Goodbye and thank you from Seattle PostGlobe

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Seattle Journalism Commons

Farewell article via Sally Deneen -PostGlobe Co-founder and Curator

We started as a nonprofit news site created by laid-off staffers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after the 146-year-old paper printed its last edition on what for others was a festive St. Patrick’s Day in 2009. More than 100 journalists lost their jobs as the paper scaled down its staff and went online-only. Some ended their journalism careers that day, as newspaper jobs nationally continued to evaporate – nearly 15,000 other print journalists lost their jobs that year.

A recap of some of our major enterprise:

(Photo by Mike Kane)
* Eric Ruthford explored how gangs are turning from selling drugs to selling girls for sex as part of a special series on teen prostitution in Seattle.
* Our reality check on the King County 10-year plan to end homelessness revealed shortcomings; no one could think of a single homeless program that will close for lack of demand.

* We broke the story about City Light Superintendent Jorge Carrasco getting a $40,000 bonus from the city.  It’s impossible to know if another reporter would have discovered that eventually. But we may never have known had we not been there.
* We broke the story of how Seattle might ban smoking in parks.
* We “ truth-squaded ” the proposal by King County Council members to have Seattle pay for the downtown bus tunnel and were the only ones to report Metro believes Seattle was already paying its fair share.
* We were the only ones first to report a bit of Seattle history – the sale of four old ferries that cruised Puget Sound for decades. And we were the only ones to chronicle their departure for a scrap yard in Mexico.

[Read More]

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WSDOT – using social media to get the word out on transportation

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Seattle Journalism Commons

via ONA / SPJ Meetup.com page

Hello all,

Heading over the Cascades? Trapped in your car during #snOMG? Figuring out a way to get around summer road closures? WSDOT aims to help you navigate through all of it with innovative and responsive use of social media. Jeremy Bertrand, web manager and media strategist of Washington State Department of Transportation, will chat with us about how he developed this government agency’s policies and practices at the next ONA-SPJ Seattle Meetup Tuesday, July 26, at 7 p.m. at Jillian’s.

This is our fourth in a series of the #Newsnext meetups, where we’re talking to interesting locals working in the digital space. If you’re interested in gathering with writers, editors, photographers, producers, developers, designers, engineers and anyone else with an interest in the production of news, Jillian’s will have a cash bar and some great space to meet with like-minded digital professionals.

Any questions, feel free to let us know.
Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Monica, Tiffany, Mark, and Paul

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New local partners for Seattle Times

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Mike Fancher

The Seattle Times announced it has added three websites to its News Partner Network. They are Inside Bainbridge, My Everett News and Seattle’s Child. All together, The Times now has forty partners in three categories:

The Times launched the network in August 2009, with a relatively small grant from J-Lab. At the time there were just a handful of local partners, but they included real online news pioneers such as Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog, Kate and Cory Bergman of Next Door Media and Justin Carder of the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog.

The network has grow remarkably. I’m unaware of any newspaper in the country that has done as much as The Times to build such a collaborative network. A list of success stories on The Times’ site includes cross-linking to stories, photo swapping, training on topics such as mobile reporting and video editing. It also mentions two collaborative news projects, one on homeless families and the other on graffiti.

The Times says it wants to establish and build cooperative relationships with other news sites. If you have questions or suggestions to include in the network, contact Bob Payne – bpayne at seattletimes dot com, Times editor for partnerships and audience engagement.

The News Partner Network is a prime example of what’s working in the Seattle area news and information ecosystem. Other examples are included in the State of the Media section of the Seattle Journalism Commons. We invite you to submit other examples.

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I worked at The Times for 30 years, but all of this wonderful work happened well after I retired in 2008.

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Librarians + Journalists = match made in heaven?

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Jacob Caggiano

[vimeo width=”400″ height=”225″]http://vimeo.com/25585289[/vimeo] I remember how it felt to discover that chocolate and strawberries are a little different, but still go amazingly well together. That’s how I’ve been feeling about JTM’s Beyond Books initiative, and we’ve had some exciting stuff happening, with Seattle crew on board.

Mike Fancher (Commons co-founder, retired Seattle Times Exec. Editor) & Marsha Iverson (King County Libraries) were at the #ALA11 convention in New Orleans last week, and here’s Mike’s takeaway.

I was on a panel at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans, discussing strategic partnerships between journalists and librarians. The lively discussion lasted two hours, with lots of enthusiasm and ideas from the audience.

I talked about the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and my just-release policy paper, “Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World.”

One clear impression from the panel discussion is that people think this is a worthwhile topic at a critical time for both professions. My key takeaways:

• Librarians see civic engagement as an important element in what they do and how they make their case for public support. Civic engagement helps democracy, but it also has economic benefits to communities.

• Digital literacy is a core competency of libraries. It needs to be actively advanced and promoted.

• Institutional inertia could be a barrier in some library systems. Students are being trained for a new library culture, but the needed cultural change may come slowly in some systems. (This is a great topic to explore for libraries and journalism.)

• People are excited about early results from LibrariUS, a partnership among the American Public Media Public, the ALA and its Public Library Association division. Attendees offered several ideas and examples for extending it.

• Several people spoke glowing about their experience at the Biblionews conference at MIT in April. Two items stood out: 1) the JTM methodology for bringing together people from different backgrounds and disciplines; 2) the use of information technology to capture the experience immediately and permanently. The librarians were particularly interested in the second item.

• The library community is ready to move ahead; bringing journalists along may be a tougher challenge. (That’s my view, not the librarians’.)

• Higher education needs to be a partner.

The nexus of journalism, libraries and civic engagement is a terrific area for Journalism That Matters to continue to be a catalyst.

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Seattle Digital Literacy Camp – Underway!

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Jacob Caggiano

The Seattle Digital Literacy Summer Institute is well under way this week for youth age 13-19.

You can follow updates on the program via the Seattle Digital Literacy Initiative Facebook Page

Or visit seattledigitalliteracy.com

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Seattle Social Media Day 2011 – June 30

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Seattle Journalism Commons

More info and RSVP at Eventbright

smday

Banyan Branch & Seattle Interactive Conference are hosting the

Seattle 2011 Social Media Day!

banyanbranch SIC

Join us at HG Lodge on Capitol Hill (722 E. Pike St., Seattle 98122) on Thursday, June 30th from 5:30 – 7:30p.m. for drinks, music from DJ Marty Mar, prizes & lots of networking with Seattle’s vibrant social media community.

Skillet will have their food truck parked outside HG, and Molly Moon‘s truck will have your afterparty treats at 7:30p.m.

PopChips will have their famous chips and a social photobooth on hand.

popchips

Prizes include:

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BarCamp Seattle 2011 – June 24-26th

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Seattle Journalism Commons

from http://barcampseattle2011.eventbrite.com/

BarCamp Seattle is a one of a kind event where you are the conference and the content is only as good as the attendees. If you have never attended you need to know the basics. BarCamp is an open-format conference where the attendees are the presenters. Our subject matter will be directly tied to what ideas people bring to share with the community.

This years event is in a smaller space than in the past and so we have some limitations but limitations are what makes BarCamp great. Some people will want to give a presentation, but discussion groups, round tables, Q&A, brainstorming together are also options. The only expectation is that its expected that everyone be prepared to talk about their passions and ideas.

Read more here:

www.barcampseattle.com

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#NewsNext with Rand Fishkin – CEO of SEOmoz – June 23

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Seattle Journalism Commons

Event info & RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/ONA-SPJ-Seattle/events/20734901/

Who’s hosting? Mark Briggs, Monica Guzman, Paul Balcerak, Tiffany Campbell

How to find us: Jillian’s, 731 Westlake Avenue North Seattle, WA 98109-4322

Hello all,

It’s been suggested by some in the digital world that in the era of social media, search engines could wither and die. Rand Fishkin, the CEO of Seattle’s SEOmoz, thinks they’re just going to make search better, more powerful, and more relevant. We’ll be chatting with Rand about the art of SEO – search engine optimization – and why it matters for your next story at the next ONA-SPJ Seattle Meetup Thursday, June 23 at 7 p.m. Bring your questions about white-hat SEO, social media, SEO tactics and more to Jillian’s on Westlake.

This is our third in a series of the #Newsnext meetups, where we’re talking to interesting locals working in the digital space. If you’re interested in gathering with writers, editors, photographers, producers, developers, designers, engineers and anyone else with an interest in the production of news, Jillian’s will have a cash bar and some great space to meet with like-minded digital professionals.

Any questions, feel free to let us know.

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,

Monica, Tiffany, Mark, and Paul

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June 22 GeekWire Launch Party: Get Your Geek On

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Seattle Journalism Commons

Tickets and info here

Geekwire logo

Join 600+ startup geeks, tech luminaries, sports fans, rock stars, local heroes and celebrity guests. Great times, from tunes to trash talk!

Get in the game:

·        Challenge a local celeb to a hole-in-one putt-off.

·        Got hoops?  Take on a basketball great in a game of G-E-E-K.

·        Settle your (business) scores on the astro-turf. Can’t choose between billiards and soccer? You don’t have to. Introducing GeekBall.

Party stations can transform your business card into fabulous prizes. You may already be a winner.

Get your Geek On.

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UW Masters of Communication in Digital Media Screen Summit

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Jacob Caggiano

I’m assuming people around here know the #MCDM acronym by now. The Masters of Communication in Digital Media program, which spawned 10 years ago at the University of Washington, has just announced its largest graduating class (55 people), surpassing that of all other Comm department graduate students proudly deploying their cap and gown this weekend.

Director Hanson Hosein spoke of the program as more than just a model to address the challenges of the digital disruption, but a model for academia itself. The MCDM was the first non-state funded program at UW and is one of the few currently standing. After hosting the succesful TedxSeattle and TedxRainer events, they ramped up their public interface and introduced the Four Peaks salon speaker series (featured in more detail from Seattle Magazine). Their Flip the Media blog is well received across the web, and their Media Space television program is the most popular on UWTV, reaching 300,000 viewers per month. Hosein is testing a self-publishing model for his write-as-you-go book “Storyteller Uprising” which is available for free online, though I decided to buy myself a $10 hard copy which he slings around with him from place to place. MCDM founder Anthony Giffard has a lifelong track record of being a positive agitator, first as a white South African born journalist covering the dismantlement of apartheid, then as a faculty member of a “whites only” university who ignored resistance from his colleagues when he used an administrative loophole to hand a degree to the first student of color at Rhodes University.

Mr. Giffard shared his heartfelt story at the podium and delivered two “make the chanage” awards for innovation in digital media.

The first was received by Adam Brotman of Starbucks, who won the award for its in-store Starbucks Digital Network, a content delivery service launched last year in partnership with Yahoo. Brotman is also a member of the MCDM Advisory Board with other local industry leaders.

The second award went to Dan Savage, for his “It get’s better” project which became a textbook example of an “around the world in 80 clicks” type viral campaign done right. The famed Stranger editor and columnist was moved to take action after learning about the teen suicides of Justin Aaberg and Billy Lucas, and inspired 20,000+ others to make personal testimony videos like his to remind bullied homosexual youth to stick it out because it gets better later on. He even managed to get a bunch of well known folks like Jewel, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Sarah Silverman, Perez Hilton, and Tim Gunn to share their own stories. (Read Geekwire’s post to learn about how his campaign turned into an ad for Google Chrome).

Besides the usual speech and applause routine, we also got to see a full showcase of student projects presented in a walkaround convention style setting. The space was actually a bit too jammed for me to interact face to face with everyone, but I caught some cool portfolios (i.e. Filiz Efe), an online news game for public radio, a “cinema in a backpack” entrepreneurship program launched by Disney in Nicaragua, and a mobile video chat system to help Korean students learn English (also won $25k for placing first at the UW business plan competition).

Keep your eyes out as MCDM continues to grow and put Seattle based digital media on notice for the rest of the world.

[original event announcement below]

Tickets and info via Eventbright page

“This June, we are hosting the inauguration of a new annual networking event to showcase the amazing work our students have done and continue to do in the MCDM. The first annual MCDM Screen Summit will be held on Friday, June 10, 5:30-7:30pm at the Portage Bay Cafe – South Lake Union location. The event will be bookended with an opening introduction and welcome by Hanson Hosein, current Director of the MCDM, and a closing speech and presentation of the Anthony C. Giffard “Make the Change” Award by Anthony Giffard, creator of the MCDM. Of course, refreshments will be served.

The bulk of the Screen Summit will be an opportunity for students to present their work on the screen of their choice, be it smart phone, tablet, or laptop. The focus will be on mingling and networking between students, alumni, MCDM Advisory Board members, faculty, and community members, with each student presenter stationed at a table (think poster session with screens instead of posters).”

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