Erin Dismeier & Emily Kaiser

My Life, My Town Capstone

Fall 2012

Erin Dismeier & Emily Kaiser

Executive Summary

My Life, My Town is a collaborative effort between KBIA-FM and The Missourian, The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI), and The Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI). This cooperative effort partners photography studentswith audio producers, and each team produces a multimedia piece. The project works to highlight the experience of teenagers in rural towns throughout Missouri. According to the RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, “surveys of rural youth in the Midwest and elsewhere indicate that…about 50% of young rural people would prefer to stay in or return to their rural communities after college.” The driving force behind My Life, My Town is to put faces to these statistics. The desire to let teenagers share their own perspectives on rural life is the main goal of the project. For the sustainability of My Life, My Town, it is important to increase awareness of the project throughout the state. Conducting research on who visits the website and why assists in understanding how to increase audience participation and improve the project’s overall exposure. The principle research questions upon which we based our quantitative and qualitative research are listed below.

Research Questions:

1. How do we make the shootback a reality?

2. How do we improve the project’s sustainability?

3. How do we improve audience numbers?
Our Work

Finding Challenges in Ashland

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Erin Dismeier worked as an audio producer with Naveen Mahadeven on a story about Jared Thomassen. Jared is a cross-country runner at Southern Boone County High School in Ashland that Naveen was connected to by the school’s athletic director. Both producers began reporting in September and continued gathering audio and photos up until the week after Thanksgiving. Jared and his family were incredibly open to the project and helped Erin and Naveen get any access they needed. Sarah Hoffman, the executive producer for My Life, My Town, offered some suggestions during editing, but they were all small improvements and were easily taken care of before deadline. Jared attended the screening at Ragtag Cinema and was a part of the student panel.

Go, Fight, Win

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Emily Kaiser worked as an audio producer with Yi-Chin Lee on a story about Alaysha Jefferson. Alaysha is a freshman at Hallsville High School and spends a lot of time with her cheerleading squad. She also deals with being a member of a minority group in a small Missouri town. The producers began to interview and photograph Alaysha in October. At times, it was difficult to get ahold of Alaysha and for a time it seemed she would drop the project. Although the producers were not granted access to her home, they focused on her love for cheerleading and Hallsville. Alaysha was unable to attend the screening due to a basketball game that she had to attend, but Emily sent her the link to her story so she can view it on Vimeo.

In addition to audio production for those two pieces, we were responsible for the social media accounts during this semester. We were most active in this role right before the screening at the beginning of December. Erin attempted to do more with social media earlier in the semester, but since there was no new content and photographers were not required to submit material to editors before the final deadline there wasn’t much to advertise or promote. However, as stated earlier, we were able to do a lot right before and during the screening, such as live tweeting photos from the student panel.

Making the shootback a reality

One of the biggest issues we ran into during the course of the semester was the idea of the “shootback.” Originally, we had hoped to facilitate a shootback by the semester’s end, but we were unable to do so because of communication issues and confusion of our roles. However, through our research we have come up with a new approach for KBIA and The Missourian to take in terms of the shootback and what we think is a more realistic plan.

The traditional idea for the shootback has been for rural teens to tell their own story, similar to what has been previously done by journalists involved in the project. However, there are multiple problems with this approach. First of all, there is the issue of liability. Giving a teenager who is not associated with the university or either of the newsrooms working on My Life, My Town the equipment necessary to create one of the videos is somewhat of a financial risk. Also, without at least some training, most students would not be able to make a video or audio slideshow that is at the same standard of quality as the rest on the website. Despite these issues, we do still think the general idea of a shootback is very positive and would be a great addition to the project. Students being able to tell their own story without the interference of a journalist would be a great new addition, but possibly in more of a sidebar element and that is somewhat simpler than was originally intended.

One of our research components that really helped us devise a new plan for the shootback was the focus group we held. We brought in a group of students to the Reynolds Journalism Institute and had them explore the website and offer feedback and suggestions. One of the biggest suggestions was to have new content being added to the website more consistently. We got this same piece of advice during an interview with Scott Pham, the General Content Director at KBIA. Scott is responsible for putting up new content to the website and is the general person in charge of the My Life, My Town website. He agreed that it’s difficult to keep audience numbers up when someone can visit the site and view all it has to offer during one sit-down and not need to look at it again for five or six months. Someone in our focus group even suggested having mini, written profiles about rural teens once a week. These wouldn’t have to be long or very in-depth, and may or may not contain multimedia elements. We took this suggestion as something that could be very helpful in incorporating the shootback into the website.

Blogging is something that is not only easy, but a lot of teenagers already do. Also, almost all teenagers either have digital cameras or even just cell phones with cameras. This makes adding a multimedia element to blogging even easier. Since My Life, My Town already has a very strong partnership with 4-H, it would not be difficult to arrange some kind of weekly blogging schedule for students. 4-H students already have a written requirement during their membership. All students have to write a final report, therefore we don’t think it would be unreasonable to ask them to do a small, mini writing assignment on the side. One of the members of our focus group was a member of 4-H in high school and she said she thinks many members would be very interested in being able to write about themselves and their lives online.

Another element that could be added to the shootback to make the multimedia elements a little more complex and up to the former standards would be a equipment workshop for 4-H students and any other rural teens that want to be involved. During our focus group, the idea of a shootback was brought up and someone questioned how a teenager with no multimedia experience would be able to create something of this quality. While it may not be up to the same level of a video piece made by a journalist or journalism student, we believe a short equipment workshop would at least give the students some knowledge and experience before trying to tell their story on their own.

Since My Life, My Town is a collaborative effort and this would require some focus and attention, we think someone should have the sole job of coordinating the shootback. A capstone team like ours in a future semester could easily accomplish this task. At the beginning of the semester, these capstone students would either host a few equipment trainings at the Reynolds Journalism Institute or even at the 4-H meetings of each county that is willing to participate. After those events, the students would be responsible for coordinating the weekly blogging and profiles put up by the students involved. Although this is somewhat less complex and multimedia focused than the original vision of a shootback, we believe this plan is a much more feasible approach and it will be easier to accomplish in the course of a semester.

Improving My Life, My Town’s sustainability

Another dominant goal of our research was to find ways KBIA and The Missourian could improve the project’s sustainability. During our in-depth interview with Scott Pham, we discussed what is currently being done to the website year-round and My Life, My Town’s presence on KBIA’s website. He brought to our attention that the structure of My Life, My Town makes it very difficult to associate a great deal with a continuously updating news source like KBIA or even The Missourian.

As stated previously, Scott is responsible for updating the content on My Life, My Town’s website. He noted that because the projects are created by students, usually for class credit, there are only new videos to be added once every five or six months. This issue could be solved by the solution to the shootback problem outlined in the previous section of this report. While Scott did not design the original website and hasn’t been overly involved in the project, he said he would be happy to do more if there was a clear vision for how the website could be redesigned.

Scott said that while he adds some promotional ads or texts on KBIA’s website during the days or weeks leading up to the screening of a semester’s videos, the fact that there is almost no new information going up between the screenings gives him little to work with. Since visitors to KBIA’s website are looking for daily news coverage, it is a very different audience than who would go to the My Life, My Town website. This same issue is true of visitors to The Missourian’s site. This again shows how important having new content continually being uploaded to the website is to the project sustainability. Viewers need a reason to continue coming back to the site year round, rather than just one or two times a year.

Finally, gaining a more consistent following is key to maintaining My Life, My Town’s sustainability. After talking to Scott and looking at all of the websites of organizations involved in the project, we discovered My Life, My Town doesn’t have a lot of representation. Scott mentioned that prior to the screenings, he has placed an ad on KBIA’s website promoting the event. He advised having someone design a standard size banner that organizations like Rupri and RJI can have on their websites to give My Life, My Town a more constant presence for their audiences.

Quantitative Research

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By conducting quantitative research, we were able to make better suggestions for the future of the My Life, My Town project. We chose to use Google Analytics as our main source of quantitative data collection. We requested permission to access the Google Analytics account for the project website. The analytics allowed us to continually monitor the number of visits and types of visitors. The graphic above shows an audience overview from September 2012, when we began our contributions to the project, until December 2012, when our projects were completed. One element from the data worth noting is that more than half of the site’s users are unique visitors. Thus, My Life, My Town could develop methods that encourage users to return to the site. This data supports the verbal analysis that Scott Pham provided.

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This second graphic looks at the percentage of page visits to individual stories on the My Life, My Town website. The benefit of this information is that it shows which stories receive the most traffic. The home page, titled “index,” understandably has the most page views. Although the data cannot tell us the reason that some pages are more popular than others, it suggests that certain stories have a higher number of visits because they are better received by the audience or better promoted.

Qualitative Research

The incorporation of qualitative research in the project allowed us to humanize our data. We wanted to investigate how people responded to the My Life, My Town website and projects. A focus group was the best way to learn people’s opinions of the projects through discussion. We utilized convenience sampling, and asked students from the university to participate. Four participants attended, which is a small number but still allowed us to gain insight into user behavior. The limitation to this form of research is that we cannot make large generalizations from a small research sample. The benefit of this form of research is the open conversation gave us new ideas, from people who had previously never seen the website.

One major finding in our focus group is that people would like to have a better understanding of where these towns are located in Missouri. A feasible way to contextualize each town is to create a map of Missouri that shows approximately where each town is located. This map could be an interactive graphic that provides demographic information when a user scrolls over the town. For example, the population and main industries could be included. The map could appear on each story’s page, to give users more visual information. This addition also makes the project more prepared for expansion in the state and beyond. If users were given more of a context to these rural towns, it may help increase their interest in the stories.