Post-panel thoughts
Maybe staying up all night to live-tweet Occupy Oakland’s eviction wasn’t the best advance work for driving down to San Jose to attend this panel. I’m glad it happened, but I wish I could have enjoyed it more.
Its intent was to show folks that social media isn’t an abstract concept or the latest management-driven fad, but something the woman in the next cube or the guy whose byline you always notice in the paper uses, and that you can and should and must use.
It would have been a completely different event if more BANG East Bay folks (not just me in the audience, and three of the event’s six panelists) had been in the building. Not that being in the building helped: at some point, the panel got moved from the Clark Kent conference room to an auditorium on the far side of the building with Wifi but no Internet connection. Not hearing about or being told about the relocation in advance, having to ask for directions and arriving late all color my impressions.
I think I was left wanting to know more about how people bring more than their journalism with them online, instead of how they balance online interest with print duties. I want more unity and less separation of personal and professional lives on social media. I want to hear less about what people are doing at their desktops and laptops, and more about how they’re using or adjusting to mobile devices. I’m curious about what people are experimenting with when it comes to connecting with people.
Sports columnist Tim Kawakami impressed me with straight, blunt talk about mixing it up with readers. There’s a reason he has the largest number of followers of any Bay Area News Group employee: he has a strong sense of how Twitter works based on what he learns from following breaking sports developments, and he doesn’t miss a trick when he sees what peers with larger followings do. His own journalistic values don’t seem to hobble his work on other platforms (TV appearances, columns, and so on).
The other person who caught my eye anew (mostly because of how personal his approach to social media was) was pets and wildlife writer Gary Bogue, who talked about writing posts in advance, linking to wire stories on our site and taking most tips to city editors, as well as answering up to 200 e-mails a day (usually requests for persistent content) from readers.
