Author: Michael Higdon | 03.12.2009

I finally have a chance to sit down and write about the Future of Journalism Think Tank at the Reynolds School of Journalism‘s J Week. To make it easier to digest and easier to write, I’m breaking it up into six parts, that way if you don’t care about certain sections you can skip them. If you want the whole story, you can read it all.

To make it all easier, here’s a table of contents for the six parts:

1. The Process
2. Discoveries and highlights
   
3. Group 1 prototype
   
4. Group 2 prototype
5. Group 3 prototype
6. Critique & launching point

CRITIQUE & LAUNCHING POINT

Throughout the two-day think tank, many important themes continued to rise to the surface: community journalism, user customization, paperless/mobile, engaging/fun content.

Below, I want to describe some of the observations I made about the process and the people as well as briefly critique each prototype. Then make some kind of inspirational statement about what happens next.

Observations

It was very difficult for us all to break out of our comfort zones. I likened our first day to us playing Pong, tossing the same ideas back ‘n’ forth inside of a box. Many of us came prepared to talk about our areas of interest or our own ideas but IDEO does not work on a predestined premise. Their approach is meant to create ideas from scratch based on everyone’s knowledge.

Journalists are very practical, deadline and instructions driven – this is the opposite of what IDEO likes to do also. Much of the exercises are free form and have goals and guidelines but not specific instructions. If we had a path to follow each time, we’d end up with the same results each time. *ahem*

Several of the participants had a hard time breaking out of their preconceived ideas of how to make money, produce content and distribute content. However, on the second day, most everyone appeared to break out of their shells and start to embrace the idea of having wacky, new ideas.

Right about that time, we had to stop.

Some people were also stuck on the “that’s been done, it failed” mentality, which prevented certain lines of thought. That’s problematic. So what if someone else did it somewhere else? They probably did it wrong or it didn’t work for that location.

Many ideas that have been done before were forced on journalists who didn’t buy into the ideas to begin with. Donica tells the story that a reporter at the Reno Gazette-Journal said he’d put a hamster in his pocket if corporate said it would make him a better reporter. Meaning, he’d heard so many opposing mandates that it didn’t matter what they told him next.

Nonetheless, what works in San Francisco won’t work in Reno and vice versa.

Also, we wanted to start from scratch, not graft new pieces onto journalism. Jennifer Carroll and I both said during the panel afterward that we were not trying to save newspapers (seriously, a VP at Gannett said that out loud), we are trying to figure out how to start journalism over in a new way.

But that’s hard to do AND hard to say. We’re so used to what we’re used to that breaking away from that line of thinking is often painful.

One faculty member who watched the panel said our group are the least capable of inventing new ways to do journalism because we are too embedded. I think he might be right in some respects but the group is also extraordinarily intelligent… but maybe too intelligent. Our knowledge of the industry stilts our ability to move away from it.

But who else other than these people are likely to think of journalism so passionately while wanting to change it and keep the core values the same?

I do think however, that we need outsiders in the Future of Journalism conversation. Our skill sets are too limited and our knowledge of the rest of the world is polluted by our constant use/need of journalism while most people do not give journalism a second thought.

Deferred judgment

This is the point in the game where all of your deferred judgment is released. I’ll make really brief critiques because this post is getting too long already.

• Group 1, partnership with businesses in an attempt to enliven public spaces: I feel like this idea excludes a lot of people who don’t enjoy public spaces or public interaction. It also requires a huge shift in the culture of readers, community interaction and the way the businesses operate. This however, my not be a bad thing. It’s definitely a paradigm shift and actually goes backward in time instead of forward. Again, might not be a bad thing, just a hard thing to pull off.
• Group 2, users earn points for contribution on customized, time-based website: Indy.com web developer Chris Vannoy said they tried this concept on their social networking site and for all intents and purposes it didn’t work. However, their site is in a different area and is entertainment driven. This concept has promise but has the potential for being brushed off as a gimmick or people will exploit the system for free stuff but won’t care much about substantive engagement.
• Group 3, public pays nomadic journalists to investigate public problems: This one also involves a huge paradigm shift. It would require people to be willing, and more importantly, able to identify public problems, then pay for someone to cover them. Then they have to think that a journalist is capable of doing that instead of themselves or a politician. Then they have to become substantively involved in the process. This requires journalism institutions to have mostly dissolved. Again, not necessarily bad, but hard to pull off.

Lessons into the future

Basically we learned that we don’t know squat and that’s a good first step. We also learned that in just 36 hours, we discovered a lot of problems with journalism and barely approached any semblance of a solution to those problems. Spending a week or more would yield hundreds of ideas.

More importantly, journalists don’t spend enough time focusing on what people need or want and we are especially bad at marrying those two ideas. Journalists think giving people what they want is “pandering” and giving people what they need is our purpose.

Both of these are wrong.

But Alan Mutter said it for us – as we discovered it – that the place for “God journalism” is over (AKA cod-liver oil journalism). People want what they need and want what they want and it’s our job to discover what that is and give it to them.

So what is the solution to journalism?

There isn’t one. The solution is solely dependent on about 100 factors so its our job to diversify (which we aren’t doing), constantly evolve (which we aren’t doing), think forward and get ahead of the curve (which we aren’t doing) and quit bitching (which we aren’t doing).

But we’re beginning to point in that direction.

In the meantime, the think tank will reconvene in Virginia in six months. It should be awesome.