Keanu Reeves has a bit in The Replacements where he talks about quicksand: those awful times when something bad happens and not only do you get stuck, but every effort to overcome your difficulty only seems to drag you in deeper. Yesterday was not quicksand, it was a minefield. Every time we turned around there was the very real possibility that something would blow up in our faces.

We had it all yesterday: A late start so Kel and the kids could participate in a parade running long. (That Kel was the only staff member there who wasn’t required to be there sucked as well.) Miscommunication delayed the truck getting loaded. The air conditioner compressor failed spectacularly when we started the truck. The shop couldn’t get the part because it was after noon on a Saturday.

The drive was relatively uneventful and the hotel is decent (except for the wireless Internet; why is this so freaking hard to do right?). At least, until I discovered I left the power supply for my CPAP machine at home.

You think you’re in the clear and boom!

Like I said, a minefield.

Several changes have been made behind the scenes to help ensure different formats are judged on an equal basis, including asking jurors to bring their laptops to judging in March so they can see the multimedia and visual entries as readers did.

If you’re employed by a traditional media company (or indeed, many others), you might not be able to do everything online that you want because of policies and restrictions. While I think a lot of these worries are overblown and the restrictions too broad or unreasonable, unless you’ve got enough money for a court battle, just play it safe. N.b.: if there’s some question about the legality of an action, I am not a lawyer.

But if nothing else, I think you have to have a basic resume and contact information site, even if you have no interest in ever producing new media work yourself. Even if your tagline out to be “ink on paper and nothing else”, you need to have somewhere on the Internet that people can find you.

A portfolio site would be even better and, done right, a blog can be a very powerful tool; ditto podcast, video, animations, etc. The content that lies outside your expertise doesn’t need to be the best ever seen, but it should show competence and an understanding of both news values and storytelling techniques in the medium.

Elsewhere, I talk about three methods for getting a website up and running without needing to know how to disassemble, service and reassemble a flux capacitor time travel engine. There are services that will allow you to be available without being overly exposed.

The first thing any potential employer will probably do after becoming interested in hiring you is enter your name in Google. You should have a page on the first screen, preferably the first link returned, that is under your control. A common name will mean more trouble for you and the prospective employer, but you should be toward the top of any reasonable search.

It’s just not an option any more not to be visible.

[Tony] Rogers [journalism curator at about.com] believes there is too much technology in journalism schools. The title of his article posted in September: Is There Too Much Tech Training at the Nation’s Journalism Schools?
NO.

This concludes another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

C’mon, Bryan, tell us how you really feel.
I agree that the proposition to replace fundamentals with technology classes is a strawman, given that in literally hours of interviews on the topic I found nobody on either side of the debate either proposing such or naming someone who did, and that in further hours looking at journalism schools’ offerings there was not any indication this is happening. I had one person tell me he wouldn’t object if someone created a course entirely about using Twitter—which I nearly choked on—he thought that the fundamentals should be woven throughout the curriculum alongside teaching the basic technologies journalists ought to have at least seen before.
Journalism educators have a tough task in trying to teach students how to do things that may not be part of any journalism job to date, and I think all will agree that grounding students in fundamentals has to be a part of that process. But another part has to be teaching them how to understand these media, how to learn what each can do, how to tell stories in different ways and how to be flexible enough that when those unforeseen facets emerge, they won’t get on their hind legs and bleat that this isn’t the journalism they were taught. Like so many of the curmudgeons do.

Now, [reporting and blogging] are different from what it means to be a blogger or a reporter. The latter are a matter of identity, not activity.

This exercise of limning just what makes one fulfill these terms or makes one’s writing fit into these categories is a useful one. The roles and the activities are not mutually exclusive, and they are not all that well defined in common usage.
Carmody defines blogging as writing online in serial form that is collected into a single database; reporting is searching for information and determining it’s veracity.
“Blogger” and “reporter” are, Carmody says, in the same vein as “writer”; if someone says they are a writer, we assume they identify with the act of writing whether professionally, as a vocation, or as a skill one has honed. (There is obviously a floor below which one is no longer a writer, an important concept.)
Carmody posits that reporters have traditionally been seen as representing their institutions, while bloggers have been, in the short time there have been bloggers, more personally connected to their writings. Of course the former is eroded by print reporters going on television to talk about the story of the day and blogging institutions where there may be a person identified with it, but many individuals writing posts.
The connotations of these words are many, varied and largely dependent upon one’s experience with bloggers, blogging, reporters and reporting, and it should be noted that those B words are viewed quite negatively by journalism’s old guard. The reality is that one is just a way of doing things, like briefs or narrative journalism, and the other is just the identity one has chosen for himself or has thrust upon him. They are not, nor should they be, mutually exclusive and antagonistic.

But then I’d stop… perhaps mid-sentence… put my pen down… look the person in the eye and say:

Look, the biggest obstacle in journalism right now isn’t whether people trust “us” or not. It’s not even the revenue crisis we are all facing and feeling every day.
The biggest obstacle is… you.

Preach it!
Seriously, the twin foolishnesses of trying to get top management’s heads wrapped around new media and technology that, frankly, is way below their pay grade and of said top management trying to be visionary about concepts they don’t grasp have got to be more dragging on journalism than the ad revenue crisis has been.
This isn’t to say top management doesn’t have a vital, critical role to play, but trying to be the guy who saw into the future and purchased X or convinced the newsroom to produce Y isn’t it. It’s far more likely the top boss is going to lock in the newsroom to a CMS that is clunky as hell (but has a damned good salesman) or that demand staff all sign up for and constantly monitor an Orkut account because Google just bought it. Nor is it to say that top managers should be hands-off all the time. But listening to your staff more than salesmen and pundits, and trusting them to give you the best advice they can in areas outside your expertise, is a far safer bet.

The Rogers Adoption/Innovation Curve

Shown that way, it’s clear that gaining buy-in from the left side of the curve, while important (change that doesn’t have the innovators and early adopters on board is almost always either doomed or deeply resented), falls way short of the critical mass necessary for culture change.
McClellan points out that innovators and early adopters are likely to try new things whether you want them to or not, and thus the meat of the battle is for the early majority.
She recommends giving these folks a couple of things:

• Specifics. What you want produced, with examples and models. Use input from innovators and early adopters to create processes and products.
• Training. (Do I need to point out that this is a hobby horse of mine? Didn’t think so.) Allow opportunities to apply what they’ve learned and to experiment (and fail) in a safe environment. Don’t forget vocabulary; getting people speaking the same language greases the skids of any change.
• Clear communication of goals and priorities. A big part of this is unity of message. Different messages from the top executive and the immediate supervisor confuses and stresses staff members.

Finally, McLellan advocates leaving the laggards (many of whom will be vocal or passive agressive) out of management’s focus, save holding them accountable for their performance. Oiling those squeaky wheels just robs you of resources to focus on the hearts and minds you can win.

• Food
• Education
• Labor
• Business
• Faith

He also stipulates that this imaginary site would have zero wire copy or syndicated material and be totally locally produced and aimed at the community. If sports is the crack of local papers, wire copy is the meth and syndicated content is the heroin. They are eating up resources that could be better used elsewhere.
He also gives reasons he didn’t include sports, entertainment, weather, crime and courts, comics, and government in his list. He’d limit sports to the truly local (outside niche plays around local sports of wider interest), outsource entertainment, crowdsource weather, automate crime and courts, kill the comics and cover government in ways other than horse race journalism. (Health gets the sports treatment in an update.)
It’s hard to argue with his choices and his exclusions. Far too much of the limited amount of money newspapers have is thrown at “what we’ve always done”. I’d add government back in, covered in an intelligent way relevant to the community served.

Regular cell phones, however, can get a lot done as well, especially when paired with a distribution service like Posterous which can take texts, photos and videos from a cell phone (via MMS or email) and post them to various places.

Google’s Android operating system is probably the best bet for journalists, as not only does it have apps for almost anything you care to do, but the openness of the OS means that developers can more easily create and distribute apps. In fact, even non-coders can get in on the act: Google App Inventor puts the power to create a custom app in anybody’s hands.