Is there a need for new rubrics to measure learning related to the intersection of theory and practice?
• How do we bridge the time lapse of research? Students tend to move on from courses – and even some programs – before research is completed and published.
• What must journalism programs do to blend and apply research more into skills classes or vice versa?

Feel free to comment below to help drive the conversation.

FIU journalism major Jessica Fuentes contributed reporting to this post.

Robert Gutsche Jr. is an assistant professor at Florida International University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Susan Jacobson is also an assistant professor at FIU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Jacqueline Marino is an associate professor at Kent State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

What do the Huffington Post, “The Simpsons,” Minecraft, and Led Zeppelin’s first album have in common?

All of them started as experiments. The Huffington Post was launched in the mid-2000s as a link list and blogging site, leveraging the celebrity network of co-founder Arianna Huffington for content. The Simpsons began in 1987 as short animated clips shown during the commercial breaks of a sketch comedy show on the upstart Fox television network. Minecraft was created in 2009 by a Swedish game programmer, Markus “Notch” Persson, as a part-time project. Led Zeppelin I was recorded in a few weeks in 1968 after the British rock band toured Scandinavia, with production self-funded by guitarist Jimmy Page and the band’s manager.

Led Zeppelin 1 album cover.

When the artists, creators, and producers launched these experiments, there was no guarantee they would do well. But the way they innovated greatly increased the chances of success. They moved fast, used low-cost methods of production, and kept the teams small. When they released early versions to the public, they paid close attention to what audiences liked—and didn’t like. This feedback could be incorporated into subsequent releases, and could also help drive marketing and business decisions.

All of the examples listed above are examples of what I call lean media. While their creators went on to enjoy great success, lean media is not just the domain of superstars. Lean media methods can be applied to products designed for niche or local audiences, or products that have a short shelf-life.

Further, lean media projects can take place in a variety of environments. There are many examples of people working out of a coffee shop or basement recording studio, as well as professional production teams working for established companies. All kinds of people and organizations can leverage lean media techniques to create innovative, exciting new works which resonate with audiences and help achieve business goals.

The lean startup movement

My way of evaluating the success and failure of new media products changed after attending an October 2010 talk by Eric Ries, a software developer and author of “The Lean Startup.” Earlier in his career, Ries co-founded a company that attempted to capitalize on the instant messaging craze. As CTO of IMVU, he was responsible for developing a product that used avatars to connect with multiple IM applications. The team planned lots of features, which took six months to develop.

The initial product was an utter flop. Very few people downloaded the software, and only after interviewing and watching people use the software did they realize most of their initial assumptions about their target audiences were wrong. Testers liked the avatar concept, but hated the IM connections. IMVU ended up throwing away thousands of lines of code before finding a model (based on a 3D virtual world) that worked.

Ries realized that IMVU’s initial top-down approach to product development was flawed. The team had wasted months creating a complex product that no one wanted. However, once they started to listen to what their users were saying, interesting things started to happen. They were able to steer IMVU into areas the development team had not previously considered. Today, IMVU has millions of registered users and a huge database of virtual goods.     

Based on his experiences and discussions with CEOs and managers from other companies, Ries articulated the lean startup methodology. Central to the production, marketing, and growth of a venture is validated learning—the process of “demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects.” It is a rigorous approach to product development that emphasizes getting early versions of the product in front of users, carefully measuring the results, and quickly iterating.

Another concept that is central to the lean startup methodology is the minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP is more than a technical prototype — it’s a bare-bones product that can be shown to early adopters to validate assumptions. Through a deliberate cycle of building, measuring, and iterating, a real product that has real demand can emerge. With real demand comes repeat orders, lower costs, and eventually growth (and profit).

The iterative cycles are structured to achieve product/market fit. Marc Andreessen, a co-creator of the Netscape Web browser and a top Silicon Valley venture capitalist, gives the following definition:

“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

It sounds so basic. Make something that people want. Yet countless technology companies have made the fundamental mistake of building an app, a gadget, a platform, or something else that people do not want. They may have achieved product/solution fit, in which a team creates a great product that solves some problem … but it’s not a problem that customers care about!

Bringing lean ideas to the media world

Ries’ focus was on software and technology startups, but I realized some his ideas about product development, feedback cycles, and eliminating waste could be applied to media content as well.

I had seen it with my own eyes. Print content, websites, video, music and other products that leveraged lean methods had many positive attributes. User feedback could be observed and incorporated sooner. The products were cheaper to produce, and they made it to market more quickly.

Conversely, products that took the “big launch” approach — large teams, top-down directives, secretive launches, etc. — tended to encounter problems. They required more staff and budget commitments, took a long time to complete, and more often than not led to mediocre products or expensive failures.

Just as Ries had articulated a framework for lean tech startups, I wanted to create a lean framework that was specific to media ventures. While media and technology startups share some commonalities, I believe there are some marked differences in the way a band, video producer, games designer, or an online editor approaches developing products (content) and connects with customers (audiences). Hard-to-measure intangibles such as creativity, design, and brand really do matter.

What causes media products to fail?

I’m a media person. I’ve been involved as a producer and manager in various media businesses since the early 1990s, including the music industry, broadcast television, online tech news, and book publishing. Over the years I’ve been involved with scores of product launches, new brands, and innovative media experiments. Some succeeded. Most failed. For years, I was apt to blame failures on insufficient planning, poor marketing, staff issues, and lack of management buy-in. I could also point to factors beyond our control, ranging from economic crises to technological shifts.

In hindsight, I now believe that a counterproductive way of thinking about media creation contributed to many of the failures. Over and over again, in many different companies, I participated in the creation of expensive, intensive, and secretive productions. This formulaic approach—which I call the big launch playbook—may work for a small minority of productions. But it sets up many other ventures for failure.

As the term suggests, the “big launch” is focused on the launch. There is a lot of planning and building in secret, with everything building up to the official launch date. Producers and creators are guided mainly by creative instincts and prior experience, external cues of what is doing well in the marketplace, and internal feedback. There is an emphasis on professional production processes and expensive marketing campaigns. Audiences seldom have a chance to see or experience the product before the official launch. If they do, it is usually through pre-launch marketing campaigns (think of the Star Wars clips released in the runup to the launch of The Force Awakens) or focus groups, by which point the development phase is nearly complete. After launch, there may be an opportunity for feedback-inspired improvements. In many cases, such improvements may be very limited, or focused on marketing rather than changes to the core product.

Conceptually, the big launch playbook looks something like this:

Teams can make elaborate plans and spend lots of time and money developing something that audiences are supposed to like. However, the true test doesn’t come until the end of the process when it’s released to the world. If it doesn’t work? There may be some low-hanging fruit that can help put the product on the right track. But in many cases, it may be too late or too hard to fix it.

The lean media playbook

The lean media playbook emphasizes the following elements:

• Small teams. Individual producers or small teams drive the project forward. Keeping the team small lets members move more quickly.
• Reduction of waste. Producers work with the tools and resources at hand, and avoid complex, expensive, or time-wasting processes. Creating a satisfying media experience for early audiences is more important than obsessive attention to detail.
• Audience feedback. Teams monitor audience reaction to early versions of the product to gather measurable data (metrics) and qualitative feedback (commentary).
• Iterative development cycles. The team improves a product based on metrics, audience feedback, and their own sensibilities and instincts.

Conceptually, the lean media framework looks like this:

As the diagram indicates, audience feedback plays a major role in the development of lean media products. Feedback can be qualitative (i.e., based on audience comments or observations of their behavior) or quantitative (based on metrics or other forms of numerical data).

For instance, when The Simpsons first appeared as short commercial “bumpers” on the Tracey Ullman Show, quantitative data included television ratings. But there was important qualitative information, too. When producers bundled the clips into longer reels and showed them during costume breaks to live studio audience, the resulting laughter validated the idea that The Simpsons could be developed into a full-length program.

Lean startup practitioners favor actionable data that can help product teams understand what is working and make hard decisions about how to proceed (or not; if the data does not support moving forward, the team may “pivot” to something else). In the media world, qualitative feedback may be more accessible, particularly during the early prototype stages. The feedback may cover:

• Design elements
• Accessibility
• Aesthetic considerations
• How it makes them feel
• Pricing

Ideally, audiences will share feedback with the team at the earlier stages of development, starting with the idea itself. Of course, no product or prototype will be ready the day your brilliant plan is hatched, but for certain formats it is possible to talk with audiences about the concept, or show simple outlines or wireframes. Use those comments to inform development of the working prototype.

Once a working prototype is available, don’t keep it under wraps—let your test audiences try it out! Use the audience feedback to shape progressive iterations of the prototype, with the goal of getting even more actionable feedback and metrics for the soft launch.

What is a soft launch? You may have heard the term before—it’s common in both the software industry as well as with the launch of certain types of physical products. Firms conducting soft launches quietly release their products to a small group of customers in order to gauge interest or tweak features and/or marketing messages before the main event.

In the lean media context, a soft launch is the initial public appearance of the product, or elements of the product such as the design, important creative elements, etc. Depending on how audiences react, the media product in question may only need some minor tweaks—or it could require a major overhaul.

The hard launch is the point at which the product is stable in terms of creative vision, production, presentation, features, and messaging. It may not be necessary or even possible to make significant changes after this point, although motivated teams will constantly be looking for ways to further improve their creations.

Some lean media considerations

Are all low-budget productions lean media? Not necessarily. Audience feedback must be incorporated into the development process, to let producers better understand what audiences like—and don’t like. Otherwise, it’s just a low-budget production operating under the big launch mindset.

It should also be noted that adding audience feedback to the mix does not mean internal feedback is being thrown by the wayside. Nor should producers feel obliged to incorporate every whim of their early test audiences. Rather, the team needs to evaluate and synthesize this information, and make decisions on how to proceed. Some audience signals will be easy to interpret. Others will require the team to balance other considerations (creative, production, marketing) to decide on the best way forward.

Where does it all end? Ideally, the product will grow into something that enjoys great success. Think of some of the examples cited in the introduction, or some of your own media favorites that started lean and grew into something significant and long-lasting.

In reality, however, many products will never get out of the development stage. Maybe audiences don’t like it (no matter how many improvements are made), so the creators go back to the drawing board. Or perhaps the team is working on several products at once, and when one of them shows promise, they drop their work on the others to push the winner forward.

The lean media framework is itself still at the prototype stage. I am sharing ideas with early audiences (you) to gather feedback and make additional improvements, with the goal of creating a simple guide to the basic lean media concepts. Feel free to leave your comments or share your experiences below, or check out the lean media book website, which contains additional draft chapters and examples.

Ian Lamont is the founder of i30 Media Corporation, which publishes In 30 Minutes® Guides. He has written for more than a dozen online and print publications, and served as the managing editor of The Industry Standard. To learn more, follow @ilamont on Twitter, or visit the lean media website.

Journalism educators can sometimes feel under attack, as very rarely does any report about the state of journalism education provide glowing reviews of what we’re doing in the hallowed halls of academia. So at the risk of piling on, here’s one more suggestion: Teach your students more about the business of journalism.

In the Knight Foundation’s “Above & Beyond – Looking at the Future of Journalism Education,” Medill’s dean Bradley Hamm made a comment that struck me as only partly true.

In the report he said that during transitions in the business world, “you could have picked up the phone as a CEO and called business professors who you knew were experts and you would have brought them in to work with you. … When [the digital-first shift] hit our world … were you calling anybody in journalism education to help you? If you wanted to have thought leadership, in my opinion, you would have gone to the students.”

Photo by 401(k) 2012on Flickr and reused here with Creative Commons license.

However, here’s where Hamm’s critique falls short, in my view. Calling on students to help manage the digital-first shift might have helped journalism organizations figure out which tech tools were capturing a segment of the audience, but that would have done little to create a new and sustaining business model for the profession. That’s because journalism education as a whole has failed graduates and the industry when it comes to helping students understand how journalism gets paid for.

So how do we foster all the skills journalists need and give them a crash course on the business? Just as it’s easy for industry critics to point out where news organizations have gone wrong, it’s relatively easy to prescribe fixes for journalism education (especially if you will not be held responsible for making those changes yourself), so here’s a look at what several schools are doing.

Create a required class

At the University of Maryland, learning about the business is a required core class. Called “The Business of News,” this one-credit course is mandatory for all seniors seeking a journalism degree. At Arizona State University (ASU), a class titled “Business and Future of Journalism” is also required of journalism students. The course syllabus includes a quote from Dan Gillmor, professor of practice at ASU:

“It boggles my mind that we would graduate people out of our journalism schools who don’t understand the market economy,” Gillmor says. “That to me is bizarre.”

WVTM General Manager Hank Price worries about the lack of business savvy among journalism students. Photo by Ji Hoon Heo.

Specifically, journalism educators graduate students who know little about the industries in which they hope to work. Hank Price is general manager for Hearst-owned WVTM-TV in Birmingham, Alabama, and my co-author for a book about the business of news. He worries about the lack of savvy many journalism grads seem to have when it comes to the financial foundation of journalism.

“During the old top-down days it was not important for journalists to understand how their business worked. Journalists were only accountable to their managers and to themselves,” Price said in an email. “Today’s journalist is involved in a two-way conversation.  Things like product usage, subscription trends and even the bottom line are among the ways users express their satisfaction with the product. “

Price says hiring journalism grads who understand the critical role of audience in the media business equation is going to be an essential part of helping journalism thrive in the future.

That’s something Tim McGuire, who regularly teaches the ASU business of journalism course, can agree with. He says he’s now introducing students to concepts that help them understand the importance of the “customer experience.”

“News is now a commodity, so we think it’s crucial to have students thinking about the customer because they will be going into newsrooms fighting to survive,” said McGuire. He’s also focused on promoting entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity in the class. “Only the creative and innovative are going to survive.”

Adding options, not requirements

Of course, multiple schools offer courses and even tracks in entrepreneurial journalism, but these are rarely, if ever, required classes that every journalism major must take.

In fact, the realities of curriculum change mean that it can be very difficult to cram another course into a student’s degree program, so big-picture thinkers like Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute suggest that classes that focus on teaching about audience analytics may be a path to injecting an understanding of the business imperative news organizations face.

At the University of Mississippi, where I teach, we offer a specialization in media management. The two-course credential consists of a media sales class and a media management course, but only a small percentage of our students will take advantage of the opportunity. Still, our hope is that the specialization will make a difference in the job hunt for these students, and ASU’s McGuire has evidence that it might.

“I’ve had several students contend they got a job because they could answer questions about the business and future of journalism,” he said.

Tompkins says it’s also more likely than ever that journalism graduates will never work for a traditional news organization.

“Increasingly, the people I teach are freelancers, or as they call them in Canada, ‘casuals.’ These journalists are not full-time employees but independent contractors who have to learn how to run their careers as a business,” said Tompkins in an email. “Many of the big network magazine shows now only use freelancers, not staff photographers. Producers are often freelancers called in to coordinate live coverage in big breaking stories.”

Photo by Andrew_Writer and used here with Creative Commons license.

All of this points to a need for more understanding of the news as a business.

The real barrier?

To Dean Hamm’s point, I do agree that there has been a lack of thought leadership in journalism education, specifically in the area of finding paths to financial sustainability for the profession. So, beyond the battles over how to do it, what’s keeping more schools from adding a healthy dose of instruction about the journalism business into the curriculum? It may be a misunderstanding of what the “wall” between the editorial and the business side of a news organization is supposed to do.

“What we have always referred to as the ‘wall’ was really a way of saying we were not willing to have our news product influenced by advertiser interests. That has not changed,” Price said.  “I would argue that management continues to have a responsibility to protect their journalists from outside influence. That is a completely different issue than understanding how a business works.”

McGuire is even more blunt when asked what he would tell any journalism professor who feels the business of news has no business in the curriculum.

“Go teach sociology! If you’ve been near a newsroom in the last 25 years, you know that’s horse pucky,” he said. “It’s ridiculous, a very old-fashioned point of view; the issue is that we need to be independent, not that we don’t recognize the importance of understanding the business side.”

Deb Wenger is an associate professor and director of undergraduate journalism in the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. Her new co-authored book, Managing Today’s News Media: Audience First, is now available from Sage.

This is the second of three blog posts on innovation by Eric Newton, innovation chief of Cronkite News at Arizona State University.

By experimenting with new approaches at Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, we identify innovations that improve both journalism and education. This is Dean Chris Callahan’s big idea: We hope to create the world’s first fully developed “teaching hospital” of journalism education, an immersive learning experience that develops new approaches while also teaching best practices.

Sports journalism junior Kody Acevedo tries out EcoRift with ASU professor Garth Paine during Innovation Day. EcoRift provides a virtual-reality experience of the desert utilizing 3-D audio and video. Photo by Deanna Dent/ASU Now.

As innovation chief of Cronkite News (the news division of Arizona PBS), my goal is to help the student-produced professional news operation find new ways to become a better source of journalism for the 2 million households it serves, to help journalism students become better prepared for 21st Century careers, and to help the school as a whole to stay on the cutting edge of journalism education while engaging the entire university and community.

An example of experimentation: Last Wednesday, we held our first Innovation Day. At 18 hands-on “innovation stations,” hundreds of students flew indoor drones, tried 360-degree cameras and virtual reality goggles, and played with new camera rigs, new apps, even robots.

Students tweeted their ideas for how the technology could improve journalism. Cronkite News executive editor Kevin Dale handed out prizes to choice suggestions.

Innovation Day was an experiment. We learned from it. We learned we could do it. People would come. New technology at a journalism school can be fun. Immediately, VR plans were being hatched. By our basic definition of innovation — a new and better way — the event worked.

Global studies senior Jawad Shahbandar tries out a drone while his friend Carolina Marquez, a journalism senior, and professor Steve Doig watch during Innovation Day. Photo by Deanna Dent/ASU Now.

Cronkite School faculty and staff came up with most of the ideas for the day. We gave them a flexible format, one that will change as the technology changes.

Other Cronkite experiments:

• Launching a major crowdfunding campaign to support the Borderlands bureau of Cronkite News as it amplifies the voices of people who live on both sides of the border during this election year. (The effort includes bringing on business school students to help analyze the crowdfunding data.)
• Creating Cronkite News Refresh, a news review with stories chosen based on how well they did the first time around in social media. Early example here.
• Expanding the reach of Cronkite News and special News21 reports to 33 million homes nationally through Apple News, WatchUp, as well as a rebroadcasting strategy in partnership with KCET/Link
• Moving the digital production bureau into a central newsroom location, making it easier for that team to test in a live news environment a dozen new tools in one semester. (One favorite, Bubbli, makes spherical photos.)
• Creating a new tools class to help students learn how to rapidly find, try, adapt and critique digital tools that could improve journalism.
• Using “virtual presence devices” such as the Beam and Double to bring faraway journalism innovators into our newsrooms and classrooms.

Some of these experiments may seem like one-offs. Some you might not think are as new or big as you would like. That’s not the point. Innovation is not skydiving. You don’t have to get it right on the first try. What we are going for here is not the perfect invention but the willingness to experiment.

Next post: Innovation and the Cronkite School.

Eric Newton is the first innovation chief at Cronkite News at Arizona State University, consultant to Knight Foundation on special projects and endowment grants. Eric Newton joined Knight Foundation in 2001 and served most recently as senior adviser to the president. In the journalism program at Knight, he helped develop more than $300 million in grants. Previously, Newton was founding managing editor of the Newseum, leading the content team at the world’s first museum of news. He started at California newspapers. As city editor, assistant managing editor and managing editor of the Oakland Tribune under Bob and Nancy Maynard, he helped the paper win more than 150 awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. Follow him on Twitter @EricNewton1.

This is the third of three blog posts on innovation by Eric Newton, innovation chief of Cronkite News at Arizona State University.

Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron gave a terrific speech last graduation season about the transition from print to the digital age. Among the many quotable quotes:

“The best journalism involves discovery. It involves surprise and wonder and excitement – and new knowledge.”

The same could be said for innovation.

At the Cronkite School at Arizona State, all students are required to enroll in a professional immersion program.

Photo by City College Norwich on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

Innovation is built into the syllabus. When Cronkite News students work to get 360-degree video or drone footage on their website or their air, or experiment with Slack, or use the Trac federal data in stories, they are not only supplementing their storytelling. They’re satisfying a course requirement.

As far as it goes, that’s good. What we’ve been looking at recently are ways that an innovative news machine can help students and faculty beyond Cronkite News.

Experiment with partnerships

Connecting innovation with a daily news machine should help faculty who already are innovating. Under Retha Hill, for example, Cronkite’s New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab already creates apps, game templates and VR experiments. But when she partners with Cronkite News — and with their partners — it increases the number and types of experiments.

That raises a larger question: Shouldn’t our “teaching hospital of news,” under the right conditions, be able to grant “hospital privileges” to those who work elsewhere at the university? Say a data visualization professor in the engineering school has students working on a random dataset. Why not partner with Cronkite News and find data related to a topic in the news? The result could be feedback from not one person, but from all the people who saw the data graphic.

Why can’t we apply the same ideas to the art school, the business school, the public policy school, or any other of the many centers, institutes and schools that make up ASU? We think we can. And we’re working on it.

True, some of these experiments will fail. Others may teach us things but won’t make any sense as part of the news stream. So we are working up CronkiteLab.News as a place focused on the new things we are trying. That way, when students working with Jacquee Petchel on a project such as “Hooked” win a DuPont Award for “high-quality, innovative” storytelling, we’ll have a place to explain how and why their investigation into heroin addiction was innovative.

In some ways, documenting experiments at Cronkite is harder than doing them. Cronkite News moves fast. We need to find the time and space to not just try new things, but also to track those things. Using Baron’s words, it’s the “new knowledge” that turns experiments turn into innovations.

None of this should diminish one fundamental fact:

Cronkite has been doing innovative things all along. Those include Tim McGuire’s teaching of innovation both in the classroom and online, Dan Gillmor’s Massive Open Online Course on news and media literacy, and Len Downie and Petchel’s unique News21 investigative program. The faculty as a whole agreed on a one-unit coding course for journalists as well as a host of new dual degrees, including master’s degrees, being developed with other schools on campus.

Photo by THINK Global School on Flickr and reused here with Creative Commons license.

Many creative professors populate journalism programs. Any good journalism school can list dozens of amazing ideas. Will they work? One way to find out is to connect them to daily news environments in which good new ideas can be tried, tracked and adopted. Journalism schools have several great advantages in the building of ever-changing newsrooms. Among the greatest of those: their journalists are an ever-changing group of students.

Actual teaching hospitals provide more than immersive education for medical students. They develop new models, processes, designs, tools, techniques and more. They serve their communities in ways commercial hospitals don’t. In “Searchlights and Sunglasses,” I argued journalism education can do it too. I still think it can, no matter how small or large the campus.

The students, the news they produce and the “new knowledge” from great journalism schools are hopeful signs that the best values of journalism values may yet survive and thrive in the 21^st Century. As Baron put it:  “Today, our profession feels shaken. But fear cannot be our guide. If there is one thing that must remain unshakable, this is it: That we will publish the truth when we find it and when the public deserves to know.”

Eric Newton is the first innovation chief at Cronkite News at Arizona State University, consultant to Knight Foundation on special projects and endowment grants. Eric Newton joined Knight Foundation in 2001 and served most recently as senior adviser to the president. In the journalism program at Knight, he helped develop more than $300 million in grants. Previously, Newton was founding managing editor of the Newseum, leading the content team at the world’s first museum of news. He started at California newspapers. As city editor, assistant managing editor and managing editor of the Oakland Tribune under Bob and Nancy Maynard, he helped the paper win more than 150 awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. Follow him on Twitter @EricNewton1.

Freelancers get flexibility in their schedules, the freedom to travel when necessary and the ability to choose projects they care about. But they also face a constant hustle, all-too-frequent low pay and countless business decisions — from setting prices to filing taxes. Freelance is now a commonly chosen path for journalism students. Unfortunately, it’s not as commonly a part of teaching in journalism schools.

A 2013 survey of recent journalism and mass communication graduates showed about 20 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients with a full-time position were freelancing on the side, and about 40 percent of part-time workers were doing freelance work. Given that these figures have hovered here since 2006, it’s safe to say freelancing is no passing fad.

Whether freelancing is a lifelong dream or a respite between full-time jobs, freelancers across the country said journalism schools would do well to train students for this path, focusing on five essentials.

1. The value of networking

Networking is important for all careers, but when your livelihood depends on your own hustle, networking takes on a special significance. Morgan Phelps, a Columbia College magazine journalism grad who freelanced for several years after graduating in 2008, regards networking — reaching out to editors and cultivating relationships with them — as a large part of freelancing. “You’re much more likely to be successful if you have a relationship,” Phelps said. Full-time freelance photographer Jake Naughton, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s undergraduate journalism program and CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, said editors aren’t the only people freelancers should know how to connect with.“I could not be a successful freelancer were it not for my friends who are also freelancers,” Jake said. “Networking is really important, but so is just having a crew of people who you can lean on, and also edit with, shoot ideas past.”

2. How to pitch

Deborah Blum. Photo by Mark Bennington.

In her years as a professor, Deb Blum, now the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, drove home the importance of a good pitch. “Everyone in every single one of my classes had to learn to write a pitch letter, and in a number of cases I required them to pitch,” she said. “And in fact, their grade was dependent on them generating a professional quality pitch that I would approve that they could send out.”

Naughton sees pitching as a way to have control over his career.  “I live or die, a lot of times, on pitching stories,” he said.

3. How to determine your rate

Asking for a raise is hard enough, but when there is no standard pay scale, determining what to charge as a freelancer, and being able to negotiate, can mean the difference between paying the bills or not. While Naughton acknowledges that J-Schools may not be able to teach on this topic, he believes that the question “What are you worth?” merits conversation.

4. How to manage your “business”

Phelps and Naughton both cited the business side of freelancing as a key challenge. “When it came to filing my taxes, the first time that I actually did a significant amount of freelancing, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m doing this right,’” Phelps said. “I didn’t really know where to go.”

After graduating from UW-Madison’s journalism school in 2010, Phil Levin worked for TV stations as a video producer before starting his own (one-man) production company, PDL Digital. Now, he said, running the business is the trickiest part. “If I’m going to charge a certain rate for an end-product, by the time I pay taxes on it, pay other people, pay to rent equipment, pay insurance and all these other fees, I have to make sure it’s worth my time,” he said. As a working freelancer during her time as a professor, Blum brought copies of her contracts to class and discussed the documents with her students. “That was the world that I lived in, and I wished that I had learned that when I was in school,” she said. Blum’s thinking at the time: “Let me send you out a little better armed.”

Phil Levin shoots a project for his company, PDL Digital. Photo courtesy of PDL Digital.

5. A day in the life

Phelps, Naughton and Levin say hearing from working freelancers like Blum can be invaluable for students. At Columbia, Phelps’ teachers were working journalists, and she learned from their experience in the freelance world.

For Naughton, reviewing successful pitches from working journalists stands out as some of his most valuable grad school experience. Levin recommends that J-Schools invite local freelancers to share their experience with students. He has returned to his alma mater to discuss video production and TV reporting, and he believes these presentations can help students identify a business they want to get involved in and how to get their foot in the door. Inviting guest speakers also puts less onus on the teacher, Levin said. “If they want to have someone in the room talking about freelancing, they just call the local newspaper and say ‘Give me your favorite freelancer. I want to bring them in.’”

Freelance: A continuing study

Journalism schools teach many valuable skills that help all working writers, editors, producers, photographers and storytellers, including freelancers. But given the proliferation of freelancing and its unique challenges, it is not enough to teach history, ethics and the components of a compelling story. “All journalists working today need to know something about the freelance business because it’s such a large part of the business,” Blum said.

And an education in freelance work doesn’t stop at graduation. When Blum attends professional journalism meetings, she and her colleagues discuss such topics as how to be a smart freelancer, what a contract looks like and what determines a successful pitch.

“We’re all working on that all the time and getting smarter at it,” she said. “And the sooner we start getting smarter, the more we thrive. And journalism schools want their students to thrive.”

Clare Milliken is a Chicago-based writer and editor. Milliken is a proud UW-Madison journalism school grad, and her work has appeared on Greatist.com and HelloGiggles.

Earlier this month, West Virginia University’s Reed School of Media hosted MediaShift’s latest ‘Hack the Gender Gap’ event for women in media and technology. The event brought together college-age women from across the U.S. for a weekend smart-media “makeathon” focused on the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential impact on journalism and media.

Participants attended sessions with industry leaders and spent the weekend working in teams to develop their own startup ideas, which they presented to a panel of judges on Sunday. We’ve rounded up a collection of photos, videos and coverage, as well as a Storify, to capture the highlights of the makeathon at WVU. Did we miss anything? Please add it in the comments, and we’ll update the post.

Photos

Photos by David Smith / WVU

Click the image above to view more photos on Facebook.

Video

Coverage

Maker Spaces, Gender Gaps and Helping Young Women to Succeed, by Susan Zake

Turning Uncertainty into Magic: How We Won the Women’s IoT Makeathon, by Antoinette Yelenic

Makers Gonna Make, Innovators Gonna Innovate at WVU’s Womens IoT Makeathon, by Jillian Clemente

#EdShift Chat: Empowering Female Entrepreneurs in Media

WVU Reed College of Media Makeathon Empowers Young Women to be Leaders in the Emerging ‘Smart-World’ Market

Hack the Gender Gap: A Women’s IoT Makeathon at WVU (information page)

Feedback

“I really loved this event! It was an amazing opportunity filled with wonderful people. What an incredible experience, to raise your voice and actually be heard. Thanks for that.” -Lydia Owens, WVU

“This was my second makethon, and it was great. I love working with a team of all women, and I love learning about new technology through the event. I wish the weekend could continue! I think it would be great to see virtual speakers, networking events and more community development in between events. Or it could be cool to provide seed funding to teams. The biggest challenge after the event is that everyone on your team is too far away from each other to really continue work after an event.”

“I think the competition time is perfect, but more workshops beforehand to really delve into the topic would be amazing. With maybe some time for networking among the groups/mentors/etc. afterward?”

“I’d like to see 5 minute lightning talks by students or professionals before or after lunch so that participants can be inspired by other cool work that people are doing. I really wish that there was a presentation about business and marketing. That was the biggest hurdle for my group because none of us knew how to address revenue or how much money we would need to create a sustainable business.”

Storify

It’s a running joke among my friends and family that I am technologically challenged. I have even been known to struggle with operating our game-room television — which we have owned for more than 10 years.

So imagine my uncertainty when I registered for a weekend-long Women’s IoT Makeathon at West Virginia University’s Media Innovation Center on April 1-3. I wasn’t familiar with the maker movement or any of its mantras. “Makers gonna make”? What did that mean? What exactly was I going to make? But I am a people person and a leader who is willing and determined to learn.

I may not have known what to expect when walking into the Makeathon, but I was certain of three things:

1) I would take away an experience of a lifetime.

2) I would be surrounded and mentored by prominent female leaders in the journalism and media industry.

3) I would get to work with and learn from dozens of other college-aged women.

What could be better than that?

#MakingMeCrazy

I eagerly arrived at the Media Innovation Center just before 8 a.m. on Saturday, April 2. I anticipated a long, work-filled day, but I didn’t know exactly what to expect.

I am a planner. I like knowing every detail about every situation, so not knowing the challenge was driving me crazy. I received my name tag, along with a small purple clothespin, and learned I was on Team Clothespin. Before heading for the coffee line, I scanned the list to see who was on my team. I did not recognize any of the names.

And then they announced the challenge: Our job as a team was to envision, map and pitch a startup use in the Internet of Things/“smart world” landscape. The catch is that we had to make something that would solve a problem relevant to the journalism and media industry. We had about 30 hours in which to do this before we would present our solution to a panel of judges.

Photo by David Smith of The Reed College of Media.

#MakingLifeMagical

To get things started, our team began with an icebreaker of two truths and a lie, which got everyone warmed up to each other rather quickly. Among us were two journalism students (Trista Thurston of Ohio University and Eunice Lee of Northwestern University), a computer science student (Rebekah Kambara of West Virginia University) and a strategic communications/advertising student (me, also of West Virginia University). Tanya Ballard Brown, a digital editor at NPR, was our mentor-facilitator.

We began a task that everyone loves to hate: brainstorming. We discussed target after target, problem after problem, product after product, and still nothing. We went from focusing on zero waste to recycling to cereal box prizes.

Before we knew it, it was time for lunch. We still had nothing.

Then it was time to hear from Christine Sunu, the GE fellow in BuzzFeed’s Open Lab for journalism, technology and the arts. That is when my team really got inspired. Sunu spoke about the Internet of Things (IoT) in media and journalism and how IoT can make life more magical.

That was it! Making life more magical.

At that point, we shifted our focus to finding a simple and practical solution to a problem that many people face every day: managing their money.

And that’s how CARDful was born.

A mock up version of Team Clothespin’s product, CARDful. Photo by Antoinette Yelenic.

#MakingCARDful

The problem: College students and recent college graduates struggle to manage their money and maintain budgets. Oftentimes, they find themselves overspending without realizing it until it is too late.

Our solution: CARDful, a card with a color-coded interface paired with a mobile application that makes consumers aware of when, how and what they are spending. Designed to help college students and recent graduates “adult,” the card would help them manage money at the point of purchase, all while receiving rewards and user-friendly financial and business content from media partners.

Our team was lucky enough to have strengths that complemented one another. Once we came up with our idea, it was a no-brainer as to who would focus on what. We knew we needed a cohesive story. We wanted to be sure that in our five-minute pitch to the judges that we would effectively touch on our research, target market, product specs, IoT tie-ins, marketing, budget and partnerships.

Members of Team Clothespin working hard on their product, CARDful. Photo by David Smith of The Reed College of Media.

#MakingWinners

By noon on Sunday, it was time for presentations from all eight teams. I was amazed at the thorough and interesting products and solutions that other teams pitched.

Pitching CARDful to the judges and audience felt as though we were on our own real-life episode of “Shark Tank.” It was exciting and nerve-wracking and seemed to go by in the blink of an eye.

After all eight presentations, we anxiously awaited the judges’ decision. When they came out of their deliberation, the judges discussed the strengths of every team and then announced CARDful as the winning idea. Overjoyed and honored, my teammates and I jumped out of our seats smiling and ready to claim our medals. I cannot be more proud of Team Clothespin and CARDful.

By the end of the event, I no longer felt uncertain about being involved in the Makeathon. I was confident and lucky to be among such talented and driven women. The experience inspired us all to be creative and to think up what seemed impossible from the start.

All photos by David Smith / WVU.

Antoinette (Toni) Yelenic is a senior student in The Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. She is majoring in strategic communications with an emphasis in advertising and dual minor in business and event planning.