#ncme

KQED’s Ian Hill guest blogged for us this week about the station’s experimentation with “open newsrooms.” 

One possibility, I thought, might be to set aside time in reporters’ schedules specifically to meet the residents they were covering on the Residents’ home turf. A model for this had been established by the Center for Investigative Reporting, an organization that partnered with my employer, KQED News.

They called it an open newsroom. Think of it like a meetup or a mixer for journalists and the community. Reporters tell residents they are going to be at a coffeeshop in their neighborhood at a specific date and time, and any resident is welcome to come and chat.

We asked this question in an informal poll during our last webinar. Out of 51 respondents: 

25% said a person on staff devotes part of all of his/her time to them.

12% said their our reporting staff splits up the work.

45% said their reporting staff works with other departments to hold them 

18% said departments outside of our newsroom handle them 

“Our traditional teams are too slow. We’re not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change.” That remark could have been overheard at the recent iMA conference, or it could have been said by Shane Guiter during his recent NCME webinar ”Think like a Start-up.” It was neither. Rather, it was GE’s chief marketing officer Beth Comstock commenting in a recent Fast Company article about change and innovation. That’s right: with all their resources, the folks at GE think they aren’t innovating fast enough.

Probably for good reason. A recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out that large companies have a difficult time changing, often leading to their demise. In fact, large companies that survive over the long haul tend to be ruthless about change and have executives who behave like those at small companies. If you feel your organization doesn’t have enough resources to innovate, think again. You’re big enough to innovate and possibly in a better position to do so than GE and other big companies....Read more.

As usual, the end of the year offers a great opportunity to look back at the best of 2011. In turn, I took a look under the hood of our blog to see what the most popular posts were this past year. Here are the top posts you loved to read.

CPB launches American Graduate initiative Our post about the launch of American Graduate was the most popular of the year. We’re glad you paid attention: This amazing CPB initiative is making a big impact on communities across the country. 

Public Media’s Social Media Handbook When we introduced the Social Media Handbook, in collaboration with iStrategy labs and CPB, people were raring to explore these ideas to kick-start their digital strategies.

From Alignment to Integration When executive director Charles Meyer blogs for us, we’re always in for a treat. In this post, he talks about the need for stations to shift their thinking to be more community focused.

Public Media Supports Communities in Commemorating 9/11 Many public media stations led on-air, online and on the ground activities to commemorate 9/11. We shared a few ways stations remembered the past while looking to the future.