Greetings from Hershey, Penn.
A handful of NAA staffers (Michael Snyder and Lisa Rabasca of Presstime Magazine, Beth Lawton of New Business & Audience Development) are here covering the
America East Newspaper Operations and Technology Conference. Today and tomorrow, we’ll post a bunch of highlights from digital media sessions of the conference.
If you’re here, let us know by e-mailing me (Beth) at
beth.lawton@naa.org. And feel free to add your own notes in the comments section of any America East post.
Note: This is one of a series of posts from the America East 2007 conference in Hershey, Penn. (See more coverage from the first day of America East .)
America East Opening Session: From Shovelware to Digital Storytelling
The e-edge track of the conference started with a few reminders from Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. While recalling some of the challenges the newspaper industry faces (profit pressures, a culture that doesn’t change easily, etc.), Paul said news editors need to understand the “new news audience”. The new news audience is using multiple gadgets simultaneously, and they take advantage of time-shifting and multi-tasking. People in the new audience are triangulators: “Now we can sit and look at our computer and get information from the Washington Post and Al Jazeera and The Times of London … and be able to quickly and readily combine information,” she said. The new audience is also made up of contributors and learners more than browsers (i.e., they often go online with a specific task in mind).
Paul also highlighted the need to rethink storytelling: We need to move from explain to experience (example: MSNBC’s baggage screener interactive feature), from tell to explore (example: The Sarasota Herald Tribune’s interactive evidence exploration feature from an old homicide case), and from inform to invite opinions (example: Seattle Times budget balancer), she said. Online newspapers can be encyclopedic instead of just episodic by connecting the ‘dots’ (links) between ongoing stories or issues. Other changes: From text to sound and images, from reading to playing, and from reporting to databasing.