Alumni Magazine - Summer 2008 - (Page 66) World War I was the exclusive venue of newspaper correspondents, and Edward R. Murrow’s radio broadcasts from London during the next global war represented a coming of age for radio. The Korean conflict was vividly portrayed in the great magazine photo essays, while Vietnam elevated the importance of TV news. The first Gulf War belonged to cable, and the present conflicts may cement the new status of the Internet and its associated technologies as a news source. “In each case the other has not gone away, they’ve just been enhanced — the storytelling has been made more complete for the audience,” Gelman says. Nowhere are the pressures from the new media felt so strongly as in the newsrooms of America’s newspapers. Shawn MacIntosh, director of culture and change for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — her title alone underscores the immense transition taking place at big-city dailies — addressed some of the paper’s efforts “to straddle this transition from the old media to the new media.” It’s a task complicated by the fact that a newspaper is also a manufacturing enterprise. “Pressmen are not used to mixing it up in the hallways with search-engine optimization experts,” says MacIntosh, noting that the paper makes more deliveries in the Atlanta area each day than UPS. Singling out the Atlanta newspaper as a “leader in the development of an online edition” Because the Internet empowers a more egalitarian form of news reporting by amateurs and citizen journalists, changes are inevitable for journalism. “It’s not going to change radically overnight, but new kinds of journalism and new kinds of reporting are possible.” — Carl DiSalvo when ajc.com was launched three years ago, the former editor described her job as helping the paper become “more embracing of innovation, more adaptive of technology and able to move our resources more quickly.” Like other U.S. newspapers, the JournalConstitution faces declining circulation and ad revenues. Readership for the online edition, however, is growing, she says, explaining that its content is different from the print newspaper. She declined to go into specifics regarding the newspaper’s research into the differences between online and print customers. Ajc.com makes extensive use of video, images and links to blogs and other text to present the day’s news. In addition, some of the sections formerly available in print have been moved completely online. Reorganization of the newsroom from 16 departments to four, for example, reflects the streamlining — and the personnel layoffs — produced by financial pressure but also shows the efficiency brought about by computerization, according to MacIntosh. “I know there’s a lot of hand-wringing about the newspaper business,” she says. “I’m not worried about it. I couldn’t be more excited about the demand for news and information. I think the challenges are going to require partnerships between technology and journalists, and I think they’re going to require incredible collaboration and smart thinking and creativity.” GT 66 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Summer 2008 http://Ajc.com http://Ajc.com
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