What are different types of thinking we use for journalism currently? How should we be thinking in a way that informs our journalism better? These are the questions my colleague Greg Linch addressed in his 11 a.m. BCNI session entitled “Rethinking our Thinking.”

Spurred by his recent interest in computational thinking, the idea of his session is to balance larger view concepts and how they can be applied to the news process.

Before diving into the topic at hand, Greg asked the 50-person audience to arrange our seats into a circle. We each went around the room and introduced ourselves.

Warning: these notes are all over the place because this session was all over the place. There was no structure. It was brilliant.

Types of thinking we brainstormed

• Analytical
• Linear/non-linear
• Critical
• Curiosity
• Inductive – start with small point and expand
• Deductive – start with larger point and look for the smaller picture
• Computational
• Visual thinking
• Brainstorming/visioning
• Episodic
• Stream of consciousness
• Narrative
• Philosophical
• Conventional
• Relational

After brainstorming a list, we identified the top “best practice” thinking as analytical, critical, computational, visual and relational thinking to come up with definitions. The following are the definitions we created and our subsequent analysis of those forms of thinking. (I did not attach names to each person’s comment simply because I could not keep up with everyone shouting over each other )

Analytical thinking: Gathering data, scientific thinking, testing a hypothesis, evidence, context.

• How we can improve analytical thinking? We have the day-to-day, but we don’t step back.
• We shouldn’t be scared of finding  ”right answer” to questions
• To be better analytical thinkers we need continued “liberation” of journalists from the old way of thinking and the physical model (deadline structure, form of the workday)
• The process informs the way we think
• We’re being trained in the “AP” style of thinking, don’t draw conclusions, don’t put your own analysis into it — people aren’t interested in reading that anymore
• The comment that the AP should die was followed up by a comment that maybe we need a better AP
• Identifying questions sufficient to a full story – the need for immediacy can’t distract us from covering a story fully (answering all the questions, identifying a hypotehsis, etc.)
• Hypothesis, method:

Critical thinking: Questioning face value

Computational: Using computing and applying it to other areas. The computer scientists in the room defined computational thinking as using user interfaces as a way of solving human problems in the world. Greg described it as abstraction vs. automation

• Dan Berko of the New York Times said the data is not the end all of itself to tell a story. Data is just one source of information that can lead you to different conclusions
• Will Mitchell of Washington City Paper said that looking for relationships (domain modeling, for example) in any set of data is where he starts with any problem when building a system
• Mitchell also said to look for outliers, look for points in a set of data when the assumptions break down. One example is a “best of” issue of a newspaper that’s produced once a year. How do you map a print-based product into something usable online?
• When a political reporter comes to him (Mitchell) with a set of data he wants to analyze, he first looks for relationships within the data, answers relatively simple questions that need to be answered. From that it evolves into a process of finding trends (what he calls “domain knowledge”).
• Greg says there’s a need to find the balance between human thinking and computational thinking
• Before we can think computationally, we have to relate to each other as human beings first
• There are parallels: modeling vs. storyboarding, algorithms vs. editorial structure
• Similarities between object-oriented programming vs object-oriented journalism
• The point: there needs to be a middleground
• Educators say that students aren’t coming out of education with a new way of thinking. Worried that we’re not in school telling students its OK to melt the two ways of thinking — you can find these students with these kinds of thinking, not the ones in journalism programs.
• Independent thinking is important to journalism because education is institutional

(We didn’t get to jump into the following modes of thinking because we got so caught up on computational thinking:)

Visual thinking: Mapping, images, patterns, visceral

Narrative: Description, telling a story, inverted pyramid

Relational thinking: Linking, connecting

I wrote a post Tuesday about a new collaborative called The Climate Desk that is grabbing much attention in journalism circles.

Ad Age hailed it the “revolutionary” future of journalism. The CJR questioned whether it would work.

I believe that yes, it is, and yes, it will — but there are still some rough edges that need to be worked out.

Based on my current impressions of The Climate Desk, collaboration primarily takes place at two points in the editorial process:

1. Brainstorming
2. Distribution

That makes sense. Those are the easiest two points at which collaboration is possible. But those aren’t the most important points. What about all the in-between? Sharing sources, sharing data, reporting together, editing together.

If the collaborative model is going to scale for newsorgs, we need better tools for storing and sharing data.

If I work at newspaper x and I want to work with newspapers y and z about climate change, how would I go about sharing the data I’ve already collected?

If I wanted to find all the data about climate change based on coverage my newsorg has already done, the process would look like this:

• Do a Google site search of “climate change” at [mynewsorgsdomain].com
• Find the dates those articles about climate change were published
• Go back through some date-structured folder system on my newsorg’s server to find contact sheets, notes, drafts of said article
• Email those files to the other newsorgs collaborating to report on climate change
• Everyone shares their contacts, someone puts together a Google Spreadsheet to combine the data we found and make something functional out of it — an overall picture of sorts

This process isn’t ideal for finding and sharing data because it doesn’t structure that data in a way that would be more usable the next time the newsorg wants to collaborate around climate change. If we collaborate again in six months, I’d have to go back to that spreadsheet, copy the data that is useful for me, then start a new spreadsheet titled “Climate Change Resources Oct. 2010.”  It’d be redundant and inefficient.

This ties into Daniel Bachhuber‘s upcoming discussion for BCNI about knowledge management systems. He asks:

[...] what I mean by this is how news organizations manage all of the data they’re privy to that is either stored in structured format or could be stored in a structured format if they had the tools to do so.

I see two of topics that Andrew Spittle brainstormed as being directly related to collaboration:

• Cross-platform tracking of information
• Role of KMS in on-going coverage

If we can figure out how to store data in a way that’s transferrable across multiple platforms and in on-going coverage, collaboration not only becomes easier, but becomes the next logical step in knowledge management.

A few thoughts:

The structure can’t be owned by anyone. It has to be native to the web

There needs to be universal markup for certain kinds of data — markup that’s native to the web like HTML, but not owned by any one brand. I want to be able to tag something as <location =”12.9982348 14.23423423″>home</location> and have that data be transferrable to any maping platform, whether it be Google Maps or Mapquest. The same goes for time. I want to be able to tag something as <time =”15:32 PST”>time of the event</time> and then be able to filter all data on the web related to that exact minute.

If we have a standardized structure for all types of metadata, then we can begin to organize and reuse that information on a large-scale and in new ways.

A CMS that builds layers of data on top of each other

Crowd Fusion has always stuck with me as a good baseline for a knowledge management system. Crowd Fusion is the CMS built originally for tech product review sites on top of wiki, blogging, RSS and social networking tools. The creators understood that databases are good for information and blogs are good for news, but there’s no way of connecting all those pieces. My thoughts when I first discovered the CMS in Sept. 2009:

This CMS created by Brian Alvey reminds me a lot of the CoPress connection engine. The concept is dynamic, combining databases, blogs, RSS, social networks and wikis to give the user an all-in-one experience. I wish a newspaper had developed this software and I wish it was open source. I could see a new direction for newspaper websites. [Update: Apparently now there's an open source beta. Yay]

Built into the CMS are features for both data management and collaboration:

• Workflow
• Group feed reader
• Assignments
• Database
• Wiki
• Team-based permissions
• Applications that work on top of the data
• Topic-based user experience

More about it here (worth the watch, I promise):

I’d be interested to see a newsorg adopt the software and start to build more interactive applications on top of data generated from back-story research and interviews– plus combining it with user-generated content and collaborative reporting from multiple newsorgs.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. Let’s continue this conversation at BCNI Philly, to which I am hopping on a plane at 10 p.m. PST and arrive in good ol’ Philadelphia at 6 a.m. for the 9 a.m. conference. Who needs that sleep thing, anyway?

Full Disclosure: I have been employed by Publish2 as a product designer since January.

My favorite Cal Poly journalism professor emailed me this week asking how he could use Publish2 in his journalism classes. Although this list of ideas is specific to Cal Poly’s journalism curriculum, it could easily be adapted to other j-school courses as well.

For those of you unfamiliar with Publish2, it’s a collaborative curation platform powered by journalists (i.e. a way of link saving and sharing powered by the most authoritative experts in the news field). Because all Cal Poly journalism professors and students are journalists, the service is free to them.

Before I jump into my implementation ideas, there are four general assumptions I am going to be making (or really, they’re standards I’m encouraging) for journalism students and professors.

1. All journalism professors should maintain a blog — either personal or for the courses he/she teaches.
2. All students should maintain a blog.
3. All students should subscribe to their professors’ blogs and vice versa.
4. All journalism students should be consuming excessive amounts of content (news, blogs, tweets etc.) — more on this later.

If Cal Poly wants to integrate Publish2 into its curriculum, every student should make an account in their first journalism class and continue to use it throughout their four years of college.

Journalism 203: Introduction to News Reporting and Writing

Introduction to the fundamental techniques of reporting and writing news articles from print and online perspectives. Extensive laboratory and field practices in

gathering and evaluating information. Writing basic news stories under close supervision. 3 lectures, 1 laboratory.

Back to my earlier premise that all journalism students should be consuming excessive amount of content: In an ideal world, this would be true. But as a recent college graduate, I’ve seen first-hand that many students don’t stay up on news. Making it a requirement for class won’t encourage it either; I’m against requirements as a form of habit-building. If you force students to read news, it won’t be fun and they won’t want to do it. If you give them an incentive to read news (discussing current events at the start of each class; creating a reward-based system for those who curate the best links), rather than assigning a grade value or quizzing students on news consumption, it will be more effective.

JOUR 285 Introduction to Web-Based Journalism

I was still at Cal Poly the first quarter this class was introduced. I helped write the syllabus and contributed to the lectures each week. From the course description:

Introduction to the social, editorial and technical issues surrounding the Web as a new form of communication. Fundamentals of gathering, writing and publishing content for the Web that includes using photographs, sound, pictures and video to tell a story. 3 lectures, 1 laboratory. Prerequisite: JOUR 203.

Although that sounds vague, the class actually had a very specific goal: each student created a blog and by the end of ten-week quarter, they were semi-experts in bloggings, curating, tweeting and amateur multimediography.

• Each student maintained a WordPress blog with a very specific beat (prime target for Publish2 usage)
• In addition to commentary, analysis and original reporting on topics specific to the beat of their choice, each student could curate a newswire of links relevant to their blog
• If some students’ beats overlapped (local music blog and local art critique blog, for example), the students could create a newsgroup and collaborate together.
• (This same process can be applied to JOUR 304 Public Affairs Reporting in which each student is assigned a geographic beat. Although they’re not blogging as a requirement to this class — sadly– they could still use newsgroups and save the links to Publish2 without publishing to a blog).

The ability to be an expert curator is a huge part of journalism these days when it comes to finding the value in context in an era of information overload and content pollution (more here, here and lots here). Finding the top news and tweets relevant to a beat is one of the best ways to learn curation (and even at the professional level, it’s what high profile journalists are doing — and they’re even using Publish2 to do it).

JOUR 303 Multimedia Reporting and Production, JOUR 410 Applied Multimedia Reporting

Showcase student work:

• One of my introductory assumptions at the start of this post is that each professor has a blog (Brady has a WordPress powered site for each of his journalism classes).
• If each student adds a link to his/her published work through a newsgroup as a result of class assignments, professors can easily display that work on the class site/blog along with analysis of how the assignment went.
• Because Publish2 gracefully integrates video into saved links, a multimedia class is a perfect use case

Department-wide usage

One of the key concepts Publish2 was built around is collaboration. So, naturally, the product would be more effective if its usage wasn’t only broken into silos for each class, but if journalism professors used it to curate news for the department to read. An even better situation would be if the entire department — faculty and students — were collaborating together. I’m sure plenty of other uses would arise once that collaborative network was initiated.

I’m open to any other suggestions for how Publish2 could be used in the classroom to encourage collaboration. Good luck and happy publishing.

Of all the scholarly articles I’ve read, nothing has paved a clearer path for my senior project than the concluding words of a speech from John Temple, former editor of the Rocky Mountain News:

Know what business you’re in.
Know your customers.
Know your competition.
Know your goal.
Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
Measure, measure, measure.
Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
Let the people running a new venture do what’s best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
Invest in R&D.

So now I embark on the 10-week journey of discovering the perfect ingredients for an online newsorg business model. It’s not going to be easy, but at least I’m entering it with the right mindset — that’s 90 percent of the problem at newspapers.

This quote from Temple, (which I first saw in a tweet from Jay Rosen) is especially powerful:

“We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn’t give up the idea that we were newspaper companies.”

Over the next few weeks, I plan to specifically research the following elements referenced by Temple. Here are my preliminary thoughts:

Know what business you’re in: My hypothetical newsorg would be in the business of sharing and spreading relevant, timely information with my community as quickly and accurately as possible.

Know your customers: My customer base would primarily be the community in which my newsorg is situated. I would have to find specific demographics for the exact age, gender and race of those users and use surveys to determine where and how they get their news.

Know your competition: My competition would primarily be the main newspaper for my city. If there are any local blogs, I would need to identify them. In addition to news competitors, a main competitor online is time.  I’m competing against sites like Facebook where users spend 21 minutes/visit.

Know your goal: I am going to be honest. I don’t have a goal yet. I know part of it is is to create a site with news that readers are invested in. The quality of my content will likely play a huge role in the development of my business model. There is also a goal of generating enough revenue to keep my newsorg running and thriving (I’m not necessarily looking to generate hundreds of thousands a year).

Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old: Temple acknowledges that the Rocky Mountain News failed because they saw themselves as strictly “newspapers” rather than seekers and spreaders of news — disconnected from the medium.

To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it: This will mean understanding and measuring analytics, observing user trends and noticing my own habits on the web. This will mean knowing how the web is changing and how users are changing. This will mean knowing who advertisers want to reach and how to meet those goals.

Invest in R&D: Research and Development is an on-going project. It’s not something you do before launching or when anticipating a change. It’s something that should be continuous and never-ending. And that research should be put to use to use as new revelations come about. I intend to hire a person for my hypothetical newsorg who can stay on top of R&D.

I’m meeting with a Cal Poly journalism professor Monday to talk about ways he can use social media as a supplement to his global communications class.

I don’t know much about the class or the professor, but I’ve embedded the syllabus from 2007 below. I don’t imagine it’s changed much, if at all. (Disclosure: I’m enrolled in this course for fall quarter, which starts in two weeks. )

A few ideas I have for how he can use social media in his class:

Social bookmarking

From the syllabus:

Students will choose a particular country whose media/news they will monitor at least twice a week. Students are expected to bring to each class session an article they have downloaded from the media of the country they have chosen.

That system is antiquated.

Instead, students should be bookmarking those articles along with their personal commentary using Publish2 or Delicious. Not only does it save us paper in bad financial times, but it makes more sense as a way of organizing and keeping track of content (tags, anyone?).

Instead of going around and reading off our printed-out articles, the professor could open our Publish2 group on the projector at the start of each class and pull up each student’s article as it comes up in discussion.

Twitter/blogs to gauge hot topics

From the syllabus:

The article should be recent and not older than 2-4 days. It is up to the students to choose the articles they feel are the most the important for the people of that country.

Just because we’re in the United States doesn’t mean we should have to make guesses about hot topics in foreign countries. Twitter, blogs, Digg — and now, even searchable Facebook updates — can give us a very realistic idea of topics people care about in certain places at given times.

By using search.twitter.com, you can filter results by city using filters like near:Kabul to see tweets from Afghanistan’s capitol. Sites like GeoFollow have a similar feature with a translation option.

RSS and Google Alerts

If we’re expected to follow world news for ten weeks from specific countries, we need to become deeply consumed in their affairs. On the first day, every student should be required to sign up for Google Alerts and subscribe to RSS feeds in Google Reader for media from their assigned countries.

According to student critiques of Professor Havandjian on PolyRatings (and stories I’ve heard from classmates), he spends the first 15 minutes of class writing notes up on the board. Students should use that time to catch up on their RSS feeds (assuming the class is held in one of the journalism labs) instead of sitting around waiting for class to start.

Reaching out to individuals over social media

From the syllabus:

There will be a number of written assignments based on those handouts where students will deploy critical analysis to dissect material they have researched to supplement the handouts.

In any other journalism class, an analysis would mean talking to people who are directly impacted by widespread news issues. In a global communications class, the same thing is possible thanks to Twitter direct messages and Facebook messages. I’m sure people are willing to Skype or IM about issues in their country. Although this doesn’t have to be a requirement for the class (because of privacy/security/safety issues), for anyone who really wants to leverage their resources to have a true, accurate analysis of global issues, why not? (I know I will!)

Do you have better ideas for how social media can be used in a class like this? If so, share ‘em in the comments.

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