Streaming Media - August/September 2007 - (Page 62)

newspapers in multimedia metamorphosis Two Kinds of Convergence As newspapers add more multimedia to their websites, they are straying farther and farther from the print world and into new territory. Eventually, say the pundits, the concept of the print newspaper as we’ve known it will die, and in its place will arise new entities, whether we call them newsgathering companies, new media news organizations, or something else. In the future the demarcation between newspapers and television channels will be blurry. There will be no standalone newspapers. There will be newsgathering and distributing companies with print arms. Print will be just one media of many used by media companies. And as time goes on, we may also see individual traditional media companies (TV stations, newspapers, radio stations) merging and consolidating in efforts to boost efficiency and reduce staffing costs. They will be forming so-called “converged newsrooms.” In these catch-all newsrooms, news will be the raw material but its output will take many forms, with print being just one. By the way, just to make things confusing, pundits are using the term “convergence” to refer to two different trends. One is the trend already mentioned—for different media companies (TV stations, newspapers, radio station, magazines) to try to combine and consolidate their separate newsgathering operations. The other kind of convergence is when a single media company (such as a newspaper) tries to combine its now-separate internal print and online news operations. For an example of convergence, Glaser points to The Tampa Tribune, which he calls “one of the more pioneering efforts.” In 2000, the newspaper began to create a “converged newsroom” in cooperation with a local TV station, WFLA Channel 8. But this isn’t a good example of two rivals getting together, because in this case both companies (newspaper and TV station) are owned by the same parent company, Media General. So the decision to stop competing and start cooperating came from on high rather than from the pressures of the marketplace. And the jury is apparently still out on the Tampa Tribune converged-newsroom project. “A lot of what they thought they’d get out of the convergence, they haven’t really gotten,” says Glaser. “They thought there would be a lot more synergies and a lot more revenue, and it has been very, very slow. A lot of people say that the Tampa Tribune experiment was successful in some ways but didn’t succeed so well in others.” Interestingly, The Tampa Tribune just recently announced staff cuts, apparently as part of the ongoing Photojournalist Colin Mulvany has pushed his paper, The SpokesmanReview, to add as much video as possible to its website. convergence process. An April press release from Media General framed the move as a “performance improvement.” Seventy staffers out of a total employee base of 1,335 were eliminated. “Our newspaper is experiencing the challenges of changing reader needs and fundamental shifts in spending by our traditional advertisers,” said Tampa Tribune president and publisher Denise Palmer in the press release. “We are reducing resources in areas that are in decline and investing in areas of growth, including local news and the internet.” One place where convergence was briefly considered but didn’t catch on was at The Spokesman-Review, which is owned by a company that also owns a local radio station. “We found it really hard to make that work. The cultures are so different,” says the newspaper’s Colin Mulvany. Mulvany says that two or three years ago, when converged TV and newspaper newsrooms started to become a trend, he started to shake his head. “I kept saying, ‘No, that’s not going to work. We don’t want to be TV. We don’t want that model of TV on the web; it doesn’t work.’” And he feels his initial negative instincts have proven valid. “At a lot of those places where the TV stations and newspapers started working together, things just didn’t pan out,” he says. One high-profile newspaper that has been pursuing the converged newspaper/website concept is The New York Times. “The Times has been trying to converge its web operations and its print operations into one newsroom. That’s been a long process and I don’t know how successful they’ve been,” says Glaser. “But, look, the web has been around for over 10 years, and it’s taking time to work all these things out. But I think it’s interesting that The New York Times, which everyone considers just a newspaper company, is transforming itself into a news and information company. And whether the public gets their news on a mobile phone or whatever— it isn’t going to matter to the Times, as long as they work out a way to either get paid for the delivery or by inserting ads.” 62 STREAMING MEDIA August/September 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - August/September 2007

Table of Contents Sweet Sixteen Letters to the Editor Technology and Business Trends IBM Takes Webcasting to the Desktop ROI in the EDU Bank Serves Espresso, Enterprise Video Online Video Advertising: Hit or Miss MLB’s Foul Bawl A Crash Course in Flash Video Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis Webcasting Large Entertainment Events: Seeing Through the Hype Webcasting With Windows Media Can’t Start A Fire . . . A WiMAX Primer Mobile Video at Last Telestream Episode Pro Grass Valley ProCoder 3 Silverlight Is No Flash Killer

Streaming Media - August/September 2007

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