Based on my performance this semester, I believe I deserve a C for my final grade in advanced reporting.
In my list of goals from the beginning of the semester, I stated that improving my writing in longer, feature-style stories was my main goal for the semester. With my stories on the Mid-Missouri Comics Collective, professional comic book writers in Kansas City and other arts stories, I believe I have stretched and improved my skills. Based on the field I want to enter in journalism — entertainment journalism, particularly at the publication of my former internship Wizard Entertainment — these clips have been extremely helpful in job applications and, after sending them to Wizard to update my resume, I was contacted for a job interview and later offered a job. In that sense, I consider my work at the Missourian a success because it showed Wizard that I had learned from my time there and gave me a chance to demonstrate that I could apply those skills elsewhere.
I believe my class participation during the course of the semester was also a strength for me in this course. I enjoyed the chance to express my opinons and views in a blog and later have some of them reach not only my classmates but faculty members across the Journalism School as well. In all our talks about how we want to improve the Missourian in our community and make it a source for discussion, I ended up using my blog to cause discussion within our journalism community. My e-mail to Tom — which later became a blog post — about the need for a forum on the Missourian’s web site was a topic of discussion in class and in e-mail form among editors and faculty. My post about whether we were really listening to our readers led to a class-long discussion. I think in writing these posts and managing my blog in a thoughtful and provocative way, as well as participating in the discussions in class, I demonstrated the theme of discussion outlined in the syllabus and prompted my classmates to do the same.
However, I am aware that the quantity of my output fell significantly short. I spent a lot of time on my first three stories on the comic book community and did not immediately pick up the pace. That said, once being made acutely aware that this amount of work was not going to cut it, I spent nearly every day after that in the newsroom and pursuing stories with gusto.
I think my improvement since my last stint reporting at the Missourian was substantial, and the goal of honing my skills at writing longer stories was achieved. I have tried my best to recover from low output; I’ve written five stories since Thanksgiving — with more to come — and have been in near-daily contact with my editor. I believe I have earned a C.
(See the below for my final non-grade pitch post)
Thursday, December 6, 2007
That's all she wrote (for now)
Well, it's been a fun and thought-provoking ride — hopefully for any reader's out there as well as myself.
This blog actually made me think twice about whether or not an online journal of this nature was really worthwhile. In the end, I think they are.
Not only do blogs have a level of personality that news may never be able to have, but they have a level of discussion as well that most news outlets have yet to achieve. There is something to be said about being able to bare our brain and soul onto a web site and have thier contents be up for discussion for any and all willing to read. With a level of reporting, blogs have become to column of the future without that stuffy newspaper feel. This blogging experience has led me to think that one of the aspects of my new prospective job as Online News Editor for a magazine need be reporter blogs. Examples like th Columbia Tribune really can't be denied their success and after feeling the liberation brought with writing a blog — a blog with relevant content and not just the day's idle thoughts — is an experience that I think can benefit writer's and readers alike.
That's all for now, folks. Please see the above (and last) post for my grade pitch.
This blog actually made me think twice about whether or not an online journal of this nature was really worthwhile. In the end, I think they are.
Not only do blogs have a level of personality that news may never be able to have, but they have a level of discussion as well that most news outlets have yet to achieve. There is something to be said about being able to bare our brain and soul onto a web site and have thier contents be up for discussion for any and all willing to read. With a level of reporting, blogs have become to column of the future without that stuffy newspaper feel. This blogging experience has led me to think that one of the aspects of my new prospective job as Online News Editor for a magazine need be reporter blogs. Examples like th Columbia Tribune really can't be denied their success and after feeling the liberation brought with writing a blog — a blog with relevant content and not just the day's idle thoughts — is an experience that I think can benefit writer's and readers alike.
That's all for now, folks. Please see the above (and last) post for my grade pitch.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
A publication written by the audience, for the audience A.K.A. Stevens Second Suggestion
This past week has been all about websites this week; thinking about how to improve them and their content. Between my job interview with Wizard about the possibility of being brought on staff to help revamp the content and image of their website and Jane Ellen Stevens document critiqueing the Missourian, my mental process has been extremely web-centric of late. With that said, I think that many of Stevens criticisms aren’t only something that can be used at the Missourian (and I think many of them should start going into effect here, because there are some really great and progressive thoughts in this packet) but also shed some light on what I might suggest to Wizard in my follow-up job interview after they read the current pitch I have of how to revamp their site.
However, being a Missourian focused blog for the time-being, I would like to voice my opinion about how greatness of Steven’s second recommendation. The idea of a whole separate site/publication that is specifically directe at students and young people and covers music, bloggers, video games and the MU campus is genius. It isn’t just genius because most of Columbia’s similar sites (CoMoMusic.com, for example) aren’t very good sites, but because we have the single greatest asset in creating this type of site: competent students.
Not only could Columbia use a site like the one Stevens suggests, but we have more of an ear to the ground in this field than any Columbia publication could hope to have. Our reporters are entirely students who aren’t stuffy literary critics, jaded critiquers of music or video game reviewers with limitless budgets. We can review, report and discuss books, comics, video games, movies and music with a degree of authority but without completely alienating our audience. I love music, I love concerts, I love comics and I love video games. The New York Times may have some incredibly talented writers who I know are super-intelligent of the topics they write about, but when I read their reviews of concerts or articles about video games, I have to say they leave me lacking. They come across as the Academia view of things that people should just be able to describe as AWESOME (Yes, in all caps) and not with a string of adjectives that sound more condescending than relatable.
For a publication like this, we (college students) are truly our own audience. While we are young journalists learning to write about courthouses and school boards for the masses from ages 13 to 80, we are also the best candidates in this town with our journalistic training to be writing about Halo 3 and The Blue Note’s events. This is something we have to harness, because no other publication in town (or potentially in the country) can hope to compete with the fact that we would be writing articles for an audience we are part of; writing articles for ourselves.
However, being a Missourian focused blog for the time-being, I would like to voice my opinion about how greatness of Steven’s second recommendation. The idea of a whole separate site/publication that is specifically directe at students and young people and covers music, bloggers, video games and the MU campus is genius. It isn’t just genius because most of Columbia’s similar sites (CoMoMusic.com, for example) aren’t very good sites, but because we have the single greatest asset in creating this type of site: competent students.
Not only could Columbia use a site like the one Stevens suggests, but we have more of an ear to the ground in this field than any Columbia publication could hope to have. Our reporters are entirely students who aren’t stuffy literary critics, jaded critiquers of music or video game reviewers with limitless budgets. We can review, report and discuss books, comics, video games, movies and music with a degree of authority but without completely alienating our audience. I love music, I love concerts, I love comics and I love video games. The New York Times may have some incredibly talented writers who I know are super-intelligent of the topics they write about, but when I read their reviews of concerts or articles about video games, I have to say they leave me lacking. They come across as the Academia view of things that people should just be able to describe as AWESOME (Yes, in all caps) and not with a string of adjectives that sound more condescending than relatable.
For a publication like this, we (college students) are truly our own audience. While we are young journalists learning to write about courthouses and school boards for the masses from ages 13 to 80, we are also the best candidates in this town with our journalistic training to be writing about Halo 3 and The Blue Note’s events. This is something we have to harness, because no other publication in town (or potentially in the country) can hope to compete with the fact that we would be writing articles for an audience we are part of; writing articles for ourselves.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Amazon.com's user modifications are THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS!
The future of newspapers, the near future at least, has been sitting in front of me for years and I never noticed till yesterday. The future lies in the way in which Amazon.com is set up for its users.
In order to use Amazon, you must register as a user. This is step one. After registering at Amazon, you can shop for things from any category and based on what pages you look at and what you purchase, a list of other recommendations (based on similarity of items and what other users also check after checking the item you check) is made. This list can then be viewed and modified by the user (by rating items you have bought, or by informing the site that you already own a certain item) and then better recommendations are given. Not only that, but recently, Amazon has added a feature that gives percentages of what people buy when they look at a certain page (i.e. 57% bought the item on this page, 13% bought item B, 10% bought item C, and so on). Lastly, users can start forum discussions on certain topics that can even be viewed from the forums of related topics/products so that buyer input can be seen for an item on its page and on the pages of related items. Also, users can rate useless comments that do not further the discussion, which are viewable, but not exposed in the conversation.
This is the format for the newspaper of the future.
Readers will register (for free or for a cost depending on publication). They will then search for news, and initial recommendations of other stories will be made, like “Other readers read the story on Monkeys you read, and then read this story on Zoos.” The website would take the stories viewed by a reader, based with the reader’s recommendations for readings and place those on the front page of the site when this user signed in. The front page would basically be custom made with the news that this person was most likely to read. The reader could of course search for other stories and viewing those would further customize his/her recommendations. The reader could also look at a list of recommended stories and rate how much they enjoyed them to further customize their experience.
Forums would be available for all stories, but users would vote on which comments were contributing and which were pointless insults and the good posts would be left while the bad posts would be removed.
Also, much like Amazon’s homepage will feature recommended products for me, it also tells me about certain sales and newly released items. In this way, the personalized “front page” of the website could feature mostly recommended stories but also have links to breaking news that the person might want to know about even if the news did not fall specifically under their recommendations that reflect their preferences.
Now, if people were to go online and use the website until a list of recommendations was pretty fleshed out for them, they could then select the option for a print version of the newspaper based on their recommendations to be sent to their house. Who wouldn’t read a print paper when they were assured to have it chock-full of stories that they know they would read anyway.
Basically, Amazon takes their user input (what their customers view, rate and buy) to tailor their webpage so that what pops up is something the consumer is most likely to purchase. News outlets can take this user input (what stories search, read, comment on or rate) to tailor their front page (be it wed or print) so that what is there is what are the stories each particular reader is most likely to read.
This would of course lead to some horrible science fiction future where advertisements begin be tailored specifically to consumers (“Hey Jim, I hear you have athlete’s foot…” etc) but it also could be used to give people the news they want immediately without having to sift through different web pages and web searches or multiple paper sections.
In order to use Amazon, you must register as a user. This is step one. After registering at Amazon, you can shop for things from any category and based on what pages you look at and what you purchase, a list of other recommendations (based on similarity of items and what other users also check after checking the item you check) is made. This list can then be viewed and modified by the user (by rating items you have bought, or by informing the site that you already own a certain item) and then better recommendations are given. Not only that, but recently, Amazon has added a feature that gives percentages of what people buy when they look at a certain page (i.e. 57% bought the item on this page, 13% bought item B, 10% bought item C, and so on). Lastly, users can start forum discussions on certain topics that can even be viewed from the forums of related topics/products so that buyer input can be seen for an item on its page and on the pages of related items. Also, users can rate useless comments that do not further the discussion, which are viewable, but not exposed in the conversation.
This is the format for the newspaper of the future.
Readers will register (for free or for a cost depending on publication). They will then search for news, and initial recommendations of other stories will be made, like “Other readers read the story on Monkeys you read, and then read this story on Zoos.” The website would take the stories viewed by a reader, based with the reader’s recommendations for readings and place those on the front page of the site when this user signed in. The front page would basically be custom made with the news that this person was most likely to read. The reader could of course search for other stories and viewing those would further customize his/her recommendations. The reader could also look at a list of recommended stories and rate how much they enjoyed them to further customize their experience.
Forums would be available for all stories, but users would vote on which comments were contributing and which were pointless insults and the good posts would be left while the bad posts would be removed.
Also, much like Amazon’s homepage will feature recommended products for me, it also tells me about certain sales and newly released items. In this way, the personalized “front page” of the website could feature mostly recommended stories but also have links to breaking news that the person might want to know about even if the news did not fall specifically under their recommendations that reflect their preferences.
Now, if people were to go online and use the website until a list of recommendations was pretty fleshed out for them, they could then select the option for a print version of the newspaper based on their recommendations to be sent to their house. Who wouldn’t read a print paper when they were assured to have it chock-full of stories that they know they would read anyway.
Basically, Amazon takes their user input (what their customers view, rate and buy) to tailor their webpage so that what pops up is something the consumer is most likely to purchase. News outlets can take this user input (what stories search, read, comment on or rate) to tailor their front page (be it wed or print) so that what is there is what are the stories each particular reader is most likely to read.
This would of course lead to some horrible science fiction future where advertisements begin be tailored specifically to consumers (“Hey Jim, I hear you have athlete’s foot…” etc) but it also could be used to give people the news they want immediately without having to sift through different web pages and web searches or multiple paper sections.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Dirty Jobs: The Discovery Channel's gain is ours as well!
I must admit, when I saw Monday’s front page I was near outrage. I saw the big Dirty Jobs label on the first story and was furious that the Missourian would so shamelessly rip off a brilliant idea by the Discovery Channel.
Then, I saw in the first sentence that the article immediately expressed that the week’s series was being completely “inspired”… er, *cough * ripped off…by the show, and all of a sudden I was completely pleased. All it took was a simple admittance of idea robbery (which, is of course, completely legal in this sense) and I was on board. I love Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel and I can’t believe just taking such a simple premise (I mean, the show was there for goodness sake) and putting it in the paper hadn’t dawned on me before.
In essence, this type of story has been written millions of times before. It’s a profile of someone who has an interesting job, but through that dirty twist on it, latch it onto a popular show and make it local and suddenly you are looking at the makings of a fantastic story. I have to give mad props and extreme kudos to the minds behind this idea. So simple, yet so effective. When I saw that Tuesday’s article would be about a Livestock Semen Inspector…well, I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard or looked forward to Tuesday’s paper so much…EVER!
So, what’s next…Mythbusters? I’ll take it on. Myth 1…how many MU students who kiss on the bridge in Peace Park actually get married? I broke up with my ex-girlfriend who I kissed on it, so Myth busted on my vote. How about, will the Tiger Mosaic ever be finished? Will Mizzou ever have a period where half the campus isn’t under construction? The possibilities are endless!
Missourian Deadliest Catch? The squirrels are game this season!
Mizzou How It’s Made. Focus on the history of the columns construction and the making of the bronzes on campus (Thom Jeff, Beetle Bailey, etc).
Like I said, the possibilities are endless and I haven’t even started working Animal Planet and History Channel shows into the equation yet.
Then, I saw in the first sentence that the article immediately expressed that the week’s series was being completely “inspired”… er, *cough * ripped off…by the show, and all of a sudden I was completely pleased. All it took was a simple admittance of idea robbery (which, is of course, completely legal in this sense) and I was on board. I love Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel and I can’t believe just taking such a simple premise (I mean, the show was there for goodness sake) and putting it in the paper hadn’t dawned on me before.
In essence, this type of story has been written millions of times before. It’s a profile of someone who has an interesting job, but through that dirty twist on it, latch it onto a popular show and make it local and suddenly you are looking at the makings of a fantastic story. I have to give mad props and extreme kudos to the minds behind this idea. So simple, yet so effective. When I saw that Tuesday’s article would be about a Livestock Semen Inspector…well, I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard or looked forward to Tuesday’s paper so much…EVER!
So, what’s next…Mythbusters? I’ll take it on. Myth 1…how many MU students who kiss on the bridge in Peace Park actually get married? I broke up with my ex-girlfriend who I kissed on it, so Myth busted on my vote. How about, will the Tiger Mosaic ever be finished? Will Mizzou ever have a period where half the campus isn’t under construction? The possibilities are endless!
Missourian Deadliest Catch? The squirrels are game this season!
Mizzou How It’s Made. Focus on the history of the columns construction and the making of the bronzes on campus (Thom Jeff, Beetle Bailey, etc).
Like I said, the possibilities are endless and I haven’t even started working Animal Planet and History Channel shows into the equation yet.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Are we really listening to the public? Where is the data, survey results and public input? Or are we still just talking to each other?
I haven’t heard a play-by-play rundown of what happened at the retreat this summer with all the Missourian editors, but the more I hear about it — the changes made there and how the changes were made to better serve our readers — the more certain questions come to mind. These questions come to mind after a conversation held almost a month ago in our Journalism and Democracy Capstone class…
Our professor, Charles Davis, brought in Reuben Stern to give us a rundown of a lot of the new things that were being done at the Missourian with public interaction and the new web-based format. I had heard about a lot of this because I was in the advanced reporting class where we went over a lot of it, but Reuben started guiding the rest of the class through the new “comment” feature and other things. I don’t remember exactly how we got to this question — this all took place weeks in the past — but after continual remarks along the lines of “our readers have responded well to this” and “another thing we are doing to aid our readers that they seem to be picking up on,” (these are not direct quotes, just the gist of what led the question) Greg Gaia asked a very simple question. He asked whether data was actually being taken to gauge whether certain things on the web site were “working” to back up some of the generalizations we were all throwing around in our class discussion. The basic answer, at the time and I believe currently, was and is “No, we don’t have hard data to back this up.”
Today, in class, as we discussed staying in touch with the community — web-based or in person — and what we need to do to accomplish this, it brought me right back to the Greg’s question: what are we doing to gauge whether or not what we are doing now is “working” and how are we finding out where we are going wrong if it isn’t? I guess what I am really saying is, I keep hearing people in the newsroom and the J-School talk about how we need to become part of the conversation that the public is having, but did we even take the public’s voice into consideration when we made major changes to the way the paper works; changes that were made to better serve the public?
As far as I know, our current way of gathering information on whether the “new Missourian” is working better than the “old Missourian” is the same way we always have. We check the web-site and letters to the editor and gauge things from the limited public input we get. I am sure there is more going on, but none of it is hard data. I don’t know exactly what public input went into the change, but by all appearances and things I have heard, it seems to have been our thoughts on the public’s thoughts, not hard data. Now, it seems to be the same, we gauge our reactions and discuss them amongst ourselves instead of surveying the public or crunching numbers.
Now, I know we have surveyed readers in the past, but after the changes we have made, shouldn’t we be doing it again? Why not do something as simple as putting up a comprehensive web-survey asking the public what they think of the new Missourian and suggestions they might have? We could email it to all the registered comment users and we could advertise it on the front page. I believe we did this before, but why not do it again? I just feel like every conversation that we have about this talks about how we need to get off our high horse and down with the people and adjust to their needs, but it seems like we are still on our high horse looking down and guessing their needs. We keep talking about how journalists are talking to each other about the future of journalism and are doomed to fail because community journalism and blogs will run us out if we don't talk to the people, yet we keep having these conversations among ourselves without bringing any hard data from the public to our discussion. It just makes me wonder if anything has actually changed or if we are just saying it has and acting like it is true. I don’t think I will be convinced that things are changing according to the public’s needs until I see some hard data (survey results, sales numbers, web site hits, frequency of web site hits, etc) and some actual public input, because right now it still feels to me like we are up on our high horse talking about how to better things down on ground-level.
Our professor, Charles Davis, brought in Reuben Stern to give us a rundown of a lot of the new things that were being done at the Missourian with public interaction and the new web-based format. I had heard about a lot of this because I was in the advanced reporting class where we went over a lot of it, but Reuben started guiding the rest of the class through the new “comment” feature and other things. I don’t remember exactly how we got to this question — this all took place weeks in the past — but after continual remarks along the lines of “our readers have responded well to this” and “another thing we are doing to aid our readers that they seem to be picking up on,” (these are not direct quotes, just the gist of what led the question) Greg Gaia asked a very simple question. He asked whether data was actually being taken to gauge whether certain things on the web site were “working” to back up some of the generalizations we were all throwing around in our class discussion. The basic answer, at the time and I believe currently, was and is “No, we don’t have hard data to back this up.”
Today, in class, as we discussed staying in touch with the community — web-based or in person — and what we need to do to accomplish this, it brought me right back to the Greg’s question: what are we doing to gauge whether or not what we are doing now is “working” and how are we finding out where we are going wrong if it isn’t? I guess what I am really saying is, I keep hearing people in the newsroom and the J-School talk about how we need to become part of the conversation that the public is having, but did we even take the public’s voice into consideration when we made major changes to the way the paper works; changes that were made to better serve the public?
As far as I know, our current way of gathering information on whether the “new Missourian” is working better than the “old Missourian” is the same way we always have. We check the web-site and letters to the editor and gauge things from the limited public input we get. I am sure there is more going on, but none of it is hard data. I don’t know exactly what public input went into the change, but by all appearances and things I have heard, it seems to have been our thoughts on the public’s thoughts, not hard data. Now, it seems to be the same, we gauge our reactions and discuss them amongst ourselves instead of surveying the public or crunching numbers.
Now, I know we have surveyed readers in the past, but after the changes we have made, shouldn’t we be doing it again? Why not do something as simple as putting up a comprehensive web-survey asking the public what they think of the new Missourian and suggestions they might have? We could email it to all the registered comment users and we could advertise it on the front page. I believe we did this before, but why not do it again? I just feel like every conversation that we have about this talks about how we need to get off our high horse and down with the people and adjust to their needs, but it seems like we are still on our high horse looking down and guessing their needs. We keep talking about how journalists are talking to each other about the future of journalism and are doomed to fail because community journalism and blogs will run us out if we don't talk to the people, yet we keep having these conversations among ourselves without bringing any hard data from the public to our discussion. It just makes me wonder if anything has actually changed or if we are just saying it has and acting like it is true. I don’t think I will be convinced that things are changing according to the public’s needs until I see some hard data (survey results, sales numbers, web site hits, frequency of web site hits, etc) and some actual public input, because right now it still feels to me like we are up on our high horse talking about how to better things down on ground-level.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
It's all about to boil over...
Well, time for a little self-reflection in my already late blog post…
The semester is more than halfway done and I just don’t know what else I should be doing. The two stories that I have done so far are some of the best I think I have ever written —http://www.columbiamissourian.com/media/multimedia/2007/pages/Comics/comics2.htm and http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2007/10/07/quinlan-keep-comic-book-store-close-end-october/ — but my current story that ties Midwest comic books to the national scene just isn’t quite coming along the way I wanted and after that I just don’t know exactly where to go. I know that Wizard Magazine, where I did my summer internship and one of my dream jobs, is looking at me for a job and if that doesn’t pan out I am heading to a career fair this week to try for more jobs, and I think that is the problem with my reporting. Earlier this semester, Missouri was what I was thinking about. I had been in New York all summer and I came back ready to make some waves at the Missourian and focus on some stories that I wanted to see in print for central Missouri. But now, things are coming to a close and all I can think about is how I don’t have a job yet and how that is the next most important thing and how I need to get that taken care of. I know there is always more that I can learn at Mizzou and more I can learn in Columbia, but right now, I just feel like the next step needs to happen in my life and I know that next step is a job. It’s just getting very hard to focus on that and try to focus on the present at the same time. Things are just getting a bit shaky and piling up and when I need to be buckling down more than ever, I feel like I need a vacation more than anything else.
Ah well…that said, I better get back to work. I got a ton of things to do.
The semester is more than halfway done and I just don’t know what else I should be doing. The two stories that I have done so far are some of the best I think I have ever written —http://www.columbiamissourian.com/media/multimedia/2007/pages/Comics/comics2.htm and http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2007/10/07/quinlan-keep-comic-book-store-close-end-october/ — but my current story that ties Midwest comic books to the national scene just isn’t quite coming along the way I wanted and after that I just don’t know exactly where to go. I know that Wizard Magazine, where I did my summer internship and one of my dream jobs, is looking at me for a job and if that doesn’t pan out I am heading to a career fair this week to try for more jobs, and I think that is the problem with my reporting. Earlier this semester, Missouri was what I was thinking about. I had been in New York all summer and I came back ready to make some waves at the Missourian and focus on some stories that I wanted to see in print for central Missouri. But now, things are coming to a close and all I can think about is how I don’t have a job yet and how that is the next most important thing and how I need to get that taken care of. I know there is always more that I can learn at Mizzou and more I can learn in Columbia, but right now, I just feel like the next step needs to happen in my life and I know that next step is a job. It’s just getting very hard to focus on that and try to focus on the present at the same time. Things are just getting a bit shaky and piling up and when I need to be buckling down more than ever, I feel like I need a vacation more than anything else.
Ah well…that said, I better get back to work. I got a ton of things to do.
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