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Any news organization that is actually asking its audience survey questions like, “What content should we publish?” is downright pathetic. I hate to admit that’s exactly the sort of thing the previous J-School Buzz editors did before I removed them last week.

When we started J-School Buzz almost one year ago, I never asked anyone what they wanted JSB to be or look like or publish. I never commissioned one survey on the topic, for a couple reasons.

The first is that because I was a target member of J-School Buzz’s audience, I knew what I wanted in an independent news blog about the Missouri School of Journalism.

The other reason we never bothered with marketing research was that this type of survey is generally not accurate. Either people legitimately don’t know what kind of news content they will click on, or more likely they are full of shit and lying to an interviewer just to sound better. I am a cynic about people’s news consumption habits, so I tend to think the latter.

That said, the previous editors actually had a group of marketing majors at the University of Missouri design a strategy to “increase positive awareness” of J-School Buzz. That sounds boring and unproductive, but okay. Wait, there’s a second marketing goal: “Remove negativity brought on by the former editor-in-chief.” Haha, who’s that guy? He must have really messed up…OH SHIT, THEY MEAN ME?

The report is basically aimed at undoing everything I did at J-School Buzz, short of changing URLs. You can read the whole report here, but here are the most notable quotes from the report:

1. “Most participants still believe J-School Buzz to lack credibility because of the controversial content posted.”
2. “Most people did not visit the website often due to their current trend of updating bi-weekly.”
3. “J-School Buzz should not post controversial content as the previous ditor-in-chief did, but should focus on journalism school events and activities as well as informative content.”
4. “Originally, under Teeghman, J-School Buzz was known for challenging the Journalism School by bringing up controversial issues. After Claudia Tran took over, J-School Buzz chose to change their image from the controversial disliked website, to a resourceful website for students, faculty, and alumni.”
5. “The researchers brainstormed with the Claudia in order to come up with idea to increase readership and awareness, as well as create a positive image and stray away from the controversial perceptions under the previous editor.”

That’s a lot of negativity and dumb advice to break down, but I’m up to the task.

1. The first claim is the hardest to refute, because how can you prove your news organization has credibility? It’s such an abstract quality that can’t be empirically measured, at least not reliably. I used site stats to tell us if JSB was publishing relevant content our audience could trust. My reasoning for that was that I don’t think would you read and share content from a site you didn’t trust. When you compare JSB’s traffic and social media sharing figures between the time under my leadership, and this past semester under different leadership, the difference is vast. JSB got about 20,000 page views this semester under Cladia Tran’s vision for JSB. That includes residual traffic the site got from posts that JSB published last semester. Under my leadership, JSB got about 110,000 page views that semester.  Web traffic isn’t everything, but it does give you some idea of whether your editorial strategy is resonating with your audience.
2. JSB has to update on a regular basis, every week day if possible. Updating once every two weeks is mind-bogglingly idiotic for a blog. You know what comes out every two weeks? Rolling Stone. JSB is not a print magazine, it is a fast-moving blog that should be publishing and experimenting on a daily basis.
3. I never set out to be controversial for controversy’s sake, it just so happened that my opinions and writing style leant themselves well to controversy. So be it. But reporting very critically on the J-School was an intentional decision to fill a niche that was left wide open. The Missouri School of Journalism gets a lot of good press and a lot of good PR, without much skeptical analysis of what it is doing. JSB was meant to be the source of healthy skepticism about what the J-School is doing. If people want to learn what is going on at the Missouri School of Journalism from a PR perspective, there are plenty of places to find that: listserv emails, the J-School’s website, plus its Twitter and Facebook pages. If you want independent coverage of the Missouri School of Journalism that is fun and sometimes negative, there’s only one place to go: J-School Buzz.
4. This is exactly why I removed the most recent editors of J-School Buzz. They lied to the original editors during our personal interviews for the jobs. If they had said they wanted to completely change the editorial mission of JSB from being an interesting and respectful critic of the J-School to being an events bulletin board, we would have shown them the door. Alas, they voiced no concern with continuing the voice and editorial strategy that worked for us. We chose the wrong people for the job, and that is a bad decision for which I accept full responsibility.
5. I wish I were not the face of JSB. Even when I was editing the site, I didn’t want to be its face. The reason I became the face of the website is because I was publishing content far more often than any other editor and that content was far more interesting than what they were capable of. The problem is that of the 20 most popular posts J-School Buzz has ever published, I have written 18 of them. If there had been other editors on the site who published much more often and got more attention, even if it were for positive J-School stories, JSB would not be so dependent upon my involvement. My hope is that I will soon have no involvement in JSB’s daily operations and almost never publish, but that it will still feel like I am there because the current editors are sticking to the editorial strategy we laid out. Even without me, the site will remain interesting, relevant and sometimes controversial. If JSB is not publishing the dirty truths about the Missouri School of Journalism for us all to discuss and resolve, who will? The current editors seem to understand JSB is a major time commitment that is also a hell of a lot of fun, if you do it right.

It seems clear from this report that the JSB editors we just removed wanted to remake the website into something different entirely. Instead of applying to be JSB editors, they really should have just built their own website, something like JSchoolEvents.com. That sort of website is fine, but it should complement a fun, fierce, factual and first sort of website like JSB, not replace it.

JSB is obviously not going to follow any of this advice. JSB plans to update almost every weekday, but that is a much more ambitious publishing goal than what the marketing strategists suggested. It also plans to publish interesting and relevant content that we think J-Schoolers want to read, discuss, dissect and share. Sometimes that will make the J-School look great, and other times it will cast the J-School in a negative light.

This report had great timing, because I received this list of terrible ideas on how to draw more people to the site on one of JSB’s largest traffic days in history. The site got 2,600 page views on Friday because the new editors and I have decided to ignore every piece of advice in this report.

With the new editors in place and and willing to publish content that is really interesting and do so a lot more often, I think JSB is back on the right track.

Shortly after we started J-School Buzz last semester, then-Social Media Editor Jenn Paull and I gave an interview to The Maneater‘s Allison Prang about the young site. That interview resulted in this Maneater article. Prang sent us an email shortly after our interview, with the entire conversation (sans her questions) transcribed, in order to verify our quotes.

I came across this email recently, buried deep in my inbox, and I thought it was interesting enough to share. As usual, I am publishing this in the name of transparency, so that you know a little more about our original intentions and thoughts when we started J-School Buzz.

This email has been lightly edited to correct names and remove sensitive personal information that does not really need to be online. I also bolded the parts that I thought were particularly relevant or noteworthy.

Just a warning, this post is about as inside baseball as you can possibly get about JSB. Here goes.

David: “Basically, J-School Buzz was my idea. I always thought this was going to be a more gossip and rumor site than a news site. I originally had it as a site called ‘J-School Gossip.’ That was my original idea. A friend of mine, Zach Wade, actually said that I should change it to ‘J-School Buzz’ or something that’s not ‘Gossip’ because of the negative connotation behind gossip. Literally, during my meeting with Zach, I just pulled out my computer and looked at synonyms of ‘gossip,’ and ‘buzz’ was one of them. So I was like, ‘J-School Buzz,’ that sounds pretty good. I registered the domain less than a week later back in October.”

“People are always so interested in things going on that are related to the J-School.  And I realized that any time I would send out a link on Twitter in any way related to the J-School, that it would get more clicks than anything else. A picture of a professor of mine, just when she had done her nails, got more than a hundred views. And it was just because everyone in the J-School knew that she was not the kind of person to wear nail polish usually. And so I just saw this need.

And last year, there was this thing called MU lockout, and what happened was, the associate dean, Brian Brooks, sent an e-mail to the whole school saying you can’t be in the J-School past midnight. And, if you’re a J-Schooler, you sometimes need to be in here until four o’clock. I’ve been here overnight many times. And so the student body didn’t react well. And all I did was publish the e-mail to a random website I was working on, sent out the link and it got, like, 300 views. And I didn’t even offer commentary, people were making commentary in the section below it. I was like, ‘Okay, there’s a need. People are interested in this sort of thing. They want to hear about it. So I saw a need.’

Jenn: “And then he recruited me into it, and we thought it was just going to be kind of an extracurricular activity. Then for our capstone class, we had to do some kind of big final project, and I was like, ‘Hey David, why don’t you pitch it as our capstone project?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, I never thought of that. Sure.’ And so we worked with our other associate editor, Lindsey Wolf, and just put together a pitch and we heard back from our professors a few weeks later, and they really loved the idea, and now we’re doing it. So, now we get to get class credit for it, too, which is really nice.”

D: “Which is like the craziest thing. I did not think that was going to happen. Because we’re in the journalism school, getting journalism credit, reporting on the journalism school, sometimes critically. So it’s all sorts of crazy conflicts of interest, kind of, basically, out the ass. The J-School has a news website of its own, but it’s PR. And there’s this new publication called ‘J-School Magazine,’ and first of all, I looked through it, well, it’s boring as f***.”

J: “Hey.”

D: “It’s boring as f***. First of all, it’s really boring, but also it’s PR. It’s not news. The commentary’s not interesting. It has to be independent. The reason why anybody’s going to look at our website is because it’s going to be interesting and it’s not going to be PR. It’s not our job to make the J-School look good. Some of the stuff we do, it’s going to make it look good, but that’s not our goal.” (Ed. Note: That’s why I stepped in this semester when I saw JSB had become boring PR)

“We don’t get prior review. Nobody looks at our stuff. Nobody’s discussed our content.”

J: “Yeah, nothing’s censored or anything like that. It’s all up to our discretion, so we just kind of have to use discretion and common sense when we’re looking what to publish. We’re not going to publish something that has a lot of swear words in it or something like that. We’ve had things that have been submitted to us that have a lot of curse words in them, and we’re like, ‘Okay, you need to tone that down.’ It’s not necessary. We’re trying to find views and commentary, we’re not trying to let people just—“

D: “And I actually am surprised (at our self-censorship). I always thought I didn’t have like an ethical side. That it was just, whatever is news, I’ll publish it.”

J: “He’s very excited talking about this. He’s a colorful person.”

D: “It’s nice that for three years, we’ve been talking about journalists’ ethical dilemmas, and I was actually confronted with one of my own (pertaining to the single girl poster story).

J: “Well, JSB has kind of become our main focus of everything, but the thing is, we don’t really notice the time commitment as much because we have so much fun doing it. The three of us work really well together and we were friends long before this came along. It’s just, we work really together and we just had so much fun doing it. Half the time I’m doing it, I’m not really thinking, ‘Oh, this is a time commitment.’ I’m actually working on a class project, I guess.”

D: “I think the difference is, it was originally not a school project. That changed my mentality towards it.”

J: “Yeah, definitely. But we’ve spent many hours talking to possible contributors, editing other people’s work, editing our own work, taking turns editing things that the other one writes. So it’s been great, we’ve met once this week. I don’t even know how to add up how many hours we’ve spent doing this.”

D: “A lot. But it’s just because I’m generally interested. Looking at our site statistics is just like one of the most interesting things to me.”

J: “But I guess an easier way to measure would be looking at the different responsibilities each one of us has. I’m the social media editor, so I’m in charge of Facebook and Twitter and FourSquare and Tumblir. When people respond on Twitter, when they @mention us, I’m the one that responds back. I was the one who went out and kind of mass-followed people in the journalism school, things like that.”

D: “Thanks to you, we have, like, 350 followers in four days.”

J: “Yeah, so we’ve gotten some really good response with that. And then Lindsay Wolf is the multimedia editor and she’s the one who makes sure that we have some kind of multimedia component in each one of the posts we have, whether it be photo or video or anything like that. And then David is the one who kind of ushers along all the people who are writing for us, and kind of keeps people on deadline. He’s the one that decides, ‘We’re going to publish this piece of content at this time.’”

D: “We’ve published a few contributions from people who aren’t on the masthead. We give them credit. We run the posts with their byline and we put them on the ‘About’ page as a contributor. We’re still looking for some, but you put more time into ushering along a contributor than just doing it yourself, I feel like sometimes.”

J: “We don’t really need more than three people managing it, (Ed. Note: it soon became clear that we did indeed need more than three editors, but that’s all part of the learning process!) but I think that we can always use more contributors just because we want a variety of voices. We don’t want it to just be our voices. We want to get everyone’s ideas heard. So whether you’re a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, if you have some kind of idea, or something you want to talk about, just talk to us and we’d be more than happy to invite you to write a piece for us or to record a video or take pictures or anything. We have friends from all sequences that are pitching their own ideas.”

D: “We don’t pay money to writers, and we never will. Basically, the difference, why people would want to contribute to JSB, is that most our posts just kind of start out as questions that we’re curious about. Like why is KBIA in Jesse Hall? That makes no sense to us. The difference is that you’re reporting on stuff that you really care about, especially if you’re in the J-School, when you’re obsessed with these four walls. Reporting on the Mizzou poster thing was the most fun I’ve ever had reporting. When I was calling up a source, it was journalism, but it was journalism I cared about. I’ve done a lot of journalism I don’t give a sh** about. I’ve reported on a school board meeting that I just didn’t give a sh** about. So I mean, I like reporting on stuff I care about. And everyone’s really passionate as a contributor.”

J: “Exactly. Everyone has opinions that they really want to be heard.”
D: “I don’t like newspaper journalism as much. I did one piece for The Maneater and I was out the door.”

J: “(David has) worked for the Daily Herald. Just in classes and stuff, we’ve worked in different newsrooms. Obviously, part of convergence is you kind of get experience in everything. We’ve worked for KBIA, the Missourian and VOX and then I did a PR internship at a PR firm in Dallas two summers ago. I’m actually going to grad school for school counseling so I’m kind of looking for a way to merge my passions for journalism and psychology, so we’ll see what that goes into. (To David) You’re more interested in blogging and things like that.”

D: “I’m more interested in online. I’m a technology blogger for Discovery Channel’s website right now. And I used to have a show on KCOU and I’ve done KBIA and the Missourian and the Daily Herald and VOX. I’ve been published a few places. But basically, online journalism is what I like most. I like the form of writing, I like the free-flowing style of it, being able to update once we learn more.

I’m a big fan of process journalism (rather than product journalism). Process journalism is more like, we publish what we know when we know it. So, a perfect approach was this Mizzou poster story that we did. As soon as I saw it, I ripped this poster down from a tree, took a picture of it, and uploaded it with a few details that I could get from there. And I said, ‘We’ll update this later once the girl on the poster calls back.’ We publish it, it starts getting views, we update the post once we talk to her and we update it again once I speak to MUPD. I didn’t wait for all those pieces to come together. I published what I knew when I knew it. I like that more. It’s kind of, like, a little more transparent.

J: “That post wasn’t related to the journalism school. And the only reason that we published it was because we knew it would be of interest to a lot of people in the journalism school. It was really interesting. But 99 percent of what we’re doing is going to be just about the journalism school.”

D: “Well actually, the Starving Journalist doesn’t really relate at all to the journalism school.

J: “We are starting with a series called the ‘Starving Journalist.’ It relates to the journalism school in the fact that everyone here likes free food and most of us are broke because we’re college students. Basically, what it is, is anytime we hear about free food on campus, we’ll actually give details about it. That technically doesn’t relate specifically to the journalism school, but it relates to the J-school students. And I know many times when you’re out reporting, you’re hungry, and you’re broke, and we like free food.”

“We’re going to be talking about the portfolio requirement at the journalism school. We’re going to be talking about the journalism school’s relationship with Patch University, which we already published, just things like that. Most of it is going to be specifically related to the journalism school. Anyone outside the journalism community wouldn’t be that interested in it.”

D: “Your (Prang’s) job at The Maneater is to specifically report on stuff that concerns the whole campus, something that maybe someone in the school of engineering is going to be interested in and maybe someone in the school of journalism. And that might concern some stuff in Columbia. The thing is, that gets a lot of stuff left out. Like little minutia, little stuff that J-Schoolers are interested in. We published a piece about an Android student competition—the results were announced. And that was something that only J-Schoolers are interested in and a few others. The difference is, we can be very very local, like very specific and just target a very niche audience. Basically, what we’re doing is practicing hyper-local community journalism at its most basic level.”

J: “We are kind of already talking to juniors about the idea of taking it over from us when we graduate, because we definitely want it to continue after we graduate. When we came up with this idea, it was never something that we were going to do for six months and then just kind of blow off. Our ultimate goal is to expand it to other journalism schools outside of Missouri, like Northwestern, like that. In the meantime, what we’re trying to do, is build an audience and build a following now.”

J: “When we graduate, we will train someone else who’s a junior to take over our roles for us. So we’ve been talking to a couple people we know who are very responsible, very smart, very dedicated, that we think would be good additions to it.”

D: “I did my research before I registered the domain, because I was interested in the fact that there’s so many media websites aimed at professional media insiders, but there’s nothing to cater to media students. Nothing for journalism students, nothing for communications students at any university that I can find. And I thought that was really weird. I would like JSB’s navigation bar to be changed one day to like, Mizzou, Indiana, Medill, but that’s very far off. My goal is to make it popular now and make it sustainable for someone to take it over in May. It’d be like finding people at Indiana who could do the reporting there.”

J: “We would have a different thing at each one so you could only be reporting on things that go on at your school. It’d be trying to create a J-School Buzz on other campuses.”

D: “Exactly. Well, you’re going to be moving to Bloomington next year in the fall, and I’m going to be moving to Indianapolis.”

J: “We might try to start the idea there.”

D: “Yeah. We might do it. I’m actually doing Teach for America. I’m not going to grad school or anything. Hopefully, online media after that. And I want to keep J-School Buzz around so that in a few years, when I start going into online media I can still say, this is something I started that is still around, still thriving.”

J: “We live in University Village on the other side of Providence, but we’re always here in the J-School anyways. It’s kind of nice because we can work on it together anytime. We were out to dinner last night and we were talking about it. I definitely think that’s one thing that really helps with the three of us being so close, is that it’s not weird to randomly call each other up and say, ‘Hey, did you see that post?’ or ‘Hey, can you edit this for me really fast?’ which is an advantage I think in our capstone group.”

D: “Yesterday was like a J-School Buzz marathon for me. Like, seven hours yesterday.

J: “But we spend quite a few hours everyday working on it. Even if it’s just something like following people on Twitter that are following us, or responding to a comment or something like that, all that kind of adds up.”

D: “Site stats is my world. It’s kind of interesting to see where are people coming from and what is it that they’re looking at. This is just like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. Like all these different spellings of J-School Buzz that people are looking for when they find us, it’s like really fascinating. The ohe one term that people are using in search engines to find JSB that makes me happiest though, is the ‘Missouri School of Journalism’ (pointing to tag on screen).”

J: “We make sure that we always write ‘Missouri School of Journalism’ in our posts. We’ve already been bumped up to like, if you Google the ‘Missouri School of Journalism’, the second page.”

“That’s one of our goals, is we want to create content that freshmen would be interested in. I know if I was an incoming freshman, and I saw a chance to kind of get in on the J-School community, if for no other reason that you would be so far ahead of other people, just because you’d know what’s going on. If you read the stories, then you’re already going to know more coming in. So you’re kind of going to be more of in an inner J-schooler community than you were before. Because when I first came here, I knew absolutely nothing, I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t know anything about the school. I would’ve stalked this website everyday if I was a high school senior.”

D: “The capstone professors approved JSB thinking it might be a rumors site. Lynda Kraxberger asked us if it was going to be a rumor site, and this was after she approved it. She was open to the idea, which I thought was pretty cool.”

J: “I think they were surprised that we got off this off the ground so quickly, because the very first day of our capstone class, they were asking what we had done and we said, ‘Oh, we’re ready to start publication. We have eight pieces ready to go,’ and they were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t expect this to be fully formed already.’”

D: “We only have four months.”

J: “We got really excited about it and started working on it over Christmas break.”

D: “That was my winter break, designing the website. I spent hours and hours just testing these different WordPress plug-ins, seeing what works well in connecting these accounts to Twitter and all sorts of things. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work, but it makes the website look really good.”
J: “And then I spent quite a bit of time doing the actual design of it, doing all of the colors and making the organization and navigation of the site. He did all the behind-the-scenes work of making everything work effectively and then I made it really pretty.”

D: “That’s a good way to put it.”

J: “It was fun though, we had a good time doing it.”

D: (On Marvin Overby) “He is my favorite political science professor. I want to be him. He’s one of my letters of recommendation. He’s a hero to me. If I could be like him…I want to be like him. I’m not even joking. He’s the best lecturer I’ve ever had. He’s so incredible. I just have a huge amount of respect for the guy. He’s brilliant, he’s charismatic, he’s funny. He’s everything. He’s a total media-whore. He says he’s a media-whore.”

J: “Well, we’re always looking for contributors. We don’t want people like freshmen or whoever to think that they can’t contribute because they haven’t had a lot of experience. If there’s something you want to talk about, you can create a forum for it. Whether you want to write a story, or whether you just want to suggest that we write a story about, that’s great. Just let us know your thoughts.”

D: “I didn’t really become a part of the J-School community until I started taking classes here, which was spring of sophomore year.”

J: “We want to bring them into our community and stuff, because by the time we’re seniors we’re already a really close-knit family. We were on a pub-crawl with two dozen of our closest convergence journalism friends and our teacher. We just want everyone to kind of be closer and know what’s going on with everything in the school and with everyone. That’s kind of one of the ideas behind it.”

D: “And I do like that it’s a place to kind of be honest with your opinions. One of the things that I’ve always had a problem with journalism is (objectivity). I’ve never liked it. I’m very loud-mouthed.”

J: “Really?”

D: “That was one of the things that I enjoyed most about what we did about our StratComm post. I made it very clear that my opinion is that that’s a stupid idea (StratComm career fair for only StratCommers), that you shouldn’t be excluding 60 percent of the school from it. And I said it’s probably because you’re just looking our for number one and you just don’t want the competition.”

J: “That’s something we could’ve never said.”

D: “No. That was total opinion based on our reporting. I enjoyed being able to say that.”

J: “There’s some things that we report on that are going to be just strictly news-based in which case we will be objective about it. But the other thing is just going to be commentary and things like that. So we’ll definitely have a mixture because we spend so much time working for these news outlets. We’re not allowed to have opinions because we’re journalists, but we do have opinions, let’s be honest. JSB allows you to say, ‘I think this is really great, or I think this really sucks,’ and no one can say anything about it. We’re not going to punish you for having an opinion. We encourage you to have your opinion whether it’s for it or against it. It allows people to share how they feel about things whether it’s positive or negative.”

D: “I think JSB is reported commentary. That’s the way that I like to characterize it, reported commentary. Sometimes it’s just opinion. Sometimes it’s reported commentary. Sometimes it’s news. Sometimes it’s Starving Journalist.”

Well, it’s come to this. After lots of griping on Twitter, a blog post on this very site laying out my complaints and email exchanges with the current editors of J-School Buzz, I am convinced the blog needs new editors to return JSB to what it was last semester. I have emailed the current JSB editors to let them know they will not be editing the site after this semester ends on Dec. 16.

The obvious question is, how did it reach this point? Here’s the full story.

Hiring New Editors

When we put out calls for new J-School Buzz editors last semester, we had about a dozen people apply for the positions. Each prospective JSB editor submitted an application and interviewed in person with at least two JSB editors. Each applicant was asked what they liked about the site, what they disliked, what they wanted to change, etc.

None of the four editors we selected mentioned problems with the blog’s tone or its unique approach to reporting on the J-School. Those four editors must have envisioned something entirely different for JSB if you look at what it has become this semester under their editorial control. As I told them in my last email, they “turn[ed] JSB into exactly the blog it is not supposed to be,” one that is filled with infrequently updated boring PR for the J-School.

The blog’s editorial strategy has shifted 180 degrees since they took it over from the original editors. Here is the full pitch that got J-School Buzz approved as a capstone project. I’m confused as to what site they wanted to edit when they applied for the job in the first place. If they did not want to run a blog that was controversial, opinionated, snarky, fun and relevant, why did they want to edit JSB in the first place? As far as I’m concerned, they lied to us about they wanted to do with the blog when they applied for the positions in the first place.

When the original editors graduated in May and turned over the keys to the new editors, we became hands-off very quickly. I published a couple times this summer, but I never spoke to them about what else they should publish or what the blog would look like in the fall. That was my mistake.

What I Have Learned About JSB From Teaching

In my first five months as a teacher, I have learned that I should have handled the transition very differently. Each of my lesson plans has three components to it: modeling, guided practice and independent practice. Or, in other words: Teacher shows new skill, Teacher guides students through skill, Students practice skill independently from Teacher. It’s the classic “I Do, We Do, You Do” strategy almost any teacher is familiar with.

How does teaching relate to J-School Buzz? The original editors spent our first semester modeling for anyone who would want to take over the blog, showing them how to do it and what it was supposed to look like. But we completely skipped guided practice and moved straight to independent practice. As soon as we were done modeling how the blog should be run, we just handed it off to the new editors with minimal instruction on how things should work under their control. We thought it was obvious. We were wrong.

I Reluctantly Get Involved With JSB Again

It will probably surprise you how little I have thought about J-School Buzz since the fall semester began in August.. I am a first-year middle school teacher in Indianapolis as part of Teach For America. My 70-hour work week does not allow much time for dwelling on undergraduate pet projects.

That’s not to say I was ignoring the site. Definitely not. I was reading every post, tweeting out links and sending occasional story ideas to the editors (none of which they followed up on). I knew JSB wasn’t publishing often enough and it wasn’t very interesting when it did, but I was more focused on learning how to be a good teacher for students who really need me and who I absolutely adore.

My indifferent attitude towards JSB changed at Mizzou’s Homecoming a few weeks ago. I was identified as the person behind JSB at several J-School events I attended that weekend, and quite a few people took the chance to talk to me about the failings of the blog in its current form. I told them I thought they were right, but that I was not taking a hands-on role with the blog now. That was about to change.

“Publisher” Actually Means Something

At one point, I even threatened to resign as the blog’s Publisher, such was my level of discontent with J-School Buzz. But then I thought, I’m the Publisher, the head honcho of this blog, and its founder to boot. Why should I leave?

I’m basically a landlord that rented out a house to some bad tenants, the kind of tenants who are only vaguely familiar with how a house should be maintained. The Publisher gig was supposed to be a no-show job, one that just gave an impression of continuity and grandeur. Clearly, that has changed.

As JSB’s Publisher, I legally own the domain jschoolbuzz.com, as you can see on this WHOIS Lookup. I control the site’s email address Tips [at] JSchoolBuzz [dot] com, through which I will be able to easily turn over JSB’s popular Twitter and Facebook Pages to new editors. I am also the only administrator on the blog’s WordPress Dashboard, and the current editors only have the admin privileges of authors.

I mention all this because I’m as intrigued as anyone to see what “things up [their] sleeve” the current editors have to prevent me from putting the site back on the right track by placing new editors in control. For the first time all semester, the current editors actually seem interested in having an engaging and transparent conversation. But it’s too little, too late.

What Happens Next?

I emailed the current J-School Buzz editors this afternoon to inform them of my decision to remove them from the masthead, and they have seen (and responded) to my tweets on the subject. So, where do we go from here?

Two of the current JSB editors are now in an independent study for the site with Mike McKean. I will not disrupt their independent study, because I don’t want their grades to be affected by a difference in editorial philosophy. Admittedly, it is a profound difference in editorial philosophy, but that is neither here nor there.

I will also not be publishing on the blog or its social media networks until this semester ends on Dec. 16. That is because as part of the independent study agreement the editors made with Mike McKean, I am not allowed to publish on the site if they are editors. Let me repeat that. The current JSB editors agreed to not let me publish on a blog I created and still own. They did not inform me of this capitulation until several weeks afterward.

I will be announcing plans for how new editors will be named later this week. I have already spent the last week reaching out to current J-Schoolers (and current JSB contributors who also believe the site can improve) who are interested in taking over the site next month. If you are interested in joining JSB’s new editorial board after this semester ends, please email me at DavidTeeghman [at] gmail [dot] com.

The worst case scenario is that no one expresses interest in taking over the site next semester. That is a chance I am willing to take. I would prefer the site to go black and wait for new editors to arise from the shadows rather than continue in this bastardized form.

Let’s Have a Conversation

I am sure this blog post will spark a lively, contentious and (hopefully) mutually respectful conversation on Twitter. Please follow me on Twitter, and add your thoughts below, to be part of that discussion.

UPDATE!

The current editors and I have agreed that we will work together to find new people to take over the site after the semester ends in December. This whole thing was a problem of communication, because I did a BAD job of communicating with all the editors directly. I might have graduated, but JSB is still teaching me a whole lot about being a leader and communicator.

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In the name of transparency, I thought I should post the email the original editors wrote to the Convergence Faculty to pitch J-School Buzz as a capstone project.

Here goes!

Hello Mike and Lynda,

I wanted to follow up on a conversation Mike and I had in his office before Thanksgiving Break, about an idea for a Capstone project. That was still while the idea was coming together. Lindsey, Jenn, and I have put together a formal pitch for our Capstone project. It’s below in full, and we would be happy to meet before Winter Break to discuss it further, if you have any questions.

Project Members: Jenn Paull, David Teeghman, and Lindsey Wolf

Idea: J-School Buzz, an independent news and commentary website for and about the Missouri School of Journalism.

Audience

Websites like Mediaite, Mediabistro, Mediagazer, and many others exist to feed the rapacious desire for “news about the news.” And let’s not forget the mainstream news outlets that employ media critics/reporters. However, there is no website for the Missouri journalism student that is interested in the news that most affects him or her. Some people have tried to create that place, such as developing the #BestJSchoolEver hashtag on Twitter and some unpopular Facebook groups, but there is nothing to truly unify all these different groups and conversations.

And that gets at the value of this project. J-School Buzz would serve as a tool for students and community members alike to learn more about the institutions that bring them the news. We always talk about the importance of building a community around content, and that if we want to be great journalists, we need to explore and become a part of a community. We identify first and foremost with the J-School community, which will allow us to intelligently and passionately report on this institution.

With this project, we hope to explore some of the key differences between digital and traditional reporting. Traditional mediums like newspapers and television stations try to capture a wide swath of the public, looking for audience in bulk. But the trend among online-only media companies like AOL and Gawker Media is to cater to a series of niche audiences, and report on their subjects obsessively.

Translate that media ecosystem to the University of Missouri. In the traditional media landscape, The Maneater covers the entire University of Missouri-Columbia, and sometimes even the UM System. But in an online media world, we imagine niche sites that cater to individual colleges: one for the J-School, the Business School, School of Engineering, and so on. The entire campus might not have much interest in, say, a new vending machine in the Futures Lab, but people within the J-School are extremely interested in that story. More than 100 people saw a photo of it that David sent out on Twitter.

J-Schoolers are the perfect niche audience for a website like ours: smart, engaged, and tech savvy. They want to know what is going on around them, and have the means to consume and spread that news, and even produce news in a variety of mediums for JSB as contributors.

This is who we believe will be regular visitors to J-School Buzz, and how deep their relationship with the website will be:

• Core: Current J-School students and recent graduates, along with J-School Faculty
• Secondary: Older graduates, non-journalism Mizzou students, prospective J-School students
• Third: Columbia citizens who consume news from J-School news outlets
• Fourth: Journalism industry insiders, including faculty and students from other journalism schools, and practicing journalists.

Where We Find News

• J-School Students and Faculty: We have already begun talking to potential sources and contributors about this project, soliciting advice and story ideas. Of the dozen or so J-Schoolers we have discussed this project with, every one of them had at least one unique story idea to contribute to the website.
• Tips Line: Personal interactions won’t do it alone. That’s why we set up a tips line, Tips@JSchoolBuzz.com. We believe that the Tips email will serve as an extension of our physical presence, with J-School students and faculty emailing us with story ideas and inside information. Every blog post will have this tips line at the end of it, making it easy for any user to become more engaged with the website.
• J-School’s PR Office: We will also report on some press releases the J-School has issued, if they are newsworthy.

Publication Frequency

Each team member will be expected to produce or solicit at least one piece of content each week, so that we publish three items each week on JSB. There will be some weeks that each team member produces more or less than that, but as a publication, we will need to produce at least three pieces of content each week to maintain the attention of our audience.

Goals

We have set forth objective and measurable goals that will serve as concrete goals during our Capstone semester. They include:

• 2,000 unique visitors/month by the end of the semester: We will gauge our success in how much traffic the website draws, specifically unique visitors. We believe that is the most accurate measure for the website’s use to the community we hope to serve. This is certainly a lofty goal, but one that we believe we can achieve. We have all been blogging in some capacity for several years, and know what it takes to draw and maintain an audience.
• 5,000 bit.ly clicks: We have created Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr pages for JSB, each intended to reach JSB users in their various online playgrounds. We will regularly post updates to our social media profiles (both personal and JSB) with bit.ly links to JSB posts. To track our progress in using social media to reach our audience, we have set up a bit.ly account just for JSB to accurately measure how many times people have clicked JSB links. On top of raw numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, the number of bit.ly clicks will let us know how engaged and active our users are with with website.
• 20 user-submitted entries over the semester: The website will not publish only the work of its three editors, but will use the practices of crowdsourcing and community journalism to solicit users for contributions. The most valuable relationship we can develop with a community of student journalists is to have them contribute to the website, and become part of the conversation online. We believe that our social media presence and Tips Line will also assist in obtaining these user-submitted entries and encourage people to contribute to the website.

Here is how we hope to achieve those goals

Asking readers to interact with the site’s content and other users will also develop a core audience and generate more traffic. Comments will be strongly encouraged, as will contributions. We can also introduce polls to see what the readers really want to learn more about, and gauge their reactions to content on the website.

The only way this will be successful is if we actually listen to their suggestions, and successfully implement them. This leads to another one of our goals: to take full consideration of what our viewers want, while also using our role as curators/gatekeepers to deliver content that is consistent with our editorial philosophy.

We will also be careful with our tone. This is a news and informed commentary website, not a gossip site. Contributors or commenters who seek to make it one will be stopped. This is not My Greek Gossip for the J-School, and will never deal in trivial personal matters.

Sustainability

We have spoken with several juniors in the J-School who expressed interest in continuing the work of J-School Buzz after we graduate in May.

Multimedia

True to Convergence form, we will present the news in a variety of mediums. Every post will contain at minimum some type of visual element. We expect for text to be the primary medium of many posts, but they will still have multimedia components like photos, videos, and hyperlinks. We will also be recording podcasts to put on the website, and distribute on iTunes. You can see our dedication to multimedia in the story ideas section below.

Story Ideas

• It Gets Better: Reporting Edition (video with text intro)
• Why Do Mag Majors Love NYC? (audio podcast and text)
• The Senior Portfolio Requirement: Explained (text with audio, photos)
• Has The J-School Partnered Up with Patch? (text with photos)
• Starving Journalist: Where To Get Free Food (recurring text/photo feature)

Thank you for your time and consideration. Please let us know if you have any questions regarding our pitch.

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know I am not happy with the direction J-School Buzz has gone in this semester since the original editors and I turned over the keys to a new editorial board.

My 140-character gripes on Twitter got the attention of the current JSB editors and they responded to me in an email, but I thought it was worth taking the time to flesh out the problems I see with JSB now as an alum and observer. I still want to see the site succeed in a way that best serves current J-Schoolers and the editors. That’s why I started the site, after all.

Here are the main problems I see with JSB now, and I will dissect each:

• The site is now PR for the J-School.
• It is boring PR.
• JSB is all commentary, no news.

Let’s begin!

Just What the J-School Doesn’t Need: More PR

JSB now seems to be geared entirely towards making the J-School look good. The series of posts called “Why Mizzou” is simply about why students chose the Missouri School of Journalism over any other journalism school. This series is a pretty good idea, but not when “Why Mizzou” posts make up almost half the site’s content since they began publishing in August.

The most obvious problem with a “make the J-School look awesome” editorial strategy goes back to the principle of supply and demand. There is already plenty of PR about the Missouri School of Journalism coming out of the J-School itself. Students’ inboxes are flooded with J-School events every day, and the J-School’s homepage and Twitter feed are filled with news glorifying the #bestjschoolever. The school doesn’t need any more PR, it gets plenty of it already. JSB became popular so quickly because there was a real demand for independent news about the J-School that could sometimes prove critical.

Last year, JSB played a role in the J-School news ecosystem similar to the role Fox News plays in the national political ecosystem. Let me explain. We saw that all the other outlets putting out news about the school existed only to make the J-School look good, and we could be the only ones to deliver news that ever put the J-School in a bad light. There was a need in our audience not being filled by anyone else, so we stepped up to meet the demand. We published plenty of news that was basically PR for the J-School, but we became synonymous with posts that criticized the J-School, mine in particular.

As a diehard liberal, I hate Fox News, but its editorial strategy clearly has merit if it draws far more viewers than any other cable news network and is one of the most profitable channels on television. Those are impressive feats given the current state of the traditional news media.

Becoming known for anti-JSchool posts has its own pitfalls, which is why I wrote on Twitter that it’s a good idea for JSB to no longer be quite so critical of the J-School. But again, you need to find a happy medium where you can be even mildly critical of an institution that is supposed to embrace free speech.

I once heard this great quote that went something like, “PR is what people want everyone to know, news is everything else.” At the end of the day, JSB editors and contributors are journalists, not PR people for the J-School. The site should look that way.

JSB is Boring

You know what’s even worse than PR? Boring PR. While exciting PR might be an oxymoron, PR at least has the potential to not be a total bore. JSB is now boring. There are plenty of reasons why it is boring, and just as many ways to see that J-Schoolers have noticed how boring the site is now.

The main reason JSB is so boring is because the site offers nothing original. The events posts are basically copy and pasted from the emails that are already going out over the J-School listserv, and “Why Mizzou” posts would make more sense on the MU Admissions home page than on an independent news site.

And I swear to fucking god, I will go nuts if I read another “Why Mizzou” post that basically says “I didn’t want to go to Mizzou but then I took a campus tour and OMG I loved it, so now I’m here.” At least write about why you are happy now that you are here, not the reasons why you initially picked Mizzou, which will be superficial at best.

Because the site lacks anything unique or original, JSB is not particularly useful to current students.

There’s a good deal of proof that students no longer find the site useful, interesting or relevant. I have a well-known love affair with site stats, and so I went to the site stats to prove the “JSB is boring” hypothethis. The most popular day ever for JSB was February 17 with 5,058 page views, and the most popular single post was the Chris Spurlock resume, with 7,450 page views and counting. In contrast, the most popular post this semester has only garnered 318 page views. That post is not in the top 40 ever published on JSB.

You can see more proof on JSB’s social media outlets. JSB grew to nearly 1,300 Twitter followers in the first semester. JSB has gained about 100 followers this semester, and now has 1,411 followers. Facebook shows a similar picture. JSB’s Facbook grew to nearly 500 fans this summer, and has only gained a handful this semester.

As I’ve written before, site stats are not everything, but they are a pretty accurate barometer of how your audience is reacting to your content. What does it say about the site now that the most popular content on any given day is as likely to be the Chris Spurlock resume as something published this semester? Nothing good. Plus, no one has posted  a single comment on any post on the home page. Not even one.

I also heard a fair bit of anecdotal evidence this weekend that JSB is not getting much attention this semester. When I met several current J-Schoolers, they recognized me from my work with JSB. It was simultaneously flattering and embarrassing, but when they brought up the site I took the chance to ask what they thought of it now. It was interesting to hear them speak of the site in almost exclusively the past tense. As in, “I read that post last year, but I don’t know what’s been published on JSB this year.”

That was tough to hear, because for all JSB’s faults, nobody could deny that it was central to many discussions about the J-School last semester. Students and professors talked about JSB in capstone classes, newsrooms, and the career fairs, and that’s just the places at the J-School we heard about. The site got plenty of attention nationally too thanks to Romenesko, The Huffington Post and PBS MediaShift.

JSB reached a level of mass awareness in its target audience that would be an honor for any publication, much less one that just launched. That’s no more. Even Fake JSB doesn’t give a shit about the site anymore, as it has not tweeted in more than a month.

J-School Buzz used to feel like a living thing, a place with a real sense of community that was borne out with plenty of regularly updated interesting posts that drew lots of comments. JSB now feels static, publishing with much less frequency and drawing fewer comments than last semester.

Where’s The News on JSB?

I can only find a couple posts this semester that have had any time hook to their publication dates. The rest are evergreen stories that can’t explain why they are being published now rather than, say, last week. Or last month. It’s not a news blog if there’s nothing on it that is timely. I don’t see much evidence on the site of good news judgment.

When JSB has stumbled onto something timely this semester, they have not been able to take advantage of it at all. I’m specifically thinking of this post about Brian Brooks. The only piece of news in the post that students wanted to learn was that he is retiring at the end of the school year. The man is a J-School legend, and the news of his retirement would be a huge scoop for JSB.

But where in the story do you see the news that Brooks is retiring? It’s not in the headline. Nor is it in the lede, or the first half of the post even. Rather, the news that he is retiring is literally buried into the final paragraphs of the post.

How do we know that J-Schoolers only cared about the news Brooks is retiring, and not much else in the post? Because the original tweet with the original headline on JSB’s profile received zero retweets from non JSBers.

However, I read the post and tweeted out a link saying that Brooks was retiring. JSB must have seen that tweet, because it later sent out another tweet saying “Brian Brooks to retire,” and boom, seven retweets!

I Should Probably Shut Up

When I talk about JSB, I feel like a teenage mother (reckless, young and immature) who gave her baby up for adoption too soon and still wants to play a parental role. I completely understand the site is now theirs and I have no say in what goes on JSB, but I hope they will give some consideration to what I have written here. JSB used to have a mission to report and discuss the J-School as it actually exists, the good, bad and ugly. I don’t see that as the case anymore, and that’s a damn shame.

I put this post on my blog because of my fetish for transparency, and my hope to spark some discussion about the issues with JSB I have noticed. I had a few conversations about J-School Buzz at Homecoming this weekend, and I know I am not the only person with something to say about the direction JSB is going in now.

If you’re so inclined, let’s discuss, everyone. See you in the comments section below.

If you love microbrews as much as I do and live in Indianapolis, I think you will find this list very helpful. I have compiled a pretty thorough list of microbreweries in Indianapolis, along with hours, approximate prices and relevant links.

Enjoy!

I made a video tour of my classroom at Harshman Middle School. If you like what you see, please vote for us in the Avery Back to School Competition to support our efforts with free school supplies.

With new J-School Buzz editors announced and added to the masthead, it’s about time I officially sign off as JSB’s Editor-in-Chief. This has been the most important learning experience in my time at the Missouri School of Journalism, and I’m thrilled we get to pass on the website to a new generation of editors.

Before I head off for the sunset though, I want to impart some hard-earned wisdom to our new editors. Please add any thoughts you have on what the new JSB editors should know in the comments section.

Make an impact

We have already seen that change is possible in the Missouri School of Journalism as a result of what you publish on J-School Buzz. When we pointed out that Biotech University was pro-biotechnology propaganda, the J-School changed how the weekend seminar will work going forward (more details on that later this week).

Since we wrote about problems in Career Services, Director Barbara Willis is putting several new policies in place to make the office more useful for job-hunting students. And according to several journalism professors, our reporting on the J-School’s lacking social media outlets has pushed the J-School to work out ways to improve them in the near future.

Report on the stuff you care about and think the J-School can improve, and the administration will listen.

Publish news J-Schoolers want and need

Before we started JSB in January, I thought we would mostly publish blog posts that we thought J-Schoolers needed to know. That included news like the J-School’s confusing relationship with Patch, the Open Missouri project and how many hours the Reporting class should count for.

That idea changed when we started looking at the site stats and saw which pieces of content J-Schoolers actually wanted to read: the Chris Spurlock resume, Brad Pitt at Mizzou, the Mizzou Greektown celebration and the like. Your job as JSB reporters is to not only provide the news you think J-Schoolers need to know, but also the news that you think they want to know. Your news judgment will improve throughout the semester as you get to know your audience better.

My point is that you can’t afford to be arrogant enough to dictate to your audience what they need to care about. This is the Internet, and the users have the power here.

Death to Objectivty

Though plenty of people will disagree, J-School Buzz is based on the idea that absolute objectivity is an outdated concept in American journalism. We don’t believe sharing opinions or having voice in a story means the writer lacks journalistic integrity.

We have never been afraid to declare our opinion loud and clear, whether that was about the J-School’s lacking social media presence or the lousy (though improving!) state of affairs in the Career Services office. Original reporting plus analysis is a powerful tool for change, and is a great form of journalism.

Back up your opinion with reporting

Too often, we were overly reliant on snark to distract from the fact that we hadn’t done enough reporting. You have every right to your opinion, and now you have a very large megaphone to spread it and hopefully convince a few other people. But if you want your audience to trust your analysis, they need to see you have done the reporting that lead you to that opinion. That’s been one of our greatest failures, mine in particular.

Get more J-Schoolers involved

One of the biggest regrets I have about our time with JSB is that we weren’t able to get more J-Schoolers to contribute on a regular basis. Yes, we had plenty of people contribute once or twice, but no one who contributed on a regular basis throughout the semester. It’s awesome you have already started soliciting contributors, because they will help JSB represent a greater variety of opinions in the J-School, and allow you to publish more content about more subjects.

Remember the 80-20 rule

JSB gives our online commenters plenty of opportunities to criticize us. It’s going to happen, because sometimes we deserve it. This just comes with the territory as an online reporter. People have more ways than ever to tell you what they think of your reporting and J-School Buzz. They can @ mention you on Twitter, post on our Facebook page, or leave a comment to say you and your work are terrible.

Of course, most people aren’t so mean or blunt, but it will happen occasionally. The important thing is that you read every vitriolic blog post and short-sighted commenter who take the time to discuss your work. You have to sift through the useless commentary to find something you can use to make J-School Buzz an even better site.

Of all the criticism you will read, 80 percent will not be helpful. But you have to read every piece of criticism to find the 20 percent that is extremely useful and will help improve the site. Thus, the 80-20 rule.

Always respond to the good criticism: the commenters or Twitter followers who make a good point. This website is still being shaped and has a lot of room to grow and improve. We don’t have a monopoly on wisdom, so always be transparent about your efforts to improve this website.

Failure is an option

Fail big, fail often. It’s the only way you’re going to get better. We learned as much from our failures as our successes. You will too.

Sincerely, Teeg

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Every year, the folks at The Maneater like to hand out a bunch of self-indulgent awards to people and organizations on Mizzou’s campus as part of “Mizzou in Review.” What’s that? You haven’t heard of these awards either? That’s because you and I are normal Mizzou journalism students who don’t pick up The Maneater because we can find more useful information on the side of a Coke can.

In a desperate attempt to claw its way back to relevance, The Maneater named J-School Buzz “biggest handjob” in the Mizzou in Review. The award goes to a group that is “self-serving, misplaced and lacking valuable purpose.”

Yeah…I know, the maturity and journalistic professionalism are overwhelming. I’m so glad I could be lectured on journalism by a bunch of freshmen. Anyways, I thought it was high time DavidTeeghman.com handed out its own handjobs (or whatever) by naming The Maneater Most Irrelevant. Congrats, guys, you really do everything possible to earn it!

 The older you are at the University of Missouri, the more irrelevant The Maneater becomes. Freshman year, you mistaken it for a real news source that might print “interesting” information, and it’s kind of cool that they can print swear words in the opinion columns. Fuck, I thought swearing is what the Internet and web logs were created for. By the time you an upper classman though, you realize that The Maneater does not matter.

This is particularly true of students in the Missouri School of Journalism. Ask a senior J-Schooler if they ever worked at that rag, and you will often hear very proud “Nos” or the deeply apologetic and excuse-filled “Yes.” I only got the former from the dozen or so J-Schoolers I talked to while I was writing this blog post.

Then there are the handful of former Maneater editors who are still proud of the publication, but that group is limited almost exclusively to the number of Print & Digital News J-Schoolers you can squeeze into the Missourian‘s Photo Bubble.

What I found most interesting about The Maneater‘s award for JSB is that it was given for something “self-serving, misplaced and lacking valuable purpose.” That would seem like a perfect description for The Maneater‘s Best Handjob Award itself. You can say what you want about J-School Buzz, but please don’t insult handjobs. Granted, they are a little high school, but they serve a very valuable purpose.

But I’m glad that The Maneater fired some shots at JSB, because it finally gives me an excuse to talk about all the reasons The Maneater is unfit to use as toilet paper.

I don’t really mind self-importance when you can back it up. The New York Times deserves to feel and act self-important, because they are the pinnacle of American journalism. The level of self-importance that The Maneater attaches to itself is astounding. What irritates me about the level of self-importance that infects that clusterfuck of a newsroom is that the distance between its own perceived level of importance and how important it actually is.

But let’s discuss a more tangible and recent example of The Maneater‘s growing irrelevance: the Greektown celebrations after Osama bin Laden’s death. According to one Maneater editor, it had about a dozen people on the scene taking photos and writing stories (no video, of course).

J-School Buzz on the other hand only had people on the ground sporadically. That’s because I was glued to my computer screen hitting refresh on Twitter to see the latest photos and videos students were uploading and sharing with their friends. We posted those videos and photos to our website and gave credit and link love to the person who had shared it.

By crowdsourcing the breaking news reporting, we were able to get more interesting photos and videos on the site in real time and be part of the conversation about the event as it was happening. We tweeted a couple dozen times during that four-hour period and tried to stay on top of the situation with the help of students on the ground. Not only did students like being part of the celebration, they liked being part of the reporting process and that we thanked them on the website and on our Twitter account.

I had a conversation about our crowdsourcing effort with a couple Maneater editors, because I was surprised The Maneater hadn’t done something similar for the celebration. The idea of crowdsourcing a breaking news event is by no means revolutionary, but The Maneater seems to think the idea is far too radical to do it on one of the biggest news events of the semester. What’s funny is that one person posting those shaky videos and photos on JSB got more page views than the work of a dozen Maneater photographers and reporters, according to one Maneater editor.

Side note: the quickest way to see that someone doesn’t know jack shit about the Internet or web analytics is when they say “page hits” when they mean “page views.” They are very different, as you can see here.

But hey, if The Maneater were revolutionary and experimental, it wouldn’t be the stodgy boring humorless old Maneater we all know and…tolerate is the best word, I guess.

The handjob award piece does not have a byline on it, even though several other articles written as part of Mizzou in Review have them. Such a cowardly move, though it does not surprise me in the least. It’s a shame, because I want to treat the writer to a beer and explain why they are headed for the unemployment line. Then again, if they are working at The Maneater, they aren’t old enough to drink a beer.

I’m not going to say The Maneater is one of the worst college papers in the country, I’m just going to say there are at least a dozen reminders in each issue that the staff is mostly a bunch of self-righteous freshmen who have yet to master the comma or an interesting phrase.

I should not be surprised by this award. JSB practices a very different and radical and exciting new form of journalism that is nothing like The Maneater. JSB has analysis and humor and it is not objective, so naturally The Maneater wouldn’t like JSB. It’s kind of like asking a diabetic to like chocolate: it’s unnatural.

JSB is here to serve as a kick in the ass for the journalism school and journalism on this campus in general. It is experimenting and failing and succeeding and having fun and doing some great journalism. I hope JSB’s success will prompt The Maneater to do a little more experimentation, but if this handjob is any sign, that probably won’t happen.

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