A new perspective at CNN

By Donecia Reed
October 11, 2017 11:52 p.m. ET

This CNN logo made of license plate numbers stands proudly outside of the newsroom.

The Cable News Network (CNN) represents the gold standard of news coverage and success for many journalism students. As an Atlanta resident, I have toured the CNN headquarters many times. Normally, a visitor sees news studios and journalists in the newsroom from a distance. But on Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2017, I took a behind-the-scenes tour with Monte Plott, CNN digital news editor, that changed my perspective on how news works.

During Plott’s tour, I stood in the midst of a newsroom full of journalists who didn’t have the time to pay attention to me. Some of them were sitting at their desks, answering emails and looking up information, while others were up pacing and jotting ideas down, lending new meaning to thinking on your feet.

“The only thing we (journalists) have going for us is credibility,” says CNN Digital News Editor Monte Plott. “If we lose that — if we get things wrong, doesn’t matter why or how we got them wrong, just that we screwed up — then we’re out of business.”
I witnessed journalists in the business, working hard to get it right.

It has definitely been an interesting semester. With class, we’ve learned of certain concepts that can affect our leadership approaches, and more importantly, we’ve learned about some of the factors that will influence our group as we grow together over the next few years.

We have discussed things like, groupthink and cohesion. We’ve talked about the way that in-groups can behave. We have also reflected over the different things that bond a group together, and what can tear them apart.

I think one of the really interesting things that we went over is the stages that a group goes through. These would be the forming, norming, storming, performing, and adjourning stages. I remember when we were discussing these stages in class. At first, everyone was pretty chill, just going through the motions of taking notes and answering questions. But of course, when it came time to evaluate our cohort in terms of the new information that we’d learned, things got a little patchy.

Lol, I love our group. I promise I do, but naturally we don’t see eye to eye on all things, not even the way that we should be governed (or govern ourselves).

Another one of our classes that really resonated with me was when we were talking about what type of conflict people we are. So we did the little questionnaire to see whether we, individually, had more fighting or compromising personalities. I found this particular class important because it forced us to look at ourselves and the way we manage our relationships with each other.

I won’t say that it changed anything for me personally because I pretty much knew where I fall on the spectrum. I try to stay aware of my interactions with people and how my behavior and mannerisms factor into those interactions. However, have another source confirm those things that I already assumed about myself did make it more real, and as a result, I am taking it more seriously now. I want to be the best person that I can be. In order for me to do that, I have to be aware of my strengths and my flaws. I also have to try to be aware of those things in others.

Finally, I appreciated the class that we spent talking about decision making. In grades K-12, students are taught how to make decisions for themselves. Yes, we also did group projects but those were more about being aware of yourself and communicating with others to accomplish a task. I feel that it was an important class because it addressed the way that groups make decisions, together and as a whole.

Some groups don’t receive or accept input from all of its members, but typically decisions are impacted by the thoughts, experiences, and opinions of more than one person. Because these perceptions are not all coming from the same person, they are not all the same, and bringing them together to form a decision can be really hard.

I struggled a little with our group projects in this class, for this very reason. I can appreciate and respect it because of the things that I’ve learned about myself and some of the others in our class.

According to what we learned in class last week, I am more of a fighter. I like to get my way, and usually I’m going to put in some effort to try and make whatever I’m suggesting the option that is picked. However knowing myself the way that I do, I can say that I will only fight up until I see that a group is completely unwilling to even consider my way an option. I don’t enjoy wasting my time. The other part to that is that if I genuinely believe that my plan is better, and haven’t been convinced that another way is better, I may go along with whatever the majority in the group decides for the sake of getting work done. However, in my mind, it is a petty type of waiting to see if what the group decided will fail and my way will be acknowledged as having been better.

I will always do the work to try and make sure that whatever the group has decided on will work the way we planned, but  I also kind of bide my time curious to see if it will in fact work. That’s general Donecia. Leadership Donecia has a different mindset about the whole process because my goals are a little different depending on what role I play. If I am just an ordinary member of a group then I have as much say as everyone else, and I want what I want because I think I’m right. When I have some form of a leadership role, then I ultimately want the overall process to be as smooth and efficient as possible.

As a regular member, I just want to be heard, and hope that others will see the value in what I am saying. I will push for my plan up until the point where it no longer makes sense to. Then, I’m all about the whatever makes us succeed, but a part of me on the inside may not believe that we will because I am still convinced that I am right. I can be proved wrong; I have been. I have seen that my way isn’t always right or the only right way. That’s fine. I still celebrate the group’s success because I still worked to help us achieve it. I will consider our failure differently if we fail if we didn’t do what I wanted.

As a leader who recognizes when I’m in that position, I may favor one plan of action over another, but I am mediating to make sure that everyone, or a majority, can agree on what to do, and understands what is to be done. If my suggestion is not one the my group is open to and I’m not completely certain that choosing another option will lead to failure, then I may not fight as hard to get my point across. In this case, what I want most is to see us succeed, not waste much time, and other members feel as if they really played a role in the outcome. I compromise more easily.

Factoring my role in a group when it comes to the type of person I am works for me. Like I said, my goals in the situations are different. I feel that it is perfectly acceptable for me to argue my point when I’m on the same level as my peers. As long as I’m not really holding the group up or creating unnecessary conflict/drama, then I have a right to my opinion and being right. As a leader, my main role is managing the way my group functions. The attitude that I bring to the table when I am on the same level as the other members doesn’t work well here. I don’t want my group members to resent me and become defiant because they feel like their options aren’t being considered. I want the group as a whole to come as close to stress less process as possible.

I don’t like that people make assumptions about you based on how you handle these situations as if, circumstances are always uniform. I am very much a situationally appropriate person, so making some assumptions about my behaviors based a unique set of circumstances is unfair, but it happens frequently, and I accept that because I have to.

This is my infographic that is all about me!

https://infograph.venngage.com/p/174652/mylifeline

With anything you do that requires you to deliver information, there are a few things to be aware of:

1. Title – How you label your information can be very important. The title should declare what the information is that you are presenting. The title does not have to be very long or complex, but it should make sense.
2. Context – Context is important because sometimes the title just is not enough, or maybe it is a little ambiguous. Your information may require some context. Where needed (and if possible), it is not bad to make a statement declaring what information you are presenting. Information without context can lack clarity, not always but often enough that it should be considered.
3. Formatting – When presenting a visual summary of information, it is important that the visual is easy to understand, AND easy to see and focus on

Examples:

https://infograph.venngage.com/p/166969/rainbow-bubbles

My first example is of a infographic titled “Rainbow Bubbles” on the website library. Once you open it, the title seems to be “Elements” on the actual infographic. In general, I would not call this a good infographic. The title did not say what type of elements were going to be discussed. When I first looked at, I was thinking that physical elements, like earth, wind, air, and fire. Once you have looked at the whole infographic (it is short), you realize that the infographic is discussing chemical elements, as in the periodic table. This infographic was also unclear in that the information did not seem to fit together. The first set of bubbles talk about how the different elements are named. For example, some elements were named for cities and some were named for mythical creatures. A certain number of elements were known to ancient civilizations. The second set of bubbles stated when groups of elements were discovered. Right at the tail end of this set is a bubble labeled Iron, and below this bubble is a couple of statements talking about Iron. I just didn’t really see the purpose of this infographic.

https://infograph.venngage.com/p/166667/instagram-privacy

This is a better infographic. The title, “Instagram Privacy”, is very clear and when you look at the infographic you see that the title matches the information. This infographic was in subtitled paragraph format. So, each section had a different subtitle and a short blurb about whatever the topic was. It should be applauded that each section dealt with Instagram privacy policies. Although the infographic was not long and most likely did not cover all of the Instagram policies, it did give brief, understandable coverage of the policies that were discussed. It was understandable, simple, and clear.

So far, I can say that I’ve been enjoying the class. I find that I really enjoy the activities we do. Honestly, the only negative I can say about the class is that it’s so long, and we don’t leave early hahaha. Which is cool because class is supposed to last for a certain length of time, and we all already knew that coming in. But time is one of those funny things that you have to experience to know how you feel about it, so this is certainly an interesting experience just in terms of time. It’s not like a lab where you come into with a goal to accomplish that may take all of 2.5 hours, instead we sit in class just sort of counting down the time. Not because what we’re learning isn’t interesting or useful, but 2.5 is so abnormal that you can’t help but pay attention to it.

What I think works is having open discussions, where we learn material for a little while, then have brief discussions about or feelings or experiences with the concept that we’ve been working on. I’ve learned a lot about so of my classmates that I may not have learned because it’s not a part of typical conversation.

I think the quizzes are really good as far as helping us learn the material because we go over the questions, and anything that we didn’t understand in our readings that may be on the quiz, we get clarity on and remember because knowing the material matters in these moments.

I don’t know that anything more could be done to help improve my learning because I feel like I have a good understanding of everything that we’ve covered. Maybe at some point during class or at the end of it, we should get another (non-grade based) quiz to make sure that we are really cement the information in our minds.

Following last week’s class activities,  I had a clearer idea of what needed to be done within the group. Things, like roles and procedures, that we had already settled on were revealed to need more consideration.

I think the most enlightening exercise was the one that required us to list the official roles that we have in our group. As the class began to offer their ideas on what was required of each position, one thing became very clear to me. We needed to make some minor adjustments to the way we communicate.

Right now, our communication system involves mostly email and GroupMe. It was only after we began to discuss how each committee, or the executive head of each committee, conferred with the rest of the cohort that I realized our slight hiccup. Everyone seemed to be under the assumption that each executive head was going to emailing their information to the rest of the cohort.

In general, there is nothing wrong with that setup, but we have a communications committee (which I’m om). What is the point of the communications committee if not to regulate and manage the  flow of communication. I feel that outside of our monthly assembly meetings, exec. heads should not be emailing cohort members that are not apart of their committee. Any information that the cohort receives should go through my committee. Exec heads could send someone an email to someone within my committee who could then tailor that message and send it to everyone. This would also apply to the meeting head. It would be more effective if the person who mediates the meetings sends the agenda to my committee who would then handle sending it to the cohort.

I think this would be more effective because then emails would not be coming from everyone, and it would also give other committee members something to do. Right now, there are maybe five people on the communications committee. Brianna heads the meetings, Janavi keeps the minutes, and Daniel handles our Google Docs and emails. If we centralize the email chain, then Daniel could share the roles with another person to not put so much pressure on himself and share the workload.

The system that we have in place right now is working, and it is working fine; I just feel that we could make it work a little smoothly. Our organization does not have an email domain that lets us know “Hey, this message if coming from the LEAD Group.” Instead we get messages from every other member and at some point, usually in the actual email we are told that it deals with LEAD stuff.

I made the suggestion. We’ll see if it gets picked up.

Anyway, I think that was the most important thing that I took from our exercises. I don’t feel hopeless or frustrated or anything like that because what we have works; I just saw a way to make it work  a bit better.