Newsecology-samoan

(notes by Bill Densmore -- typos etc. will be cleaned up overnight -- please return if you're printing or linking)

This evening we’re experiencing a “Samoan Circle.” Four empty chairs are placed in the middle of the room and four “starters” get a discussion going. Anyone in the room has the right to tap one of the four chairs’ occupants and the person seated yields the seat. The new occupant can then offer their thoughts.

Starting in the Samoan Circle are Chris Peck, editor of the (Memphis) Commercial Appeal; Jim Kennedy, vp strategy of The Associated Press; Neil Budde, editor/publisher of DailyMe.com and Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center and Jim Brady, former editor of WashingtonPost.com

Jim Kennedy starts by talking about an ethnographic study The AP started and is continuing focusing on young adults ages 18 to 34. They picked six cities – Philadelphia, Houston, Kansas City and San Jose, Brighton (U.K.) and one other city. In each of the cities they asked pre-selected participants to keep a journal and the anthropologists spent time with the participants at home. “They synthesized it into a model that has really been a breakthrough for us.”

“The anthropologists didn’t know how big of a breakthrough they had,” said Kennedy. The researchers found the participants felt bombarded by news and wanted to get more depth and couldn't. "They wanted to get deeper into a story, they wanted to know what the context was, they wanted to know what was going to happen next. They were bored with what we were giving them . . . our old products were failing."

Says Neil Budde: "This is very important research that very few people in this industry have read."

Michele McLellan is now asked by Chris Peck to talk about what's going on. She's has been with The Oregonian, one of the best papers in the country as a political editor, a projects editor and an ombudsman. "I'm not coming at this from outside." She realized on election day, she noticed that virtually all of the election news she was following "was coming from links from people I follow on Twitter."

"That is a really basic, fundamental drastic shift," she says. "It's because I trust them more . . . it is because they are very transparent."