Monthly Archive for January, 2007Page 2 of 2

Should Newspapers use SoundSlides or Video?

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on January 15, 2007
in editing, multimedia, robbmontgomery and socialmedia
. 4 Comments

Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News says he is ‘Bored with SoundSlides’ in a recent blog entry and notes that there does not seem to be a lot of variety right now with how newspapers are using Soundslides. And, he’s right.

The bigger issue is viral (and social)
This is not an attack on photogs, web producers or fans of SoundSlides. Please read further.

The bigger picture here is to meet the demands for media portability, interactivity, stickiness.

If you don’t make your digital content sticky, portable and interactive then what does it matter if your ’still frame photos with audio overdub projects’ are produced using SoundSlides or made with iMovie, iPhoto, Still life or Keynote?

How portable are your visual packages?
It is easier for a publisher to repurpose a video asset across many web sites, blogs, and also push it to mobile phones, cable TV partners, et al.

The hard, closed Web containers that newspapers tend to present SoundSlide content in are just that - fixed. What is good for print is nor always best for digital. Interactivity, portability and user control are the criteria that define the new era of multimedia journalism.

Share your viral visuals

I am looking for examples of newspaper SoundSlide shows that have gone viral, are embeddable, portable offer social bookmarks, or allow users to comment in the same pane.
Please post up your SoundSlide links to share.

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Karl Gude endorses Robb Montgomery

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on January 8, 2007
in robbmontgomery
. 0 Comments

“Robb combines powerful technical knowledge, innovative ideas and strategies and great interpersonal skills to help everyone he works with achieve their goals. He is a community builder. I chose Robb’s website, VisualEditors.com, as the home to my blog about the news industry due to the personal care and service I receive from him as well as because of the caliber of the hundreds of journalists who have joined his online community.”

Karl Gude
Former Director of Information Graphics for Newsweek magazine and the Associated Press.

Karl’s blog.

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2007: The year of the ‘fully-trained’ journalist

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on January 5, 2007
in Blog, editing, education, multimedia, research and robbmontgomery
. 0 Comments

Analog Kid. Meet The Digital Man.

  • He’s not concerned with yesterday
    He knows constant change is here today

    He’s noble enough to know what’s right
    But weak enough not to choose it

    He’s wise enough to win the world
    But fool enough to lose it

Those Neil Peart lyrics, written 24 years ago, seem just as relevant today because they reflect the illogical and emotional struggle of how difficult it is at times for us to adapt to change - no matter how necessary or abrupt. The changes from childhood to adult, from old to the new, from death to life.

Education is the key to unlock the challenges of constant change
I had a quiet lunch last week with the publisher of a large North American newspaper and we while we were both on vacation we couldn’t avoid discussing the unknown in the year ahead. We talked about the training challenges, the institutional challenges and, more. Yes, that nasty word ‘monetize’ came up but that’s OK, his job is to keep his paper in business.

He surmised that, with fully-trained journalists on staff, local franchises have some great opportunities to thrive in the coming years. For editorial units one critical key is to broaden the base of ‘beyond print’ expertise throughout the newsroom and keep story teams nimble and ‘fully-trained.’

In the end we agreed that newspapers will not be better served by creating yet another department of specialists - but instead everyone on the staff must learn how to work in this new media world. Beyond print. To understand the concepts, see the dynamics up-close, and not only learn how to speak the languages but know how to use these new tools. The investment publishers make in providing continuous learning and reorganizing their teams will prove critical.

2007 certainly has the potential to become the ‘year of the fully-trained journalist’ as more print-only editors gain skills and experience producing video, editing multimedia blogs and developing interactive story techniques.

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