Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

Editors' survey reflects growing agnosticism about news platforms

Thu, 15 May 2008 16:15:40 GMT

The World Editors Forum has begun posting its 2008 Newsroom Barometer -- the results of a survey of more than 700 newspaper editors on the future of news -- including predictions about integrated print-Web newsrooms and the rise of multimedia and multi-skilled journalists.

Meanwhile, the forum's weblog is running a series of interviews with, as its name might suggest, some of the world's top editors. It's fascinating to compare the responses to the question "How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?" Hint: Almost all say they've considered themselves "news" or "information" organizations for some time, "newspaper" being just a "distribution channel."

Even true-believers in journalism seem to be turning to what one calls an "almost platform-agnostic" integrated newsroom. (That link goes to a preview of New York Times digital news editor Jim Roberts' presentation to the forum's conference in Sweden next month.)

Here's the list of interviewees, including already-posted transcripts and publications expected to participate:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times - Dan Bogler (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

Thanks to Mich Sineath's AEJMC Members Forum for pointing out this discussion.

The Web video express train don't stop here...

Tue, 13 May 2008 03:52:16 GMT

School's out and my summer blogging will be limited or obsessively compulsive... I haven't decided yet.

But here's some "other journalism" that just flew in the e-mail window from a reader who noticed the blog's title -- a visitor from www.LiveNewsCameras.com

"The concept is simple, let people watch news as it happens anywhere in the world... raw, unedited on your computer at work or home," says the e-mail from Andrew Finlayson at FoxTV.com

"It officially was made public on Super Tuesday (although we had been tinkering with how to do it for months) with just a couple of feeds focusing on the Republican and Democratic candidates," he says.

Now the site has 150 streams, and Finlayson predicts the total will double soon.

Alas, I can't get any of them to work on my iBook and http://www.radnetva.com/ municipal WiFi here at home. The connection just grinds to a stuttering stop when the page loads, attempting to automatically stream some video and open a chat window on my screen at the same time... without giving me a choice in the matter.

I'll try it again from the office to see how it works with the university's broadband connection, and how the originators keep all that video from being videobabel.

Here's more from Finlayson's mail:

"We streamed the hearings about Iraq, we streamed the Pope almost from the moment he arrived to when he went home... nothing unusual about that... but we also stream the presidential candidates live every day... sometimes two or three times each a day as they go around the country. No one else is doing that."

"Imagine what will happen when every mobile can stream live video... We are working with such a phone right now. Every major news story could be shown live from a dozen different points of view."

He says the site's informal motto is "'Veritas odit moras,' from line 850 of Seneca[base ']s version of Oedipus. It means 'Truth hates delay.'"

That reminds me of another old proverb, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, but old enough to have been quoted this way by an English preacher in 1855:

"If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old proverb, 'A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.'"

For online journalism, I wonder if there's a connection to "re-booting" the computer when all that new media locks it up?

For the less bandwidth-deprived, here's another interesting video project from my long-lost distant cousin, Robb Montgomery... a report on Camp VideoJournalism, a hands-on training program that Visual Editors sponsored in partnership with Viewmagazine.tv and Newsvideographer.com.

Summer reading aggregator

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:39:17 GMT

This is where I'm posting links to things I plan to read and/or write about once I'm through with end-of-semester grading and sorting-out... Expect this list to get longer...

Degrees in the Past. "Ultimately, to change the media industries, we've got to change our universities," says my old friend Vin Crosbie, without giving away all the secrets of what should change. "Although the youngest professors are for change," he says, "so are a great many of the oldest. It's those aged in between who are most obstructive, those who worked in the media industries during the 1990s before entering academia."
Since I just arrived here at Radford by a circuitous career route, I'm one of the oldest and newest... and in a new School of Communication, so change is in the air. I'll know by July 1 how many of my older (in service to the university) colleagues are interested in the university's recent offer of a "workforce transition" early retirement option.
A Primer on how to read your online newspaper after the paper stops using paper.