I was asked to present my experience at the Reynolds Journalism Institute as a member of the first class of fellows. As a faculty fellow, I was able to spend a lot of time working, thinking and trying to institute my lessons learned with my students and my newsroom at KOMU. Five minutes.

I wish I could really summarize this experience in five minutes. But since I have five minutes, I'm going to focus on how I grew and changed my goals. I first focused on how newsrooms can collaborate. It's still important... But I learned during this time that even if I find the most amazing way to bring multiple newsrooms together with the help of technology, it isn't worth the effort if people don't use the information. That's why I moved to the most important word for my life as a journalist and as a journalism professor:

Community.

We need to find ways to teach our journalism students and our industry how to respect the process and work it takes to build community. This is crucial as more people turn to journalists for their personal skills and abilities - it's very possible they aren't going to them because of their newsroom. We need to be open, honest and connected. Hopefully I can search for ways to share this knowledge so we can all use the great skills of the journalism profession in this new socially connected world.

View more presentations from Jen Reeves.

What do you think? I'm going to try to say these things in five minutes - but I have a lifetime to try to expand upon these thoughts.