JTM Stewarding

Submitted by Maurreen Skowran on Thu, 05/28/2009 – 12:04pm

May 27 JTM Stewards Call Notes – compiled by Leigh Montgomery

Attendees:

Peggy Holman
Barry Parr
Steve Hanson
Leigh Montgomery

Website update:

Steve wants to replace ‘People’ tab with Profiles of those who have ‘signed on’ on the JTM site – will be done by webmaster

Jonathan Lawson, Michelle Ferrier and Peggy will discuss longer term direction for the site, to bring ‘content out of conferences,’[spaces] make it more visible, searchable, utilitarian

Suggestion for discussion forum other than Google Groups

JTM update:

Three conversations going on:

1. Bill Densmore: working on event to be held at Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA in September – pertains to civic engagement – will need more detail from Bill
2. Peggy:  Exploring a possible first – a regional JTM event, around a (working) central question such as:  How does journalism support the cultural health of a region?
3. Potential JTM event focused on people of color – similar to Silicon Valley event with intersection of tech and journalism, this would include outreach to journalism orgs, groups etc -

Note: These last two are in a nascent stage, still getting focused / funding etc.

Stephen Silha is speaking to Kellogg Foundation about supporting JTM as a whole – grant proposal needs to be put together

Stewards issues:

Are these calls useful?  Or are we just getting together once a month and stammering at each other? Is that too frequent?  Maybe every six weeks?

Should we have a periodic conference call around a topic, perhaps selected by JTM participants, via discussion forum or web site? – check in with Maureen on next steps

Leigh suggested having periodic updates, maybe every six months, on how things were going, what was getting traction from the conferences, ideas and processes that were working -
This has crystalized around Leigh kicking this off, getting participants from the Poynter New News Ecology conference in March to submit their fruitage

Suggestion from Peggy: have any JTM participant submit a video of up to 2 minutes for the site.
Discussed getting people submitting these via twitter and posting to the site.

Next Stewards Call:  Wed July 8 unless any conflict – Maureen will set time, ideally 4 pm EST or 1 pm PST – this time worked well for everyone today.

Thanks to all!

Submitted by montgomeryl on Thu, 05/28/2009 – 5:30am

May 27 JTM Stewards Call Notes – compiled by Leigh Montgomery

Attendees:

Peggy Holman
Barry Parr
Steve Hanson
Leigh Montgomery

Website update:

Steve wants to replace ‘People’ tab with Profiles of those who have ‘signed on’ on the JTM site – will be done by webmaster

Jonathan Lawson, Michelle Ferrier and Peggy will discuss longer term direction for the site, to bring ‘content out of conferences,’[spaces] make it more visible, searchable, utilitarian

Suggestion for discussion forum other than Google Groups

JTM update:

Three conversations going on:

1. Bill Densmore: working on event to be held at Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA in September – pertains to civic engagement – will need more detail from Bill
2. Peggy:  Exploring a possible first – a regional JTM event, around a (working) central question such as:  How does journalism support the cultural health of a region?
3. Potential JTM event focused on people of color – similar to Silicon Valley event with intersection of tech and journalism, this would include outreach to journalism orgs, groups etc -

Note: These last two are in a nascent stage, still getting focused / funding etc.

Stephen Silha is speaking to Kellogg Foundation about supporting JTM as a whole – grant proposal needs to be put together

Stewards issues:

Are these calls useful?  Or are we just getting together once a month and stammering at each other? Is that too frequent?  Maybe every six weeks?

Should we have a periodic conference call around a topic, perhaps selected by JTM participants, via discussion forum or web site? – check in with Maureen on next steps

Leigh suggested having periodic updates, maybe every six months, on how things were going, what was getting traction from the conferences, ideas and processes that were working -
This has crystalized around Leigh kicking this off, getting participants from the Poynter New News Ecology conference in March to submit their fruitage

Suggestion from Peggy: have any JTM participant submit a video of up to 2 minutes for the site.
Discussed getting people submitting these via twitter and posting to the site.

Next Stewards Call:  Wed July 8 unless any conflict – Maureen will set time, ideally 4 pm EST or 1 pm PST – this time worked well for everyone today.

Submitted by Maurreen Skowran on Wed, 04/29/2009 – 1:33pm

JTM Stewards Update

From Maurreen

April 29, 2009

INSURANCE

I added and consolidated some info at the Wiki page Bill Densmore set up:

http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-health-insurance

Also set up a poll on the main JTM Web site to see which state has the most JTMers interested in insurance.

Steve Hanson, would you make the state poll on the Web site more prominent somehow, please? Maybe just move it to the top or bottom of that column?

Then I’ll ask people to take part in the survey.

TELECONFERENCES

My plan so far, also posted at the Google group (http://tinyurl.com/csgs8v):

* The first one would be around the end of August. Future ones should
follow no more than four months apart.

* I like Barry’s idea of featured guests — “Maybe 10 minutes of intro and conversation with a host followed by Q&A.”

* The first topic would be either:
A. Advertising, or
B. Finances, which could include advertising, other revenue options,
expenses, and keeping the books

Barry’s response at the Google group was: “I’d vote for advertising over finances or business models. I think a focused discussion would be a lot more interesting than one where the topic wanders around.”

Sounds good.

Can and should we use the same number that we use for the stewards call? Does anyone have any tips from the previous general JTM teleconferences?

Please respond at the Google group if you have further thoughts on the teleconferences.

STEWARDS CALL ATTENDANCE

Would it help to get a reminder closer to when the call is scheduled for? Such as about 24 hours before, or one hour before?

I might make future calls only if at least two other people confirm.

Submitted by Maurreen Skowran on Wed, 04/29/2009 – 1:24pm

JTM Stewards Call Notes

April 29, 2009

ATTENDANCE

Maurreen Skowran

Michelle Ferrier

NOTIFIED ABSENCE

Barry Parr

NOTES

We spoke briefly, mainly about polls on the Web site.

NEXT STEWARDS CALL

Agenda:

* Insurance

* Future events

* Teleconferences

* Web site

* Maybe more structure – such as incorporating, membership fee that would earn discount to JTM events, part-time administrator

Wednesday, May 27

* Eastern time, 4 p.m.
* Central, 3 p.m.
* Mountain, 2 p.m.
* Pacific, 1 p.m.

Phone number: 641-715-3200
Access code: 132888

SUBMITTED BY

Maurreen

Submitted by Maurreen Skowran on Sat, 02/28/2009 – 11:51am

JTM Stewards Call

Feb. 26, 2009

ATTENDANCE

Peggy Holman

Stephen Silha

Maurreen Skowran

POYNTER EVENT

March 1-4

Stephen:

Good idea about checking with churches, to diversify participation from outside journalism. At least one person is coming from the Christian Science Monitor. He’ll check with Ellyn Angelotti at Poynter to see whether they know anyone.

An interesting group of folks is coming, both returning and new.

Part of JTM will be videotaped. So there can be some participation from afar.

EVENTS FROM AFAR

Maurreen:

The RJI Collaboratory talkfest held earlier this year had some interactive elements for participating from afar. We might want to look at doing some of those in the future.

I don’t remember everything they did, but besides video, it included the opportunity to write to a central place. The main interaction for the virtual participants was with other virtual participants, not those there. It included Ning and CoverItLive.

POSSIBLE FUTURE EVENTS

Summary:

* Communities losing papers, etc. – Newsout

* Investigative journalism

* Regional in general

* Seattle – still being looked at, regional

* Young activists, regional

Stephen:

Couple of rumblings about Baltimore.

Peggy:

Bill Densmore has an idea about the University of Maryland. A new dean is going there, from NPR. A woman who will be working for him had been working for Jan Schaffer.

Jonathan Lawson was at Silicon Valley. He’s part of Reclaim the Media. He’s been working with young people who are activists and maybe not aware of journalism.

It might be interesting to mix them with journalists.

It would have a regional focus.

Another idea, conspicuous by its absence so far at JTM, is investigative journalism.

Maurreen:

Maybe if and how the public should pay for or support journalism. Bill is doing “Newsout” soon – “What to do when the newsroom lights go out:Options and strategies for New England communities.”

Stephen:

Some want to be part of planning group for possible Seattle event.

Peggy:

That would be regional.

Maurreen:

We talked earlier about doing more regional events – training people to take JTM to their areas.

Stephen:

We have no infrastructure. Need local hosts.

University of Washington new digital media program could host Seattle event.

Stephen:

See what emerges at Poynter.

Peggy:

Poynter potentially a source of people who want to get involved.

This will be a test of the new Web site. Not many people have posted interviews.

NEXT CALL

Thursday, March 19

Pacific, 9 a.m.

Mountain, 10 a.m.

Central, 11 a.m.

Eastern, noon

Phone number: 641-715-3200

Access code: 132888

Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 01/15/2009 – 9:58am

Steve Hanson

Steven Silha

Michelle Ferrier

Brief discussion about the cold, the hacking of SoapBlox, etc. while waiting for people to show up.

Michelle discusses things happening in Florida and the difficulty of producing blogs to fill the gap left by newspaper bankruptcy.  Content production, legal issues, technical requirements as part of the difficulty, people who refuse to use digital media. This ties into the discussion on what is needed to support local journalism efforts.

Bill thinks that a print component is essential -

How can new media operate when the model for journalism in that world requires a huge commitment of time, and very little commitment of money.

Michelle talks about Mytopia and changes that are going on there, partly due to the financial uncertainty of things. Aiming at getting it past the tipping point of self-sufficiency. As with all of us doing this, keeping all these balls in the air at once is exhausting.

How can there be a mix of print and online media that will allow a mix that allows for the growth of the online media while still maintaining some of the revenue from print, since it’s difficult to make enough media sales on the online-only media.

Brief discussion on the web site and what would be needed to make it more successful?  How do we engage people to produce content, and how do we then  market this?

Can we sketch out or define the life cycles of online communities?  Can there be a section of the web site for discussion of those issues?  How can you expand to generate more revenue from your existing brand? Might this fit into the Knight Fellowship Program?   Possible use of some of the different lifestream technologies to track where people are in their own projects?  What would be good ways to capture that? Aggregation, twitter-like, etc.????

Poynter gathering?  37 people are registered – many have requested scholarships.

Re-convene 2 weeks from today, possibly discussing this life-cycle idea?

Audio recording of JTM web meetup conference call from 11/20/2008. This was the first meeting of the web meetup group. Sorry there are a few minutes of blank air at the beginning – when I get a chance I’ll edit that out.

Notes:

JTM Web site call
20 Nov 2008
Notes by Maurreen Skowran and Stephen Silha
Web site committee
(To set policy more than for technical work.)
Volunteers –
Steve Hanson
Peggy Holman
Lynn
Michelle Ferrier
Maurreen Skowran
Goals
Want to have set-up we’re happy with by Poynter conference in March.
We also plan to invite people from previous JTM gathering to the site
when it is further along.
Goal for site should mesh between mission already on old JTM site and
initial statement of stewards.
What’s the Google group purpose?  Mutual support and connection,
mentoring and being mentored, being idea lab for experiments and
projects
Peggy read JTM mission: Journalism That Matters is a community of
media innovators and stakeholders that blazes paths and builds bridges
to a new news ecology. We convene, connect, and inspire diverse,
engaged citizens that will mold and lead the media of tomorrow.
Discussed the relationship for the site and JTM overall between local
news efforts and everything else. Plan to keep JTM and the new site as
broad umbrella, and a focus within that on the local news projects.
Bill:  Do we have a consensus that supporting local entrepreneurs and
online news communities, but also to support JTM and JTM
collaborators?
Lynn:  use tagline.
Josh Wolf: maybe purpose should be to get new people to learn about
JTM.  Should be Innovative journalism community, including online.
Relationship with others
Prefer to avoid duplicating other sites and projects (such as Neiman,
J-Lab, RJI, New News, Placeblogger). This is a recurring issue. So we
plan to check them out and see what they’re doing or plan to do and
what’s missing. Let’s do content analysis and talk with people
organizing these others. Discussed a few ways to do this. (I’m not
sure we made a decision about method. – M)
Peggy: Ethic under JTM is to take responsibility for what we love.
Don’t want to fill a niche for the sake of filling a niche. In other
words, is what’s not being done something we want to do?
Bill: Dream that JTM would become nexus for eventual association of
local news efforts.
One thing apparently missing from related efforts and sites is the
openness and conversation, which we’ve had and want to continue.
Conversation vs. information – JTM’s role.
Wish list
Lynn:  1 place to find the answers, find the connections.  Community
bloggers.   Hub where you find every thing you need.  Legal info.
Plus have community aspect to encourage and inspire.  Continuing
education.  Video streaming.
Buttons on front page would link to David Ardia at Harvard for legal
stuff… monographs by Jan Schaffer …
Bill: we’ll never have a full-time editor.  We’re a meeting place.
Occasionally can create fresh material.
Maurreen: Can we or will we be able to get updates by e-mail?
Michelle:  Might be helpful to have people identify themselves.
Icons.  Educators, etc.  Brings that spirit onto the website.
Peggy: We can also have “wild card”  = dice.
Stephen: Wants to be able to easily see people’s locations.
We also talked about having a place for rejects from the Knight News
Challenge on our website!
Miscellaneous
Peggy, Stephen or Bill should get access to edit.
“Organic group” on the site planned for the Web committee.
NYT story on local online news communities.
Two papers may close down.

Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 11/13/2008 – 10:09am

Notes provided by Steve Hanson and Maurreen Skowran

Present
Maurreen Skowran
Michelle Ferrier
Peggy Holman
Stephen Silha
Steve Hanson

Web site

Maurreen — How can we get people moved from the Google group to the site?

Steve — That may be a little abrupt at this point. Could we get some people posting on the new site?

Peggy — Can we use the Poynter conference as a transition point, because tje group will get new energy then?  Can we bring this up on the Google group as a transitional period?

Steve — Probably should give some thought to the possibility of building a two-way mailing list implementation on the site. This may be interesting since it doesn’t look to me like all of that behaves well in Drupal 6 yet — but I’ve been a little out of the loop on that.

Need to have some discussion about the workflow of the site (such as what goes on the front page, who has what privileges), and what would the issues be for the upcoming conference.

I’ll send out a  message to the Google group about this, and set up a conference call in ReadyTalk so that we can actually look at the site in the process.  I’ll need to pull together some training info, etc. The call will be Thursday, Nov. 20.

We’ll move to discussing the web site for the near future as issues for the Stewards meeting calls.

Can we start moving more of the functionality from the various wiki’s, BaseCamp, and other places into the single web site?

Also — Peggy is going to copy over recent posts from the WordPress site at journalismthatmatters.org. All the posts there were by her. Steve had copied much of that from there to here. He will change the attribution from Bill Densmore to her.

The Google group has about 30 (Steve – actually it’s 113 subscribers) subscribers, with eight to 10 of them active. The new site has 12 accounts, two other people who started to sign up but didn’t finish, but only two people have written anything there.

Stewards

Are we fulfilling our purpose?

Probably doing so — should probably continue to have the Stewards meetings by phone till we’re more set up with the new web site.

We’ve been having some problems with the fact that the calls each
week often skip over  the issues from the previous calls, and just
concentrate on new items.

Who are the people in the Stewards group?  Don’t seem sure.

Probably should build a Stewards Organic Groups group on the site. How can we organize that?

We probably need to work on re-invigorating the Stewards group.  We should extend an invitation to ask people to participate, and make explicit what skills are needed and what the mission is.   This could probably use more structure.  Can we make this less haphazard by having some points persons on particular issues so that we don’t just keep letting things drop?  We should review what the original declared purpose of the group actually was.  There should probably be some invitation to the current members of the stewards group, asking if they’re interested in continuing, and if not, replace them with some new blood.  Who will do this?  Michelle will do this but we need to first figure out who is in the group. Michelle will try to send it to the Basecamp site e-mail list, which is as close as we have to a Stewards mailing list.

Some people might want to participate but not be able to make the calls. Because probably no single time will be good for everyone, we might start changing the call times, to widen the opportunity.

There were some to-do lists on the Basecamp site — someone who is involved in them should probably update the status — think about how we can move some of that functionality into the new site.

Next call will probably be 11 December.

Poynter conference -

How will the web site be used in conjunction with this?

What about the funding issues?  Still not resolved.

Announcement is going out very soon.  Roles and responsibilities in the new news ecology, March 1-4 at Poynter. Trying to do outreach to non-journalism people who are community-involved. How do we try to reach those people?

Should talk about that during the next call.