Robb Montgomery

At the beginning of the year I was asked by the editor of Ideas Magazine (Published by INMA) to write a column about multimedia. The magazine comes out every other month and I just filed my fourth column to the editor today. That copy won’t appear in print for a few weeks yet and it is exclusive to them.

Below I am reprinting the inaugural column filed back in the first quarter 2007. If I am going to write about how multimedia must be interactive, then we better back it up by inviting feedback to these columns.

The text of the IDEAS columns will be reprinted in the blog no sooner than six months after publication. And as you know, that lag can be the toughest thing.
Just look at what’s happened in the last year:

Last June on a stage in Moscow the NY Times’ dot com VP Vivian Schiller was touting the fact that the Times Select paid service generated $9 million a year in paid subscriptions. Yesterday she pulled the plug on the pay model. The WSJ might ditch their paid model, too.
Hey if the mighty NYT can be that nimble to change, and if Ol’ Rupert is right then we all must be doubly nimble now.

Like Ferris Bueller once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once and a while, you could miss it.”

Everyday multimedia for newspapers

By Robb Montgomery
CEO, Visual Editors.com

Multimedia is currently the hot buzzword for newspaper editors and executives but there is little agreement beyond the name about what multimedia is or what the potential impact of interactive digital journalism will be.

It seems clear that we are only at the beginning of a new era and newspaper managers are now expected to investigate new opportunities to reach new users using new formats on new platforms.

Multimedia is a disruptive technology and is rapidly morphing into new and more powerful forms. The multimedia demands on newspapers are moving quickly beyond the intensive Flash animations of graphics departments and the full-screen, voice-over Soundslides projects of photography departments.

Developers have created an array of new tools and techniques that marry multimedia video and graphics to databases, RSS technology, widgets, API’s, commenting controls, discussion forums and online communities.

Multimedia is suddenly a lot smarter and more satisfying for the user. The instant feedback loop that smart community tools provide allows editors and reporters to enhance the journalism in dynamic and surprising ways.

INTERACTIVITY IS THE KILLER APPLICATION FOR MULTIMEDIA
What’s changed is the audience’s expectations for interactivity to be included in the media experience. I am going to use this column and my multimedia blog to look at concepts and projects that newspapers are developing to facilitate interactive multimedia as part of their everyday experience.

The new definition for newspaper multimedia should include Web and mobile phone news and data widgets, interactive Web video, multimedia blogs, community-driven and user-generated media, database-driven graphics that users control and customize, and the list goes on.

Multimedia is the new melting pot for digital journalism and it is where journalists will produce mashups of maps, video, streaming live data to create intelligent and engaging new media forms. These multimedia story forms do not lie far off in the future, they exist now. Newsroom leaders need to build a culture that makes multimedia literacy, investment and execution part of a newsroom’s ordinary, every day business.

Please interact with this column and share your multimedia experiences and projects on my multimedia blog at Robb Montgomery.com or with the online community of digital journalists at www.visualeditors.com.

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