I’ve attended a few South Florida tech events in the last couple months (BarCamp, WeMedia, SoFlaTweetup) and last night I was glad to finally add Refresh to the list.  Lots of familiar faces, both people I’ve met at other events and tweeps I met in person for the first time. Thanks to VOIS for the beer and munchies and to Alex De Carvalho (@alexdc) for coordinating.

I got to hear a bit about the concept of co-working, which was new to me, from social strategist and blogger Brian Breslin (@brianbreslin).  Freelancers and independent workers sharing a common space to get their work done, fully equipped with other like-minded brains to bounce ideas off of or swap skill-sets with. Like social media, with co-working, it’s not about the space but about the people you can work and connect with. Super cool idea.

It’s tough going to cool tech meetups as a member of the news industry.  Whether it’s the rough economic times that newspapers are experiencing so publicly these days or the general techy and social media interests that we all share, geeks at the three big South Florida newspapers have found some common ground and a sense of camaraderie (despite a Twitter #rivalry). When we add our organization to our name tags, it’s easy for people to assume we are all reporters, there only to scope out a good story for the local business section or whatnot, members of the media machine.  It’s easy to disspell this once we all introduce ourselves and get to chattin’. Most of us are in the online department at our papers, tweeting on our respective accounts and utilizing social media tools to spread our news online.  We’re tech-heads just like you all!

I know it can be frustrating when a grassroots tech community starts to blossom and flourish and little is said about it in the mainstream media.  When event attendance grows year-after-year and people start flying into Miami from all over the world (I saw Ryan Carson [@ryancarson] from the UK at BarCamp the day before FOWA), I can understand the notion that Florida might be developing its own version of Silicon Valley, and that’s great news. What is easy to forget (well, not for those of us who work there) is that the scope of what newspapers are able to cover is shrinking due to financial hardships. In tough times the bad news often takes over the good news.

I’d personally like to do a better job blogging and covering the geek get-togethers that I’m able to make it to.  I’m not a reporter or an official Miami Herald blogger, but thankfully I’ve got all the bylines I want right here.

PLUG #1: Please stay tuned to @MiamiHerald on Twitter.  We’re planning a tweetup. It’s gonna be SWEET!

PLUG #2: If you live in the Miami area, and want to kick some balls with awesome editors, designers, producers and writers who work at the Herald, start following @HeraldKickball and bookmark HeraldKickball.com.**  We meet every other Saturday at 12:30 pm at Margaret Pace Park on 18th and Bayshore Drive. Next game is April 4th, depending on weather. Props to Lori Todd (@loritodd) and Bill Passonno (@wcpassonno) for organizing and being kick-ass in general. The more the merrier!

**We are not officially affiliated with the paper, but it is the Herald that unites us, hence HeraldKickball.

Refresh pikchurs:

@loritodd showing her Times "T" tattoo to @enzobalc

Refresh Miami turnout

Although I didn’t have the chance (or the $$) to go to FOWA (Future of Web Apps), I had a great time last Sunday at BarCampMiami. For those unfamiliar with the concept of BarCamp (and no, it doesn’t involve mixing cocktails for tips), check out the wiki here. They sum it up like this:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Greg Linch (@greglinch), student at the UM School of Communications, worked with BarCampMiami coordinator Alex de Carvalho (@alexdc) to bring specific sessions focused on news innovation tailored for us journos who were in the house. There were quite a few of us. I got to meet Twitter friends Danny Sanchez (@dannysanchez) of the Orlando Sentinel and Journalistopia and Mathilde Piard (@mathildepiard), Columbia J-School grad and web editor at the Palm Beach Post as well as a slew of other tech-minded smart people.

One of my favorite presentations came from Rick Martinez (@digx) of FIU about evolving news. “There is not a newspaper industry. There is a news industry” rang very true. Not sure why we cling to the print product with our cold, dead hands. That’s a different post.

Rick Martinez of FIU and Greg Linch of the University of Miami

I spent yesterday and today (Wednesday and Thursday) as a fellow at the WeMedia Conference at the University of Miami. My job as a volunteer was to twitter the breakout sessions with the #wemedia hashtag as a way for people who couldn’t make it to track all the good ideas being tossed about. If you follow me on Twitter (@malcolli), you can see a rundown of a few of the breakout sessions.

It’s amazing to see people from so many different types of organizations (Journalism, non-profits, startups) collaborating on how to use media to innovate and better their futures. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

Brian Storm of MediaStorm

David Liu, CEO of TheKnot.com

The #WeMedia buzz began almost instantly around the Twitterverse in the morning intro session as awards were given to Game Changers in the realm of advancing media. As a political nerd, I was a tad (ok, maybe more than a tad) devastated that Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe wasn’t in physical attendance to accept his award. Twitter, ZeFrank and others were honored. Go to the web site for a better rundown.  The twitterers in the room started to slowly emerge and the convo took off.

Because I was there as a volunteer twitterer who was encouraged not just to tweet a play-by-play but to add my voice to the mix, I made a point not to hold back. Granted, the caliber of participants was very high and I wasn’t sure how much value they would see in tweets from a 22-year-old recent college grad 3 months into her first newspaper gig, but I found that the presenters appreciated the instant feedback and honesty.

During a social media session with Susan Mernit (@susanmernit), formerly of AOL and Yahoo Personals and fellow Twitter-holic, she was using her BlackBerry to scan our tweets since she knew that some of us were actively tweeting the session. Hats off to her. Perfect example of a how Twitter is a tool and not just a silly site for sharing what you had for lunch. I sent out a tweet saying I thought the session was a little too basic and she jumped right in and got the ball rolling to get to the higher-level stuff (like Facebook Connect, which I’m trying to get really familiar with).

Susan Mernit (left) and Rebecca Watson of Real Girls Media (right)

On the downside, I had over 200 tweets over the two-day event, which wouldn’t normally be on the downside except that I do have some followers who I bet were completely overwhelmed and annoyed by a long stream of #wemedia, #wemedia, #wemedia.

This makes me rethink an issue that came up a few months ago about whether or not to split up my tweets into two accounts; one for Mallory Colliflower, the conference-attending working professional and one for Mallory Colliflower, the chick who checks icanhazcheezburger multiple times a day, swears from time to time, likes to share music and stay in touch with friends.

More importantly, because of the buzz and conversation about the WeMedia conference we were able to generate on Twitter, #WeMedia trended in the #2 spot twice during the conference. Quite a feat if you want people to be talking about what you are doing and saying.  I managed to be the top trendsetter for the #WeMedia hashtag and had the second-highest number of retweeted posts, behind Tom Kennedy (@tomkennedy), multimedia editor and consultant from Arlington, Virginia.  More stats here.

Was my mission accomplished?  I give a confident ‘yes.’ Between Greg, Mathilde and another Columbia graduate Veronica Zaragovia (@verozaragovia), we managed to provide a service to the media-minded who couldn’t make it to the conference as well as meet and connect with people who had similar and differing thoughts on what was going on in front of all of us. In regards to that, the bloggers over at the WeMedia page have done an excellent job summarizing and analyzing all of the discussion that took place. I won’t try to duplicate what they’ve already done so well, so head there for more.

Big ‘thank you’ to the organizers of the event, particularly Chad Capellman (@chadrem), WeMedia’s web producer and to Greg Linch for inviting me to join the team. I was thrilled to meet all of the people that I did and hope to hear more from and about them in the future.

One of the biggest issues plaguing print journalism with the rise of the internet is the inability for a newspaper to encourage interactive reader discussion. This usually takes place online in story comment sections or community forums. In print, this kind of audience sound-off can only take place among the few letters that are selected to print in “letters to the Editor” section.

These days, readers are talking and discussing and ranting more than ever. Even according to the 10,000 Words blog (one of my favorites), the only section that appeared twice in their post about the six Newspaper sections rendered obsolete by the web, was the Opinions section, which they say both isn’t going anywhere (“Even at their most basic form, newspapers will always contain someone’s opinion, albeit with a lot more fact-checking.”), but also serves less purpose because of comment sections.

Digging to the Opinion section means flipping through chunks of other sections to find a jumble of editorials from columnists and cartoonists and selected letters to the editor, all on different topics thrown together for the sake of keeping bias separate from fact. The story on 1A, for example, about South Florida housing becoming more affordable may or may not have a letter or opinion piece to accompany it over in the Op/Ed section, but readers are forced to go and scope it out, with or without a teaser from the story.

What if the Op/Ed section was dispersed throughout the entire paper? Each section — Nation, World, Local, Living, etc. — could have three or four pages in the back dedicated to letters and columns about the current events and issues in that section. I know some papers already do this in some form. The Miami Herald has certain columnists that are published on 1A and 1B on a weekly basis. These are usually the pieces that get readers stirring online the most as well. Comment sections for online versions of columns usually fill up pretty quickly. Some examples: Myriam Marquez, 33 comments and Linda Robertson, 148 comments .

In certain scenarios (like yesterday’s news of A-Rod’s positive steroid test), we had our column up online before it ran in print the next day. If we scooped some of the better-quality comments that were posted online and ran them beneath the story as “What others are saying,” print readers would get a taste of the buzz happening on our site. Online readers would also be compelled to write more thoughtful comments on the Web with the opportunity to get some play in print. This isn’t something that hasn’t been said before, but a stronger effort should be made to link print and the Web. Promos on the bottom of stories to “go online for a photo gallery” don’t paint a good picture of the conversation taking place about that story.

If we encourage more reader contribution to the print product, “citizen journalism” to use a cliche, it would allow more readers to talk to each other in addition to reading the static opinions of a few returning columnists.

As a more online-centric person when it comes to news, I know the argument could be made that this already occurs online in the ways that I’ve stated, so why duplicate it in print? But I think that goes against the nature of starting a conversation.

We have painted this picture of the prestige of becoming a journalist. That somehow after a few years of J-school we are granted the exclusive ability to feed information to people. In the online world, information is shared. You are not being talked AT, but rather talked to, listened to and open to a world of infinite conversation. Print newspapers should do a better job of emulating that.

I don’t want to sound naive. I fully understand the dire state of newspapers and as an online producer it is easier for me to envision a future of paperless news. But before we hammer the last nail into the coffin, what do newspapers have to lose when trying new things? It’s now or never to take some risks with the print product. I’d love any links to examples/blogs of papers who are doing this already (I doubt this is a novel idea).

Hi all.

Just doing a test run for some embedded Flash code into a WordPress post for a fellow Twitterer (@arthurb1955). He’s looking to make the switch from hosting on WP to hosting on his own, and he’d like to see some of the perks in action, such as embeds. So here you have it, Arthur. Looks pretty good I’d say!

Real post coming soon: Trying out Twitter apps for iPhone; what I like best.

Inspired by this blog post at Journalistopia from Danny Sanchez (@dannysanchez) of the Orlando Sentinel, I was forced to come face-to-face with reality.  As an online producer, what I do isn’t exactly technical rocket science. I am lucky to have a job at a transition time when most people have not had the chance to keep up with the online learning curve. And for most people, it’s no fault of their own, in my opinion.  Reporters are busy digging up dirt, driving to crime scenes and going to press conferences. I can understand how it would be difficult to use down-time to putz around teaching yourself the necessary online skills to survive in this business. Lucky for me, I am needed as the liason between print and online. But, as Danny points out, it is only a matter of time before new reporters will trickle into the newsroom already fully equipped with the skills that I use. Eventually the middle-man will no longer be needed. His post gives insight and encouragement on how to stay ahead of the game.

In the spirit of this, I am making a committment to myself to use at least a few of his 10 things we can do to protect our jobs.

1. Writing this blog post is one of them, which I do using WordPress and host myself at my own domain name. Soon, this blog will be the landing spot for MalloryColliflower.com, and include my Flash and Web portfolio.

2.  I’m still debating on which Lynda.com class to enroll in, but that is at the top of my list. Any input from journalists on which script would be most helpful for an online producer like myself would be greatly appreciated.  I have yet to delve into my ActionScript 3 book. Between the untouched book and a Lynda.com class, that might be a good place to start.

3. I would like to be more of a fly on the wall in the graphics department at The Miami Herald. There are a lot of sharp, creative minds buzzing around there and even kindly eavesdropping on upcoming projects can’t hurt my own creative juices. Though my skills are modest at best, I would like people to know that I have them.

4. Lastly, I need to do more independent journalism. Being an online producer doesn’t give me the opportunities to keep my clips fresh and my portfolio well-stocked. If it entails taking more photographs with my Nikon D40x and using my eye a little more stategically when shooting, or borrowing my dads digital camcorder on days off just to get some practice, I need to do more. Putting together a Soundslide every once in a while takes little effort but can show editors my journalistic abilities. I’ve also got my own publishing outlet right here under my fingertips.

**Addendum**

What are you doing to improve the staying power of your online media job? What classes or courses have you taken to stay on top of your skills? I’d love some feedback in the comments!