I have some pretty big news: I’m leaving Lee Enterprises to work for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) Office of Digital and Design Innovation as their Mobile Products Manager in Washington D.C.

I know what you’re thinking, “Did he say the BBC?”

Nope.

So who are they and what do they do? The BBG‘s mission is, “To inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” It’s an independent agency of the federal government focusing specifically on delivering journalism to countries who don’t have a free press or who have governments that control information access. Some of the properties include: The Voice of America, Radio and TV Martí, Middle East Broadcast Network, Radio Free Asia and Europe. The gig will be executing products and partnerships across mobile and emerging platforms — from the complete spectrum of tools like SMS through the mobile/tablet device array to broadcast and ‘second screen’ social experiences. It’s very tech focused and will offer an amazing array of opportunities to learn, grow and tackle very unique challenges from low bandwidth, low tech countries to places where the leadership is actively jamming your signals and blocking your satellites. It’s going to require a lot of creativity, a lot of learning, experimenting and a whole lot of innovation.

Leaving Lee and the Midwest is going to be tough; we’ve made a lot of progress and had some good times, but this new adventure is going to be amazing. A multi-platform, multi-media, multi-national, multi-talented team and I can’t wait to get started at the beginning of June.

As chain-smoking scientist Ray Arnold in Jurassic Park says:

Hold onto your butts sound bite Samuel L. Jackson sound bites

6/10/10 UPDATE: So this whole mysterious QR Code has been a rather unsuccessful experiment, only proving that no one knows about or actually uses QR Codes except maybe 2-3 percent of the population. I did a similar post on our internal intranet at work and only a handful of folks knew what to do. Eventually it’s spread virally and well… most people were more annoyed than delighted to learn about a new technology. Which should be a good lesson for what I’m doing:

I’m taking off from the Post-Dispatch in August to head west for a year-long fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (located at the University of Missouri). I’ll be researching and independently studying mobile web development, specifically focusing on using mobile geo-located devices for news, social and multimedia content creation and consumption. I’ll be studying some traditional news orgs, some non-traditional news orgs but mainly a whole lot of non-news orgs to learn about the emerging technology and learning best practices, applications and new developments.

If you have any suggestions of folks I should definitely talk to in the mobile technology space, if you have questions yourself that your news org is struggling to deal with about mobile, if you have ideas about how this fellowship could help journalism, or if you have anything else you’d like to share — please don’t hesitate to contact me at will {at} journerdism.com. This is literally going to be an academic year, free for me to work on an fully ‘independent study’ (no teaching requirements, no class requirements, no dancing the tango in Argentina like some other fellowships) so I’m hoping I can really learn a lot and share the ideas (both of successes and failures–like the QR code on this blog ;D) with the news industry to move adoption and understanding of the mobile web along much faster (especially compared to how long it took news orgs to really buy into the web).

This will be an awesome adventure. Please join me and share your thoughts and suggestions.

Hey gang,
The feeds appear to be working fairly regularly now! Please let me know if you see anything funky (email will [at] journerdism.com).

Thanks for your patience and for your attention.

Cheers,
Will

As you may have noticed, the feeds from this site have been all sorts of jacked up. My feed (through Feedburner) has been working on and off (mostly off) the past week. Google says their working on it. It’s not just my feeds either — Google asked Feedburner users to migrate their feeds over to Google’s servers (it was all done by Google though, I just had to click a button to migrate them) and evidently some of the tubes  have been busted because the feeds have been producing 502 errors fairly regularly.

All the aggregators that take my feed, run it on their sites and make advertising money off of it are probably pretty bummed.

There’s hasn’t been an official ETA on a fix, although my feed count moved from zero today, so something’s going on. In the meantime, that means to get your Journerdism jambalaya, you gotta come and scoop it off the site yourself.

I also should take this moment to get another meta matter on the table. I haven’t been posting many longer entries recently, mainly due to time constraints keeping the Jambalaya flowing and (I think) also because I’ve been microblogging on Twitter more. I have a handful of entries half ready for publication and hope to start getting those out on the table soon.

Thanks for your patience and for your attention.

Keep up the good fight,
Will