Let’s lay it out.
These are basically my notes from David Johnson’s first Saturday interactive journalism class. Excuse the choppiness.
Why the turmoil?
- Anyone can publish.
The cost of entry of the newspaper business is very large. Just to buy a printing press you can expect to spend $50 million. The Washington Times only recently paid off their presses that they bought in the early 80s. However, with a computer, an Internet connection, a domain name and a hosting plan, anyone is able to publish their ideas/stories/photos/video for arguably a teensy fraction of what it would cost to break into the traditional publishing business.
But, that doesn’t mean that everyone knows how to publish effectively.
- Relevancy & Timeliness
The Web is an immediate form of information. We (the webbies) offer the immediacy of broadcast with the depth of print. The newspaper prints an article at 11 pm from a wire that came in at 5 pm that was edited for two hours after being written by someone at the wire service at 3 pm. You’ll see it tomorrow morning, but you could have seen it at 3, when the story was originally written.
- Advertising
The only thing that defines how long a newspaper can be is the amount of advertising sold for that issue.
The huge push right now is to create video content, which Johnson says is one of the most inefficient ways to bring content to your audience. It takes people to go out and gather the video, then time to edit, etc…
As if you haven’t seen this already: O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0 (yay 2005!)
Here’s the bottom line: The key job of an interactive journalist will be to tune out the static of all the voices of the Internet and tune in what’s relevant. Forever the gatekeepers, huh?
What I Hope
Obama FTW
I may not agree with everything he does, but I hope every day that he survives to Inauguration and beyond.
How sad is it that I keep that hope beating in my heart because of a man’s skin color? Why is there still so much hate in this world that I feel the need to worry about his life? When are we as a country going to sit down and have that conversation about race? The elephant has been in the freakin’ room for a long time now.
Gah.
In other news, I’m still producing Flash for the American Observer. As much as I love going after a good story, figuring out ways to visually represent data and stories is pretty thrilling. How much you wanna bet that’s going to play a part in my post-graduate job?
There is a one credit course being offered next semester, on Fridays. It meets at the Washington Post downtown and we’d get to speak with some of the best journalists out practicing today. But here’s the catch… there are spots for only four graduate students. In order to get a spot, we have to submit a two-page essay on, “why you should be one of the eight AU students chosen to participate, and what you would do if you were in charge of both the newspaper and Web divisions in 2009.” It’s a toughie. I have an idea of what I’ll write, but dang… only four spots?
As Russ said, “Someone’s going to be in tears after this one.”
