For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, ringmaster David Cohn asked something I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer. But I’ve got a solid track record participating in the resurrected Carnival so far, so I decided not to break my streak.

Cohn asked us to give advice to either the Knight Foundation about its next steps (as the 5-year-old Knight News Challenge ends its run, and a new vice president arrives) or the Reynolds Institute at the University of Missouri about its fellowship program.

Since Knight turned down all three Knight News Challenge submissions from my program at the University of Colorado Boulder (including one I thought was and is damn good and important for the future of journalism credibility and accountability!), I’ll pass on Knight in case any disappointment-inspired bias might spill out in my words. So Reynolds it is!

As Cohn (a Reynolds fellow himself) noted, the program is only four years old. It’s not as big and doesn’t accept as many fellows as, say, Stanford’s renowned Knight Fellowships program. Therefore, the program is still shaping itself. Cohn asked:

1. How would you shape the fellowship to drive innovation?
Because the program is small, I’d narrow the focus significantly. In fact, for each fellowship year, I’d pick a theme and find fellows who all wanted to work on complementary aspects of the theme. Let’s say for the next crew of fellows, select all of them because they want to focus on variations on a theme of “business models for journalism in the digital age.” Next year, I’d pick a different theme. The key would be that the theme is the most important challenge or opportunity facing journalism at the time. Business models for journalism addresses solving a big problem for the news industry and for journalists who want to make a living. A theme that could address an opportunity instead of a problem would be best utilizing emerging mobile technologies in the news realm.

Such an approach is less appropriate for a larger fellowship program, like Stanford’s, which takes on 20 fellows each year.

2. What types of fellows should they be looking for?
If we go with my answer to No. 1, then I’d say find a mix of fellows from multiple disciplines who can work together to address the year’s theme issue or opportunity. If the theme is business models for news, then, of course, bring in a business expert who perhaps is not a journalist but has a strong interest in publishing business models. Or an economist. Or a marketing guru. Don’t invite in as fellows people who don’t know or care about the news industry, but rather individuals who want to engage and can work well with the journalist fellows. One word is key: interdisciplinary.

3. What types of fellows should they avoid?
Pure journalists. I’d much rather see Reynolds recruit journalists who also hold MBAs, or are extremely competent technologists. Avoid one-dimensional journalists. And especially, avoid anyone who doesn’t believe with 100% of their being that in the media of today and the future, digital is at the center of things and is the control hub for any media or news organization.

4. What programs should the fellows go through in order to drive innovation?
Bring in lots of outside experts to get the fellows thinking beyond the confines of journalism. If mobile is the theme, bring in mobile industry leaders and force them to shift gears and think with the fellows about how the news industry can leverage emerging mobile developments that the industry leaders are working on today. Bring in entrepreneurs who may not be focused on news and journalism as a market opportunity, yet who are building digital products or services that have significant potential for news; force them to focus on news applications, and let the fellows lobby the entrepreneurs to put some thinking and resources into addressing news problems and opportunities.

Get the fellows to roam the university, finding partners in other disciplines to assist them in thinking through and developing innovative news-beneficial projects that cannot be done by journalists alone. If any of the journalist fellows come out of the program with any old journalistic dogma still in their heads, the program will have been a failure.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of David Cohn, a.k.a DigiDave, the Carnival of Journalism has been resurrected. Somehow I missed participating the first time around several years ago, but with a name like that it must be fun, right? So I’m in this time.

The Carnival revolves around a monthly topic, with a bunch of smart people in the journalism field presenting varied points of view, usually on their own blogs, but republished and/or linked to on the Carnival site. David chose as this month’s topic: “The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community.”

OK, I’ve got some strong opinions on that, especially now that I work at the University of Colorado Boulder running its fledgling Digital Media Test Kitchen program, which I founded.

David asked us to ponder a Knight Commission recommendation to “Increase the role of higher education … as hubs of journalistic activity.” (He also wrote: “No box here to write inside of.” … Good, otherwise I’d probably go outside of it.)

It’s all great that some university journalism programs are putting students to work as reporters in new forms of news media. Their work makes up for some of the journalism that’s been lost in recent years as mainstream news organizations laid off thousands upon thousands of professional journalists. And students get to learn in a dynamic, innovative new news environment, rather than a depressing old-media newsroom in decline.

Some students at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, for instance, work as interns for the non-profit Bay Citizen news website in a joint partnership which also includes an innovation initiative. The City University of New York (CUNY) Journalism School is collaborating with the New York Times and has students producing neighborhood (or “hyper-local,” if you prefer) news for The Local. Fantastic.

However, I want my university and others to go further — or more specifically, to look further into the future.

My focus of late has been on identifying emerging technologies that will or might have significant impacts on journalism and the news industry. Actually, the most fun part of my current job is scanning the horizon, spotting some fledgling technology or oddball Internet or mobile start-up, and thinking, “That could be really useful as a journalistic tool!” or “There’s a business model that might work in the news field!” Often, the technologists and entrepreneurs I run across do not have news or solving the news crisis on their radar screens.

At CU, I’ve been lucky to have the student-run news website (nope, there’s no print edition) to work with in experimenting with new technologies on both the editorial and advertising sides. The CU Independent’s editors have been eager (or at least willing to be persuaded) to try new experiments. (Since they make the decisions, it’s the editors’ call whether or not to try what sometimes may seem like crazy new ideas.)

They’re trying things like website and mobile social gaming tied to news to increase reader engagement and news awareness. … The editor-in-chief is starting a video channel where she’ll answer student text questions with short video answers, as a way to better interact with the campus community and put a human face on the CU Independent brand. … A couple of graduate students are working with me to develop a premium membership model for collegiate media, and the CU Independent is going to try it out when it’s ready. … And more.

The student editors also are encouraged to innovate by their staff media advisor, Gil Asakawa, a news and new-media veteran who joined the CU Journalism School last fall after most recently working for MediaNews Group.

Gil and I talk and collaborate a lot, and he recently remarked to me how refreshing his new job has been in terms of trying new innovations. Where implementing a new technology at MNG more often than not took months of meetings and deliberation, in the university media environment, you just do it. Now.

I think that’s where university journalism programs — and especially student media — can push old news organizations forward. We can run with ideas that a prudent and more conservative newspaper publisher would put off. And in fairly short order, we can tell that publisher and the rest of the news industry how it turned out, and if others should follow our lead.

Bless university student journalists, but their work in covering their local communities is often not as good as that of experienced professional journalists (many now in other careers, unfortunately). That’s not an insult, just a fact.

But I think that beyond producing community journalism, where student journalists and Journalism Schools can best serve their communities is by innovating (dare I say) radically where the traditional media serving their cities or towns innovate too conservatively or hardly at all.

Communities need better information, as the Knight Commission has concluded. Journalism schools and journalism students can provide it, in a roundabout way, by teaching professional news organizations (old and new) how to leverage new and emerging technologies and techniques to create a better-informed citizenry (and perhaps make enough money to afford to cover their communities adequately).

The Knight Commission is correct in urging universities and their Journalism programs to do more for their communities in these tumultuous days of media transition.

Unless your personal blog is your livelihood and brings in a decent amount of revenue, it’s sometimes difficult to keep it well fed. That’s my excuse for not having posted here in over a month. (Yikes!) … But I have been working on some fascinating news- and technology-related projects recently, so I share them here as an update.

Nearly all my work time has gone into the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication, a program I founded and direct. (Yes, that journalism school — the one that may be “discontinued.” But no, it’s not the end of journalism education at the University of Colorado, but rather an institutional process that will modernize it as part of an overall restructuring to make journalism and media teaching and research more interdisciplinary and relevant to the digital transformation under way in our society.)

I’ve been pleased that the Test Kitchen program has been raising donor money despite the uncertainness of the university process’ eventual outcome, including two donors coming forward just last week.

So, here are some of the project areas that we’re working on at the Test Kitchen. I welcome partnership and collaboration inquiries in these areas, as well as new research ideas to benefit the news sector.

• Membership models for news. This is a Journalism-Business research project looking into alternative revenue models for news websites (and including mobile components) vs. “paywalls” that some news publishers have put in front of commodity news content. We’re focusing on two areas of news providers where paywalls don’t make much sense: investigative reporting organizations and collegiate media.
• Social gaming to change news behavior. In partnership with the developers of the popular Qrank mobile social news/trivia/history quiz, we’re experimenting with and examining the role of mobile gaming in changing the news-consumption habits of young adults, and increasing news awareness.
• Always-on video as a news tool. In the area of “life-casting” is technology that allows an individual to record everything that happens to them, including video recording of everything that the person sees and hears. We think a more practical use for always-on video is for reporters out working a story.
• Cross-device media viewing. We’re experimenting with ways to allow for better consumption by an individual of long-form journalism across multiple devices (PC, smartphone, tablet, etc.) by allowing an article reader to pick up where he/she left off when picking up a different media device at a later time.
• Mobile augmented reality. This is an area where we’re looking at the potential of smartphone AR technology being put to use for innovative editorial presentation and reporting, and for new forms of local advertising.
• Next-generation news aggregators. We’ve gotten a start on that with our beta SlicesofBoulder.com site, but more is in store, including a refined user interface and aggregator-level source ratings.

There’s more, and I’m excited about the coming year. As I mentioned above, I love to hear from potential partners and collaborators: students, academics, entrepreneurs, etc. E-mail me at steve.outing@colorado.edu or call me at 303-834-7810.

And if the Digital Media Test Kitchen sounds like a program worthy of your financial support, allow me to point you to our Giving page!

I’ve been neglectful of this blog for nearly a month (till posting about Paycheckr yesterday), but perhaps I can get back into the groove. It’s just that I’ve been working hard at driving forward the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. And since the School is going through a “discontinuation review” and might be reinvented or replaced by a new School (or other form of academic entity) designed to be more interdisciplinary in addressing the complexities of today’s journalism and media realities, it seems like an important time to push forward on leveraging emerging technologies in the pursuit of better journalism and better informing communities.

At the Test Kitchen, we just debuted a new website, SlicesofBoulder.com, that fits that bill. Working with Toronto-based Eqentia Inc., a CU team (journalism instructor Sandra Fish, journalism master’s candidate Jenny Dean, and me) worked over the summer to produce an extensive taxonomy of the city of Boulder and its surrounding area, and find all the news and information sources online producing content about Boulder. (I.e., not just websites and blogs that fit the traditional definition of “news,” but also the information flowing out of scientific institutions, government agencies, police and fire departments, key local companies, local bloggers and tweeters, etc.)

The result is SlicesofBoulder.com, powered by Eqentia.com, which processes and slices and dices links to the content flowing from hundreds of local sources, plus finds news coverage about Boulder from non-Boulder (state and national) news sites and selected credible blogs.

What’s exciting for me about this project is that it is, I’m pretty sure, the most in-depth curated news and information site in existence about any city. (Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.) The site can serve in an in-depth manner the ongoing news and information needs of any Boulder resident with a specific topic interest (city politics, Boulder crime news, the local rock climbing scene, a specific local company like Celestial Seasonings, a specific neighborhood, and so on). It continually tracks Boulder news and and information digital content flow, and provides links to the original content. (Users can create a personalized Boulder news/info page; receive a personalized daily e-mail; subscribe to fine-grain RSS feeds; etc.)

The site could be described as a “hyper-local” aggregator in that it identifies fine-grain content feeds from sources that Google News, Yahoo! Local, Topix.com, and Outside.in don’t get to.

It’s not a creator of original content, of course, but rather a curated aggregator of local sources — so my hope is that it will help new hyper-local blogs and news outlets in and around Boulder be exposed to new users.

In addition to being just plain useful (to keep citizens informed at either a local overview level or deeply on specific local topics, and to give local journalists story ideas), I’m fascinated by the research potential of the project. It gives us a snapshot of the Boulder digital media-sphere today, and we’ll use the site to watch as the Boulder digital media landscape evolves in the coming years. (My prediction: further decline in news output by traditional local news media, and growth of small local and hyper-local news providers to make up for that.)

Boulder is a university town with 100,000 or so residents, so researching and finding all the local online sources of news and information was a doable task. (I know we haven’t found them all, and expect that the team will discover more, and that community members will suggest additional sources.) The research work to find all the sources in, say, Seattle or the San Francisco Bay Area, which both have a thriving online independent local and hyper-local media scene, would be daunting; though perhaps crowd-sourcing plus dedicated researchers would make it possible.

The surprise for me was in finding fewer individuals providing news about Boulder’s neighborhoods than I’d expected. I thought we’d find more people using the free publishing tools of the web to keep their neighbors informed, a trend that’s common in some other cities. Perhaps it has to do with demographics: Boulder’s population is one the most highly educated in the U.S., and I’m wondering if that has something to do with it. (We’re all mostly too busy to do volunteer work like run neighborhood blogs or websites?)

If you’d like more information about the SlicesofBoulder.com project, feel free to contact me. A backgrounder about the project and site is here.

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week participating in the “Upgrade to Digital” workshop at the brand spanking new Boulder Digital Works at CU facility in downtown Boulder, a bleeding-edge training program to teach advanced creative, tech, and business digital-media skills. (Disclaimer: I attended on a free pass since I’m working on building a digital-media initiative for CU’s Journalism & Mass Communication School.)

What was especially great about the experience was that the workshop was run by Scott Prindle and Joe Corr, VP/director of technology and senior technical lead, respectively, of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the white-hot ad agency with offices here in Boulder and in Miami. Other CPB personnel also floated in and out (plus other special guest presenters), so attendees were treated to being taught, and critiqued, by ad agency rock stars.

Since I’m focused on the news industry and its transformation, I had a different perspective than most of the other workshop participants; I was thinking of how what we were seeing and learning could be adapted and/or applied to news (from digital techniques, to business models, to technology). In this and perhaps more blog entries, I’ll share a few take-aways from the last two days, as viewed through my news-colored glasses.

1. It’s the utility, stupid! Those companies savvy enough to be on the digital forefront (enough so that they’re spending money with CPB) are experimenting with smart-phone apps and web applications that emphasize utility for the customer, not just trying to get a brand message across. A phone example is Nike’s Nike+ running shoe with an embedded chip that communicates data with Nike+ on an iPhone (or iPod). There’s a website and social training community built around the product and its personal data from you, so that you can do stuff like time yourself time on a specific route, then compare it to a friend who runs the same route at a different time — a virtual competition. The phone and online components are meant to sell Nike+, certainly, but they provide the Nike+ customer with a great training log and social tool. It’s not just about selling, but improving the shoe buyer’s life. Utility.

Apply this to news: When developing mobile apps, think utility, not just presenting news. An app that keeps track of local road construction projects and finds re-routes around them could be handy for local commuters, for example. It might be introduced one time to accompany a big story about all the local road projects under way due to the federal stimulus money coming into the community — but it could be used by commuters and residents long term, and re-marketed each time there’s another road-construction and traffic-delays story.

On the web, CPB presenters showed us their NCAA Final Four Bracket-o-matic Flash project created for Coca-Cola Zero. (Link is to video.) The idea was to make the NCAA basketball championship grid easy to fill out; instead of picking teams and inputing them into the grid based on who you think will win, there’s a series of sliders along the top that fills out the grid based on 8 variables that you adjust.

What struck me about this was the thin line between a soda company doing this vs. a news company producing the same sort of thing and selling advertising around it. The Bracket-o-matic would feel OK as an editorial online feature. Again, it provides utility as well as fun. Why did an advertiser do it and not a media company? Coca-Cola had the money to pay CPB to create it; most news companies don’t have the technical chops to pull something like this off.

More take-aways later. … Off to a meeting now…

If you’ve been to a media conference lately, you know that it’s increasingly common for audience members to be posting to Twitter during speeches and panels. At the Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas recently, during a panel I was chairing, not only were some audience members tweeting about the panel, so was one of the panelists when she wasn’t speaking!

Yesterday I was on a long car ride with a buddy who’s interested in educational technology, and we were bouncing around ideas, including how to leverage social tools online and using mobile devices. I don’t know if some educators haven’t already tried this, but here’s an experiment we devised using Twitter:

• Pick a day when your class has a guest speaker.
• Ask all the students to take notes by posting to Twitter (laptop or cell phone).
• Each tweet-note should have common hashtag (e.g., #123notes).
• Because of Twitter’s 140-character limit (including the hashtag), students will be forced to boil down the speaker’s points to their essence.
• And, of course, clue in your speaker so he/she knows why the students are glued to their phones and laptops!

Here’s why this could be a beneficial classroom experiment:

• Any individual student taking notes or just listening to a speaker will retain only a percentage of what’s been presented. Some will pick up and remember more than others.
• With all the students taking Twitter notes, the resulting stream of tweets (in my example, http://twitter.com/#123notes) will document more of the speaker’s ideas and thoughts than any one student could record on his/her own.
• Students can review the tweet stream later to get a better understanding of what was said — reading about points that might have gone over their heads, or that they missed in a moment of lost concentration.
• Those who missed the class can still get a pretty good idea of what was presented.
• Students can even tweet among themselves (using the hashtag) so there’s a side-channel conversation going on.

I think this is a technique that could actually enhance the amount of information retained by a room of students listening to a speaker. Has anyone tried this? If not, how about it?

It’s one of those thoughts I can’t believe hasn’t crossed my mind till now. (Though I’m certain it’s not original.) But I just noticed that lots of journalism schools at universities are still called the “School of Journalism and Mass Communication.”

Don’t you think it’s about time that they all get rid of the unneeded and outdated word “Mass”?

After all, it’s the “mass” part — the old news industry model of one-to-many — that is fast being usurped by the many-to-many and social model that is so much a part of the digital world that journalism is transitioning to.

I’m not sure they need to replace Mass with another word; just remove it. “School of Journalism and Communication” fits today’s media reality.

To the many journalism schools that still have “Mass” in their names, why is it still there?