Meet the character behind @TheClassicCarol

The 140 Character Conference Northwest is today! The focus of this conference is a large-scale community conversation about how social media is affecting our communities, our governments and our personal engagement. 65 speakers will present LIVE from Vancouver, Washington, including me @TheClassicCarol!

It is the first time that a 140 Character Conference has come to the Pacific Northwest. It's also the first #140 Conference that will have so many presentations from those who work in government. Me? I'm from the media. Here's a link to an interview I did for couv.com featuring @Mary_Rarick, Al Partridge @uselink126 and @MichaelPerozzo

AUDIO INTERVIEW : http://couv.com/community/140confnw

You can follow the chatter on Twitter by searching for the hashtag: #140ConfNW, or join us live at the Vancouver Conference Center inside the Hilton. Ticketing is closed, organizer Cheryl Bledsoe told us last night, BUT she saved space for walk-ins.

If you're more comfortable behind your computer you can watch it live: http://nw2011.140conf.com/watch-it-live

Recycled journalist reinvents news

This is part two of a two part story. Part I is here.

Steve Woodward was part of the Portland Business Journal startup and went after business stories before business stories were cool. He jaunted over to The Oregonian covered more b-happenings and dove into technology.

He wrote through the dot-com boom and dot-com crash. He kibitzed with politicians including Mayor Vera Katz, worked for solution-seeking editors such as Sandy Rowe, and built a solid reader base with support on the technology side from colleagues like Mark Friesen who added a Twitter stream to one of his top stories so readers could not only read about technology, but could also participate in it.

Woodward believed reporters should be feet on the street like cops, "fast, fiesty and first, and that advanced degrees may be not as important as advanced thinking.

He waded through 3D virtual worlds to conduct interviews of Oregonians in their virtual homes and advocated for higher awareness of technology in the newsroom. The newspaper industry stumbled into the era of Craig’s List and social media. Undaunted, Woodward championed for risk taking and saving the paper. He invested time in a work committee tasked with idea generation. It floundered, so Woodward moved his energy offline and collaborated with other pro-newspaper staffers over pizza and beer. Management tapped into their collective genius and moved to put select ideas into practice, not necessarily successfully, but then nobody’s really figured out the new newspaper model.

Then he was out of a job.

But not out of ideas.

Woodward's path crossed with this guy he used to say ‘hi’ to in the elevator. They both had been Oregonian reporters. They both were named Steve.

“A group had been meeting several months on Steve Suo’s idea,” Woodward said. “To extract public records through software, mash up with Google maps, and do an online newspaper of some type or create a non-profit to deliver the content to newspapers around the country.” Steve Suo is a superhero fighting to place public records into the hands of the public. “Steve was really wanting me to join his public records venture. I wasn’t really interested in that per se,” noted Woodward. “I wanted to go forward.” For Woodward that meant leaving the newspaper industry behind, but he got to talking with Suo’s software partner Brian Hendrickson, who among other things coached a boys tennis team at Grant High School in Portland, Oregon.

Hendrickson was researching how his tennis team could communicate with each other. He concluded they could openly microblog on Twitter or Identi.ca, or he could set up a private microblog.

The meeting between Hendrickson and Woodward lasted four hours—drinking Peet’s Coffee and drawing diagrams. “What if you took Steve’s public records and moved them into microblog that goes directly to users?” Woodward proposed. That idea was the spark, his avenue to impact journalism again. “I got excited.” Woodward said. “Now we have content and a delivery system and end users in real time.”

Suo’s group had loosely formed around the name ‘Info Liberator’ and had envisioned a technology company. When Woodward started kicking around his idea of combining Suo's public records concept with Hendrickson's microblog, the company concept morphed into a media company. “We did a lot of talking because it was a more ambitious than simply extracting public records,” Woodward confessed.

On March 21, 2009, almost exactly a year ago, group members shook hands and the venture—Nozzl Media emerged.

“We didn’t listen to our readers enough.” Woodward notes of newspapers who day in and day out choose what to present as news. The defining difference with Nozzl Media is offering consumers everything. “Everyone’s definition of news it different and changes from minute to minute, but no matter what little piece of it you want, you’re going to get.”

January 2010 Nozzl Media released its beta, a slightly altered course from Woodward's original concept. “I credit Jeff Bunch for this.” Jeff Bunch is the Web Editor for the largest daily newspaper in Southwest Washington, The Columbian. “We were thinking a fire hose, one per city, and sell this thing and the end user would simply type in keywords and get their version of the fire hose. Jeff asked, could you do a nozzl for this and a nozzl for that, separate specialty widgets, such as following the race for the Brian Baird seat.”

“This could be huge, when you think of it in those terms,” Woodward said.

Customizing for each customer means understanding the market, a vital component for a community's newspaper. “What makes the most sense? Charleston West Virginia might be different than Vancouver, Washington. The newspaper becomes the aggregator of relevant info and sources.”

No matter the market, to sustain a project advertising comes into play. Nozzl Media is a revenue center not a cost center. The newspaper ad staff sells ads into the stream itself. “As a reader you’re typing in ‘bank’ or ‘mortgage,’ each content item is tagged with a keyword, but also each ad is tagged with keywords.” Nozzl is building an ad dashboard for advertising staff so they can monitor ads and insert ads into the stream and a dashboard for advertisers is under discussion.

Next steps for Nozzl Media is revenue generation for the company. They have their first inked deal with Jeff Bunch’s company and more organizations lining up. “We’re all full time, non-salaried employees now,” Woodward said. “Except for Brian. He really can’t afford to work for free.”

Convo with former journalist Steve Woodward

There’s that moment of hesitation before you hit the send key. It flashes so fast as if to be lightning, or it tugs and pulls you back. Your arrow-pointer hovers over the submit button. You consider. You choose.

I felt that tug. I paused. Then I said, “What the hay,” and fired off the blog post Change May Require Listening.

Thus, the newly born 360 Convos leapt into the hailstorm of the We Make the Media event aftermath.

Tweets, DM’s, blog posts, comments and snark pinged rapid fire as the attendees roared opinions about an event that stumbled and tripped between the old world and the new, an experience that brought a hodge-podge of journalists together to discover a 21st Century truth. When something discomforting happens, distressed people blast it via social media.

I almost didn’t attend, but random encouragement from a colleague as our paths crossed in the lunch trailer prodded my curiosity, and on that fateful Saturday I flopped into the fray. During a break I made a mad dash to make connections and introduced myself to a tall guy. He asked where I worked, I answered. He reached into his pocket and handed me his card. I tucked it away. He had that recycled newspaper man aura. It was later, when another friend explained what he was actually doing that I pulled his card back out and decided we should talk, preferably over coffee.

He had launched something interesting. Something that could affect my newspaper future.

Yes, Steve Woodward had been a newspaper man. He'd covered business and technology for The Oregonian, but he had escaped—layoff papers in hand and a generous severance package headed for automatic deposit. He’d be comfortable, he could relax for the short term, but that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. The ‘what next’ part would be a brainteaser he looked forward to untangling.

“Y2K was one of my favorite things ever.” Woodward said, as we settled in with lattes and croissants. “In order to figure out how everything might fail, you had to figure out how everything worked.” He ticked off the potential points of failure including the electric grid system, how chemicals were stored, everything around the city of Portland, Oregon that computers ‘touched.’ It was an incredible amount of work to plot but it garnered him a good following.

He moved from business to features but kept covering technology, this time from a social point of view: technology in society, web stuff, art. “For me it really took off with that Twitter article I wrote for the Oregonian. I hung out with Rick Turoczy for a day at Back Space. I started getting into social media. My job was to try everything new that came up, make my readers aware of it.” He wrote about technology from inside technology. He embedded a live Twitter feed on OregonLive where people could tweet about the story. “We were using the technology to record the story about the technology. ” Some of what he covered was, “Kind of weird.” Doing all the freaky, edgy technology stories, but it made him aware of how much was going on in Portland, and “How totally unaware the newspaper was about it.”

Woodward noted that everyday the paper pumped out the same diet of state politics, crime, and standard news. He became convinced the newspaper product needed to evolve. “You can’t afford to be cautious, that’s the riskiest thing you can do these days, it’s a sure path to failure.” He sensed that his paper knew it needed to do something, but they didn’t quite know how.

The Oregonian launched a newsroom wide set of committees to brainstorm ideas, and even though each committee was given the charge to start with a blank slate, no rules, few took it at face value. But Steve Woodward did. “No rules? Okay! I started throwing out ideas.” His neuron zapping concepts met with immediate resistance. Editors responded, You can’t do that. You can’t have reporters choose who their editors are. “Why not?” Woodward asked. Reporters are lazy and want to slide by. “No,” Woodward said, “Reporters want to be better. They really want the best story possible and will choose the editor based on who will help them the most.”

The newsroom committees skipped down the path of least resistance. “You don’t innovate by committee,” Woodward commented, and shifted his energy into an offline group. They gathered around pizza and beer on their own time and brainstormed what they would do if charged with trying to save the paper. “I was convinced it was really almost too late, that advertising was going too drop off.” Woodward also projected the paper would experience staff reductions. “We wanted to have some alternative to take back to management.”

They played by the rules and told their respective bosses they were meeting and kept them informed. “It wasn’t intended to behind their backs.” The only restriction they worked with was that there had to be print product. They did research, interviews. “What started to emerge was perhaps a tabloid, once a week, younger readers, maybe we would do top stories you should know about today. We were in the brainstorming stages of it, far from done, still testing ideas, when the editor approached me. ‘I understand that you have this little group, I’m interested in hearing what you’ve come up with.’ At the same time the Newhouse family wanted to hear about new ideas for The Oregonian and all their papers. We made a presentation of our still unfinished ideas to the editor, Sandy Rowe.

“She was intrigued by some of the ideas. I wish we’d been allowed to go forward, but she asked us to stop and said, ‘We’ll take it from here.’ She and the department heads took our ideas and implemented one or two.”

The pizza and beer group disbanded, watched from the sidelines and sighed as their concepts were hashed through but not necessarily as the original group intended. “Readers don’t want more info they want less info, but they want that info to be more relevant.”

Woodward was frustrated. He needed to do something meaningful in journalism. Early retirements were offered. A year later a series of buyouts beckoned. “A lot of people passed it up because they didn’t know what they’d do. I’d had an impact on business and technology journalism when those departments were a dumping grounds for disgruntled reporters. Now, I had an opportunity to have another impact on journalism. I didn’t know what that would be, but the buyout gave me time to figure it out.”

Where did Steve Woodward focus his efforts to impact journalism next?

Stay tuned ...

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Read Part II, Recycled journalist reinvents news.

My favorite interview question

Thanks everyone for sharing your favorite, or non-favorite question. I’m going to continue to collect them. I’m especially interested in interview questions—that would be Phase One of my project. Phase Two will be analyzing how candidates, who were hired, answered those questions, and Phase Three will be whether the hire was a success.

I’ve had a rich and varied experience myself, in both asking and answering questions. I know through analyzing my own interview performance and feedback (throw their first two reasons out, people who don’t hire you have to warm up to the process of assistance and disclosure) why I think I connected or why I did not.

I was briefly mentored by a former NIKE Human Resource manager who taught that everything you need to know about the prospective candidate is right there…if you choose to pay attention. I have not always hired the best candidate. I would like to.

While I collect the questions, I thought I’d share my favorite interview question, the one I ask every prospective candidate. Instead of just blurting it out I’d like to make this fun. This comes from a manuscript currently in progress. The scene involves Jae-Chun Lee, a California real estate developer who owns a chain of commercial sales and leasing offices in three states, his wife, the outgoing manager of one of the satellite offices, and Michael, the regional manager, who has had them both fly in to interview a candidate to replace Lee's wife. This is in the wife's voice.

I rested my interview questions that my secretary had printed on the portfolio I’d snatched from a surprised brokers desk and readied the fake Mont Blanc pen I grabbed from the hands of another. “Patricia, if Mr. Lee offered you the job, what is your plan to set the tone of the office and get off to a good start?” Start wide, Mr. Ward my mentor had taught, move in closer with each progressive question and don’t be afraid to ask something unexpected. This wasn’t vague and she better think fast.

She smiled, reached into her laptop bag and pulled out neat binders. “I thought about that and crafted a strategy.” She walked the men through it, while I said, shit, in my head.

“What would your peers say about you?” Helpful, hard working, focused. “Your manager?” Driven. “What do you like about your present manager and what would you like to change?” His abundance of knowledge, but limited time to collaborate. “What motivates you to put forth your best effort?” I like to win, I’m competitive with myself, and I want to make my dad proud. Gag.

“How do you determine or evaluate your success?” By my achievements. Let me share my past year. “What career aspiration would this job satisfy for you?” I’d get closer to Michael’s job. I observed him, he showed no sign of fear. Silly boy. “What do you do when you know you’re right and your boss doesn’t agree?” Lee’s pencil flew over his pad and he nodded a couple of times at her answers. Silly man. “What gets in the way of your job performance?” People who don’t hold my same commitment.

“When is it appropriate to steal from your employer?” That brought the room to a standstill.

Her face blanched. “I would…never… I can’t imagine.” She swallowed. “Could you repeat that?”

“Sure, when is it appropriate to steal from your employer?”

She blinked a couple of times. “I guess when you’re ready to be fired,” she paused, “Or you’re the company attorney.”

The men laughed, even if a little nervous. “You like that question, don’t you?” she asked smiling, her garnetfrost lipstick holding its perfect line.

“I do,” I said. “I’ve had some interesting answers.”

And I have!