Posted in Online media, tagged aggregation, engagement on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
(Originally posted on Aug. 25, 2010)
The new news-aggregation site TBD.com in Washington, DC, has a reporter devoted exclusively to compiling lists. Lists are popular with Web audiences. That might seem frivolous, but if you think about it, it’s no less frivolous than much of the entertainment material we put in the paper or on the air. If a list is fun or interesting, it achieves its aim of giving the audience something to talk about. One such example from TBD: mottos of local public schools.
Posted in Online media, tagged engagement, hyperlocal, innovation on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
(Originally posted on July 19, 2010)
The winners of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism were announced today. Take a look and see if any give you ideas. The top winner is especially interesting because it’s a model for livestreaming an event while simultaneously providing context and links to further reporting:
“As people watched the live streaming video, the team added additional reporting and document links on the opposite side of the screen, hosted a live blog, and displayed an evolving log of Tweets about the event – all in one place.”
UPDATE: More about the winners.
Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged curmudgeons, innovation, mobile on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
(Originally posted on July 16, 2010)
Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten reflects on the ways the newsroom has changed in recent years:
“Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.”
He finds much wrong, to his traditionalist’s eye, in the new, Web-oriented way of doing things. He has some good points. He also seems to recognize what’s in the past is in the past and staying there. We all have to.
UPDATE: As if to underline my last line (what was my last until I started this), along comes a look at the implications of the rapid growth of mobile Web use, which within five years is expected to surpass Web use on computers:
“It won’t be enough just to build branded mobile applications that repurpose content across all of the different platforms. That’s like newspapers taking the print experience and replicating it on the web as they tried back in the 1990s. Rather, we will need to rethink, remix and repackage information for an entirely different modality than platforms of yore.”
In other words, if you think the newsroom has changed, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
This video may or may not make you feel better about it.
Posted in Online media, Print media, Writing, tagged engagement on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
(Originally posted July 6, 2010)
A former newspaper publisher with a background as a reporter and editor has a common complaint about a recent story on an emotional meeting he attended: The reporter’s account of the meeting was dry as dirt. He doesn’t link to the story or identify the newspaper, so we can’t tell exactly how much the story failed to capture the meeting, but what he describes is absolutely commonplace, and not just in stories about meetings. Just last week, while thumbing through a stack of various MG papers, I saw a story about a public hearing on a topic that was stirring local residents’ emotions. At least, that was implied. The story did not show that. There was nothing to provide a reader the sense of what it was like to be in that room. Not only that, all the highest quotes in the story came from elected officials. Members of the public, the majority of those who spoke at the hearing, were relegated to the bottom of the story.
One of the important things any story should do is answer the question “What was it like?” (or, if the story is about a person, “What is he/she like?”), and one of the cardinal rules about stories that involve regular people to get the regular people high up and the talking heads (politicians, or anyone likely to talk at length without saying anything, or anything that isn’t predictable) down low, or out entirely. As writing coaches often say, how would you tell the story in person to your mother, or a friend? If you think about your story like that, you’re less likely to fall into a formulaic, official-sounding presentation.
Posted in Online media, tagged database, engagement on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
(Originally posted on June 29, 2010)
If you have put a lot of effort into a project, especially a multimedia or other online element, be sure to point to it again or update it when the news makes it relevant again. Tampa provides a perfect example today, though the circumstances are tragic: the killing of two police officers in the line of duty. TBO.com already had done an interactive on officers killed in the line of duty, so when the news broke, it was a matter of updating the database.
Newsroom With A View 