Conventional Wisdom

Moving Pictures II

I'm posting this on-the-spot video report from Visuals Editor Robb Montgomery despite the fact that he stole my idea to ennumerate the swell swag handed out at this year's joint CNA/CCNA/CCMA convention.  The point here ain't the topic or who thought of it first, rather it's the ease and speed with which he was able to produce this brief video report - and others.
(See his Visualeditors.com web site for other videos - include senior newspaper people dancing. WARNING: seeing senior newspaper people dancing may cause drowsieness, headaches and a complete loss of hope that we can ever be seen as anything other than hopelessly outdated by the "young kids" of Canada.)
More later
Bill

Click To Play Video

                                                                                                            
         

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

Web 2.0 is already old, and where are we?

Bruce Annan - consultant with Classified Intelligence Inc. (and a fellow blogger here - thanks Bruce!) offered a whirlwind tour of the Web 2.0 world in his session: Personalization of Online Content and Advertising, that was worth attending for the url's alone.
I've added some of my own in this list - if the names and sites are unfamiliar to you, spend some time clicking through and looking around — you'll end up with a good sense of where our end of the web is headed.
Bruce is a deceptively unpolished, naturalistic speaker with a self-effacing style that tends to mask what seems like a  decent grasp on where the web is going and what we ought to be looking at.
You're not alone if you're a little confused by the fuzzy Web 2.0 term. It was coined six or seven years ago by that brilliant tech publisher, Tim O'Reilly in a brainstorming session about the future of a post Dot.Com bust world.
(ed note: Tim is the fellow behind one of the absolutely smartest tech blogs, O'Reilly Radar. If you don't read it, you'll be getting your tech and web innovation news six months after the smart people do.)
Simply speaking Web 2.0 covers the post dot.com boom and bust web innovations that focus on the web as platform and the user as participant, not consumer.
Newspapers are still very slow to understand that final, key sea change - although people like Doc Searls (see the ClueTrain manifesto - which was written in 1999),  Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen have been screaming about it for several years. 

Online sigh of relief

Rob Curley, vice-president of product development for the Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive was by far my favourite speaker so far. What innovation!
Curley spoke of the ever popular 'hyper-local' concept and gave some brilliant examples that were adopted by the Naples Daily News and Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas. Check out the video online program: On Being-brilliant!
Great advice about tapping into our intern resources and "every newspaper must have a supply of nerds". 
I must admit that while I was encouraged throughout the presentation that someone out there is doing this online stuff very well, my spidey sales senses were in high gear waiting for some indication of revenue success. Curley did not disappoint with a great finish alerting the audience that every city or newspaper has to have their own unique strategy and do what makes sense in their market.
While it appeared a ton of resources and revenue were being thrown at all of his wonderful projects, he also spoke of web revenue success!!!! Whew!
Kelly

News is NOW

Rob Curley is the uber-in-demand online guy. He starts his talks with this quote: My name is Rob Curley I'm an internet nerd from Kansas who is in love with local news and the evolution of traditional media. His message: if you are not online, get on it NOW.
It's where the growth, money and readers are. If you are among the people saying,  "Hey we have a good story, we are going to hold it for tomorrow's paper." Rob says: Don't. "If readers see smoke and they log onto your website and don't see it there, they don't think you are holding it for tomorrow's paper, they think YOU SUCK."
That pretty much sums up Rob's message. Get online and use it for hyper local content. We are in the news business and we should be giving our readers every single scrap of content we can.
He says publishing online is easy (9-year-old girls with cells phone are posting photos and video to you tube 52 seconds after they've captured their content). I've got some of his recommendations, after the jump:

The missionary position

Here’s the thing.
I'm here on a mission and here's my position: I don’t think newspapers get it yet. The web that is. Or maybe that should be that too many newspaper people don't get it yet.
So I'm going to nose around while I'm here.
Ten, 12 years after first dipping their toes into the river of info the web was, many are still figuring out even more clever ways to dump their newspaper into ever more clever internet boxes — instead of understanding the fundamental shifts that have occurred as our audience discovers and embraces the “I” in interactive.
The web, it’s increasing speed and ubiquity, and the emerging “good enough” browser-based software tools, are creating an online space where users can connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime and perform tasks that as little as a decade ago required a doctorate and more dollars than most of us could stuff into a typewriter case.
And people have not been slow to seize those tools.