this week

We are working on putting together our "social media guide" to give to The Examiner at our final project presentation.

I am paying for a Facebook ad to go up tomorrow for those 25-55, who list Blue Springs or Independence as their hometown, and whose friends are already connected to The Examiner's page. We will see how that goes, and we can add that to our guide as well.

As far as our discussion from Monday, I agree wholeheartedly with changing the convergence program. I think it needs to be better integrated into the rest of the school and newsrooms. There is no direct link from the Futures Lab to each newsroom. Thus, we must come up with our own story ideas and be judged much harder than those in the newsroom. Then, if the story actually turns out, we must take it to the newsrooms, make our own doors there and fight to get it published or aired. That is why this rarely happens. Not because the projects are low quality, but because there is no avenue or system set up to move projects from the lab to the newsroom to publication.

Maybe abolishing the convergence degree is too drastic, but the degree should certainly be changed. I also agree with Juana's suggestions in class that we should learn how to use wordpress or blogsspot instead of dreamweaver in the intro class, as using dreamweaver is very difficult, and probably will not be used again by most students.

Brad