Both, however, are highly complementary projects to increase media fluency that will be able to build off each other in many ways.
On Friday afternoon, I had the chance to connect with Susan Mernit of Many Hats, Inc. for the very first time and Cornelius Swart of the Portland Sentinel and Portland Media Lab. I’ve been invited to work with Cornelius on the Portland Media Lab; our very first meeting is tomorrow, Monday the 15th, and I thought it would be worthwhile to talk with Susan about what they’ve learned in the several months the Public Media Collaborative has been developing in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Our conversation with Susan about both projects is the first thirty minutes or so of the audio. We cover the origins of the Public Media Collaborative, what type of training it has accomplished thus far, and Susan’s community news startup of the very new future, Oakland Local. After she leaves, Cornelius and I talk a bit about ideas for the Portland Media Lab and what the future of journalism might hold in general.
As a note, I started editing the first fifteen minutes of audio before I realised how much I want to be a production engineer. If you find any major kerfuffles, let me know and I’ll update the production value.
Cornelius Swart, Publisher of the Portland Sentinel, talks about the takeaways from this morning’s journalismsessions at BarCamp Portland, introduces the ideas behind the Portland Media Lab, and presents one reason why he’s optimistic for the future of news and journalism in Portland. Learning about the Portland Media Lab on Thursday personally made my day. The skeleton of what Cornelius is proposing seems very similar to the type of community empowerment work Jackie Hai and Richard Caesar are doing with the Amherst Wire, and I can very easily see the Portland Media Lab becoming an incubator for the type of journalism Portland needs.
I had the opportunity to get lunch today with Ryan Knutson (@UOknutson), a former colleague at the Daily Emerald that I respect and consider a friend. He’s several weeks away from graduating with a double major at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Given the current state of the newspaper industry, and thus the education industry that feeds it, I thought it might be interesting to ask him about his perspective on the situation, where his felt his J school was successful and where it needs to improve, and why he’s optimistic about the future of news.
When he discusses the journalism school, I think there’s an important note to be made: most of the value in the education he obtained was from the skills he learned, not necessarily the academic side of journalism. As the tools and methods needed to do journalism change at a greater and greater pace, the four year approach of the university becomes an inappropriate and ineffective mechanism for delivering knowledge. I think this is a large root cause reason for why J schools are having such difficulty in trying to figure out what to teach. They have an idea of what will be applicable today, but not four years down the road. On the plus side, though, there will be more and more demand for weekend or short-term workshops to learn special skills such as Flash, database design, Final Cut Pro, and the basics of editing audio.
Video removed on the request of Village Health Works.
Isaac Holeman chats with Deo, the Executive Director of Village Health Works in Burundi, about his clinic in Kigutu supported by Partners In Health, what the need is (Burundi is the poorest country in the world according to a 2006 World Bank report), and where he hopes to take the project in the future. If it isn’t conveyed in the interview, Deo has had a tremendously lucky life that he’s taken full advantage of. At the conference Isaac and I attended last week, we were fortunate to hear Deo speak on two occasions, a panel on “How Poverty Enters the Body” and a Saturday keynote. The PIH bio on Deo is another good source of information on his experiences and current work.
A couple of notes on from my end. First, apologies for the shakiness. I’ve learned that, for Flip interviews over 5 minutes, tripods are a must. Second, I didn’t realise at the time how distracting the background noise would be. We’ll make sure to find a quiet place next time.
I sat down with Steve Woodward this evening (@oregoniansteve on Twitter) at Bailey’s Taproom in Portland to discuss a whole myriad of topics, including the supposed “death of journalism,” how and why the internet is disrupting other industries, and why now is a great time to be alive. In the interview I did at the end of our conversation, I ask him what he thinks journalism is and about the project he’s currently working on, a mashup between InfoLiberator and OpenMicroBlogging. Their goal is to build a “Costco for data,” aggregating local information from a number of sources and then feeding it to you based on keywords, location, and other meta criteria. Watch all of the way though for a coincidental appearance by a drunk, and how he too applies to the project Steve is working on. I’ll work for better audio next time.
Of the many significant takeaways from the conversation, I’d like to record one: we are so done with the “newspapers are dying” conversation.
This video is the first in what I hope to be a series of interviews, discussions, and arguments with various people I find interesting. I’m posting them to Vimeo right now, but might be switching/cross-posting to Blip.tv if I can convince it to upload my content. Blip is pretty cool, in my opinion, because it offers an instant video podcast but Vimeo has better HD. It’s definitely a first-world dilemma.
Daniel Bachhuber is a photographer, hacker journalist, and vagabond based in the beautiful state of Oregon. He's currently the intern at Publish2, and co-founder and Executive Director of CoPress.
Large monitor in the office that provides a real-time stream of information about and relevant to the company is awesome. If each person had access to one of these, it might even make remote working more effective.
