Productive second visit

Our last visit to WILL was beneficial for both us and the WILL Connect team. After sitting in on a staff meeting last Friday, we had the opportunity to critique the WILL Connect site thus far. The site had launched about a week before, so we got to offer suggestions for how to improve it. Reuben, Sarah and I all went to separate offices with different members of the WILL Connect team so we could give them our unedited thoughts without hearing anyone else’s opinions.

After giving our ideas separately for about a half hour, we all got back together and had a mini “focus group” to discuss our suggestions as a group. It was incredible to hear what other people thought of the site – half the suggestions had never occurred to me! We discussed the main banner image of the site, how to organize its tabs and side panels, how users will discover the site, how to arrange blog posts, etc. We did not spend a lot of time at WILL on Friday, but we certainly made our time count. 

This week we’re working on our final report and starting to generate ideas for our final presentation. I can’t believe we have so little time left!

Heading to Champaign again

This afternoon, it’s back to Champaign for our capstone team! We have meetings tomorrow at WILL with the WILL Connect editors and news director. We’re also going to meet more of the staff at a Friday afternoon staff meeting. We’ve spent several hours this week compiling research and tips to create a handout that we will give the staff as well. The handout compiles some of the best practices for social media engagement and online interaction. We hope it will be useful to the WILL staff as well as other public media outlets looking to connect better with its audience. Stay tuned, we’ll link to the handout shortly!

Embracing social media in the legal field

I read this article this week that explained the importance of blogging and social media use for lawyers. As a convergence student, I’m lucky to already have some social media skills down, and I know the importance of personal branding using the Internet and social media. But I’m really interested to see how social media evolves while I’m in school for the next three years. I’m already hearing that paper business cards are “out” and just exchanging Twitter user names is “in” for legal professionals. (Of course, I know that isn’t true for everyone!) But reading that made me wonder what new technologies and relationship-building tools will surface by the time I enter the workforce. Will Facebook and Twitter still rule the social media scene? How will LinkedIn fair?

I also read this article which provided some insights into helpful apps for lawyers – everything from note-taking to email-to-fax conversions!

This week’s tasks

After visiting WILL last week, my group is now hard at work planning what to do with the station next. We each sent Reuben our thoughts on the visit, our suggestions for how we could help the station and some quick tweaks the station could make on its own in the meantime. Reuben helped compile the list, and we sent it to our primary contact at WILL yesterday to review with the staff. Depending on which specific suggestions we decide to work on, we may or may not visit WILL again. If the station decides to take us up on our offer of staff training for social media, we can certainly visit, but it entirely depends on what type of work we will be doing.

We also split up the sections of our final report to start working on. Our final report/guide has morphed into a guide for audience interaction with public radio audiences. Sarah is going to focus on audience interaction via Twitter, I’m going to focus on Facebook and Lee is going to take the section of everything else, from website interaction to email communication newsletters, etc. We think dividing and conquering this part of the project is the best – and most productive – idea to divide up the work.

Stay tuned for my thoughts on interesting stories I saw in the news this week regarding social media and the law!

Our visit to WILL

We had a jam-packed day yesterday during our visit to WILL in Champaign. We went in with a few ideas of who we would meet and left with a very good understanding of what WILL is as a station and what its goals are moving forward. We started our tour of the facilities with Sean Powers around 9:30 a.m. and the tour turned into back-to-back meetings with staff members ranging from community engagement editors to TV directors to the WILL Connect editor. It was tiring, but we were so happy to get a grasp of the station’s strengths, weaknesses and ideas to grow and better communicate with its audience.
A few common themes that came up as we met with these journalists, editors and directors yesterday were: the desire to expand its online presence, better communicate with/help the community, freshening online content and archiving it effectively, incorporating user-generated content onto WILL sites, building community engagement, etc. Some of the challenges the station has are pretty common in the public media world – it has only so much staff and money to work with, as well as a bit of a learning curve when it comes to multimedia and web design.

The WILL Connect site we saw yesterday looks crisp and very impressive, but the station is still tweaking and improving it. One of the WILL staff members described the WILL Connect site as “a graphic representation of connecting”. Celeste, the editor of WILL Connect, also summed up the importance of the site by sharing with us one audience member’s view. A woman told Celeste that “I used to listen to WILL, but now I know WILL listens to us.” WILL Connect’s goal is to share stories, projects and resources with the community to make it better and help solve some of its problems.

Overall, the day was a big success. These meetings were a fabulous opportunity to bounce ideas around with different staff members and explain what we’ve learned from Intersection and other RJI/KBIA programs. WILL seemed very grateful that we were able to come visit as well. We even learned a few tips and tricks about video archiving from WILL that might help Intersection too.

Looking ahead to the next few weeks, we’re going to talk with WILL again at the beginning of the week to figure out what exactly we need to present to it on April 20th. (For example, are we physically going there to train them, or is this going to be a web-based conversation/training?) We also invited Sean to come observe a few of the live Intersection community events coming up this month.

First visit to WILL-FM

We got in last night to Urbana-Champaign to visit WILL-FM, our partner station. We have a full day planned to learn more about its newsroom culture, social media operations and staff. We’re excited to meet in person the individuals we’ve spoken to over the phone a few times and get a real sense of how we can best help the station. We’re also equiped with flip cams to take some photos and videos of our trip that we can use to keep track of the key staff members at WILL as well as potentially use in presentations later down the line. We’re anxious to get started today and kick off our time with WILL. Look for another post later today or tomorrow detailing our full day with the station, and our game plan from here on out!

Steve Inskeep in WSJ: ‘Liberal Bias at NPR?’

I really enjoyed reading this article yesterday from “Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep. Although the stereotype is that NPR has a liberal slant, Inskeep shared a few anecdotes about listeners from all sides of the spectrum. I also appreciated this piece because it pointed out that NPR member stations are able to provide local news coverage and programming for communities that have few news outlets. The importance of local coverage came up several times in the focus group with KBIA-FM listeners, so I liked that this was also stressed in the article. The most important part was the end – Inskeep mentioned that listeners (both liberal and conservative) call and write in with their comments and tell NPR if it’s toeing the line.

Associated Press alleges retailers use ‘Hope’ image without permission

'Hope' image by Shepard Fairey, courtesy of Popcultureshock.com.

AdWeek reported this week on the complaints the Associated Press brought up with three stores that allegedly misused the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ image. The stores the AP confronted were Nordstrom, Zumiez and Urban Outfitters, AdWeek reported. I’ve followed the story of this photograph-turned-Shepard Fairey-artwork because I love seeing how this journalism/art/copyright issue plays out. AdWeek printed that Fairey’s clothing line supplied these three stores with the image to use on their clothes and products.

We’ll see how it turns out!

What a productive week!

GOOD NEWS: We have one station – WILL-FM in Champaign, Illinois! We had an hour-long conference call with three WILL staffers, including one Mizzou grad who works on social media and reporting for the station. We spent the hour discussing WILL’s current efforts to move forward and how we think we could fit in to its plans. What we’re doing now is looking over our conversation notes and sending the station a more polished list of ideas/our potential contributions. We’re also lucky that Tuesdays at 11 a.m.  (our weekly meeting time with Reuben) is also the best time for the WILL producers and editors to have conference calls with us. We’re going to talk again on Tuesday at that time to solidify our goals for the partnership.

Last night we held our focus group in our usual basement conference room in RJI as well. We had six participants come to share their thoughts on Intersection, Views of the News and Global Journalist. We really appreciated hearing about the programs from their perspective and doing some brainstorming with them. They all spoke very freely, and didn’t have any trouble filling our one-hour time slot. We obviously still have to compile and organize our findings, but I have to say, we learned quite a bit about audience behavior and preferences from the discussion

Another exciting little bit of news is that Lee spoke to another station this week that might be interested in our project as well. We’ll update more once we have a longer talk with the station.

Overall, this week was just what my capstone group needed – we’re so glad that all the time and effort we’ve put in so far are starting to pay off!

Pitching to stations

I would be lying if I said this week has been easy. We had to push back our focus group another week, which has been a blessing, because we’ve been struggling to get in touch with stations. With the focus group now set for next Wednesday, we’ve been able to focus our efforts on pitching to stations.

In positive news, I have had two great conversations with a news director at a station in Little Rock, Ark., who may be interested in our project. Lee has also found success talking to WILL-FM in Champaign, Ill. We’re crossing our fingers that WILL-FM will want to take us on as partners. It’s such a perfect place for our project because it has both radio and TV studio space, it just hasn’t converged the two yet. The news director seemed extremely interested in Lee’s pitch, so we’re setting up a conference call for early next week to answer the station’s questions and hopefully come to an agreement! Personally, I’m really hoping this partnership works out because I’m joining the Urbana-Champaign community this summer and would love to be able to dive in and help what will soon be my local NPR station.