Thursday, June 7, 2012

A Morning with Mayer

Joy Mayer, the director of community engagement at the Missouri School of Journalism spoke to our SJI class about social journalism. Her philosophy is that social media has always existed, but the expectations have changed. She used the example of a little girl who confused her father when she searched for the "mouse" for their television set.

She couldn't fathom that she couldn't interact with the content. It reminded me of this video, I saw a while ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

For that baby, traditional print-based media was unacceptable. She wanted to interact. She wanted to know how she could manipulate the content she was seeing. That's the point Mayer made in her lecture. As journalists we have to constantly look for ways to make our audience a part of the conversation.

They need to trust us. When we can make that happen, we can do our jobs better than we've ever done.

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