The theme of the 2008 Unity convention was “Journalism in a Changing World.” As a result, a lot of the panels there were devoted to approaches to multimedia. On Wednesday, Knight Digital Media Center did an all-day workshop showing participants how to use Flash Web software, embedding video in Web sites, and other essentials. I did not attend all of the workshop but got some contact information from the center and their offer of online tutorials for some of the class segments. The tutorials are available at Knight Digital Media Center. You must register to take the tutorial and I believe there’s no charge.
It was fitting that some of the earlier offerings at Unity involved understanding how to make the bricks. As the conference progressed, you could learn how to build something with those bricks.
On Friday, “A Day in the Life: Adventures in Multimedia Journalism” featured Larry Hackett, editor of People and People.com, Sharon Epperson, Personal Finance Reporter for CNBC and USA Weekend, Maria Hinojosa, NPR and correspondent on PBS “NOW,” Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post political reporter and Stephanie Mehta, global editor at Fortune magazine.
Hackett: People had to start thinking about being in the information business not the magazine business; People and People.com have different purposes, for example, no human interest features on People.com, but breaking news about births, sightings, sentencings etc. leads the way there; magazine is integrated into the website with promo of deadline for cover image release on people.com (7 a.m. Tuesday) and coordinating with marketing and PR having editors and correspondents make appearances in other media to promote magazine and online stuff; also how to respond to the 24-hour news cycle and allow personnel some quality of life. One way is to have magazine side people be responsible for online shifts to make sure one side knows what’s up on the other.
Epperson: Goes into her live reports on CNBC thinking about her blog, magazine column and web video so that her live reports on, say, the ups and downs of the energy markets can be translated into consumer friendly info on coping with gas and heating oil price increases. Her blog links her video and writing, but she chooses not to get overly personal in her blog entries. She has two children, 3 and 6, and finds the constant news cycle challenging but makes time for her family.
Hinojosa: Also noted problems with work-family balance since she also has a home studio for recording for radio. Also encountered initial resistance from some of her employers to looking at multimedia presentations of her work. Her husband helps her maintain her Facebook page. While reporting in Rwanda for NOW, discovered information about global migration that led to an NPR commentary. Urged all attendees to think about presenting stories in all formats, even if this leads to the conclusion that all formats may not work for some kinds of information.
Vargas: After writing a series on HIV and DC, Vargas proposed that he join the Post’s political team to write about multimedia and the campaign. He shot videos of Ron Paul supporters using his MacBook and posted it to the Posts’ campaign blog. Also did stories on regular Iowans who didn’t participate in the caucus hype including a guy who sold candidate buttons at a local mall who had predicted caucus results accurately by button sales. Also noted that media should be paying attention to the “third screen,” that is, Web-enabled phones. Noted that at one Obama South Carolina event, campaign workers told the assembled crowd to text “HOPE” to the campaign’s short code (short code is a five-number code in lieu of texting to a 10-digit phone number). Each person who sent a text got numbers of five people to call to urge them to vote. Vargas noted that he was single and few issues with work-family balance.
Mehta moderated the panel but did not offer abundant information on Fortune’s web strategies.
I was sorry to miss a Saturday panel called “The Re-Tooled You: Finding Stories and Jobs in a Web 2.0 World” but I got a tweet (if you’re on Twitter, you know what I mean) from one of the panelists, Gil Asakawa, who briefly worked for advance.net and is now manager of audience development for MediaNewsGroup Interactive. He was worried the 8:30 a.m. starting time wouldn’t help attendance. He was right.
I ran into Gil at what was probably the best multimedia presentation of the conference for newspaper types. “Beyond the E-Paper: Innovative Ways to Drive Web Site Traffic and Revenue.” The presenter were heads of digital content for several Cox newspapers. The two most important points made here were:
1) Advertising, promotion/marketing and editorial have to work together, which is hard for some hardcore newspaper people to accept. Get over it if you don’t want to be left behind.
2) just posting your print content online is not enough.
Most of the Cox papers have a branded paper website as well as a community site with separate content. Also, each had different strategies for online ad positions. A study was cited saying that by 2010 online ad revenue should surpass print.
Cox Newspapers are in the process of unveiling a tool called Feedbot, which combines aggregation of RSS feeds with web crawling technology for searching online content. If you want to participate in the beta test, click here or e-mail Zac Mcghee of the Dayton Daily News (zmcghee (at) coxohio.com) noted that they allowed community organizations to post press releases for free on their site and the releases, identified as such were put under the appropriate categories on the website (entertainment, business etc.) An example of how Feedbot would work is you could search for Fourth of July and it would pick up stories about holiday events, press releases about same and other site content containing those words. Make It “Fourth of July fireworks” and you get material related to that
Tim Lott from the Austin American-Statesman, pointed out that in the multimedia environment sometimes you needed people who weren’t steeped in newspaper values to open up areas you might not think of. Lott hired a woman who played bass in a local band. Thanks to her efforts, the austin360 music section has 900 MP3 files of songs by local bands that people can stream or download. She knew her peers and what they wanted, and the site delivered.
Lott also hired a documentary filmmaker, who was interested in incorporating live streaming video on site. Thanks to Ustream, the Austin paper was able to stream speeches and presentations from the NetRoots Nation blogging conference live.
Lastly, Lott hired a Web developer who wanted to job because he felt the Bill of Rights was under assault. Thanks to his efforts, Austin integrated CoverItLive into their site and had their film critic chatting with consumers about aspects of “The Dark Knight” juggernaut. They did some video of the critic at his keyboard for the panel presentation.
Also, Austin is a high school football hotbed. To capitalize on that, the site offers a “Whack Your Team” 20-second game where you play whack-a-mole with a rival’s football helmets. There are four ad positions in the “stadium” where users would normally see ads at their local football stadium. You can forward links to friends, and click on info about the record of the rivalry. The game page also includes reader-submitted photos of fan in full regalia. Also on the page is a game-time weather forecast. Below that panel is weather rating depending on your football weather preferences. The game weather panel is also a widget that can be imported to iGoogle or MyYahoo. At least 300,000 people have played the game so far.
Lott also offered the following points:
1. Be open and listen to your customers.
2. Go where the money is.
3. Make frenemies.
4. Use search engine optimization.
5. Make it fun.
Lott and others cited the stat that 60 percent of people doing online
searches do not go past the first page of results. Also, 40 percent of
online ads sold now are to search engines. Also, don’t expect to
consume everything on your site or to get all of their news from your
site.
Hyde Post (Atlanta) and Gina Wilcox (Palm Beach) did a tag team
presentation on mobile products. Very soon, more people will access web
and information from phones, PDAs etc. than computers and we must be in
the competition for the so-called “third screen.” Wilcox has partnered
with local advertisers to have banners on texts. For example, Palm
Beach has a short code (explained above). Type “STORM” and you’ll get
up to date information on hurricanes that could affect the local area.
Publix, local supermarket, sponsors the storm data and has a link to a
household checklist for hurricane food supplies. Publix used to put
hurricane tracking maps on their grocery bags so this was a natural for
them. You can also type “LUNCH” and get lunch specials from local
restaurants or “HAPPY HOUR.” This delivery system allows local
advertisers a cost-effective way to get on board with your company.
Palm Beach has also developed an online Hispanic Yellow Pages and the
paper has placed online kiosks in libraries, malls and other public
places. The kiosks are branded with Palm Beach Post graphics and allow
people to search and print out job listings (their primary function in
the library setting) and shopping and entertainment information (at the
malls). The kiosks have reached more than 300,000 users with 3 million
individual page views with approximately 208,000 printouts.
All of the Team Cox folks acknowledged that there are barriers to
multimedia growth in newsroom culture. One is moving from daily
deadlines to a deadline a minute. Also, top-down management can impede
speedy progress. Plus, most papers are cost-cutting and that also slows
down movement.
They suggest following the advice of Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer:
1) Innovate from collaboration.
2) You should have diversity in terms of points of view, background and training.
3) If you have two people who are in agreement all the time, one of them is redundant.
