Conversational Media for Journalists: Notes for My Talk

By Amy Gahran

At 2:15 today, at SEJ's 2006 conference, my friend and I, Reporter co-founder Adam Glenn will be giving a session entitled How Blogs and Citizen Journalism Can Help Your News Career. (This is part of the "Craft II" track.)

Adam will start off with an overview of blogging, which is at least somewhat familiar territory to most journalists by now. Then I'll tie that back into the bigger picture of conversational media, and why that's becoming important to media, communities -- and to journalists who hope to keep making a living.

Here are my notes, and links, for this session...

First, here's the blurb about this session that ran in the agenda:

So you know what a blog is (or you think you do) and you've heard of citizen journalism (although that sounds rather heretical to your editor). So what? Our experienced presenters will help you navigate the new landscape of participatory, conversational media -- where a surprising amount of news breaks, and which you can leverage to build your career in the newsroom and beyond. Learn how to apply these tools to enhance news coverage and elevate public discussion of environmental topics -- while avoiding common pitfalls and myths.

Presenters:

• Amy Gahran, Media Consultant and Freelance Writer. Co-founder, I, Reporter
• Adam Glenn, Media Consultant and Freelance Writer. Co-founder, I, Reporter

Location: Emerald II

Next, here's what I'm going to talk about. Well, OK, it's just my plan. I tend to improvise my talks to a certain extent, responding to the particular needs and interests expressed by attendees. But having given this kind of talk to journalists many times, I expect this mostly reflects what I'll actually cover...

Questions for attendees: What defines news? What is the point of producing news? What role does it play in communities?

My assertion:News organizations don't own or define the news. They never did, actually.

Big change: Media is no longer mainly a spectator sport. The evolving news audience is getting steadily more interested in participating: discovering, combining, discussing, contributing.

Journalists can -- and should -- be doing much more than simply producing stories that are distributed by a news organization. News can about engaging communities -- information flowing in both/all directions.

You can't stop conversational media (blogs, forums, IM, podcasts, more). So leverage your audience's interest, knowledge, and enthusiasm to create better coverage, enhance your professional reputation

Combining journalism training/ethics with conversational media and community liaison skills can increase your market value and expand your career opportunities. Important while the traditional news media job market continues to shrink.

What is conversational media? Here's how I define it on my blog The Right Conversation:

Conversational media is: Using media to publicly converse with a writer/speaker and each other. This happens through tools such as weblogs, online forums, chat sessions, e-mail discussion lists, wikis, podcasts, social software, call-in shows, creative participatory use of print or broadcast media, and more.

Social/conversational media: 3 ways to use to further your career:

1. Reporting: Getting leads & sources, following conversations. Feeds, aggregation services, social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Newsvine).
2. Networking: Identify and engage key communities who can help you achieve your goals. Good for scoping, funding, or launching new projects or venues. Important to participate in the public conversation. Comment tracking, SEJ Talk, forum search feeds.
3. Marketing & personal reputation-building: Make yourself and your work more findable. People hire you if they hear about you or can find you. Also, an easy-to-find home base for you on the web. Search engines like blogs better than sites: more frequent updates = higher page rank.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Being a community liaison is a marketable skill that's complementary to journalism -- and increasingly important at news organizations.

If you don't have time or resources to do the coverage you want, why not distribute some of that task to your audience. You CAN do this in ways that enhance credibility and foster transparency. It doesn't have to be a free-for all.

Example: iBrattleboro: citizen journalism, Brattleboro, VT. Nature section

Here are just a few recent items people submitted to iBrattleboro:

• Suggestions for saving energy
• Announcing workshops
• Connecticut River Aquatic Invasive Plants Project
• Excessive heat
• Anti-nuke

J-lab new voices grantees: Diverse collection of citJ venues

NewWest

YourHub

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