Transcript for
AEJMC 2005
Interactive Journalism Summit:
When Consumers Become Creators

August 12, 2005
San Antonio, Texas

Clyde Bentley
Founder, MyMissourian.com

Clyde Bentley: While we’re getting this up there I want you to know that my boss, Dean Mills, is over there somewhere next door with the Knight folks. He couldn’t make it but I want to give him a nod as probably the most inspirational man in my life. Film at 11. Just remember that one, OK?

My name is Clyde Bentley and I write well. Now those three words have defined my life for the last 50 some-odd years. I have essayed my way to grades I probably didn’t deserve in school. I memo’d my way to better jobs and salaries in different jobs, and I’ve front-paged myself into the hearts and minds of the community where I work. And that shouldn’t be surprising to you, because that’s what we do; we’re journalists. We write well. It’s something we love. Here’s four more words that might scare you: We are not alone.

One of the pieces of prose that I’m proud of (for that good writing) was the lead to our paper that we did in MyMissourian. It says that if necessity is the mother of invention, panic may be the mother of journalistic innovation. What you’re going to see in the next few minutes is how a very traditional journalism school handled that panic in a way that we think was fairly logical, but in a way that was very much with what we do in our industry.

Missouri is, we like to think of it, the home school of journalism. We’re the first school in the country — in the nation — with a journalism school. It’s very traditional, so you’ve got to remember that. You probably all know that you don’t have to ask someone if they’re a Mizzou graduate, because they’ll tell you long before you ever get around to asking them. Part of it is we developed this curriculum called the Missouri Method. We’re very proud of it. We own commercial media outlets, and all our students work in those commercial media outlets. And it’s worked very well for us. But it makes us very much part of the traditional media center. The other thing to know about us is that we’re very big. We have about 80 full-time faculty members, and they’re almost all heavily experienced in the media business.

Our faculty started an e-mail chat about open source journalism, which has morphed in a year to citizen journalism. This man on the left here (points to presentation), Yeon-Ho Oh, started doing this stuff in Korea with OhMyNews. By the way, if you don’t know this man, he will probably go down as the genius of the early 21st century. The man is truly a media genius. He started the site and just started changing things, and then another person in Bakersfield picked up on that and put an American spin on it — Mary Lou — and really set the world on fire. The listservs are burning up all over the place asking, “What is this that she’s doing?” In our school, we were chatting back and forth about this quite a bit.

I said, “Well, I teach an online journalism class” — this was an “aw shucks” type of e-mail — “I can just take my class and put together this open source thing instead of what we normally do.” And Dean Mills said, “This is great! Go ahead and do it.” He said, “I’m in no hurry. Next week would be soon enough.” I told you this guy is inspirational. And that’s the kind of the panic that got into us.

So over the summer I got a handful of graduate students together and said, “We’ve got to plan this thing out.” Two of them are here — Brendan Watson and Jeremy Littau, who had been doing some great stuff. I got this core of students who took on this with just true genius. But, as we were doing this, this was a big challenge to the tradition of Missouri. Those 80 faculty members weren’t all just happy about what we were doing, and we had a lot of questions. The big question was control. Who’s going to control this? Who’s going to make sure you’re not making mistakes? How is this going to work? We need to know what’s going on here.

Well, the grad students picked up on this real quickly. Brian Hamman, who’s one of our students — by the way, if any of you are looking, this guy is going to be the next Adrian Holovaty, I’ll tell you — he is just genius out there on the technical journalism end of things. Grab him before he goes off somewhere else. Anyway, as Brian said, he got excited the more we were doing this. We’re coming up with something new. And he and the grad students came up with this idea that we’re no longer covering the news, we’re sharing the news. And this is an important concept: It’s not teaching people to cover and write, but to share. What we were looking at is if there’s a future for journalists out of this. That’s another thing about this: We’re a traditional journalism school. This is not the Montessori for graduate students. We’re not out there to try and put the newspaper business out of business. We’re out there trying to make this thing work. We are journalists.

We got into this whole idea of “is it going to be something out there?” And we think yes. Both professionals and citizens are going to coexist. But part of what we came up with is — as this whole blogging thing came up — we realized that there is a conflict between blogging and plogging. We’ve got a huge number of things on the Internet out there. And what is it that we do? Journalists, what we do really well is we edit, we consolidate, we find ways of making this thing go. So we’re moving from the picture of a journalist as a writer and reporter to the picture of the journalist as the editor and guide. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to be storytellers and guides as we go along here, and we think we have something that will work.

Now I go back on this idea. One of my other grad students, Hans Meyer, was saying that (you know, a lot of these grad students have a lot of experience — he was general manager of a newspaper) and what he was saying is, you know, where we have an advantage over most of the companies out there is we can do this as a way of showing that it can be done, and we can make this so that companies who are afraid of putting money into it can see what we’re doing. And our whole goal was that we’re going to make this work as something that someone can pick up, take out and put into their pocket as their own program. By the way, my own dean has asked me if we’d like to put together a seminar later this year that is just a how-to. If you want to come in and learn how to do this, we’ll teach you how to put together a project and we’re gonna try and do this later this year. So if you’re interested in that, please e-mail me.

Now, in order to make this thing work, what we did first was sit down with, first these grad students, and said, “We’ve got to figure out what the basic problems are with doing this.” And we broke them down into 4 areas:

1. Decency
2. Commercialism
3. Literacy
4. Banalism

And decency was a big deal. We’re a college campus. I can see indecent stuff in any e-mail that I get from students, let me tell you. It was an issue, and we asked, “How are we going to treat this?” Commercialism was big. I got a lot of hardcore journalists who did not want to give any room to people making money. And we have this idea of literacy, because what we do is write. We wanted everybody to edit. We had this idea of, “How much are we going to do to this?” And then we had this idea, “Is there anything that is too stupid to go into our site?” So what we did is we had a long and arduous kind of argument about this trying to figure out how we’re going to come up with it. And what we came up with was a set of policies.

• On decency we just said no profanity and no nudity. That’s the way it is. We’re going to follow general newspaper terms. You know our host newspaper, The Missourian, that’s what they do, we can go along with that. There’s no problem with that.

• On commercialism what we said was let’s just kind of be lenient. Let’s not ban commercialism until we can figure out where it’s a problem. But what we’ll do is, we’ll just be good journalists. If someone is in there hyping their business too much, we’ll say, “Hey back off a little. Let’s try to make this more useful to the entire community instead of just yourself.” We’ll work with that.

• Literacy: There was a long discussion on this, but we finally said that we’re not going to be working with an AP stylebook, we’re going to work with the idea of readability. So we don’t work along the stylebook. We said, “Let’s try to make it readable.” And so the way we do that is if one of our editors looks at something and says, “Oh I don’t know quite about this,” they ask one of the other student editors to take a look at it. “What do you think? Is this readable? Is this okay?” So there’s no stylebook that goes along with it.

• And then there was the whole idea of banalism. Hey, you know what we figured out is that journalists don’t know really well what is stupid. So what we figured out is, I don’t care how stupid it is, we’ll find somewhere to put it in there. Because we’re not very good at that.

And we boiled it down — we really like boiling things down, we’re headline writers, you know — and so we came down to four one-sentence rules:

1. No profanity.
2. No nudity.
3. No personal attacks. (No attacks on race, religion, national origin, gender — any of the nice things.)
4. We asked for original material.

But that’s it.

And you know what? It works. It’s hard to miss on four simple rules like that. Now Jeremy, here, was talking about this whole thing of “the end of no.” If you’re out there in the business you spend most of your time saying no. “No, I don’t care if you want a 37th wedding anniversary. We do 25th, we do 50th, we don’t do 37th. I don’t care if your wife’s dying and she’s not going to be here for 38. We just do it that way.” And we have those rules all the time. We never have to say that. If someone comes in with a pumpkin shaped like George Bush, hey, we’ve got a place for you. We’ll put it in. There’s no “no” in our paper. And it’s been a wonderful way of looking at that.

Our technology goals as we were doing this, unlike some institutes, my inspirational dean, one part of the inspiration he forgot about is he gave me zero budget. I mean zero budget. We have spent $300 in one year. That’s our total expenditure. We had to buy a domain license and we made a couple photocopies, but we have spent zero. So we had to come up with something with high usability and no cost and easy to do. And so we came up with Mambo. And it has this really simple design. We made something where we had a bunch of sections that we’d brainstormed out — much like Mary Lou — what kinds of sections would work. And we had a team of students leading each of those sections and a graduate student leading each of those teams of students, so it was kind of like the structure at a newspaper.

Now our design started out with our first site as one of the templates off of Mambo. We just kind of put our name on it and it was pretty easy. And then one of our students came up with an idea of a nice flag about grassroots journalism and we said, “Oh yeah, we’ll stick that on top there. It looks pretty nice.” Then Brian, my techno Wizard, came up with an idea and said, “Let’s redesign this.” And we had to put it on a new server, so we now have it on a Linux server. He came up with our new site, which is up there and it’s nice and clean and it works just darn well. It’s very readable. All this is just done within the framework of free software in Mambo, just moving things around. Real easy — well, not real easy. Easy enough that you can usually find someone to do it — not me.

He also, by the way, came up with this nice little thing on the side which is just wonderful. It gives us a cue of what’s on there. Any of the editors could come in there and figure out where it is and make our edits to the site. It’s just a delight to work with — it’s just the easiest thing I’ve ever worked with — and we have a nice easy way of submitting. You just fill in the blanks, push the button and your stuff is in our queue to be edited.

What happens is, well, they write. And they write about controversial things and they write about very nice things. We have a religion section that has some really great things by our local group of pagans, and we have some really great recipes and stuff. But they write and they write and they write. And that’s fine. That’s what we want. We’ve got all the room in the world. But we said, maybe we can do something a little different. We have a nice big Earth Day festival that happens to be right next to our journalism building, and so I said, “Why don’t we just set up a booth within our wireless internet loop?” And we set up a booth there and put a bunch of computers out there and said, “Hey! Cover this. Tell us what you think about Earth Day.” And people would come up and write. They’d write about these neat things about Earth Day and we’d post them right there. And they’d look and say, “I’m published! I’m published! This is great!”

But the neatest thing is, we got this idea of saying, “Give me your driver’s license, I’ll give you a digital camera. Wander around here and take pictures, we’ll put ‘em in.” We had something-like-12-year-old girls, and this big 7-foot giant started taking high altitude pictures. The next day, Tom Warhover, The Missourian newspaper editor, came over to me — we’d done really good coverage of this festival — and he said, “Your folks did better than my folks.” And I said, “Whoo, that’s a hell of a compliment.” I think actually we did better together than anyone did. We did it both ways and that was cool.

So, we’re working with one of our museums on a history of then and now. They give a picture of the way that something was, we go out and find the same scene and take a picture of it and say that’s the way it is now. That’s a fun kind of thing that people like.

Here are some of the things that happened here. We had some unexpected issues. What kind of confused everybody is that politics didn’t turn out to be a very big thing at all. We launched this thing in October so that we’d be able to be part of the election. But the stuff that we got for politics was stuff we had to pull teeth to get. People did not want to write about politics. But then we did a little thing on the prettiest pet in the county. My God, I’ve never seen so many images of cats, rats, whatever. Recipes — we’re talking about doing a cookbook. We can’t keep up with the recipes. Everybody seems to have a recipe. And religion — people write with passion about religion. I mean they really do. They don’t write blasphemy or anything, but it’s something that’s very near and dear to them. And guess what? They’re pretty technically savvy, even though we in the newspaper business kind of think that is something in the back part of the paper that shouldn’t be around.

The teaching issues we ended up with were we found out that there a lot of things that journalists didn’t know that we thought they would know. One of those things was our sports department. About sports we thought, this is a natural. Jeremy found out that [students] didn’t know how to find anyone who was in Little League. We had someone literally say, “Without a press guide, what am I going to do? What are these guys?” And we found that the new students really don’t like to talk to anyone face-to-face. Oh, they love to e-mail people, but don’t like to talk to people face-to-face. And trying to get someone out the door to talk to people and bring them in is a difficult task. But we’re working on it. They were just not prepared to work with the public.

We, of course, started to work with OhMyNews, and I was going to be shipped over there to talk to them. So I had to look at this whole American perspective, and what we’re finding out is that in America we have this need for family topics.

One of our grad students from Korea said that this makes him kind of nervous. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a need for alternative media. The people are pretty happy with their government and they’re not all that upset about things, so it’s not a big political thing. And so he was up there saying, “Is this really journalism? You guys have got to get out there and punch it up a little more. You guys have got to be a little more aggressive on this.” And maybe he’s right.

What we did do is we looked into the future. We’re going to go to the print edition. Even in a great place like Missouri, I’m having a very difficult time having our administration say, “Follow the NorthwestVoice idea.” The point here is to put it in print; make a blended thing. Like everyone else we have this problem with blending. But we’re going to do it this year. We’ll also do a daily teaser in the paper saying, “This is what’s on MyMissourian.” And we’re going to add student-written blogs on there as part of my class. Teaching blogging as one of the things we’re doing in citizen journalism. And we’re going to try to put in some sort of content directly from blogs in the area.

We’re getting into this whole idea of participating — the idea of journalism; of sharing. It’s a new concept for us, but we think it’s going to work. When we started this conference, I was at a focus session on the spiral of death in journalism that asked, “Are we on the way down?” And I’m going to repeat this and say no, I don’t think so. I think what we’re looking at is the dance of the phoenix. A phoenix will burn up, be something really ugly, but it will come up. I watched the Harry Potter movie. That phoenix came back as a new set of colors and it saved the day. And it wasn’t the way the phoenix was that started it, but it’s going to happen. And I think that’s what we’re going to do.

So if you’re interested in talking about how we can roll this out, please e-mail me. And if you’re not, just tune in to MyMissourian.com and we’ll see what the future brings us in the next few months. Thanks a lot.

• Continue to David Wiseman's speech
• Return to transcript menu