Conventional Wisdom

Wait! More's coming. Soon. Honest.

I've got two other posts still to write (yeah, I know I missed the deadline - by about 2 weeks) focussing on video in the newsroom that I think are worth a look.
As soon as I do them.
Which will be soon.
I'll also reconfigure the blog (reverse the order of the posts so they're chronological, add an index etc)  to turn it into more of a static web site, as  a kind of ongoing record of the 2007 conference.
In the meantime, check out the work of the two Red River Community College journalism students — Helen Cholakis and Jennifer Ryan —  who covered a pile of the conference sessions - including hotshots like Juan Antonio Giner, Rob Curley and Bruce Annan. 
You can access their stories here on the Canadian Newspaper Association's "Conference Presentations" page. Links to their reports are intermingled among links to presenter's blogs and websites, so look for those authored by Helen and Jennifer.
And check back here next week when I should have this thing all buffed up and ready for summer. Honest.
Bill
(photo is from Chris Buschap's Flickr photostream)

And the winners are?

Friday evening  I stood on the second floor of Delta Winnipeg lobby with my bags at my feet, and the taxi that would take me to the airport waiting just beyond the front door. As I watched the National Newspaper Award nominees arriving for their gala, dressed to the nines, their spirits bright and tightly wound, I felt a little like Moses watching his compatriots cross the valley into the promised land. Not that we've had to endure any plagues this past week during the convention — from what I've read the locust don't hit Winnipeg until June.
No, it's just that for the past several days it's been all about the business of newspapering — readership and circultation and innovation; moving online and finding the "jobs" our readers need done for them. Not a word, really, about the quality of the writing, the picture making, the digging.
Hell, my online hero Rob Curley even suggested we make sure to drop "writer" from our staff titles and replace it with "reporter", a not-so-subtle way of reminding everybody that their jobs, their roles, have changed.
I can't argue the last bit — in my newsroom they hand out earplugs to the unfortunates sitting near me so they don't have to endure my endless repetition of that mantra.
But as someone who chose this career as a teenager precisely because it meant writing for a living, I'd argue long and loud for the necessity of  recognizing and celebrating great writing (and photography). Happily, I don't have to — we have the National Newspaper Awards. Founded in 1949 by the Toronto Press Club, they're now housed in the CNA offices and administered by an independent board of governors (since 1989).   Here is a list of  the winners. Oh, and don't forget the Edward Goff Penny awards for  promising young journalists. Although they were announced in March, both winners — Elisabeth Johns, a reporter with the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder, and the Ottawa Citizen's Katie Lewis — were presented at last night's gala. (That's Elisabeth with CNA president Anne Kothawala at the gala.)
(As an aside - am I the only one who thinks we all cheapen the awards by only publishing details of our own paper's winners, rather than offering readers the whole list and maybe reprinting an award winning photo or two? It turns it form a celebration of the best of our work into something of a jingoistic excercise...)
Bill
(Photos courtesy David Gollob)
ps: check back Sunday - I'll be posting some more on what we learned in the seminars about video and the newspaper.

Moving Pictures 1

Rob Curley, the disarmingly candid news web guru behind LJ World and the washingtonpost.com's fabulous "On Being" site, talked about running an ad in Naples, Florida, when he was working there and they were launching Studio 55, a daily newscast.
I'm paraphrasing badly, but the ad featured photos, headshots, of every single member of the Naples Daily News newsroom, all 100 of them, and then pointed out that the local TV news station had a newsroom staff of 10. "Who would you rather get your news from?" the ad asked.
"Yeah, they hated us for that one," Rob said with that dry smile of his.
The local TV folks may have hated them, but I'm betting their web users don't. Studio 55 is a simple, low cost, perfectly serviceable newscast, covering 3 items or so, plus the weather, and incorporating readers and staff photos, staff video and in-studio narration - all stitched together with some very slick graphics and sound. (More on the philosphy and mechanics of Studio 55 in a minute.)
Folks, this is your future.
In yesterday's lunch Leonard Asper talked about adding video capabilities to the CanWest newsrooms and, half jokingly said, "The CRTC (Canadian Radio Television Commission) will probably never allow us to have a television station in Ottawa, but there's nothing to stop the Ottawa Citizen from becoming a local TV station," and of course he's right.
Think of the size and reach of your newsroom — compare it to your local TV news operation. "Who would you rather get your news from?" indeed.
Up next: Moving Picures II - how to build your own newscast - the Rob Curley way
Bill

No, I didn't get lost

I really wanted to attend the Video Newspaper session despite this being an 'editorial' focus and my being a 'sales gal'...I was very interested to see how low cost video could be produced both for the newsroom (and also see if this as a tool for advertising!!).
I appreciated CEO of Visual Editors, Robb Montgomery's casual style and "(minimal) bullet points" — I think I'm just about conferenced out!!
Robb had good examples and lots of reference to sites and tools to check out. He made reference to a  European newspaper/web site produced by a 29 year old editor: 24 Video that fits everything on one screen — "thinking of the consumer" who likely does not want to scroll down. Good examples of innovation...let's get moving!!!
Kelly
kmontague@thespec.com