Crunchberry Project

The team spent Friday morning coalescing ideas and understanding about eastern Iowans and what we might be able to do for them. Thursday we sent out email surveys and called people to ask questions. Friday we discussed our interviews and identified some information needs that eastern Iowans might have:

• Child rearing - online forums, daycare
• Family Activities & events
• Housekeeping/housework
• Family dinner & nutrition
• Crime news & enforcement & neighborhood watch
• Baby news & family news
• Local business & jobs
• Farmers market
• Grown-up things to do
• Local news
• Keeping in touch with friends, family
• Night life
• Making news gathering easier: most news-bang for time-buck

A favorite of mine is the need to make news gathering easier.

A new study from Medill’s Media Management Center called ” What It Takes To Be A Web Favorite” shows that people can be overwhelmed by the volume of stuff on a newspaper’s website. They see a enormous list of headlines in multiple columns on a web page, and get turned off. Another study from the AP called “A New Model for News” shows that readers really want depth in the news they consume, but often don’t get that in their daily reading. People will go from web site to web site looking for stories that provide more information and read the same story or similar stories over and over.

People don’t have a lot of time to read the news, but want in-depth news and are having trouble getting it. This issue was echoed by a few people we interviewed, and our team members recognized that this is something that they personally deal with.

It’s the usability, stupid.

UPDATE:
Let me talk a little about how we came to pick these topics.

We did a limited survey of people who volunteered to participate, and called them to ask some more in-depth questions. A few people were stay-at-home moms. Around half of the people had kids of some age. The rest didn’t. We then threw ideas around in a few rounds to come up with a list of things that jived with the activities and interests of the people we talked to and received survey responses from.

It’s certainly not exhaustive and definately rushed.

Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress, was a literary, musical and artistic movement of emotional expression reacting to the occasionally oppressive rational restrictions of the Enlightenment during the late 18th century.

As Team Crunchberry tackles innovative approaches to building stronger bonds and networks within the community of Cedar Rapids, we too must consider breaking from the past.  We must see both the forest and the trees; the macro- and microcosm.  The task can seem Herculean when viewed at a distance and so we have spent some time gaining perspective.

Shipwreck, 1759

Aiding us to do so today was social media specialist Dan Pacheco, who has worked on various projects including the Bakersfield Californian and Printcasting (see team member Brian Boyer’s blog post on the subject).  Pacheco discussed social networking as it fulfilled the majority of the tiers within Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, and the importance of defining users as content.

Lisa Williams, of placeblogger and h2otown.info, also spoke to the team today, covering subjects including the necessity of regarding a newspaper as an application and the pitfalls of not really knowing what an audience really wants until you put it out there.

The team is approaching a challenge of this magnitude by deconstructing it, where possible, into more manageable chunks.  Today, the team established the over-arching goals we wish to attain and the elite task force known as “Consumer Insights” put the finishing touches on a survey which we’ll be using to gain as much insight into our chosen demographic as possible.

So we shall plunge on, thinking in new directions and attempting to free ourselves from potentially restrictive pre-existing models.

BRUSSELS – I’m on a bit of a hiatus from the project this week as I am taking part in a delegation of journalism graduate students to the European Union. Each day we have been meeting with diplomats, representatives from the EU, NATO, the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, career journalists and other students trying to make it in this field.

When surrounded by such intelligent people who care a great deal about journalism as public service and a tool for democracy, one topic, be it over Belgian waffles, mussels, chocolate or beer inevitably comes to the surface, “Where is journalism headed?”

What now? Choconancy1/Flickr

I find the silver lining in these admittedly gloomy conversations knowing that this project could help answer this question.

One thing that consistently comes to mind is the importance of experimentation. Like the pack mentality of the EU press corps, the journalism industry has been waiting for someone to write the lede so the rest can follow suit.

Instead of waiting for someone else to find the answers, I appreciate the unique opportunity the Cedar Rapids Gazette has given us to experiment, succeed, and even, fail.

Our charge is simple: foster community interaction. Comments and discussion boards are the reigning formats for user-interaction. Yet, hardly anyone would argue they are the ideal systems. For the most part, users use them as soapboxes and rarely engage in dialogue with fellow readers. When dialogue does occur it is rarely the intelligent conversation newspapers aim to foster.

In a hypothetical world, a reader visits her local newspaper’s website one morning and an article about a robbery in her neighborhood catches her eye. No one was hurt and only $75 was taken from the till, but still she is worried. She has been reading about crimes in her neighborhood more often lately – it used to be such a safe place. But this woman is not a bystander; she wants to know how she can help. She logs into the website and notices 16 other registered users are reading the same story. She poses a question, “Does anyone want to chat about what we can do to stop the rising crime rate here?” Three users respond and they begin to chat about the problem, live, much like people do on AIM, MSN and Google Chat.

I’m certainly not saying this model is a winning solution. It probably assumes far too much about the level of civic engagement in American communities, and news organizations would likely worry about their inability to monitor such conversations. But it is an idea nonetheless – an experiment. It could fail. It could succeed. Much like the experiments we will test out as part of this project may fail or succeed. The important thing is we refuse to do what is already being done and we are lucky enough to have the opportunity to try something new.

Tree of Five Seasons in Cedar Rapids, IA. fluidicmethod/Flickr

A problem facing many online news outfits is how to handle reader conversations. Do they enable comments?

Some do and others don’t.

It’s difficult to keep things constructive. Irrelevant, offensive, spam and false comments can plague sites that do allow commenting, especially those that don’t require readers to register.

So how do we improve the participation? How do we direct user participation into a constructive debate or conversation?

These are the issues that our group of graduate journalism students have decided to look at in our 12 week new media capstone project at the Medill School of Journalism. We are fortunate to have a partner, The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, IA., to help us explore these issues. We will be talking to them and the people of Cedar Rapids in order to better understand what people want from online conversation.

As part of our project we will develop a working application that draws from the lessons we’ve learned and addresses the problems of online participation on news websites.

We’ve spent the last 2 weeks learning about the people of Cedar Rapids and eastern Iowa, the great flood of 2008, The Gazette and their vision. We had a chance to visit Cedar Rapids and speak to the staff thanks to the Gazette’s content ninja, Annette Schulte. We will be interviewing people and brainstorming over the next couple of weeks, and logging our experiences and the things we’ve learned on this site.