SPJ often gets mistakenly tagged as old school, a bunch of old print guys reminiscing over the days of manual typewriters.  The reality is, SPJ is embracing the future.

The newest example is our Citizen Journalism Academy.  The first drew about small crowd of 25 in Chicago last weekend.  The crowd was small, but SPJ executive director Terry Harper those who attended gave the programming high marks.  Here’s how the Chicago Tribune reported it.

The point is to train the growing numbers of folks contributing to online projects about ethical and responsible journalism.

The next CJA is in June 7 in Greenboro, N.C.

If you know any budding citizen journalists, bloggers or others, tell them to check it out.  Maybe try to bring it to your town on the next go-around.

Get more information here.

The Twitter trial seems to be working.  So far.

It’s a modification of what we began last fall: live updates of a capital murder trial in the killing of a small-town Kansas sheriff. It was a way of live blogging from the courtroom.  I would email updates from my smartphone and Bluetooth keyboard and send them back to the online team at the newsroom.  They would post them with time stamps.

Readers enjoyed it, but the workflow lagged at times.  The copy desk during the day is sparse, usually one person posting all the updates throughout the day. Metro editors were in meetings all day. I was filing faster than the posts were appearing.  That was a snag we were going to have to work out.

This spring, as another big trial loomed, the copy desk said they couldn’t handle another round of live blogging.  People are going on vacation.  We’re short-staffed. There was no time to sort through my updates each hour.

The trial: Ted Burnett is accused of killing Chelsea Brooks, a 14-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in June 2006, during a murder-for-hire.

When jury selection began this week, I decided to start posting updates on Twitter.

Jury selection is usually the most boring part of any trial.

“This is the part they don’t show on TV, it’s so exciting,” prosecutor Kevin O’Connor tells jurors.

Most times, we don’t even cover it.  But capital murder trials are different.  The juries not only decide whether a defendant is guilty.  If they return a conviction on capital murder, the jury also decides whether or not the defendant will receive the death penalty.  With life and death at stake, I like to know who is sitting on the jury.

But jury selection also seemed to be ideal to conduct experiments.  Who would notice? So I began tweeting portions of the part of the trial no one seems to care about.  Most were tidbits that probably wouldn’t make it in any stories I wrote for the print edition.

Some of the Twitter highlights:

Prosecutor told the judge one prospective juror “appears to be stoned.”

• “I don’t know if this is a legal reason,” O’Connor said, “but the state’s position is he should be dismissed because he’s a punk.”
• Prosecutor: “Do you have any concerns about the criminal justice system?” Juror: “Some people in the system are criminals themselves.”
• Lawyer: “Do you understand some of the things you’ve heard about the case may not be accurate?” Juror: “Sure, especially from the media.”

You get the idea.

I didn’t expect the reaction..

I received an email from a Wichita police officer following the trial on Twitter, saying “Keep it up.”

A woman tweeted her friends, “Court TV is gone but Twitter has @rsylvester.”

(Actually, it’s now “In Session” on TruTV and I do some work for them, too).

But this is important to me, becaise they are local people, looking for local news. They’re not readers or viewers or audience anymore – in this world of social networking, they’re my friends. I like that.

I keep getting notices that more people are following me each day.

Jill, my editor, is encouraging me .

Katie, our online content developer, is working on a widget to put my tweets on Kansas.com, when the trial really gets going.

Here’s what I’m learning:

• Keep it professional.  Remain a reporter.  Resist the urge to comment or editorialize.  Just tell what’s going on and give context.
• Pick the most engaging parts to report.  Remember, I have to take notes and try not to miss anything important.  I try to Twitter the parts that catch my attention and which I think are important from my experience on the beat.  Even in capital murder trials, there are lighter moments.  But also select the parts that will increase awareness and knowledge of the event.
• Keep it clean. I mean copy. You have to proof read yourself.  Remember, there’s no copy desk between you and publishing. And if I remember correctly, they don’t have time for this, anyway.
• Check to see if anyone is replying.  It’s tough to do on a mobile site that isn’t fully functional, as it is on a desktop.  I post with text messages but occasionally check through the Web to see if there are any responses. One of my new friends had to contact me on Facebook to point out I was missing her replies.  I also try to go back at the end of the day and see who I missed.  I don’t know if it’s bad form to reply something like 10 hours later, but I want folks to know I’m paying attention.

Yes, it’s the same as Intro to Journalism.  Know your audience; get it right. But in this delivery system it’s live, and it’s fast.  I keep reminding myself, I can’t cut corners.  Good journalism should shoot for high standars, even in bits of 140 characters at a time.

And at a limit of 140-character, Twitter forces you to write tight.

It’s hard work.  I leave court feeling exhausted

And it’s only the first week.   The intense and exciting part – the real evidence of the trial – is yet to begin.

Culture can change as quickly in the newsroom as an editor can slap a new lead on a story.

Just a few weeks ago, I wondered if anyone outside our online team – which I had been banished from sometime last summer – got or cared about Web-first publishing or multimedia journalism or Web 2.0.

Then through a series of b-and-moaning (me) and firings (someone else, thankfully), I was assigned to Jill, full-time metro editor, part-time blogger and sometimes Tweeter.

In addition to keeping up with my little experiments, such as my live blogging jury selection of a capital murder trial on Twitter, Jill wrote me into our team goals as a “multimedia trainer.”  Evidently, Jill figured my last year of learning how to use a video camera, editing software and hooking up microphones to audio records should be passed onto the rest of our staff.

Beginning this month, I’m supposed to begin showing the three other reporters in our corner of the newsroom the basics.  It’s the beginning of a newsroom DIY-training.

It seemed only weeks ago people with the title “editor” were asking me to cut it out with the electronic toys, as they had told me in earlier years to stop developing narratives and stick to the inverted pyramid.

Culture can change quickly in newsrooms.  So if you sometimes feel like one of the only ones trying to do something new, don’t get frustrated.  Just keep plugging away.

It’s kind of like that project I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and now – because of a murder trial – has to be once again put on hold.  But news of the moment takes priority.  And there’s always news of the moment. Eventually, there will be time for enterprise.

Eventually, someone will grasp what you’re trying to do.

Meanwhile, follow my experiments on Twitter.  You’ll hear about stoned “punk” jurors and what men facing a death penalty trial say about newspaper subscriptions.  Really.