Recovery programme for newspapers
Paul Grabowicz from the University of California at Berkley. It’s not enough to just to stick up a video version of a story alongside the text version: “We have to take control of the technology and not let the technology dictate to us”.
He recommends storyboarding elements of the story and working out which medium suits it best: “If you have data, don’t put up a chart – put up a database and let users search it. If you want to create a mood and get people to feel a certain way about a story, use photos. It it’s action – tell that in video.”
This is great. He’s composing a ten-step recovery programme for newspapers. For starters, he said for one week drop news reporting and just run wire stories instead. By the end of the week, see if anyone has noticed. He guarantees that newspapers would get a far smaller response than if they dropped a popular comic strip. And that says that “nearly everything we’re doing is wrong. We’re just not reaching people”.
Secondly, he said reporters should ditch the Roladex for a week and go out to talk to people they’ve never talked to before. “Go to bus tops, beauty salons and bars and talk to regular people. Find out what they care about, start recruiting them and when you find someone very articulate get them to contribute to a blog. Listen to people.”
Robb Montgomery from VisualEditors.com: “To get where I am after 20 years in newspapers I’ve had to embrace an inversion of my thinking – sometimes a heretical inversion of my thinking.” He did the video blog for the World Editors Forum in Moscow in June alongside John Burke. Both of them are very good at snooker.
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