Dec/100
Os Media em 2011: Previsões
O meu caro amigo Mr.Steed desafiou-me para fazermos um post conjunto com as previsões para os media em 2011. Consultámos algumas pessoas cuja opinião nos pareceu ser pertinente, tanto da nossa praça como além fronteiras, sobre o que poderão ser as tendências para o negócio dos media num futuro próximo.
É claro que há riscos neste tipo de coisas. Existe uma frase feita que diz que a mudança está a ocorrer mais depressa do que a nossa adaptação a ela. E quando falo de nós, refiro-me quer a utilizadores, quer a produtores de conteúdos. Atravessamos a maior revolução desde a Revolução Industrial, que assenta não só em avanços tecnológicos mas também em novas relações entre os media e os seus públicos, entre instituições e cidadãos comuns, entre os próprios utilizadores.
Se tiverem dúvidas pensem nisto: o Youtube tem 5 anos; o Google tem 10; o Facebook tem quase 600 milhões de utilizadores, e quantos de vocês estão lá há mais de 2 anos? E que consequências traz algo como o Wikileaks? E quantas vezes a Internet e as redes sociais são referidas nos noticiários, nos jornais, e quantas vezes as primeiras informações surgem através de cidadãos anónimos (cada vez mais um paradoxo), com vídeos filmados com telemóveis, fotografias imediatamente colocadas na rede, ou tweets durante os acontecimentos?
A esta nova lógica juntam-se dispositivos completamente novos, que exigem uma linguagem e formas de comunicação também completamente novas. A primeira década do século XXI vai ficar na história como a década da Revolução Digital. Por isso, qualquer exercício de adivinhação é uma tarefa complicada.
Neste post vou só destacar algumas das ideias propostas pelos nossos convidados, mas poderão ler tudo na íntegra no blog do Mr.Steed, onde ele faz as suas próprias previsões para o ano que se avizinha.
Uma coisa é certa: são tempos incríveis para se ser jornalista, e poucas gerações se podem gabar de poder ter vivido algo que tenha afectado a maneira de nos relacionarmos com o mundo de forma tão profunda, como ao que estamos a assistir todos os dias.
Algumas redações vão descobrir em 2011 que: 1) existe uma coisa chamada World Wide Web; 2) os computadores servem para mais do que bater texto, editar imagem, ver p0rn/receitas e receber spam; 3) o Internet Explorer dá para fazer mais coisas do que ler blogs e os sites da concorrência. Do número de descobertas dependerá a velocidade da migração dos jornais para as plataformas a que continuamos a chamar novas como se a última década tivesse demorado três meses.
Paulo Querido
I said that things would get ugly in 2010 and have been sadly proved right. I think they’ll get even uglier in 2011 as the reaction against the shift in power grows and the fallout from Wikileaks continues. Expect a lot of rushed-through legislation against the invisible threats of the web which has implications for journalists and publishers.
Paul Bradshaw
Novos títulos irão surgir mas com enfoque em nichos. Títulos especializados. Direccionados a comunidades.
Rodrigo Saraiva
Muitos média com conteúdos medíocres não resistirão a fazer-se pagar por eles, como se fosse possível enganar os utilizadores. Perderão em influência e em publicidade.
António Granado
The new year will also see a refinement of multimedia strategies. So far many multimedia projects have been experimental in some ways, but we can now look back and see what works and what doesn’t and better serve our readers and viewers.
Mark S.Luckie
Jornalistas da comunicação escrita, com maior espírito de sobrevivência, intensificarão a sua aprendizagem nas áreas das técnicas audiovisuais.
Alexandre Pais
Os jornalistas estão a descobrir avidamente o Twitter e o Facebook, são cada vez mais bloggers e produtores de conteúdos nas redes sociais, e começam até a ser gestores das suas comunidades on-line. Também haverá cada vez mais free-lancers. Provavelmente o Sindicato de Jornalistas não conseguirá acompanhar esta nova realidade. Parece-me pois provável que um dia destes surja uma associação profissional que congregue os novos interesses e desafios da profissão.
Alda Telles
As empresas de media portuguesas ainda não têm um modelo de negócio para estes novos tempos.
Manuel Falcão
E que previsões têm vocês para o ano que se avizinha? O que é que esperam dos media em 2011?
May/101
Help me out with my #ParanoiaTimeline
My last assignment for the Online Journalism module for this term is going to be a timeline. Well, it’s more than a timeline, because I want to create an interactive graph, that resembles a timeline, with videos, graphs, interviews, the works. But i want to do it in less than two weeks. Are you willing to help me?
The idea is to show the biggest social paranoia events, at a global scale, that happened between the end of the longest paranoia period of the 20th century – the Cold War – in 1990, and the next catastrophic “event” set for 2012 (believe me, some people are terrified over that). I have a list for Pandemics, like SARS, Mad Cow syndrome, swine flu, bird flu; Environmental, like the ozone layer and global warming; Technology includes items like Y2K; and Terrorism, a real situation that keeps our society on borderline paranoia.
As you might have noticed, most of these events were huge on the news, they affected our lives in some way, but most of them never amounted to nothing, or to not as much as the media predicted. I need your help to give depth, and sort the time windows for each one of these events, and if you can interview someone who can talk about this, or tell me about good experts in any of these fields, share information or previous works you made before about any of these subjects, I’d be most grateful, and you’ll all be credited in the assignment. Anyway, if the timeline is not finished by the established deadline, I’ll be working on it for a few more weeks. I’m building a website around this and I really want you to contribute, this is also a crowdsourcing experience.
How can you participate? For now i’m using a Public Google Wave, anyone can join in, but i have a wiki, if you want to use it instead of the Wave just send me a message. I’m thinking about opening a Facebook group, but I’m still thinking about it. I’m open to suggestions. If you know any similar projects just leave the links below in the comment box. Thank you.
Apr/100
Breadth Portfolio: Part 1 – Maps and Forms
In this series of posts I’ll share part of the report I wrote for the MA Online Journalism’s Multimedia Journalism module, in which I describe some experiments I developed in the last months. I’d appreciate some feedback and ideas on this.
Maps and Forms
One of the most interesting phenomena in online journalism is how media can easily be left out of the process of delivering the news: they are no longer the source of information to a wider audience, but most times sit on the sidelines trying to grasp what is going on before their eyes. As we have learned with breaking news stories, it has been the crowd, the common users, that have revealed events to the world faster, more accurately and in a more diverse fashion than “regular” media is able to. We saw that happen with the Hudson River airplane near-crash, lots of earthquakes from China to Haiti, with the demonstrations in Iran. All were relevant for different reasons, but their dissemination to a wider audience has a few points in common: social networks, and the absence of media, at least in the very first instants.
I’ve been defending for a while that journalists are no longer mediators between fact and public, but news DJs that remix the information available, building on preexistent content, generated by users, authorities, and other media. Yet, media seem to fail to gather and organize this torrent of information.
When on the 20th of February a storm hit Madeira Island, causing mudslides and floods, the silence on most news websites, radios and TV stations was deafening. But on Twitter there were accounts from local people about what was going on, and, above all, they had videos. The event was being tagged as #tempmad, so it was easy to follow all the developments, but the information seemed to be too scattered to get a real picture of what was going on in the island, and since there was no one organizing the information available, I decided to create a map on Google[ii], to place videos, pictures and other relevant information.
Starting off with links to YouTube videos published by witnesses on location, and asking for more content, I quickly put the map together and made it available to everyone and although it hadn’t many items, it started to get hits at an impressive rate. Since it was Saturday, and most newsrooms were empty, it was the only visual representation online of the events in the first hours, and it was used by some Portuguese media[iii] in their coverage of the event (more specifically, two national newspapers and public television). It got 10.000 views in the first hours and reached 30.000 in just two days. One month later, it has the impressive number of 77 thousand visits.
Madeira Map
But that was relatively easy, since all I had to do was to place and embed the video and photographic content available into the map. When I started collaborating on the second day with an impromptu team that was aggregating data about the floods in a Netvibes website[iv] created by IT student, I started thinking about how to create ways to make information available in real time, or with the direct participation of the community. We were already trying to create lists of missing people, when doubts started about the number of dead. So we asked people to share the information they had, and since we couldn’t be waiting for that information to show up on the timeline, I created a form[v] where people could – with some detail – give out the names, residence and origin of the victims, and where they were found. Rumors placed the number of dead around the hundred, but final count marks 43, and that form was useful to have some grasp on reality. The form would then feed a spreadsheet automatically, placed on the website.
I also installed two maps, one giving the number of dead by district[vii], fed through a spreadsheet that automatically placed the marks in the right geolocation; the other was a recent Umapper development, showing geolocated tweets[ix] using the referred #tempad tag. These were easy to set and place and I think they did their job quite well.
It is hard to present a structured research for this assignment about this situation. The technical skills required are not that demanding, and the most rewarding and interesting tools for live mapping did not apply or were too complicated to put into use in a breaking news operation. But as geolocation gains more and more relevance in the production and sharing of content, the standards for online news coverage start to revolve around the concept.
One of the things that struck me is that despite these are tools available for free and easy to use, media don’t take advantage of them. It was really fast to deploy these features on the website, and there wasn’t much science involved, all that is required to respond in a breaking news situation. GoogleDocs are simple to use, and the latest developments allowed them to become almost “just-add-water” apps. What is the real challenge is to choose the right way to present information. It’s the journalist’s discerning view that will make the difference between good and bad web-based newsgathering.
Links and references
[iii] Post with media references http://tinyurl.com/y9wdu3t
[iv] Netvibes website http://tinyurl.com/yhb8zux
[v] Form on page http://tinyurl.com/yhb8zux
[vii] Death Map (on top) http://tinyurl.com/yhb8zux
[ix] Ummaper tweet map at the end of the post http://tinyurl.com/yapktkz
Apr/100
Information is free. Experience and context are money.
All in? I don't think so...
If you are reading this via RSS go to the real post to enjoy its full effect. There’s free beer.
This has been in everyone’s mind: how to make journalism a profitable business? Ads, paywalls, premium and freemium contents, there have been many options, but none seems to be working. Murdoch builds walls while others
Recently Johnston Press decided to give up their paywall since the subscription numbers were appalling, in the single or low double digits.
The stakes are high, and yet everyone is showing how bad poker players they are, going all in when they don’t have to.
The biggest problem is that there aren’t many users willing to pay for information they know they can get for free someplace else or that is not important for them. I’m not, for sure. Besides, most of the content news websites have to offer could be in print and my experience as a news consumer would be exactly the same, so why bother? So, how to keep those who want the free stuff, but how to profit from the content generated by journalists?
Imagine that you own a news content production company, and you have a team of talented people who can make good journalism, using
Exhibit A
Imagine you have those people willing to engage and participate with the community, not only to dig for stories or disseminate their work, but to enrich the community member’s experience with information about the process, or
- information
I think that transparency and time are two valuable items, and that time is the most valuable of them. Communities are part of the newsrooms’ life whether we like it or not, both in the construction and the distribution process. Journalists are the quarterback/midfielder (choose metaphor according to origin) of the news process, receiving the ball and creating options and deciding part of its course, although when it’s out of its hands/feet they should still be focused on the game but let the ball go. The rest of the team is community and the goal is to inform, and like in a real game there are less players than passive audience. I’m still working on this specific metaphor.
Still, people would be part of it, pitch their own stories, creating a crowdsourced model within a traditional news structure.
Imagine you have tools that allow you to add context or media or extra information like raw bulks of data and that your reporters know how to build an online article with all its basic features but also with extra content that enriches the knowledge and experience of the user, using your own archives, other people’s archives, other websites that you found relevant to the story, ongoing conversations on Twitter and Facebook, ;
Imagine that. And think how you can do all of those things, with the same time, trained to deliver the basic and the ultimate news content. And consider to make some of that ultimate content available for free, just like the basic takeaway content you have. And ask people to pay a fee for the rest, and allow them to embed videos, slideshows, audio in their own websites, and help them look cool in their community because you create cool content. You don’t need to charge much because you are building a brand. The light bulb was sold below production price in the beginning because it was something everyone would use, and after a while, production costs lowered because there was a lot of demand, and then there was profit.
So this is how I perceive the future of the business will be, a mix between several models, that favors smaller endeavors than juggernauts, and based on quality and engagement, and new ways to create traditional content, in a contextualized way.
So, a rough example would be:
mock news picture
tell if the situation is still ongoing and you can read more about it here (linked to related article) or it had a previous related event to which we will also link to or show the related media, or even better a timeline of the events
specific details, more pictures, detailed info, background info where , who was involved,
yes free yourself! and a basic WHY (that could be expanded to whatever you’d like). If it looks short to you, well, most of the info people read out of articles is all in the first paragraphs, where the w’s and h are.
yes free yourself! People would have to pay for the contextual information in the expandable items. This doesn’t mean the free content would be poor, but that the extended content would be really rich.
I confess this is inspired/stolen from Kevin Sablan’s post, and he says context is personal. I say it’s valuable, and providing an experience through information is profitable. It is technically possible and with better results than i presented, and when you have algorithms gathering and producing readable information, it is wise to reconsider the whole news process, how information is collected, analyzed, produced and distributed, and do it in a way people can use it and be willing to pay for at the same time.
Did you clicked in all the links in this post? Why would you? And if you did, how different was your experience? Are you going back to click a few? I know you will now.
So, what do you think?
Jan/101
Multimedia Producer x 6 – Part 1
For my MA’s Enterprise assignment, I had to develop a business model for a project. Well, my project was all about promoting myself as a Multimedia Producer. Since I needed a to have a case study, I decided to interview the ones who are in the frontlines. I made a blunder in the second question, which proves you should leave your editing for the morning, and not send emails in the middle of the night, after 16 hours working in front of the computer. But these guys and gal were pretty generous, and gave me good answers anyway.
What I learned from this was that there’s a misconception of what is Multimedia Production on the part of the news companies, and that the market is really hard these days. But there is a need for professionals with multimedia skills. I’d like to thank these magnificent six for their time and contribution, and also to Mindy MacAdams for all the help. Let’s see how the grade turns out.
These are the first three, tomorrow i’ll post the others. Be sure to check out their work.
Jen Friedberg
Jen Friedberg is a multi media producer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Her work can be seen at http://www.jenfriedberg.com/
What is a Multimedia Producer?
A Multimedia Producer is someone who makes sure that all of the proper video, stills and audio are gathered and packaged in a user-friendly way.
The Multimedia Producer may also gather some or all of the content his or herself and/or be the person who creates the display. The content could be displayed in a single Flash presentation or possibly as smaller components linked to a common HTML based start page.
What is the need for this type of skilled professionals?
A strong knowledge of the basics of web design is a must. If the producer is not a photographer, videographer or reporter his or her self, he or she must at least be familiar with those processes so that he or she can have a realistic idea about the time and resources needed for each part of the project. The producer’s job is to deliver quality on budget and on time.
Where can MmP’s work? What are their business opportunities?
Multimedia Producers could be freelancers working for large corporations who need to produce multimedia content for their websites. Some organizations like hospitals and universities often have their own Multimedia Producers. They could also work for ad agencies, newspapers or TV stations, NPR or anyone with a large enough website to employ a multimedia producer. Some examples are Yahoo, google, MSNBC. Also,there are some new multimedia production houses like Media Storm.
Which are the main problems that a MmP might find in the current situation of the news industry?
New online tools and content management systems are making it easier for less skilled people to put together multimedia projects. It’s now possible for an organization like a newspaper to use their existing staff to put these projects together without the need for a specialist. Since newspapers are continuing to downsize, it is unlikely that they would hire a multimedia producer unless he or she had skills in several areas and could function as a photographer, reporter and videographer as well.
Mark S.Luckie
Mark S. Luckie is the author of 10.000words, one of the best blogs about multimedia and online journalism out there. Mark has produced multimedia and interactive projects for Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times and Contra Costa Times (Ca.).
- Mark S.Luckie
In journalism, a multimedia producer is a journalist who combines different media such as photos, video, audio, text, and other media to tell a single story using several storytelling techniques.
What is the need for this type of skilled professionals?
There a wide variety of media skills that fit under the multimedia umbrella, but a multimedia journalist should know at least two different media skills that he or she can combine into a single story.
Where can MmP’s work? What are their business opportunities?
Multimedia producers can work every sort of journalism outlet including newspapers, television and radio stations, all of which have companion online sites where the multimedia stories resides. Multimedia producers can also work in other fields such as advertising and marketing, as well as freelance for the aforementioned industries.
Which are the main problems that a MmP might find in the current situation of the news industry?
Although multimedia skills are in demand, many news media do not have the financial resources to hire multimedia producers. There are a growing number of multimedia professionals, all of whom are competing for the same jobs. A marketable multimedia producer must have even more skills the average producer to ensure they land one of these coveted positions.
Zach Wise
zach wise
Zach Wise is an award-winning producer for The New York Times. Most recently his work a Peabody award and an Emmy nomination for “Choosing a President”. Before coming to the Times, he was the Senior Multimedia Producer at the Las Vegas Sun, where his work won many awards. He contributed to a Pulitzer prize winning piece on construction deaths on the Las Vegas Strip. His work at the Sun was also recognized at the Webby Awards, National Headliner’s Awards, Online News Association and NPPA Best of Photojournalism.
Wise was also a visiting professor for The School of Visual Communication at Ohio University where he was the executive producer of the Soul of Athens multimedia project and taught the classes that produced it. The project went on to win multiple awards from POYi and NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism.
What is a Multimedia Producer?
In the newspaper/journalism world this generally means someone who produces audio/visual narratives or interactive. In other professions such as tv/film/advertising a producer is the person who oversees a project. I was very confused by this when I first entered journalism having previously worked in the world of tv/film/advertising.
What is the need for this type of skilled professionals?
Not sure I understand this question. The skills needed? or the demand?
Where can MmP’s work? What are their business opportunities?
When I was teaching multimedia, most of my students found work in advertising and the corporate sector. In journalism, there is a great need for talented producers but few opportunities as with most jobs in journalism right now.
Which are the main problems that a MmP might find in the current situation of the news industry?
Quantity over quality is a large problem at smaller companies who are struggling with their identity as a news source.
_______________________________________
Read the other three interviews here.
Jan/102
news:rewired – the Multimedia Journalism session
Top 10 skills for MMJ's
At the news:rewired event we had to choose to attend one of the three sessions about Multimedia Journalism, Social Media for Journalists, and a Troubleshooting Panel on Online Journalism. I went for the most personally appealing and stayed in the lecture theatre for the Multimedia Journalism session. I was curious to see what ideas and pointers the speakers had for an eager-to-learn-about-multimedia crowd. I think some in the audience we’re quite disappointed, but i believe they had the wrong expectations.
The first to take the stand was Adam Westbrook, one of my favorite media bloggers these days, i don’t know how does he do it, but his posts are usually nothing less than brilliant and he has a few ebooks of his own. When i later asked him about his secret he basically told me it was “by being unemployed and having a lot of free time on his hands.” Not unemployed, sorry, freelancing. It’s one of those things i’ll never get, bright people “freelancing”…
Adam, in a fast talking presentation, went through the disparities between both sides of the pond, how the Americans are investing more in multimedia than the British counterpart. I should add the rest of Europe too. There aren’t many examples of sustained investment in multimedia operations and features in the Old Continent. As an example, Westbrook referred the 1 in 8 million series from New York Times, and the several spin offs it had in other outlets.
Since he didn’t have much time, Adam Westbrook decided to show to the audience how AudioSlides work and why: they’re easy, cheap and fast to create and assemble, and if done properly, they can be more compelling than a video. Of course they don’t work every time, but he presented a slideshow that i had already seen at his blog a few weeks ago, that started out to be a video, but worked better as a slideshow. It’s worth watching.
This lightning presentation was followed by Steven Phillips’ from BBC London 94.9fm, that showed how they’re using AudioBoo along with Twitter with @bbctravelalert. I wish i knew about this before, because i was stuck at Whitechappel station in the Hammersmith&City subway train for over half an hour on my way to news:rewired. It seems it’s quite common… As a matter of fact, Phillips presentation wasn’t so much about multimedia, but how he develops his work in the new multimedia/multiplatform environment, using crowdsourcing, social networking, with free apps. Someone asked why was he narrowcasting, since the numbers weren’t that high. The panel quickly found the right answer: they’re developing a conversation, no expenses added. And that’s what these platforms are supposed to do.
And for last we had Justin Kings, who gave us the great list of skills that multimedia journalists should have that you can see at the beginning of this post. Here’s the full presentation.
It was thought provoking, and i believe it raised awareness in the audience about what being a multimedia journalist is all about these days of fast development and uncertainty.
The debate that followed the presentation was also noteworthy, since it was led by two Financial Times reporters who were right when they said that multimedia packages were left out of these presentations, as also data mashups and visualizations. There is a whole world in multimedia besides video and audio slides, and their comment was valuable in the sense that it made me think how we narrow down the multimedia concept to some media, which may not be exactly considered as multimedia. They showed their own work at the newspaper with this interactive chart.
What was left out of this discussion and presentations was that there is more to multimedia than we traditionally defend. It’s not about putting images in motion, or making radio with pictures, but it’s all about using the right tools to tell stories in a non-linear way, with the users in control of the narrative. That is what makes the online journalism different from television, radio and print. Technology is a tool, not an end in itself. And then we went off for lunch, some of us a bit more passionate about the possibilities that lie ahead.
There are accounts about the other sessions. The Troubleshooting panel on Online Journalism was liveblogged, and so did the Social Media for Journalists session.
Dec/094
Portugal: Multimedia & Online Journalism Awards | Prémios de Multimédia e Jornalismo Online
Video Journalism award winner | Vencedor do prémio de videojornalismo
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Last week, the ObCiber awarded, for the second year, the best online journalism works in Portugal. It’s a good way to recognize and evaluate the state of multimedia and online activity of portuguese media, but the feeling I get is that there is a lot to be done. If we look at the nominees, we see that, basically, only three different major news companies made the cut: Jornal de Notícias, Público and Radio Renascença, which are in fact the ones who are developing multimedia in the newsrooms in a sustainable way. The portuguese public television RTP also made the list, with their effort in mobile journalism during the elections, something that deserves to be analyzed by itself, since it had an experimental side to it. But that will have to stay for later. Here are the winners of this year’s edition:
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Na semana passada, o Obciber atribuiu pelo segundo ano os prémios para o melhor jornalismo online em Portugal. É uma boa forma de reconhecer e avaliar o estado e a actividade online dos media portugueses, mas sinto que ainda há muito por fazer. Se olharmos para os nomeados, vemos que basicamente apenas três marcas informativas chegaram lá: Jornal de Notícias, Público e Radio Renascença, que são de facto os que estão a desenvolver o multimédia nas redacções de forma sustentada. A RTP também está na lista, com o seu trabalho de jornalismo móvel durante a campanha eleitoral, algo que por si só merece uma análise mais aprofundada, devido ao seu lado experimental. Mas isso vai ter que ficar para outra altura. Eis os vencedores deste ano:
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Full House for JN | Full House para o JN
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The most nominated and biggest winner was the daily Jornal de Notícias, one of the top selling newspapers in Portugal. They were practically running by themselves in most categories, so the Overall Excellency in CyberJournalism award was more than expected. They also won in Best Multimedia Story, with a work about the credit crunch and citizen’s debts, and Best InfoGraphics with a work about Poker. Público, last year’s big winner, got the Breaking News award. Radio Renascença, the most heard radio in the country, won in the Video category with a piece about nuns in a monastery (they’re a Catholic radio), rewarding their efforts in the video department, that is one of the most hard working in Portugal, and that has been consistently delivering good works. In college journalism, the Porto’s University news endeavour JornalismoPortoNet took the prize home with the “Porto Adrift” dossier. |
O mais nomeado e o maior vencedor foi o Jornal de Notícias, um dos jornais nacionais com maior circulação. Como concorriam quase sozinhos na maioria das categorias, o prémio de Excelência Geral em Ciberjornalismo era mais do que esperado. Eles também venceram na categoria de Melhor Reportagem Multimédia, com um trabalho sobre o endividamento dos portugueses, e Melhor Infografia com um trabalho sobre Poker. O Público, o maior galardoado no ano passado, venceu em Breaking News. A Rádio Renascença venceu na categoria de Video, com um trabalho sobre freiras num mosteiro (são a rádio católica portuguesa), recompensando o seu investimento no departamento de video, que é um dos que mais e melhor trabalha no país. No jornalismo universitário, o JornalismoPortoNet levou o prémio para casa com o dossier “Porto à deriva”
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Best Multimedia Story | Melhor Reportagem Multimédia
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Alfredo Leite, deputy director of Jornal de Notícias, told me that these awards are the recognition of the work that the newspaper has been developing, and an “added responsibility, since the Observatory (ObCiber) gathers some of the people we acknowledge as the most competent in Digital Journalism” in Portugal. He claims JN is one of the most solid news websites in the country “though most times we are not seen that way” by a mainstream audience. “It is also the confirmation of a multidisciplinary team that slowly has been integrating in the digital platforms all the journalists and other resources” of the newspaper. In my opinion, there has been an evolution in Portuguese multimedia news but there is a lot to be done. What i hear is that some strategic mistakes have been made in some newsrooms, by appointing people who know nothing about the internet to coordinate multimedia, the neglect of the online towards a dead tree investment, and a demand for quality where there are no minimum working conditions. But that is not journalism, is plain politics. Still, some are trying. And those will be the ones who will succeed. Tell me what you think about these works in the comments. |
Alfredo Leite, director adjunto do Jornal de Notícias disse-me que estes prémios são “o reconhecimento do trabalho que o JN tem vindo a desenvolver, muitas vezes de forma invisível, de consolidação da sua edição digital” e “uma responsabilidade acrescida já que este Observatório reúne algumas das pessoas a quem mais competências reconhecemos e matéria de jornalismo digital no nosso país”. Ele afirma que o JN é “das webs mais sólidas do país, ainda que nem sempre sejamos reconhecidos enquanto tal pelo mainstream.” “É também a afirmação de uma equipa multidisplinar que aos poucos tem integrado na plataforma digital todos os jornalistas e outros recursos do JN.” Na minha opinião, tem-se assistido a uma evolução no jornalismo multimédia em Portugal, mas é preciso fazer mais. Do que ouço, há erros estratégicos a serem cometidos em algumas redacções, que nomeiam gente que não percebe nada de internet para coordenadores de multimédia, há negligência nos conteúdos online em favorecimento do papel, e uma exigência de qualidade onde não há condições mínimas para o fazer. Mas isso não é jornalismo, são politiquices. Mesmo assim, há quem tente. E esses terão sucesso. Digam o que pensam sobre estes trabalhos nos comentários.
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Sep/090
Changes 3: New column | Mudanças 3: Coluna nova
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And in the latest instalment for changes around here, i’d like to announce that yesterday i started my column dedicated to new media at Rascunho.IOL.pt. I am honored for the invitation they made and hope to provide a few interesting insights about the Media Revolution. The title for this weekly reflection is “Media DJ”, and the English version will be available in my (new) blog, becoming somehow an extension of my work. Below is the first text for Media DJ.
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E no mais recente capítulo dedicado a mudanças por aqui, gostaria de anunciar que ontem iniciei a minha coluna/caderno sobre novos media no Rascunho.IOL.pt. Estou honrado pelo convite que me fizeram e espero dar algumas visões pessoais interessantes sobre a Revolução dos Media. O título para esta reflexão semanal é “Media DJ”, e a versão em inglês estará sempre disponível no meu (novo) blog, sendo uma extensão do meu trabalho. |
REMIX
Imagine a stage, and you’re sitting in the audience. From up there, one or several characters proclaim the news of the day, the events they chose as the most important. They do it at a certain time, in a ritualized fashion and within a specific duration.They ignore your reactions, and aren’t quite interested in you but in how many of you are watching them. This was the paradigm for the relationship between audience and media. Then came the Internet and everything changed.
Today, the stage and the audience share the same space, there are several voices for many subjects, each one with its own perspective and different origins; information flows within that space between all the elements, from media to users, to other users, to other media. The keywords for this new model are sharing, dialogue, mobility/ubiquity and real time. Contents are made of layers, a new contribution or production is built over the previous one. And everyone can participate: with text, photos, video.
The information industry and journalism are going through the biggest revolution they’ve ever gone through. The content creation and dissemination tools evolved rapidly, and more important, they are availabe to anyone. The audience became an active element in the creation and disseminaton of information. In a matter of years we went from static versions of newspapers to multimedia rich content, real time information provided by users in social networks and on Twitter, anywhere, to everywhere, which deviated the media from the center of the news paradigm, forcing them to reconsider how to interact with their users, how to work information on the web, publish it, renew it, in a profound change of processes and views. And also how to make that profitable.
The name of this column is Media DJ, because all these changes influenced journalist’s work, demanding new skills. DJ has a double meaning, being the first, the one who, from other people’s music, mixes, remixes, aligns and generates a new dynamic, turning the whole bigger than the sum of its parts; and it also works for Digital Journalism/Journalist. Information DJs do exactly the same as music DJs, they pick up the pieces and generate a a new set, but with a totally different responsibility: they contribute to the creation of a collective conscience, and a well informed society will make better choices. In the end, nothing changed in the fundamental role of journalism, just the way you do it.
Every week i hope to bring a part of that (r)evolution, that is unfolding faster than reality can keep up. You just have to follow the music.
Sep/091
Download: Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency
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It’s a no-brainer: when Mindy MacAdams says she got 15 of her posts together in a pdf so we can improve our journo-fu, we download it. HERE. |
Não é complicado: quando a Mindy MacAdams diz que juntou 15 posts seus num pdf para que possamos melhorar o nosso kung fu jornalístico, fazemos logo o download. AQUI. |
Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency (PDF; 536 KB)
