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Nieman Reports Winter 2006 Issue Goodbye Gutenberg Exploring New Connections Taking the Big Gulp 'The Web is its own medium with its own characteristics. It is not newspapers. It is not TV news. It is not radio.' By Jane Ellen Stevens The Web is swallowing everything, and most newspaper companies are responding by doing what they've always done when big news stories roll into town—throwing everything they can at them. Two years ago, they threw blogs. Last year, podcasts. This year, it's videos. The Web—mysterious, frightening and inspiring—is all of these things (blogs, podcasts, videos), and it is none of them. And if newspaper companies (as well as television and radio news organizations) take the time to understand this new medium and set strategic goals to transition to
This journey toward the new begins with the basics—and this means learning the characteristics of the Web. A journalist might ask why anyone needs to know something so seemingly arcane as the characteristics of a communications medium, but when you don't know how a game—football, soccer, baseball—works, it's hard to play it. And if you don't understand foreign words, you can't speak the language. Another way to look at it is this: The first film was a recording of a theater production, and film isn't theater. The first TV production was a radio program, and we know that television isn't radio. But when the Web came along, newspapers thought it was a place to put text and still photos; radio news thought it was a place to put audio files (and text scripts of audio files), and television news treated it as a place to put videos (and text scripts of video stories). The Web is its own medium with its own characteristics. It is not newspapers. It is not TV news. It is not radio. Understanding the Web Before the Web existed, there was (and still is) the Internet. From the get-go, the Internet was a solution-oriented medium: Ask a question, get an answer. And it was an interactive medium: No longer were you sitting back and waiting to be told what you needed to know. You asked the question. The Internet was participatory: You and all of those other people out there were connecting—and sharing and talking—with everyone else. Along came the Web, and not only were these basic traits—solution-oriented, interactive and participatory—expanded with new technologies, but other facets emerged. Rather than go through the chronology, here are the characteristics as they apply to news organizations: Solution-Oriented Stories: No longer can news organizations just point out the problem. They've got to address a solution, including looking at other communities that have solved the problem. News organizations can do this by providing links to these successful efforts. Also, no longer are solutions personal—as in how you can make your home thief-proof? They're also community-oriented and aimed at prevention. How can my community be more thief-proof? How can we prevent people from turning into thieves? Context: The Web is infinitely deep and all points on it are connected. That means stories no longer stand alone. They're embedded in a matrix—a Web shell—that connects to stories done in the past, to data, to all the players and organizations involved in the story or the issue addressed, and to resources. Real Time = Continuity: For the first time, a communications medium mirrors life. Artificial constructs of 24-hour newspaper deadlines or multiple daily TV or radio deadlines are gone. Most news organizations figured this out a while back and have established continuous news desks or are busy doing so now. This also means the end of "been there, done that" journalism. Just because journalists drop in, do a story, and go away, the issue doesn't. Occasionally, for example, news organizations do a series about domestic violence in their communities. Once they publish, they won't tackle the subject again for at least a year, usually longer, and rarely do they cover this issue with regularity, unless celebrities or politicians are involved. But domestic violence is often the leading felony aggravated assault in a community and the economic and emotional costs in dealing with it are enormous. In some large cities, grappling with the effects of domestic violence takes a big bite out of the budgets of the medical community (EMTs and emergency rooms), the police, adult courts, juvenile courts, welfare agencies, child protective services, and schools. Now community members have a communications medium that is on 24/7 and can absorb input from many sources to foster solutions to problems, whether journalists are involved or not. Participatory: Blogs, ratings sites, wikis, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. To traditional top-down journalists, this looks like a cacophonic community at its best and communication anarchy at its
Personalization: Stories embedded in a matrix of data and resources enable people to "personalize" the story to pursue their own interests and questions that arise when they read, see or experience it. The BBC's Iraq site,
Multimedia Stories and Information: On the Web, storytelling and information become multimedia stories and information. When done well, these multimedia presentations offer some combination of video, text, audio, still photos, graphics and interactivity in a nonlinear format in which the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant. Emphasis is on the visual, with supporting text. In newspapers, stories have to be told in text, with accompanying photographs. On TV, stories have to be told in video. In radio, stories have to be told in audio. On the Web, the story decides how it is to be told. That sounds a little Zen-like, but here's the point: When doing a story, a journalist evaluates what part of it works best in photos, what part in audio, what part in video, what part in text, what part in infographics, and then assembles the story using the best parts in each medium. This makes for much more powerful and informative storytelling. Becoming a Web-Centric News Organization By understanding the medium, a news organization can set goals for a transition to a Web-centric newsroom, which is oriented to doing stories for the Web first, then spinning off text, photos, audio, video and infographics for print, PDAs, iPods, iPods with video, cell phones, and any other communications platform. A list of steps to take to become a Web-centric newsroom emerged after two years of cyber, phone and occasional face-to-face conversation among members of a think tank called Journalism That
Jane Ellen Stevens does multimedia reporting and storytelling for a variety of organizations and consults with news organizations that are committed to making the transition to a Web-centric presentation. She also teaches multimedia reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and for the Knight New Media Center's multimedia reporting workshops. Table of contents Printer-friendly format |
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