“You can’t do radical change in small steps – you have to do the full monty.”
Media Guardian’s Jemima Kiss is the modern day journalist. At Society of Editors Conference ‘08 this week she churned out minute-by-minute updates on the daily workshops which saw the nation’s top editors and media types gather to talk about the topics sweeping across the industry. Sending regular tweets to Twitter and updates on her blog, interviewing speakers in coffee breaks using the portable Nagra microphone, and testing out the new Flip Mino HD video recorder, Miss Kiss embraces online collaborative journalism and experimenting with new media platforms. I caught up with her at the end of the conference to find out what food for thought she’d be taking home.
Editors and new media commentators are frequently predicting increased use of video content for 2009. According to one set of predictions for online video from Mashable, as of October 2008, 13.5 billion videos were watched online – a 45 per cent rise on the number watched in October 2007. Hence Jemima Kisses praise of Michael Rosenblum’s animated speech which aimed to kick-start editors into taking video and audio news platforms more seriously. Mr Rosenblum said:
These guys are not in the printing business, they’re in the news production business, and that means they have to get ready to distribute that news in whatever way people want it.
A pioneer of convergence in media production, Rosenblum highlights a key theme underlining many of the discussions which took place at the conference. Consumers want their web content in a variety of forms, not just print. And editors must fill this need using innovation instead of just making sure the content is there. Rick Waghorn, editor of My Football Writer champions the idea of offering the news consumer audio and video options where possible not only to flesh out the written article but in some cases replace it.
The launch of BBC iplayer a year ago changed the way users view video content on the web – allowing for more and more programmes to be live streamed and watched at leisure online. Mobile media has also grown immensely this year – with Apple’s 3G iPhone and WiFi friendly iTouch allowing users to access the internet on the go. Technology preditions for 2009 are positive video journalism will continue to dominate, with sites like Hulu and CBS’s TV.com already setting the standard by allowing intergration with the unstoppable iPhone. Editors have no choice but to go digital or risk losing touch with their readers and this is serious business in a market already battling against global recession. As Roy Greenslade said in a feature looking at the year ahead for newspapers:
The importance of online journalism cannot be stressed too often. It is foolish to call it the future because the future is now.
Miss Kiss notes it is difficult for journosaurs (a term coined by Ben Schott in his Words of 2008 as ‘a journalist who rants and rails against online media’) to get out of their comfort zones and rethink business models, but Rosenblum’s message is clear:
He had some great thoughts about alot of things that the industry needed to hear. You can’t do radical change in small steps, it just doesn’t work. You have to do the full monty, and that means fully embracing the internet and everything that it means.
