A new newsroom
: I’m going to link again to my post about reinventing the newsroom because I was hoping for more comments like this one from Business Week’s Steve Baker, riffing after a comment by Blogads’ Henry Copeland:
Funny that Henry should mention “only the paranoid survive.” Because I think that the key to success in whatever we end up calling this new age is overcoming fear. Paranoids build walls. They keep secrets. They stitch together back-channel alliances. All of these maneuvers are designed to defend them. But they all limit connections with the rest of the world. I think that people who figure out how to share secrets, consort with the enemy, and camp out on foreign soil stand to win these days. I think the blog world is a laboratory for this.
And, no, he’s not saying bloggers are the enemy. He is one.
Mark Tapscott says on his blog:
One of the biggest challenges for MSMers is getting out of the Old Media way of thinking that is anchored around the concepts of the single hard-copy or broadcast being the basic news product and the daily deadline cycle required to produce that product. Thinking in those terms is a prescription for death these days, but that fact doesn’t make it any less difficult for folks who have operated in traditional newsrooms throughout their careers to start thinking in completely new ways.
: Dwight Silverman, tech blogger on the Houston Chronicle, quotes part of my post and says:
Yeah. I’d love to work in a newsroom that operated like that. Bring it on.
Well, Dwight, it may not be as far off as you think, considering that the good conversation I had this week on this topic was with a bunch of editors, including yours.
: Laurence Simon remixes my post quite nicely and bluntly:
On 1. Input, stop chewing and vomiting back AP and Reuters. Report on original and local material in your backyard. I see an attack on the herd mentality of media, sending crews and reporters to stories already well-covered by partners and other outlets. Also, an attack on “vanity crews” just so you can say you sent a crew there and are reporting live from the scene far far away….
3. Jarvis’ Mantra – Newspapers aren’t the source. They are the amplifier and mixer for many sources. “Houston’s Leading Information Source” isn’t right in that regard… it’s not a source but a conduit. Does it reproduce the signal faithfully? Is it mixed without much error or loss?…
Blogging as Metaphor – massive IT investment and reworking of the newsroom workflow. Everything goes into a MASSIVE DATABASE with enough tags to make it easy to store, find, crosslink, reference, edit, share, and publish. As the lifecycle of a story progresses, the public has the ability to watch it form, like a man tossing pizza dough in the air….
4. Train the reader – The reader is no logner a reader, but a participant…
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Laurence, though I tried.
: Mark Tosczak says:
To me, as a working journalist, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the old skill sets most reporters and editors were trained with are simply inadequate. Now we have to not only be writers, but also broadcasters, designers, programmers, moderators. We have to be multimedia savvy. Used to be you could have a good career (at least in newspapers) with basically just writing, interviewing and editing skills. Now we all need to know something about design, about photography, about sound recording, about video, about speaking and appearing on camera. More skills, broader skills. It’s a brave new world, and exciting.
Note he says “exciting,” not “frightening.” See Baker, above.
: And thanks, Craig, for the link.
