So says Martin Merzer, formerly of the Miami Herald, at the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors multimedia workshop in Tampa this past weekend.
In a session about writing online, Merzer said in an on-demand world, those who can write the news straight, accurate and fast are in demand. Hey now.
Reported on a horrific triple murder in the semi-rural outskirts of Tampa. Authorities charged Edward Covington in the murders of his 26-year-old girlfriend and her two children, ages 2 and 7.
Details were not released, but investigators said the three people and the family dog were mutilated. One person was decapitated. Veteran crime scene technicians called it among the most gruesome scenes they’d ever worked.
The Modern Journalist is a new blog authored by former Wired reporter and current “Media Informatics” professor Brad King. Smart dude. He’s got great insight and instinct into where journalism is headed next.
More importantly, he’s not asking what went wrong with the business. He’s teaching anyone who will listen how to make it right again. I’m paraphrasing, but King calls the discussions he’s started the “conversation we’ve all wanted to have been waiting for” and it’s attracting programmers, journalists, newspaper managers, academics and all kinds of digital pioneers.
Played around with WordPress and made some changes to the blog. Mostly organizational stuff, like creating new pages up top. I’m still getting the hang of WordPress. I’m a TypePad guy at work.
Huge fan of This American Life. Anyone seen the television show yet? I haven’t, but I’ll bet the formula – extraordinary stories from ordinary people – translates just as well on the television screen as it does on the radio. In fact, I’ve said that newspaper.com’s oughtta pay attention to TAL. There’s lots to be learned about audio storytelling. Get the NPR podcast here.
New(s) doc. Read all about it here. I wonder if anyone’s started the documentary on the rebirth of American journalism yet.
Tim Robbins railed against the current standards of television news at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas. Listen here (Link courtesy TransBuddha)
“We don’t need to look at the car crash. We don’t need to live off the pain and humiliation of the unfortunate…We don’t need to celebrate our pornographic obsession with celebrity culture. We are better than that.
Instead of catering to the gossips, the scolds and the voyeurs, we can appeal to the better nature of our audience. the better nature of what our country is all about.”
There’s a short list already. I wasn’t on it.
Chin up, right? I’ll be hitting this soon next month, anyway.
I’m applying for a multimedia training seminar at the Knight Digital Media Center in Berkeley, Calif. It’s the real deal for learning the tools of the trade and applying them to good storytelling. Can’t hurt to apply, right? Here’s the essay I wrote:
I can’t escape the question of whether or not being a fairly young, jack-of-all trades in the newsroom is a good thing.
In my year in the big leagues, I hope I’ve proven that I can be good at whatever I’m asked to do. On any day, that could be a lot of different things, all related to reporting, writing, recording, photographing and producing news. For the paper and/or the Web.
But I don’t think I’m great at any of them (yet).
That’s why I’m applying for this training. I want to shape online news coverage for the future while holding onto the hallmarks of the past. That means being armed with skills and going far beyond basic knowledge to produce smart, sophisticated and meaningful multimedia.
It’s time to exceed what’s expected of a reporter charged with the upkeep of the newspaper’s breaking news blog. I want to break free of the stigma that only the big stories, or stories that are guaranteed to garner page hits, deserve a multimedia treatment. That’s gonna kill us.
The way I see it, there’s an untapped audience clamoring for good online journalism. Good multimedia will be what convinces an entire generation that’s neglected the traditional newspaper to Start Paying Attention.
And it’s going to take a new generation of journalists to lead the way. I want to be one of them.
This will be a place to store things, spout ideas and keep the world current about me.
