TOM WEIGHS IN

I see we haven't gotten much response so far to your proposal, Rebekah. So let me jump in anyway and see if it prompts any more:

The technology:
As I said in my earlier e-mail, the Smart Decision comparison isn't appropriate in this case, because totally different players are involved. I have contracted with an outside company, Bright Tree, to do the shells programming. These are consultants who do nothing but this kind of work.
It may be true that creating something within the Missourian content management system takes more time -- too much time. If that's the case, we'll put something up anyway.

Resources:
I trust from your note that it didn't go well with the editors. I'll hook up with them in the next couple of the days. In the meantime, if you have specific reporting you need help with, send the requests to me and I'll see if I can help.

To that point, I am canceling a trip to Ft. Myers planned for next week. I'll be physically in the office Wednesday morning.

On innovation: Saying we have to do "something innovative" freezes you from doing anything innovative. Enlightened trial and error beats lone genius every time (not my words, but I wish they were.)
So don't worry about it. You're doing work you haven't done before -- even those of you in the convergence sequence. To date you all have operated in the safe confines of a beat or a class assignment or an internship. You haven't had to deal with the hardest assignment of all -- freedom.
This project has already seen one great leap, in the way you all came up with ideas and talked about them and imagined them. It has shown how much really smart students can do -- you've organized yourselves to make this happen.

I'm OK if the group wants to boil it to one. Or keep three.

I'm putting in an assignment on the blackboard for everyone to vote by 3 pm Friday.

Tom

I'm just the sports guy, but...

So I really don't know anything about designing a website, or how to use Flash, or even really what Flash is. I'm not the leader of my team, and I'm not overly knowledgeable about even my own shell.

Now that I've destroyed any credibility I might have had, I think I'm about ready to second Rebekah and Paul's thoughts on these shells...we may have taken on a bit much.

Sure, any student is going to opt for less work if he or she can, unless they're irrationally excited about it or something. But I think we've underestimated the time commitment that is going to be needed for this to work. It's easy to think, hey, if we each just put in five or six hours a week on this thing, we can get it all done. That might not even be true...it might take a lot more, which is only going to be compounded by how disjointed all of our schedules are. And even if five or six hours was a good estimation, where are these hours coming from? For me, baseball season just started, and I have to fit a semester's worth of reporting into the remaining two months of school. This, while still having all my other classes and homework, and while holding a job that allows me to attend here in the first place, social life be damned.

Okay, that was all just a little rant of mine. I'm down for whatever anyone wants to do...I have no problem in admitting that everyone else's perception is probably a lot clearer than is mine. I just thought the goal here was to get something workable - and good - done. At this point, three shells may be wishful thinking.


Progress
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The baseball team was to have their first home game Tuesday...it got cancelled. And then they were supposed to have it Friday...it got cancelled. So it looks like Saturday and Sunday will be big days for me, if the weather permits. I had a nice introductory/get to know you conversation with the coach this morning, and I think it went over really well. My goal in having the meeting was to establish some trust and, hopefully, to make him more comfortable with me wanting to steal his players for interviews all the time.

Other than this, I have little to report. I should be exceptionally busy starting this weekend though, so next week should be a bit more progressive...

Thank you, Rebekah!

I'm usually idealistic. I'm capable of recognizing, though, when I'm being too idealistic. And with this shells project...well, I let the idealism get a little out of control. It just took a little while to realize that what I thought were healthy nerves surrounding a big project are actually a giant, red flag waving in front of my face. We've bitten off more than we can chew.

Even having paired down the Safety Shell, I feel like I'm demanding way too much work of reporters who are already extremely busy. Forgive the cynicism, here, but I've about had my fill. I signed up for advanced reporting to report in-depth stories for a beat. I don't know if this has to with group dynamics or the fact that my shell has nothing to do with my beat, but I'm spending a pretty inordinate amount of time planning meetings no one has time to show up to, writing outlines no one has time to read, and coming up with ideas no one has time to discuss or flesh out. I'm really worried that I'm pouring several hours of work each week into organizing something that's going to fall apart when it comes to execution.

I'm not trying to say I'm doing everything. I'm not. I've just fallen into the role of the de-facto group coordinator. And I'll be honest. It's too much for me to handle. I trust my group, and I know we're capable, but even with the degree to which we've steamlined our plan, I still can't help but think we're taking on too much.

I'm with Rebekah. I don't know about the other groups, but I'm gripping on the last thread of my sanity this semester. If we can bring some of our ideas together and maybe shift focus to one shell project, I think I'd be much less likely to jump off the deep end. Because I'm feeling pretty crazy right now.

I really, really, really like this shells project. I just think that the way it's set up right now, it's going to push my sanity a little too far. Coming together to work on a single, really well-developed shell, would ease the individual burdens and would give our readers a much better project to look at.

This week's progress:
Matt and I organized a formal outline for our shells project. I didn't get much feedback about what stories people wanted to tackle, so I delegated the assignments out in hopes that no one would feel like they'd been given too much to do. Besides that, I did about 10 million interviews this week: several on an article that I'll write on Monday, hopefully, about Tim Page coming to town, and several more on an article I'll be writing dissecting some crazy shorts that ran before films at the True/False festival last weekend.

Webshells....

I don’t want to come off as passive aggressive in writing about webshell in my blog post and not to any individual in person, but I feel that there is a lot of altruism surrounding the webshells project and very little realization of how much time and effort goes into development of websites. Even if there has been an established design, idea, and content, the actual development can take a long time. An example of this would be the Smart Decision website, which is still being developed, even though it had a launch date set earlier in this semester.
I personally feel that if anyone wants to get the web shells project done, and really do it well, we have to have a lot stronger commitment, and based on what I am currently seeing it seems like people have more commitment to daily and longterm reporting for the paper. This is not a bad thing in regards to the webshells, but we need to start getting stories ear marked to go on the web shells if this is going to be finished.
Also, I have two items in the works. One should be published tomorrow. It is a break down of all of the ballot issues in Boone county outside of Columbia. Also, I am working on a story about a bond issue on the April ballot. I think this should be done by Friday.

This is not going to work.

Let me preface this by saying that I do want all of our projects to succeed, and I do support innovation within the Missourian and the advancement toward being a cutting-edge online news source.

However,

There is no way that the web shells project will succeed in this semester with the way we are going. Not a chance. And here's a few of the reasons why:

1) The basic fact that we have not even submitted designs to a web development company. If the company we are using is in fact the same as who's doing Smart Decision, we are going to have to wait until they are done anyway (they are months late, by the way), and people, WEB SITES ARE MADE OVER THE COURSE OF MONTHS. MONTHS! Not a week, not even a few weeks, and not by just copying and pasting a design someone makes in InDesign onto a page.

In addition to that they have to adapt it to the content management system. All large-content websites operate with a program where attaching certain tags in a program to a story/video/photo designates its place on a web page. And that takes time, and it happens AFTER the design is done (in code, not InDesign).



2) We don't have the manpower to do virtually anything we have planned. A few things to consider:

- Clearly, we can not do all of the reporting we've planned ourselves. Do we abandon our beats? We didn't touch this in our meeting today.

- The editors had NO IDEA that we were even thinking of using their reporters. And honestly, what authority do we have to take those resources away from what they're already doing?. They aren't sitting around doing nothing, and the Missourian almost never makes their goal of 30 posts a day.

- We don't have people to do these interactive graphics. The graphics department has their hands so full, and most of them are not trained in Flash (the software that you need to make graphics interactive) I defy any one of you to go up to Mary Nguyen and have her tell you otherwise. And just to put things in perspective, anything that responds to user input IS MADE IN FLASH. These projects take weeks for full-time Flash specialists at media outlets.

- We have talked about gathering an incredible amount of data. Sure, this data exists somewhere. But I guarantee you it doesn't all exist in a usable format online that we can just link to. We can't just take for granted that all of that information is there for us already. We will have to take time to put much of it in a usable format.


I'm not saying that people's ideas are bad. All of these things are doable, but not in the time that we have or with the number of people that we have.

When I've brought this or any similar cautionary comment up in class, I've been told that we are trying to be "innovative." That term is not usually a relative one, but in our situation it is because everything that we have planned has been fundamentally done already by someone else. The "how" is not a mystery, it's something that's already been figured out and we're choosing to ignore it. There is no reason for us to go around with a blindfold on.

What I am saying is that we are in way over our collective head. If the entire class was working on a single web shell, I think we could be successful.

So I guess that is what I would like to propose. Three is not going to happen. One might. Let's choose one topic, concentrate our efforts and come up with a quality, sustainable product that will outlive our stay in Advanced Reporting or even at the Missourian.

How do you deal with an angry school board?

It was an interesting week for me with reporting. Perhaps the most interesting part of that being work I did on someone else's article:

Two of the K12 kids were working on a story about the school board releasing the results of a recent study that asked employees what could be trimmed from the budget to help alleviate this $10.3 million "shortfall."

What was interesting about the survey results was the comments section of the results. When you pulled them up on the site, however, all the names had been redacted. "A person outside this newsroom" was able to unredact (I don't think that's a word) the names and show us how. The thing is you didn't really have to do that because you could print out the results and read through the black bar. Not to mention there's no doubt who they were taking to task anyway.

So, I placed a call to Lynn Barnett. She was kind enough to call me back. The call didn't start so well. I asked simple numbers questions:
Q: How many responses were there?
A: It's on the summary.

So, it's a little tense, right.

I finally get to the question I wanted to ask. Why did you decide to redact the names?

I didn't get to ask it. I started the question and she ripped into me. She told me that she had found out that we had been able to unredact the names. ( We don't know how she found out.) And she just killed me. She said the names were redacted as to not hurt people's feelings. (I checked, the Sunshine Law does not have a feelings exemption.)

I had the kids write a simple report on what the survey said.

The next morning there was an email in Liz's box from Karla DeSpain. It kind of questioned the integrity of the reporters and the Missourian. I got a little lesson in how to manage my manager, Liz said.

It was a good chance to learn how to manage a source, a little Sunshine Law primer and other lessons.

A Fresh Start

Part of learning is by researching and not getting much out of anything, I guess. After finally getting a good week and a half blocked out for some long-term reporting following the hubbub surrounding Gary Forsee, which had me filling in missing pieces here, covering his first day there, etc., I thought I would get somewhere with m investigation into some study abroad programs at MU and if they were doing some thigns that other universities in New York were doing which made the state's attorney general quite upset. Not to be.

I wasn't horribly frustrated about my findings — I did a good amount of research and it just didn't pan out the way we thought it could — but it was mildly disappointing. Nonetheless, it's better to find these things out now than after doing weeks upon weeks of research for a project only to find nothing. There's still time.

My meeting with Liz had to be pushed back to Friday since she was gone, hence the lateness of the blog post. We found another solid project that could be accomplished in a decent length of time provided I can properly balance it with the shells project. My other daily work has been fine, and contributions to Five Ideas this week was a nice stop-gap clip while doing this research. 

Progress: The extended investigation I've done still taught me a lot about in-depth reporting. It's definitely not always (or maybe even often) going to work out just the way you want it to. But at this stage, that's OK. I know of some techniques I can use to more quickly get to a conclusion next time, and now the project notes from lecture will help me make sure that the new project I'm working on will get accomplished on time. In deciding which side of the desk I enjoy more, learning is the best possible outcome from anything I do this semester.