MCO 598 Humphrey Seminar

Aleksandra Dukovska, Hubert Humphrey Fellow

Title: Toward developing a leadership situation

Jody Brannon and News 21 initiative: From god to great

Summary:

Jody Brannon is national director of News21.com, Phoenix. Brannon is leading eight newsrooms in which 12 universities are participating because of financial support by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. Before joining the excellent project of Carnegie-Knight Initiative for reviving the journalism in a national level, she worked as an executive producer for news at USATODAY.com. She worked for washingtonpost.com for six years. She is one of the leading experts for online media where she started to work back in 1995. Her academic work integrated doctorate in mass communications from the University of Maryland, College Park and a master’s in public affairs journalism from American University in D.C. and BA in journalism from Seattle University. The initiative she led is a partnership among 12-research Allied Universities: Arizona State, California-Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Northwestern, Southern California, Syracuse and Texas. This paper is explaining some of the achievement of News 21 project, role of Jody Brannon as a leader of the News 21 Initiative and Brannon development from children sport book writer to remarkable director of News 21 Initiative, a project which aim is to enrich the work of most talented journalism students across United States of America.

Introduction: Leading the News 21 Initiative

Jody Brannon is an energetic woman that always combines her reach professional experience, hard work and joy to achieve excellence and good leadership in her professional life. For two years, she is a director of News 21 Initiative, which is one of the three important elements of a national project to revitalize journalism education. Under her leadership and great coordination, the News 21 Initiative succeeded to deliver several important national journalism projects that spoke on the change of the American society in general.

The recent success of News 21 Initiative was the project on the American traffic safety. Journalism students from 11 universities participating in the Carnegie-Knight Journalism carried out this major investigation project. The 23 multimedia different stories packages came from News 21. The Carnegie Corporation of New York and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami fund this initiative to promote in depth and innovative journalism. Washington Post and mcnbc.com published the work on American traffic safety.

Even though Brannon is not in a daily contact with the Fellows who are working on various issues, she has been coordinated 12 Allied Universities which aim is to empower the most talented journalist from this universities. The common effort of the universities that are included in the project that is lead by Jody Brannon investigated several important topics for the American society in 21 century. Some of the topics investigated from 2006 until 2010 by 93 Fellows are:

The following subject will be in the focus for 2011. ASU, Maryland and Nebraska will work on Food safety issue, Berkeley will work on Bay Area Food Safety, Columbia will investigate story on Elderly in America, North Carolina will work on Powering a Nation, Northwestern& USC on Politics, Money and Accountability, Syracuse on Census-Perfect American Town.

The results from the investigative covering the different issues in the News 21 Initiative presented in a recent meeting of 12 universities at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The following data

represented average monthly traffic for various issues covered by the students who participated in the News 21 Initiative project.

The beginning of the News 21 project is in 2003 when the Carnegie Foundation decided to shape the future of journalism in the United States. The Carnegie Foundation invited the deans of five leading Universities to work on a project in order to improve the teaching of journalism in the universities. The idea was to make this possible via three elements.

The first element was the curriculum enrichment. The second is News 21 incubators, an annual national investigative reporting project. The idea was that campus professor will overseen the work of the Fellows in the project and that the final investigative journalistic projects will be distributed nationally via traditional and innovative media. The third element is the Carnegie-Knight Task Force and they are focusing more on the research and creating the platform on policy and educational issues connected to the journalism.

The concept behind News 21 is to not only collect and publish stories reported according the best journalistic practices and their presentation in an innovative way. In fact, one of the biggest challenges for the students is to work on developing new methods that will enable to the readers and viewers better interaction with the prepared story content.

To be a national director of News 21 Initiative means as well to share one simple definition. Jody Brannon vision of journalism is on the same frequency with the idea of innovation shared in the News 21 Initiative. In the focus of this

approach are still the story and her journalistic content but upgraded with the new media in order to enhance the experience for the audience.

In order to achieve that and to give the users different possibilities to approach and consume the content, News 21 Initiative is combining new technology –motion graphics, Twitter widgets, video players with well-documented investigative stories. One of the innovations that resulted from using different methods is the database on cites so the reporters or journalist can share collected information.

Finally, we learned that innovation is as much about newsroom culture and structure as it is about mastery of technology and presentation. It requires new approaches to multimedia storytelling that are as simple as putting reporters and developers in the same room so they can learn from each other and as complex as embracing failure, recognizing that being innovative means that some ideas simply won’t pan out – and that’s an opportunity for learning, too.

Jody Brannon leading coordinating role for the project has a lot with her personal vision as a journalist and her personal growth as one of the leading professionals in on line journalism.

Previous achievements and personal growth as a professional leader in on line journalism

Her personal growth as a leader in the on line news journalism is connected with the career path which is driven by her love for on line journalism.

On her web page site she is explaining herself as digital journalist starving for excellence as a result of energy plus

In an interview for USATODAY in 2004, Jody Brannon explained her beginning in the online journalism and long before the Internet became the new frontier for expressing the journalist viewpoints. She chooses the path of on line journalism because “aside from being a starving graduate student needing a summer job, the frontier aspect of this new journalistic terrain intrigued her.

“I became smitten with the medium on the first day, but I must say it's not an easygoing love affair. Despite its challenges and sporatic rewards, my passion goes deep because of its multimedic nature. That’s a world I invented for my dissertation to explain the intersection of the medium and the mindset”, said Brannon in an interview for USATODAY and republished by the JournalismJobs.com.

Responding to the question how she managed on line editor’s job that sometimes is considered “chaos management”; she answered, “It’s a more manageable goal to contain chaos”.

“We need to do a better job at anticipating bumps in the road and managing expectations. We all want to do cooler, deeper content than we can achieve. We can't be everything to everybody, but we can be the best at doing the kinds of content people expect from us, with the polish we demand of ourselves”, said Brannon.

Asked in 2004 how she will compare her role as executive producer of a national web site to her previous role as a reporter for the Seattle Times she responded that the medium is different, but the mission is the same.

“To enrich the news consumer's understanding of events based on available assets. In my earlier incarnation, I did that through my beat-up reporter's notebook and a lot of phone work; now I leverage multiple media streams into an always-available experience”, answered Brannon.

Bottom line, sites are better at doing more with less. I wrote my dissertation to provide insights into the way journalism was performed in the autumn of 1998 -- a history of sorts -- and to explore the frontline and managerial pressures of inventing and doing online journalism while learning, experimenting and adapting. My dissertation's main title was "Maximizing the Medium," and I'm still all about that. My dissertation's penultimate paragraph challenges online managers in three ways: get out of the repurposing business; develop content to maximize medium and user's experience; and spend time developing staff into technologic journalists. The challenge still holds.

Working habits and learning experience

Working as a leader of big project such as News 21 Initiative, she has to find the balance between the professional and private life. The leading role as a director of this project always means great responsibility and reporting to the Foundations that supports the Initiative. Coordination of 12 universities means working after hours, during the weekends and sometimes under the pressure to achieve the goal of the project.

In order to achieve all of this she is balancing the professional and private life. For Brannon reading books is something that everybody should practice in their daily life. One of her favorite books is “Essence of happiness” from Dalai Lama. Brannon is recommending this book to anyone dealing “with change, aging, ambition, restlessness, relationships, etc”.

“Wish everyone in the media industry would read it!” wrote Brannon in her FB page recently.

Brannon is a great fan of baseball and she is trying not to miss any game of Phoenix Diamond Backs. Brannon usually use FB to inform and update on the baseball results although she is working in the office.

“I can't get TBS on my office TV but the Yankee-Twins game is on the big screen in the First Amendment Forum so I am watching via the live Cronkite feed plus I

have the MLB.tv stream on my laptop to the left of my monitor. And I'm making progress on my annual report. Honest!”- wrote Brannon on her FB page.

Sport is her inspiration and she is learning from it while she is making her personal professional leadership growth in the sphere of the online news. Once only a writer of children sports book Brannon develop herself in a leading person in journalism education for American journalists in 21st century. In 2004 she answered that the future of on line news is “extraordinarily bright, if the money holds out”.

“I deeply believe this is *the* medium, through responsible journalism, that can best save us from media saturation. That may seem contradictory, given how deep the Web is. But people will need to rely on trusted news organizations to make sense of their lives and the world. It's our challenge to retain their confidence, wow them by making smart use of their time (and attention) and turn them into loyal digital news junkies”, said Brannon.

References:

1. (Washington Post) 2. http://news21.com/blog/innovate/ 3. http://innovate.news21.com/?p=4785 4. http://newsinitiative.org/initiative/index.html 5. http://newsinitiative.org/initiative/curriculum.html 6. http://news21.com/about/incubator-best-practices/ 7.