Mobile journalists, or “mojos,” in training. (Credit: Allissa Richardson/Flickr/Creative Commons License

On April 19 to 20, more than 300 journalists from around the world descended on Austin for a sold-out conference on online journalism. The International Symposium of Online Journalism, hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, featured a host of new media gurus discussing everything from “mojos” to data visualization. A selection of takeaways:

Don’t focus on building your own online community; insert your site into already established communities.

Deseret News, a Mormon owned news brand “for faith and family oriented audiences in Utah and around the world,” has grown its social media presence and views exponentially in recent years. The secret, according to Clark Gable, president and CEO of Deseret Publishing Company, was “finding the conversation people were already having” and then inserting their content into the flow.

The first step to being able to do that, Gables said, is to determine your publication’s unique niche (in the case of Deseret News, family values are high on the list). He emphasized that, in an online realm, it should be about what you are best at not only in your own community, but also in the world, since your audience is not limited by geography. “If you don’t know what you’re going to be good at,” he said, “you don’t know what the conversation is going to be.”

Gables provided Forbes and The Atlantic as two brands that have excelled at identifying what they are best at and then inserting their brand into existing conversations.

Data teams are on the rise, as is the demand for people who know how to manipulate and visualize data.

Data was hot at the symposium, just as it was at the Online News Association’s conference last fall.  Jennifer Carroll, senior editor and VP for content at Gannett, said her organization is expanding its data staff. Investigative News Network, in partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors, is also hiring a data reporter.

At the Texas Tribune, databases — particularly of public employee salaries — have been one of the site’s greatest successes, said John Thornton, the paper’s chairman and founder. In a talk with Latin American journalists, Thornton said that came as a surprise — calling it data “porn.”

Figuring out how to not only manipulate large data sets but also display them visually was another theme. Kim Rees, partner and head of data visualization at Periscopic, shared a stunning and devastating visualization of the number of Americans who have died due to gun violence, along with the corresponding years of lost life.

Screen capture of interactive data visualization produced by Periscopic.

University of Miami Professor Alberto Cairo summed up the value of graphic literacy to digital journalists this way: “Friends don’t let friends use pie charts.”

Engagement is not clicking a “like” button.

NPR’s Andy Carvin opened his talk about online engagement by sharing how social media gets things wrong. He started with his own experience tweeting erroneously about former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ death.

“How often do we post reports without a third source, or even a second one, to back it up?” Carvin asked. “How many of us have typed up a tweet for a major news Twitter account and hesitated before hitting the send button, wondering, what if we’ve screwed this up? And how many of us have hit the button anyway?”

The role that journalists can play in social media, Carvin argued, is a two-way street of helping the public “become better consumers and producers of information — and hopefully achieve their full potential as active participants in civil society.” Crucial to that, he said, is being transparent about what we know and what we don’t know, actively addressing rumors that are circulating online, and challenging the public to scrutinize them:

“Why aren’t we engaging the public more directly? I don’t mean engagement like encouraging them to ‘like’ us on Facebook or click the retweet button. That is not engagement. By engagement I mean, why don’t we use these incredibly powerful tools to talk with them, listen to them, and help us all understand the world a little better? Perhaps we can even use social media to do the exact opposite of its reputation – to slow down the news cycle, help us catch our collective breaths and scrutinize what’s happening with greater mindfulness.” Read the full transcript»

The question of how to create meaningful engagement was also the focus of an award-winning academic study, “40 Million Page Views is Not Enough: An Examination of the Christian Science Monitor’s Evolution from SEO to Engagement.” One of the paper’s authors, Jonathan Groves, a professor at Drury University, noted that at the Monitor they were getting high traffic, but not for their award-winning — and expensive — international coverage (Disclaimer: I reported from Spain and Germany for the Monitor). Instead, the uptick tended to come from national coverage and polls. Groves, who authored the paper with Professor Carrie Brown Smith at the University of Memphis, concluded the problem was primarily that the Monitor was conducting a one-way conversation with its readers and needed to find better ways to meaningfully engage them.

“Mojo” is on the rise.

Another focus of some conference presenters was on how to use mobile low-cost tools to train journalism students — and residents — to become “mojos,” or mobile journalists, so they can report their own stories.

Ivo Burum, a former Australian Broadcast Company reporter, has been working with indigenous aborigines and other marginalized communities, training them to report their own stories using mobile video techniques. He said that the equipment costs are under $400 a person, and some participants have gone on to be paid correspondents for broadcasting companies. “At the end of four hours everybody has a video,” Burum said. “They can’t believe it.” An editor from a Danish tabloid newspaper, Ekstra Bladet, was so impressed with the technique that now Burum is training reporters from the newsroom and developing a web television presence with them.

A mobile journalism rig. (Credit: Allissa Richardson/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Alissa Richardson, a professor at Bowie State University, is teaching similar mobile techniques to all of her students and to young people from at-risk backgrounds. She also trains girls abroad in conjunction with Global Girls media.

Forget J-schools as teaching hospitals; think entrepreneurial models.

David Ryfe, a professor at the University of Nevada-Reno, shared findings from a paper he wrote with his colleague Professor Donica Mensing on the concept that journalism students can help fill the void in local reporting. The paper, which also won an award at the symposium, explained that the difference between this model and a teaching hospital is that doctors are “committed to a profession that will reward them when they’re done in terms of prestige and income.” Journalism is not that today. Instead, the “newspaper industry is imploding,” and this model “sends people to fill in the gaps left behind.”

Ryfe urged educators to pivot away from a professional model that no longer exists and to examine new models instead. Students can do work for publication, but it should focus on experimentation rather than transferring the legacy newsroom to the university. Echoing a recurring theme at the conference, he also noted that the skills learned in J-school can be used elsewhere. A good point,, but if you happen to be paying for that journalism education, those are very expensive auxiliary skills.

x_jamesmorris/Flickr/Creative Commons License

With so much attention given to social media and online community engagement, it’s easy to forget about the media’s capacity to foster something a little more old-fashioned: live, in-person conversations. As it turns out, the newly popular “community engagement manager” position is one of the rare growth spots in the industry. And various mainstream to digital-only media outlets — from St. Louis Beacon’s “Beacon & Eggs” to Berkelyside’s Three Michael’s to Public Insight Network members — are focusing on in-person meet-ups and forums.

At Alhambra Source, a local news site in a predominantly immigrant community with a goal of increasing civic engagement, we’ve found that connecting with residents in person is as important as producing original stories for the site. As an extension of that process — and to give feedback to participants in our young adult training program — we wanted to lead a forum in the languages of our community.

Easier said than done.

Speaking about sensitive issues such as inter-racial relationships or immigration is hard enough when the community speaks one language. When a quarter of the residents live in households where no adult speaks English well it is almost impossible.

In Alhambra — a city of 85,000 where there are more than four languages that a significant portion of the community speaks — the local schools cope by having automatic translation at meetings and translators on call most of the time.

For our event, we wanted immigrant residents not only to be able to receive information, but to actually have the opportunity for discussion. To do this, we collaborated with Asian Pacific American Legal Center, an advocacy organization that works with immigrant families and youth. Their organizers had experience doing both direct translation and small group discussions. They provided us with U.N.-style audio devices, gave us some guidance on leading the discussion, and mobilized many of the families they work with to come to the event.

The night of the forum we set up five tables in a local church with designated Spanish and Mandarin translators, a youth reporter and a moderator at each one.

Seventy people filled the room –- arriving early and catching us not quite ready. They were as diverse as the city itself: a police sergeant, teachers affiliated with Alhambra Latino Association, a local author, a Chinese blogger, students and stay-at-home moms. Each chose one of the five tables with a designated issue to discuss.

As an introduction, the young people shared a personal issue they had experienced coming of age in an immigrant community — navigating American-style relationships when your parents had an arranged marriage in India, suffering teasing as a recent immigrant from Cuba, and eating tamales at home while getting addicted to fries at school. The non-English speakers put on their headsets for the presentation, and two volunteers translated into Spanish and Mandarin.

Next, the youth reporters led the discussions about the issue they outlined at the five tables with the help of moderators and translators. And, almost miraculously, five simultaneous discussions emerged in multiple languages.

At one table Irma Uc, a part-time community college student, lead a sprawling discussion in four languages on school nutrition. A mother shared in Mandarin how her son had to take two physical education classes back to back because he could not speak English well. At the other end of the table, another mother shared in Spanish about how her kids did not like that Chinese foods were served in the schools.

“Once it started, it was a blur for me,” Irma recalled.

It was complicated, and sometimes the conversations sidetracked, but it was not Babel. People did exchange thoughts and experiences, the conversation flowing via translators into English, and in turn into Vietnamese, Spanish, and Mandarin.

“For some bizarre reason the conversation flowed easily,” Irma said. “The parents that were there really enjoyed the conversation and they also enjoyed listening in other people’s stories. And this is where the language barrier faded.”

When the event was over, we received one overwhelming criticism: The discussions were too short. Participants said the highlight was the opportunity to address common issues from different perspectives with neighbors with whom you could not usually communicate.

Here are a few more of the lessons we learned:

• Assess your translators’ skills.

  If you are going to do instantaneous translation, then make sure the translator is up to the task. Without pauses from the presenters, this can be extremely challenging, and nothing kills a discussion faster than not understanding. For group discussions, there is more leeway.

• Document the event.

  As a media outlet, the objective was not only to engage residents in conversation, but also to identify new issues and stories. Two L.A.-based media outlets that often hold forums, Zocalo and Southern California Public Radio, record events and post them on their sites. This works for a presentation with one microphone but is hard with the simultaneous smaller group discussions. We’re still looking for a way to document those exchanges, since they provided some of the most valuable elements of the evening.

• Provide food if you want busy parents to come.

  Our partners at Asian Pacific American Legal Center, who have a lot of experience with community organizing, made clear that if we want people to come, then there needed to be food – and it could not just be pizza.

• Provide child care if you want busy parents to come.

  We did not anticipate parents would bring children — or how distracting those rambunctious kids would be. If we did it again, we would have a designated babysitter.

• Partner with an organization with established relationships in the community.

  If you want people who do not speak English well to be part of your discussion, you have to have established relationships with them. Our site, while it contains multilingual content, is English dominant. We turned to local organizations to help make that connection — Asian Pacific American Legal Center was a great partner in our case. Another option is to work with local ethnic press and hold the forum in partnership.

• Control in-language conversations.

  If you have multiple languages, people will tend to go into side discussions by language, which is faster and easier than waiting for translation. You need a strong moderator to bring the conversation back to a central point, if you are truly going to have a multilingual discussion.

A version of this story appeared on Good.is.

Credit: r8r/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Hyperlocal efforts got an infusion of cash earlier this month, when the neighborhood social network Nextdoor scored $21.6 million from leading venture capitalists. The backers — led by Greylock Partners David Sze, who has invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pandora — are betting that the platform for private, geographically based forums will be the next hot thing in local news and information and could even build community in neighborhoods across the country in the process.

They’re onto something with the potential to foster community. A long line of research identifies conversation as key to fostering civic dialogue and a sense of belonging. Jurgen Habermas’ theory of the Public Sphere, in which residents come together to discuss the news of the day, is one example. In a more recent one, USC Annenberg Professor Sandra Ball-Rokeach took the concept to a neighborhood level. Through studies of more than a dozen Los Angeles communities, she found that interactions between neighbors — whether online or off — can help increase local civic engagement.

But Ball-Rokeach’s research has also found that conversations need to be complemented by neighborhood news coverage and links to local organizations to have significant impact. Moreover, diverse communities require focused efforts that are tailored to their shared needs. Often such efforts must cross linguistic and ethnic lines and the digital divide. These findings have impacted our efforts to create a local news website, Alhambra Source, in a predominantly immigrant Los Angeles suburb. Based on research into community information needs, the site has elements in three languages and works with residents and organizations to report local stories.

Still, a challenge for communities is that Nextdoor’s emergence as a relatively low-cost model to jumpstart forums comes at a time when a recent attempt at hyperlocal news sites, and local news generally, has been faltering. The New York Times announced last summer that it will end its affiliation with its hyperlocal sites. Earlier this month NBC shut down the local data collection and mapping site Everyblock (Nextdoor already has an ad up saying “Missing EveryBlock? join 8,000+ neighborhoods who use Nextdoor”). And AOL’s hyperlocal venture, Patch, still is falling short on promised advertising revenues.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia, who grew up in Odessa, Texas, of “Friday Night Lights” fame, said he based the site on the type of bulletin boards found at Laundromats and supermarkets and believes that his business will be able to succeed where other hyperlocal efforts have stumbled. One thing that might help, according to Gigaom senior writer Mathew Ingram, is Nextdoor’s restrictive nature. Users must prove their identity (or at least their address) in order to join one of Nextdoor’s neighborhood networks. Another thing Ingram mentions briefly, and what could be key to its future success, is that the Nextdoor model is less expensive than Patch, which hired an editor for every community (though now Patch, too, is considering lower cost alternatives in its efforts to become profitable.)

Nextdoor and other forums can play a crucial part in a healthy news ecosystem, but they work best when tailored to local needs and in conjunction with other news coverage. Julie Moos, Director of Poynter Online, noted in a comment on Ingram’s article that hyperlocal news sites and neighborhood networks can be complementary. “Through Nextdoor I learn about breakins (sic) within a three-block radius of my house; through Patch I learn about the proposed apartment complex being discussed at the town council meeting. Through Patch, I learn about a restaurant opening; through Nextdoor I learn whether my neighbors like the new restaurant,” Moos wrote. “Without Patch and Nextdoor, I would know almost nothing about this community of 17,000.”

Online neighborhood forums are not new, and two that have been held up as models for stimulating discussion and resident involvement are E-Democracy.org in Minnesota and FrontPorch Forum in Vermont. E-Democracy’s founder, Steven Clift, who started the site in 1994, likes to describe the forms as online town halls that “support participation in public life, strengthen communities, and build democracy.” To do so, his team works door-to-door in diverse communities, hires people from the area they are targeting, and employs community organizing tactics. A difference Clift points to between E-Democracy forums and Nextdoor is that they include organizations and businesses, not just residents, to foster dialogue and ensure that they are not “virtual gated communities.” But even with all of that effort, Clift shared on a recent visit to Los Angeles that lost pets are often the most popular posts and that they rely on local news coverage to provide context. Nextdoor has its share of pet posts, too, but as Mashable points out, 20 percent of the content is about crime, making it work like an online neighborhood watch program, as well.

In my local Los Angeles neighborhood in Echo Park, nobody has set up a Nextdoor forum yet, but I have the benefit of at least three local news sites including a Patch and other online bulletin boards. One case that works particularly well is The Eastsider LA, a site started by former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesus Sanchez, who also happens to be my neighbor. In the past two weeks, seven out of eight posts from community members on his forum have been about pets — from chickens found on the entrance to the freeway to a found dog that had just been skunked. Sanchez creates most of the editorial content himself, from well-reported short posts about the record number of City Council candidates to why my favorite local gardening store is being forced out because of higher rents. The combination of the forum and reported news has changed my relationship to my neighborhood, informing me, making me feel more connected, raising issues and generating discussion — in other words, it has fostered a sense of community.

A version of this story appeared in GOOD magazine.

I also hope people will start checking out my online community journalism resource 92067 Rancho Santa Fe Free Press at http://www.92067freepress.com.

We’re hoping to serve as an example of the site sophistication now achievable with no resources due to the development of hosting resources.

We’re going strong on content but need to diversify, so any submissions from OJR visitors to our site is welcome. E-mail at 92067freepress@gmail.com