MAYER MEDIA STRATEGY LLC
SARASOTA, FLORIDA

, Multimedia Planning and Design, and News Design. I love teaching and was fortunate to get so much experience with it while still making daily journalism my top priority. I’m used to spending some time in the mornings responding to email, reading the news and other links, doing accounting work, etc. But mornings are my best thinking and writing time. If I get to late morning and haven’t accomplished any meaty tasks, I’m in trouble. So instead, I’m trying to give myself about 30 minutes in the mornings to get organized and handle urgent requests, then dive into one of my big projects. I take a break for lunch, then do a couple of solid hours in the early afternoon. My younger kid gets home from school at 3 and the house becomes a bit more distracting, so I try to save things like bill paying and non-urgent email for after 3. Music affects my productivity. Moving around the house helps. The living room sofa and the dining room table are both solid alternatives to my home office and help me enjoy my space without going stir crazy. I also have a desk that goes up and down, and moving between standing and sitting helps me change things up. I thought I’d want to get out of the house more, but it hasn’t been very productive for me. I hit up a public library sometimes if I’m in the area anyway. But most of the time, the distractions of finding the right seat, getting set up and finding my focus don’t seem worth the change of scenery. I’m trying out a coworking space soon, in case I want to have a predictable place to work that’s not home. I’ve been known to throw on some lipstick and a shirt with a collar before doing a video chat or teaching a class via Skype. I miss have work friends, grabbing lunch or coffee, chatting about what’s going on in the world and sharing anecdotes about my life. I even miss getting interrupted. I’m getting more of that digitally these days, but I need to build in more conscious social time. In my last job, I had good friends at work, so we could spend 15 minutes talking in our offices and feel like we’d connected. Now, I can go all week without really talking on a personal level with anyone outside my immediate family. I look forward to my monthly book club like nobody’s business, and I’m going to need to be more deliberate about finding social outlets. And I want us to talk to as many of them as we can. I want us to learn from them and invite them to help us serve them better. If you’re not in one of the 30 newsrooms that’s an official partner, you can still help with this effort. Any individual, regardless of whether you’re connected to a news organization, is invited to conduct an interview with someone about how they decide what news to trust. No need to start with a questionnaire. Just identify who you want to talk to and dive right in. The questionnaires were published as part of an interview project. We invited newsrooms to sit down for one-on-one interviews with their own news consumers to discuss how they decide what to trust, and the questionnaires helped those newsrooms find people across a spectrum of diversity What we’ve learned, from the questionnaires and the interviews, is being used to create strategies newsrooms can adopt to demonstrate their trustworthiness. We’ll share those strategies soon, and we’ll be looking for newsrooms to help us test them. In a previous phase of the Trusting News project, newsrooms helped us test ways to build trust on social media. You can read what we learned and search a database of Facebook posts What products do you produce, and how would you describe the content? Include any relevant urls. How would you describe the size of your audience? Include whatever kind of numbers are most relevant for your products.