At the Guardian Media Group’s online offsite yesterday, I watched a live demonstration of the benefits of following Howard Owens’ dictum for nonwired journalists.
I keep nattering on about the need to retrain newsrooms. And I assume that this should entail at least all-day sessions with folks like me earning a few bucks for training the newsroom. That probably does still make sense (at least the part about paying me).
But GMG digital czar Simon Waldman accomplished the primary goal — demystifying all this web 2.0 stuff and making it obviously easy — in an hour-and-a-half exercise pitting teams of execs against each other with a short list of tasks:
* Take photos and upload them to Flickr.
* Make a video and upload it to YouTube.
* Start a wiki page and add links and a photo.
* Start a blog and embed the video and photos.
* Join Facebook and join a group there.
Granted, many of the people in the room were online folks and all of them cared about digital; that’s why they were there. So in any newsroom, I’d take a lesson from that and similarly stack the deck, sprinkling online veterans among the unwired folks to offer help. The sure sign of success is that these content folks got past the tools and did what content folks do, bringing editorial oomph — and a few ads — to geeky tasks. And so everyone learned they could do it. And they had fun.
Howard’s bigger assignment includes tasks related to RSS, SMS, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. So make that the graduate course. But there’s no reason that every news organization could not and should not do what GMG did yesterday.
(Disclosure: I write and consult for the Guardian.)
