Welcome to the Spring MURL Class

Welcome to the new semester, MURL and my first posting on the MURL BUILDING BLOCKS blog. This first posting is much longer than normal, so don’t be put-off by it. As we get deeper into the semester my hope is you’ll be heavily involved in covering neighborhood stories in the area surrounding the “golden block.” As the semester rolls out we can talk (and post) more about the specific neighborhoods, your experiences and insights. But, first, to get you into MURL multimedia mindset, I wanted to share with you three pieces I ran across on the Poynter Institute’s Web site. I’d you to read them….in one case, view the material. Feel free to add your thoughts here on the blog.

Here’s a chunk of the first piece, “Ten Toes in the Multimedia Waters” by Rick Edmonds with a link to the rest of his piece.

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=105128

Editor's note: This article is the second of a two-part series based on Poynter faculty members' visits to print and TV newsrooms this spring. Their goal was to learn more about what news organizations are doing to develop their online products. This article, and a previous post on breaking news, is an analysis of the insights they collected. For more information on the methodology of the faculty study and to see which news organizations participated, see the sidebar below.

It has been just two years since a damning University of Texas study found that a majority of newspaper Web sites were stocked with almost nothing but "shovelware," recycled versions of the morning's print stories. With the exception of a few high-profile converged operations, local television station Web sites were even more barren.

No more. Economic necessity has combined with fast improvements in audio and video, wild-card technologies like the podcast and the high penetration of broadband to make a cornucopia of online offerings the rule now rather than the exception.

We might simply count the varieties of multimedia content, but that list is long and familiar, full of permutations like combining photo galleries with an audio report, which has been a signature format at NYTimes.com since early 2005. You could call it a Great Leap Forward for the industry, though there is no reason to think it will end as disastrously as Mao's 1958-1960 economic modernization movement in China.

In multimedia -- as in, posting breaking news online -- our survey of more than a dozen news organizations this spring found a range of strategies and a set of emerging issues. At one end are the large, well-established sites. There, the order of the day, as one online executive put it, is "slow and certain growth." Caution, especially directed at the explosive incivility of wide-open user discussions, is very much a factor.

Regional newspapers and television stations, late to the party, may be more urgent and experimental in their online endeavors. "A land rush," one online manager told us. Get more people to visit and linger at the sites as soon as possible in as many ways as possible. Monetize the traffic later and be ready to scrap what doesn't work.

Here are some of the current trends that we found -- some of them particular to newspaper sites, nearly all of them have resonance across the board, and a number have a flavor of paradox:

Piece #2
Take a Blogger to Lunch (And Other Radical Ideas for Journos Struggling to Understand the Web)

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=115376

By Keith W. Jenkins (more by author)
Picture Editor, The Washington Post

Think: Hieroglyphics. Visual displays of information. MySpace. Boing Boing. Rocketboom. Second Life. Flickr. Podcasting. And even del.icio.us.

Journalists, here's some food for thought: What we do is going away because it has to. We can no longer claim the higher ground. There will be no "transition to the Web" -- the Web exists and is as different from 20th-century journalism as apples are from hand grenades.
If we are to survive as news organizations, survival will have to be charted by people who live in the new world, rather than by people who view the Web as either a threat or a tool to gain temporary power in a mortally wounded industry. New Media, Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, is powered by the people for the people. Join them or be ignored. (If you have any doubts about this, just take a look at the latest controversy stirred up by the cell phone videos of the Saddam Hussein execution.)
What our newsrooms need is a mindset that values the Web for what it is an extension of our human desire for community. The Web is a tool to talk to one anther.
We need to develop a culture in our newsrooms that lets us become part of the conversation that is already taking place; not as a dominant voice but as one of many. By giving up our position on high we may gain an even higher level of respect in the communities we live in.
You find the rest of the piece at: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=115376
The 3rd and last piece I’d like you to check-out is also on the Poynter site, but you’ll find it in the “News University” area. This is actually part of a course they offer for free. You’ll need to register, and then you can screen the seminar:
http://www.newsu.org/courses/course_detail.aspx?id=snap_heyward06

Course Title: New Habits of News Consumers: A Seminar Snapshot
Instructor: Andrew Heyward
A NewsU Seminar Snapshot captures the key learning points of a seminar presentation at The Poynter Institute or at other training events. A snapshot features edited video highlights and other materials offered during a seminar presentation.
What will I learn? Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, analyzes how technology is changing news media and its readers and viewers. He offers his vision of the future, in which news content and credibility count more than the source of the information. This Seminar Snapshot was recorded March 12, 2006, at the “New Habits of News Consumers” seminar at The Poynter Institute.
How long will it take? The Seminar Snapshot is divided into eight sections. Total playing time is about 24 minutes.

About the instructor: Andrew Heyward was president of CBS News from 1996-2005.

Note: This course requires the Flash Player 7 plug-in. For the highest quality viewing experience, we recommend using Flash 8 or higher.

Cost: This snapshot is free for those watching it on NewsU. NewsU is exploring ways for you to download this material for a modest fee. These funds would be used to offset NewsU's cost in creating this form of e-learning.
http://www.newsu.org/courses/course_detail.aspx?id=snap_heyward06

Let me know what you think...add your comments

Professor TP