E-Media Tidbits

Knight New Media Center Here's one of my favorite posts from the Knight New Media Center's science writing seminar blog: "High Tech Fights Old Dignity" (Click image to read. Don't miss the comments.)

A couple of days ago I was speaking with Vikki Porter, director of the Knight New Media Center. In the course of coordinating with her on a talk I'm going to give at one of their seminars next month (Covering Politics in Cyberspace), she mentioned that they've started experimenting with live blogging their seminars.

For several reasons conference blogging is a passion of mine, so I had to know more about this. Porter walked me through what they did at their Mar. 11-14 seminar: Best Practices: Covering Science in Cyberspace.

Check out the science seminar's blog. Porter explained that this group weblog is written by five science students (mostly doctoral candidates) who attended the seminar. These bloggers' only prior experience with journalism was a science writing course taught by K.C. Cole at the Univ. of Southern Calif. Annenberg School of Journalism.

Porter explained, "These students really wanted to do this. They even skipped their spring break. We did pay them, but not a lot. All of them attended all the sessions, so some sessions are blogged from a variety of perspectives. Plus, we're keeping the conversation going after the session.

"We told our bloggers to synthesize, not transcribe. Their job was to capture the strings of the conversation. And I think they did that very well. They really 'got' what this kind of blogging is about.

"We also tried to get the seminar participants (mostly journalists) to blog, but they generally wouldn't -- in some cases, their employers had a corporate policy preventing this.

"We're definitely going to keep blogging our events, and we'll probably even expand how we do it. Blogging engages the students, and they offer valuable perspective. If we messed up in anything about this first foray, it's that we didn't bring our students more into the seminar's conversations about what people go to new media for."

...Coincidentally, today I read a great post by Kathy Sierra on why we still go to conferences, even when much of the resources and interaction from these events is often available online. Said Sierra: "The most underrated benefit of the face-to-face effect of conferences is inspiration."

I'd agree with that. People go to conferences not just to get information, but to get excited and creative. A big part of that experience happens through conversation. Inspiration, in particular, marks the start of a creative process. It's such a shame when a live, in-person event sparks lots of inspiration, but then most of those sparks fizzle out because the conversations which started at the event aren't easy to carry on beyond the event.

Blogging and other kinds of conversational media often can help overcome that creative obstacle. I'm glad to see Knight moving in this direction. I'd love to see blogging for Poynter seminars, too (wink wink, nudge nudge).

(Thanks to Beth Kanter for the pointer to Kathy Sierra's post. Also, disclosure: One of my clients, J-Lab, is supported in part by grants from the Knight Foundation.)