Ideas for Online

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Ideas for Online

• Jay Small
• Director, Online Audience and Operations
• E.W. Scripps Co., Newspapers Interactive Group
• Owner and Principal Consultant
• Small Initiatives, http//smallinitiatives.com/

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Example A
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Example B
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Where are you headed?

• Growing?
• Status quo?
• Shrinking?

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Whats No. 1?

• What is your newspapers top priority for this
  year?

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Whats No. 999,999,999?

• Whats the most significant thing your
  organization is doing now, that you wish you
  could just stop doing?

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The schizophrenic Internet
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The Internet is not your friend

• Craigslist Broad price destruction in
  classifieds categories
• Google Turning advertising into
  pay-for-performance, at a huge profit
• Everyone knows The cost of delivering a unit of
  information is a fraction what it was in print,
  over air
• Its cheap to launch new products
• Just looking at the pictures

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The Internet is your friend

• Papers can now compete with broadcast for
  immediacy, retain or enhance depth
• All common content forms converge in one place
• Fastest-growing revenue stream for newspapers
• Its cheap to launch new products

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Influence of our heaviestonline users

• (Hint Theyre machines,not people)

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How spiders influence what we do

• They dont care about animated content
• They dont care how your page looks
• They cant read the content of images or videos
• They process text
• They do care about codecontent
• They do care about semantics

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YouTube has an SEO edge
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But my paper cant do
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Bluffton Today
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Drupal
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The Onion
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WaPo Congress votes database
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Caspio Bridge
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FileMaker
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Even the simplest databases
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But what about journalism?
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How do I tell a story?

• Not so simple anymore
• Prose Linear, nonlinear or headline/teaser
  update?
• Imagery Still photo, illustration, infographic?
• Sounds Spoken, ambient, music?
• Motion pictures Video, animation
• Searchable databases
• Links
• Mashups (some or all of the above!)

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Processes of news storytelling

• Assigning
• Setting priorities Which stories?
• Newsgathering
• Finding the elements of the story
• Facts
• Controversies
• Opinions
• Personalities/emotions
• Visuals
• Sounds

• Preparing
• Assembling the story
• Editing and refining the story
• Packaging
• Attracting attention
• Retaining attention

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How do you preparea news organizationfor
multimedia communications?
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The best example I know

• Joe Howry, editor, Ventura County Star
• I decided to put all my training budget money
  into one program that would move the newsroom
  into the future. It has evolved from a
  semi-experimental dab into multimedia journalism
  into a full-blown, newsroomwide focus on becoming
  a true multimedia organization.
• To date, we have 24 fully trained multimedia
  journalists. We also have six editors who have
  taken part in some or all of the training. We
  also included a member of our advertising and
  marketing departments in the training. The
  percentage of staff who have been exposed to
  multimedia training now runs over 33 percent.

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The best example I know

• Joe Howry, editor, Ventura County Star
• We simply took the people in training 8 at a
  time out of the daily mix. The training lasts
  six weeks. It required sacrifices from
  everybody on staff.
• If an editor or organization is considering the
  kind of fundamental changes multimedia journalism
  requires, they must commit fully and without
  reservation.
• We can push our readers much further than we
  think. Youd be surprised how little pushback you
  get when you do a five inch story on a city
  council meeting as opposed to the typical 15- or
  20-inch takeout.

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Ventura multimedia projects
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Discussion topics and examples
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Quad Cities T-shirt folder
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Allentown Breaking news video
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Fort Wayne Police report database
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Nacogdoches State parks
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Frederick Drug bust video
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Washington Post OnBeing
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Thank you!

• Jay Small
• jsmall_at_scrippsweb.com
• jay.small_at_smallinitiatives.com
• Small Initiatives, http//smallinitiatives.com/