Correction: Appended.Novices and veterans got a picture of the role they can play in journalism's future at an unusual workshop held recently at
USA Today.
Deputy managing editor Ed Foster-Simeon organized the one-day event "to push beyond recruiting and hiring and help people find ways to succeed." Working with minority journalism organizations in the D.C. area, Foster-Simeon organized "Fast Forward: How to Quickly Make Your Mark in the Converged Newsroom."
The Online News Association co-sponsored the event and organized the panels.
The workshop attracted about 60 people from high school classrooms through newsrooms at
The Washington Post,
McClatchy and others. They saw and heard how newsrooms are embracing video, blogging, data crunching and new forms of storytelling. Some highlights:
A CHANGING ROLE
Kinsey Wilson,
USA Today executive editor and member of
Poynter's national advisory board, called the digital revolution the biggest change since
Gutenberg, one that is both pervasive and participatory.
He called it an upending of the traditional business model for mainstream media. The three legs of the platform for traditional media -- content, distribution and audience -- have been de-monopolized by inexpensive, open and standardized tools for transmission, content exchange and
RSS feeds. This has turned citizens from media consumers into creators.
The signs, though not immediately recognized, were there as
Craigslist took millions of dollars out of advertising, as
Flickr let people post way more photos than any newspaper could and as the viral
Hillary Clinton video built an overnight audience of 3 million on
YouTube. Big media, losing audience to the extent that "flat is the new up," are getting the message.
Wilson said that in the next 10 years, media convergence will provide huge job opportunities with more dynamic and fluid career paths.
His advice: Nail down your journalistic fundamentals, study audiences and immerse yourself in seeing how information is acquired, created, shared and exchanged by sites like
Pandora,
Facebook,
Frappr and others.
AUTHENTICITY AND VOICE
Dan Froomkin, who writes
The Washington Post's
White House Watch column, sees big opportunities for journalists who can break away from the traditional, institutional monotone and write with voice, passion and knowledge.
"If you could have dinner with a great national reporter, you wouldn't ask, 'What happened today?' you'd ask for the story behind the story, how things work or about the future.
"Passion, authority and authenticity will bring readers to us," he says.
As examples, Froomkin cited the
Post's
Dana Milbank, the
Houston Chronicle's
Julie Mason and the
Philadelphia Daily News'
Will Bunch.
His advice: Look for your writing voice by becoming more conversational.
VIDEO
A little here, a little there, and pretty soon you're posting video on the Web. Pankaj Paul, managing editor of
The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal, and Chet Rhodes, deputy multimedia editor for breaking news at
washingtonpost.com, told how photographers and reporters have become videographers.
They talked about modest in-house training programs and equipment that, while not the best, gets the job done. The choice between having one high-end $3,000 Sony DSR-PD170 video camera and 10 video-capable $300 Canon Powershot cameras can go either way, depending on the circumstance.
At
The News Journal, more video was part of a wider strategy that saw Web updates grow from 100 a week to more than 1,400. The audience expanded. Paul joked that some people in the newsroom were shocked that news actually sells.
Rhodes, whose team has trained 75 reporters to use small, handheld cameras, showed a cell phone that can shoot 99 minutes of low-quality video. "Pretty soon," he said, "the ability to get video with very small, handheld devices will be possible" at higher quality.
Rhodes said, "We're in a period that won't last very long that YouTube has given us where video that is not at the level of TV stations is acceptable. Get started now. We are in a unique period in video history." Paul agreed that viewers "will forgive you for a little while."
One of the success stories at washingtonpost.com has been
John Kelly, who one-man bands his "Answer Man" videos. "Here is a senior columnist for
The Washington Post with a little tiny camera, shooting this himself," Rhodes said.
Their advice: Shoot and edit video now to keep pace with technology.
BLOGGING
Voice came up again with
USA Today's
Pop Candy blogger
Whitney Matheson and
Mark "Blog Daddy" Memmott, who blogs
OnDeadline and contributes to
OnPolitics.
Memmott advises bloggers to think first about what they want their blog to be: opinionated or factual; original or an aggregator; daily posts or weekly; niche.
Both felt some ownership for the audiences they have built and nurtured. They attribute their popularity to their tone and online personalities as well as the unique content they deliver. Matheson puts writing, pictures and video on her blog and lets readers comment, but it hangs together. She said, "I think the singular thread throughout is me."
Their advice: Develop a blog by practicing offline.
DATA
Washingtonpost.com data editor Derek Willis loves the way the Internet and its coding conventions have organized data. This makes it so much easier to manage and mine. "Information doesn't just exist in space, it has boundaries. That's the key to managing information. Having information in a structured environment is much more important than the type of structure it is in."
Out of those basic structures, journalists can build searchable databases, maps and other graphic representations. Willis said that dynamic, interactive online databases could be a boost to computer-assisted reporting.
Some of the projects he clicked to:
Willis, who took exactly one programming course and no math in college, mentioned two tools for drawing news out of data:
Python, a programming language, and
Swivel, a site that helps users turn raw data into graphs and charts.
His advice: Learn about a spreadsheet program like Excel by using it to track some of your information, like finances.
DIGITAL STORYTELLINGChuck Rose, art director at
USA Today, showed a range of features that make stories more interactive. Tools are getting easier to use, and by building databases to control the graphics, it is possible to update a chart or map automatically, without having an artist redraw everything.
His examples:
- Photo galleries: daily features linked off the USA Today homepage, which have high volumes of traffic -- "The day in pictures"
His advice: Start thinking about telling stories in new ways, and ask others to help you try them.
WRAPUP
In the wrapup Q&A, Ju-Don Roberts, managing editor at washingtonpost.com, said the new competition is not the traditional companies, but new ones like Craigslist, as well as a new ethic that has people working in their kitchens as they watch television and go online. She assured those whose heads must have been spinning by then: It's not abandoning the skills you learned as a journalist. It's adding to them.
Correction: The original version of this article misidentified a picture of Chuck Rose, art director at
USA Today, as Chet Rhodes, deputy multimedia editor for breaking news at washingtonpost.com.
(Joe Grimm recruits for the Detroit Free Press
and for Gannett, which owns the Free Press
and USA Today
.)
Can you imagine if JFK had been killed in Dallas...
