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.

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.

Taking blogs for granted...the American Way!

For my journalism and democracy class this week, we were asked to comment on some readings by Ann Florini from “The Coming Democracy.” She started her book by talking about how the printing press being invented by Gutenberg was really the start of society and democracy. I have to agree that this really changed the world, but she also mentioned how the printing press had been invented in China hundreds of years before Gutenberg but had never taken off because they “weren’t ready” for the advancement. This lead to numerous questions about “why” and “how,” but in the end it led my to wonder about our current situation with a modern printing press like the blog.
The blog is a universal printing press, with the Internet as our medium. Gutenberg printed pages of the Bible, just like people can now chronicle their lives via the blog. The real question I have to ask, and Florini made me wonder about, is why we developed this modern printing press first. The answer followed quickly, as I realized that we have a great economical advance over many countries. This led to the thought of what the world would be like if the people in Darfur or the rest of Africa had the same access to blogs, or this type of mass “publication.”
It really made me wonder how much more the struggles of this region might be shown to the world if everyone there was able to blog. Instead of picking on senators who are having gay liaisons in airport stalls, we could be highlighting the problems with entire regions of the world. It really makes you think about what a luxury we have to be able to use blogs for a class assignment or to use as a diary, when they could be used to change whole regions of the globe if they only had the access to computers we have.

Halo 3: We looked like n00bs getting headshotted with our week multimedia coverage.

Well, I have a rant today, and though it is about a week late, I still think it’s a valid rant subject.
Last week, Halo 3 came out. Now, this isn’t just business news. This game broke the record for all multimedia sales in a single day, breaking its own record set by Halo 2. That is some crazy worldwide news that has a huge effect on Columbia, since — as our article pointed out — people were lined up in droves throughout the night in front of every store that sold the game.

Now, I thought the reporter who handled the article actually did a great job. Quotes were gathered from multiple locations all over Columbia and the written section did a great job of capturing the craziness of this game premiere. Where we fell off was with the photo and the multimedia.

The two photos that accompanied the article were taken at Tiger Tech, on campus. Yes, it was the biggest game preorder in the store’s history, but when you have an article that is talking about businesses all over Columbia and the world, getting two pictures from Tiger Tech on campus seems lazy and doesn’t compliment the article the way it could. I know we aren’t the New York Times and couldn’t feature Halo 3 premiere photos from Japan, LA and New York City, but I think we could have done better than just Tiger tech.

Next, with numerous expensive video equipment around the newsroom now, I was hoping to go to the website and see tons of multimedia footage from gameplay video to interviews in line with different people from every store in Columbia. You’ve got pandemonium all over town, people in costumes and camping out, and while we have words that let people know that, we could have gotten some awesome video. We had 2 minutes of footage from Tiger Tech that aired a day or two after the article. Heck, I may be in advanced reporting, but gimme a call and say, “Yo Jim, you wanna take a camera out and interview some crazy Halo fanatics in line tonite for some online multimedia stuff.” “Heck yeah, sounds like a blast,” I’d say. Throw in a story credit or two for my final grade and we could have had every camera the newsroom owns out getting mad footage of this bonkers event. We could have at least linked some gameplay video from You Tube to the website.

All I’m saying is this was about the easiest event ever for us to go hog wild on multimedia with and we came up real short. You can’t get really fun stuff like this from school board and city council and when we finally get the chance to really go all out with the new toys I have been hearing about and really give our small town a cool local taste of an international story, we come up short with nothing but Tiger Tech stuff that makes this look like a Mizzou story and that’s it. Kudos to the reporter who did capture the feel of the event and hysteria on a local and international level, but man, we gotta back up a good story like that with the multimedia and photo to show this story isn’t just words, its an account of craziness that rarely visits this small town.

Ok…rant over.