May 2000, Vol. 11, No. 5

More multimedia

How to organize a web site, train reporters for video and route ads

Live, from Chicago: Business writer Bill Barnhart during his live report on CLTV’s afternoon news show from the multimedia news room at the Chicago Tribune. Photo by Glenn Kaupert.

There may be a place in today’s newspaper or magazine where line workers and executives don't have to worry about "new media" or "multimedia" or at least something more than the traditional ink-on-paper business.

If that’s the case, though, I would be hard-pressed to determine where that place might be.

New media -- it’s hardly new any more, and some of it borders on the downright old-fashioned -- pervades the print operation today. You don't even have to be a forward-thinking publishing executive to think about multimedia -- it is now a fact of life.

This new way of thinking about our traditional businesses fascinates me. I have always been partial to video, but the notion that you can combine print, video, audio and on-line into one big publishing empire is beyond fascinating -- it’s downright exhilarating.

I dispatched Correspondent L. Carol Christopher to take measure of the latest trend in on-line: the movement of the on-line operation out of the direct control of the newspaper and into a third-party environment (albeit a third-party owned by the newspaper company).

Certainly our friends at Advance Publications and Cox have always organized their operations this way, but with the New York Times Co. and Knight Ridder recently rejecting the earlier model and setting up new media outside, it seemed like a good time to take a peek at what these guys were doing.

Last time we visited the Platypus Workshop to see how still photographers were making the transition to shooting motion video (see The Cole Papers, April 2000). This time, I asked our newest staffer, Aimee Beck, to take a look at how print reporters are making the transition to reporters who appear on cable and broadcast. It’s clear from Beck’s report that some people think this transition is a big deal, while others are more sanguine about the whole thing. But whether reporters think they'll die from stage fright or are sterling performers, the point is that publishing executives need to understand that every reporter will approach the problem in a different way and that each will have their own unique responses. Remember, our specialty is handling creative people under stress -- that was something that Microsoft couldn't understand with its Sidewalk network and so it’s something you shouldn't forget.

Correspondent Jay Small dropped by America East and New Media World in Hershey, Pa., for a few days of chatting about how the Web is affecting smaller newspapers. He comes back with some interesting recommendations that deserve your attention.

Contributor Kellie K. Speed then takes us on the journey of the digital display ad -- how newspapers have encouraged suppliers to develop routing and tracking systems to handle all the disparate elements that make up a display advertisement. The systems are getting better and they too have now been tuned to be aware of the need for multiple media.

We wrap up in Hellbox with an abbreviated Bit Bucket and an explanation of why things haven't been normal around here for the last couple of months.

The magazine of 2000 is certainly a lot different than Rolling Stone that I left in the mid-'70s; hell, the newspaper of 2000 is a lot different than the San Francisco Examiner that I left in the late ’80s.

There’s no room to be nostalgic about publishing of the past -- there’s only room to figure out how we're going to do publishing in the future.

-- David M. Cole

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.