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New Media -- A Smaller Newspaper Perspective

© 2003, Stephen B. Waters

Newsroom 2010

• 1990 Forecast ˜ Still true.
• 1993 Convergence in New York ˜ Rochester Telephone vs. Time/Warner Cable.
• 1993 Seybold „Digital Highways‰

Convergence & New Media

• Creative newsgathering
• Efficient, economical operation
• Media-independent distribution

Your job: Avoid false trails:

• Audiotext
• Overpriced NSDG Pagination,
• Predictive Telemarketing Dialers, and
• Voicemail Hell.

Leave here prepared to:

• Solve useful problems using effective tools
• Try new things

1. Solve useful problems using effective tools

• New Media has focused mostly on delivery.
• Real New Media Issues:
• Attitude, Approach, Economy and Tools
• Make people efficient
• Example: Composing Room ˆ Translate copy. „Follow copy out the window.‰
• Today: High tech composing rooms translate copy into HTML.
• Since 1996: our website uses no programmers and editors publish to the web as easily as they print.
• Userland Frontier -- Powerful scripting language glues together programs, users and the internet. Runs on major platforms, with tight community of users. See http://www.scripting.com
• Our website was programmed for pocket change by a student of fish brains in San Diego.
• We learned enough to glue our business and ad layout system together ourselves.

2. Try new things

• Digital Video -- Woodstock Œ99
• Invested $5,000 for Sony MiniDV, player, 50GB disk, 1,000 tapes, Final Cut Pro non-linear editor for Mac.
• Created 72 minute „A Reporter‚s Notebook: Woodstock Œ99‰
• Recouped costs, learned a lot, gave extra tapes to Historical Society.
• DV Lessons
• Learned how to stream video highlights to our school sports website.
• Side benefit: own all the digital tools to create irreplaceable community archives and produce other community videos.
• [Incidentally, only Rome Sentinel and Syracuse Post-Standard reported the balanced, net-positive picture of Woodstock. Others over-report the ending.]

New Media Lessons For Smaller Newspapers:

• They share all the functional requirements of the New York Times.
• Creatively use smaller budgets and fewer staff.
• Can tolerate the inefficiencies of easily programmed tools like interpretive scripting languages and relational databases.
• Can‚t afford to buy a piece of iron ˜ expensive, dumb, single-purpose tools.
• Can‚t afford to dead-end the newspaper and drain your pocketbook.

Rome Sentinel Vision:

• To be the indispensable provider of local news and advertising.
• The vision statement does not say:
• How it will be gathered,
• How it will be repurposed,
• How it will be delivered.

Discuss

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